Free Glitch by Heather Anastasiu

over at me. My terror
    must have been clear on my face.
    “I’m sure she got the message to her guys. They always
    come through, okay? Nothing to worry about. I’m going to
    open the window now so just keep your glasses on and stay
    still while I talk to them.”
    I reached up a trembling hand to make sure my shades
    were still on straight. I closed my eyes but popped them open
    again when I heard a light ping , ping , ping on the windshield.
    Rain. My chest seized as I thought of the rainstorm that ter-
    rorized me when I was fi rst glitching. What if Adrien was
    wrong about it not being toxic? There were too many things
    to be completely terrifi ed about right now for me to even see
    straight. I didn’t realize I was gripping my seat so tightly that
    my knuckles were white until Adrien reached over to squeeze
    my hand.
    “Hey,” he said. “It’s gonna be fi ne. Don’t worry. The Rez
    does stuff like this all the time.”
    He let go of my hand and pushed a button that retracted
    the window.
    A man in a gray uniform approached. The Guards weren’t
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    Heather Anastasiu
    full Regulators but I could see some bionic modifi cations,
    like the metal eyepiece that covered the upper left portion
    of his face as he scrutinized us. He was wearing thick outer
    gear and a helmet but not a biosuit or even a respirator.
    I looked away as he leaned over. My heart jumped with
    every drop of rain. In the rhythm of the drops I seemed to
    hear the word repeating in in my head like a ticking gear
    “ deactivate , deactivate. ”
    “What is your business?” the Guard asked, leaning into
    the window.
    “Alpha Six Gamma Fifteen Approach and Release,” Adrien
    said, enunciating each word precisely.
    The Guard suddenly stood up straight, his face completely
    blank. He made a motion with his arm and the gate opened
    smoothly. Adrien pushed the button to raise the window. We
    drove slowly through the gate, entering the tunnel.
    “What did you do to him?” I whispered after we passed.
    “Why did he let us through?”
    “Auditory trigger to a sleeper subroutine the Re sis tance
    implanted. I wasn’t sure if they’d get my message in time to
    hack today’s Guard, but it looks like they came through.”
    “But won’t he realize something’s wrong? Or one of the
    other Guards when they see him?”
    “Nope, it’s a stopgap memory installation. It’ll self- erase in
    two minutes and it’ll erase the video taken from his eyepiece
    recorder stored on his memory chip, too. All he’ll know is he
    doesn’t remember those two minutes very clearly.”
    I shivered. It sounded a little too much like what the of-
    fi cial had done to me. I glanced over at Adrien.
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    “But how could they, what did you call it, hack them? Did
    they use some kind of hardware?”
    He was concentrating on the road as we entered the tun-
    nel. “No, the Rez has a way to do wireless memory hacks. It’s
    one of our big one- ups lately. Central Systems thinks they’ve
    killed all outside wireless access to the Link network, but
    we’ve developed tech that can get around it, at least for Reg-
    ulators and Guards.”
    “Why only Regulators and Guards?”
    The light from outside only penetrated about twenty feet
    into the tunnel and then it was darkness. Adrien switched
    on the vehicle’s lights.
    “They already have subroutines installed in their architec-
    ture for memory erasure. Because of some of some of the ter-
    rible things they make Regulators do— it was aff ecting them
    emotionally.”
    “Emotionally?”
    “Yeah. The V-chip can only strip away so much human-
    ity. Some things are just, you know,” he shook his head, “so
    shuntin’ horrifying, that the emotions are too intense for the
    V-chip to stamp them out entirely. It was triggering glitches,
    and trust me, you don’t want to see a glitching Regulator. So
    they have a remote memory- erasure feature to delete memo-
    ries right after they happen. And that’s how we can