Glitch

for a moment, then looked at my lit- up arm keyboard
    to get my mind off my larger worries. The smooth subcuta-
    neous panels were implanted at age fi ve, then upgraded at
    ages ten and fi fteen. The skin was smooth over the top. We
    only needed a 2- D image to see my notes, so I took out one
    tiny black pyramid projector from my tablet case and set it
    on the table. I tapped my forearm keyboard to connect it.
    An eight- by- twelve screen appeared fl at on the table, and
    with another click my meticulous notes fi lled the illumi-
    nated space.
    Maximin put down my tablet, then leaned over to look at
    my projected notes.
    “I could sync my notes to your tablet if you want,” I said.
    “No, I just need to observe them for a moment.” He com-
    pared the diagrams I’d drawn with ones in the tablet text.
    “The auxiliary nerve tension between synapse quadrant one
    and two. Can you sketch it in my notes?” He held out his
    forearm panel to me.
    “Where’s your tablet?” I asked.
    “I always remember better when I see you draw it out
    piece by piece rather than looking at the fi nished whole. My
    projector’s acting up too. You can just trace directly on my
    arm panel.” He switched it from keyboard to draw mode.
    I nodded and leaned over closer to him. A curly strand of
    hair fell out of my clip, but I was too focused on explaining
    as I sketched to care. I used my fi nger to sketch the fi rst
    quadrant on his forearm and then looked up to see if he was
    following me.
    I almost bumped into his nose because he was leaning in
    32

    G L I TC H
    so close. There was this look on his face. Like he wasn’t
    thinking about synapse quadrants at all. His eyes were on
    my neck. He reached up and rubbed the escaped strand of my
    hair between two fi ngers.
    “So soft,” he breathed out.
    “Maximin,” I said. He dropped the hair and went back to
    the sketch, and I quickly pushed the stray strand behind my
    ear. My arms were frozen and tense.
    What just happened? That was certainly anomalous behav-
    ior. Could it be some sort of Monitor’s test to see if I would
    report an observed anomaly? was I being watched from here?
    Or could it be . . . ?
    Hope bloomed inside my chest. What if I wasn’t the only
    one who glitched?
    But when I looked again, Maximin’s face was completely
    blank, without a trace of the energy and alertness I’d seen a
    moment before. Of course. Once again, I’d been so focused
    on my own emotions that I was starting to see them every-
    where.
    I struggled to keep my shoulders from sagging. Maximin
    wasn’t a glitcher like me. He was part of the Community,
    part of a greater whole where each person was a small but
    necessary node, Linked in thought with all the other nodes.
    Humanity Sublime. It’s what I missed the most when I
    glitched, that feeling of wholeness and connection, of belong-
    ing to something bigger than myself. Now it was just me.
    What good was it to have color and happiness when I couldn’t
    share it with anyone?
    Community fi rst. Community always. Hot guilt swept over
    33

    Heather Anastasiu
    me again, that constant heavy sense that I was bad. Wrong.
    Broken. After all the lessons I’d been taught about how in-
    dividuality and selfi shness were destructive, here I was not
    only refusing to reporting myself, but looking for a com-
    panion. Actually wanting Maximin to be broken, too. What
    was wrong with me? I was beginning to understand the dan-
    gers of the barbarian human traits that caused the destruction
    of the world.
    Lunch ended and Maximin’s body bumped against my
    side as we walked down the dimly lit hallway to my last
    class of the day. I looked over at him curiously. The four-
    foot- wide hallway was crowded as always and, true, it was a
    narrow fi t, but not that narrow. His face was blank though.
    I stopped in front of my last class, Algorithm Design. Maxi-
    min continued on down the hallway, turning to take a long
    glance back at me. Then he was lost in the mass of subjects.
    I turned in to my classroom and only barely managed not
    to stumble in surprise. The tall green- eyed boy was there,
    sitting in the seat next to mine.
    Everyone else sat down methodically, calmly pulling out
    their tablets and typing on their arm panels to check the day’s
    lesson. I sat down, conscious of the boy’s long gangly limbs
    stretching underneath the table into the row in front of us.
    Extraneous space was an unnecessary luxury in sublevel
    buildings, so all classrooms