Shutdown (Glitch)

end this today. For everyone.”

 
    Epilogue
    Three months later
    A knock on the top of my sleep pod woke me. I took one last deep breath of safe air, then surrounded my mast cells with my telek and pushed the release button. Jilia said we’d try immunotherapy again to help my allergies once everything settled down, though she didn’t know if it would work or not. Like so many things these days, it was an unknown. In the meantime, I slept in the med container. The top pulled up and slowly retracted. I smiled when I saw it was Adrien, and then smiled even wider when I saw the tray full of food behind him.
    “You got in late last night. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep a little longer?”
    I stepped out over the side of the med container. “Too much to do today.”
    He laughed. “Every day, you mean. But still, you need to eat.” He held out a chair for me. We’d stayed at the Chancellor’s compound. It made for a good base of operations and had lush personal quarters on the top floor. One wall of the room was made entirely of windows that overlooked the ocean, but I couldn’t see anything much since it was still dark out.
    “Have you gotten the daily reports yet?” I asked.
    “Not yet.” He smiled. “Most people don’t get up as early as you.”
    “You do.”
    He reached, almost shyly, and took my hand. “I like your face to be one of the first things I see every day.”
    I blushed and looked down. It had been three months since I’d freed all the drones young enough to handle their V-chips being destroyed. It had been chaos at first. The freed people didn’t know what to do without the V-chip directing their actions and emotions. The intensity of suddenly being able to feel had resulted in a lot of violence initially. We’d quickly released all the imprisoned Rez cell leaders and positioned them around the Sector to gather as many recruits as they could from among the newly released subjects. In large part, they’d been able to gather the former drones and pretty easily convinced them to direct their anger at the Uppers instead of uselessly against each other.
    I ran my finger around the tip of my coffee cup and looked out at the slowly lightening earth. It had been far from a bloodless revolution. There was still heavy fighting going on in some of the other Sectors around the world. After I’d freed all of the drones with the pre-18 V-chip, Resistance factions in each global Sector had led revolutions with varying success. The Community Corporation that had ruled the world for two hundred and fifty years was decimated and each of the eight Chancellor Supremes had been deposed. But in some poorer countries like Sector Four, there was still heavy fighting going on among the survivors about who would rule next.
    Here in Sector Six we’d had a wide, unified Rez presence after we emptied the Community prisons, so the fighting had mostly died down. Xona and Cole led the army that took control of the Southern front a few weeks ago, where the Uppers had made their last stand. While pockets of violence still occasionally erupted, we’d subdued and imprisoned most Uppers and taken charge of the government. Many of the Uppers had surrendered in the end, especially after Simin finally accessed the Regulators’ separate Link programming channel and ordered them to stop fighting.
    The challenge now was to rebuild.
    “I didn’t get to talk to Jilia yesterday. Any developments in her research with the adult V-chips?”
    Adrien took a bite of his omelet. “Not yet. But she has better research facilities than ever before, not to mention the best minds in the country are on her team working on it.”
    I nodded. I knew it might take a long time before we could figure out a solution to free the adults from the V-chip as well. Maybe someday even my own parents. At least the next generation would grow up free, and the generation after that would be born and never have any hardware put in their heads at all. Adrien often reminded me of that. That even if we never found a way to free the adults, we’d given their children a future, and their children’s children.
    In the meantime, as much as I hated to think it, it was helpful to have all the adults continue working so the infrastructure of the country didn’t collapse. We lessened their work hours and the techer boy had taken over the Link programming.
    I’d hoped that introducing vids over the Link of what was really happening instead of the lies