Glitch

backward at the boy who had spoken.
    He seemed about my age, tall and lanky with skin the
    color of warm brown bread crust, but as the Link continued
    to dim my last slivers of sensation, it was his eyes that caught
    me with a jolt. They were a translucent aquamarine green
    and they looked vibrant and alive. Even with the mounting
    11

    Heather Anastasiu
    grayness of the Link, I could still see — see the uniqueness of
    the color fl ickering at the edges of his pupils. The next sec-
    ond, he looked away, gazing straight ahead like everyone else.
    I turned around and faced forward, alarmed by the strange
    fl ush that was creeping up my neck. I wondered if the boy
    behind me could see it. I wondered what it meant.
    I was hopeless at understanding and controlling all of
    these new emotions. I’d looked them up in the history text
    archive and was working slowly to build a cata log. Most of
    the history texts described how each dangerous emotion had
    led to the nuclear destruction of the Surface, the Old World.
    So far, some of the emotions hadn’t seemed as terrible as the
    texts described. Except maybe fear.
    Fear was the fi rst feeling I recognized, and eventually I
    could diff erentiate fear and not- fear, good feelings from bad
    ones. I also started dreaming. Almost every night I dreamt of
    that boy who kept glitching— his screams, the look on his
    face, the way his body crumpled to the ground; he haunted
    my nights. Sometimes in the dreams, he was screaming my
    name. He never came back to the Academy. He was deacti-
    vated. It wasn’t meant to be scary, or a punishment. Subjects
    weren’t supposed to be able to feel fear or guilt. It was just a
    fact. When something was too broken to fi x, or too defec-
    tive to contribute to the community, deactivation was the
    only logical solution.
    My six- month hardware checkup was coming up in two
    weeks and they would run diagnostics on all my hardware
    and check my memory chip. All of my training and practice
    was leading up to that moment, and I needed to be able to
    12

    G L I TC H
    control myself and not glitch during a diagnostic exam. Part
    of me knew they would most likely discover my malfunc-
    tions anyway. It was only a matter of time before they scanned
    my memory stick and found the evidence of my glitching,
    the drawings, and the . . . other thing, the secret that was far
    too big, far too terrible, to hide.
    “Greetings,” said the man behind the Bread Dispensary
    counter. I looked up, realizing I’d reached the front of the
    line.
    “Greetings,” I said. “Bimonthly allotment.”
    He nodded, pulling a box from the top of the stack be-
    hind him. He gestured at the small instrument at the side of
    the window. I lifted my hand and waved my wrist in front
    of it, hearing the small beep that meant I’d registered and the
    allotment would be subtracted from my family’s account in
    Central Rec ords. I slid the three boxes over the counter and
    stacked them neatly in my cart.
    I moved away, careful to keep my face blank. Later, when
    I glitched again, I would remember the paper they wrapped
    around the bread it was perfect for drawing. Three boxes of
    bread meant twelve pages. It was too risky drawing on my
    digi- tablet—every mark I made would be stored in mem-
    ory. But the paper could be hidden. Paper could be secret.
    Like the stack tucked away in my mattress.
    I pulled my cart behind me and headed over to the next
    line, the Protein Dispensary. I gazed at the rich dark brown of
    the protein patties. Color. The fi rst time I’d glitched was at
    the Academy when I noticed another student’s bright orange-
    red hair. I’d frozen in place as the shocking color fi rst broke
    13

    Heather Anastasiu
    through the interminable gray, bobbing brightly through the
    crowd of gray heads marching down the corridor. It had only
    lasted for a moment, thirty seconds at most, but it stirred
    something in me. Something new.
    Then the glitches started happening more often and last-
    ing longer. I’d notice the deep green of a spinach leaf, the
    smooth browns and creams of people’s diff ering skin tones,
    hair, eyes . . . I inadvertently glanced backward in the direc-
    tion I’d last seen the green- eyed boy, but he was gone. That
    was a completely new color to add to my short list.
    Emotions were the next thing that came with the glitches,
    and they still made no sense to me. Like how, after an espe-
    cially bad nightmare, I’d walk through the darkened