Shutdown (Glitch)

brightest setting.
    Now we came to it. Excitement tickled up my spine. We were so close now. This was the only place we couldn’t follow right behind Rowun. There were three doorways that ran full-body scans before letting anyone pass. Max’s power could trick people, but not a scanning computer.
    I stepped closer to Rowun and pressed a small drive into his left hand, forcing his fingers to close around it. Then I made him lift his right finger to a small pad and press. He didn’t flinch when he was poked and the small drop of blood was extracted. He did this every day.
    The thick door in front of him opened, and I could see beyond him to a small square room. Rowun went in and the door closed again. A flash of light came from the small window in the door: the full-body scan in action. My telek was able to pass easily through the barriers, and I kept Rowun still through it all.
    When he was inside, I did a quick sweep of the room. All of the machinery was foreign to me. I touched my arm panel to pull up the file where I’d written the Foundation techer boy’s instructions. I couldn’t remember his name at the moment. That was the problem of having the best techer on your team also be a glitcher whose power made people forget him. I’d been careful to write down everything he said, knowing I wouldn’t remember if he only told it to me.
    The top of the file read: NOTES FROM SIMIN .
    I nodded. Oh right, his name was Simin. I could always remember his name for a few minutes whenever I heard it. I read on hurriedly.
FIND THE BOX ALONG THE WALL RIGHT BESIDE THE DOOR, OPEN IT, AND INSERT THE SMALLEST DRIVE INTO THE PORT TO OVERRIDE THE BODY-SCAN SECURITY.
    Okay, so there should be a box close to the entryway. I felt along the wall for it with my telek and frowned. There was a box in the middle of one wall, but it wasn’t close to the doorway at all.
    A frantic bubble of fear passed through me, then I gritted my teeth and searched the other walls. Two were covered top to bottom with server consoles. The third wall had some kind of interface area, but it was flat and didn’t seem like the kind of box Simin described. It had to be the one on the first wall.
    I made Rowun walk over to the box, flip it open, and lift the tiny drive. I prayed this was the right one and I wasn’t about to set off a ton of alarms or something.
    He slipped the drive in.
    Max and I waited anxiously. I started tapping my foot until I realized it was making an audible sound and made myself stand still again.
    Then, just a moment later, the heavy doors of the full-body scan room opened, and I finally let out the breath I’d been holding. We were in. We hurried through the small passageway to where Rowun stood.
    Three hovering console screens were projected over the desk in the center of the room.
    I felt Max take out one pendant from his pocket. I pulled out mine and we both moved to the key stations, one on each side of the programming console. We inserted the keys and twisted them simultaneously. The blank console screens suddenly came to life, spooling out start-up data before settling on the main interface screen.
    I sat down in the swiveling chair. Halfway there.
    I studied the screen for a moment. It looked exactly like the model Simin had provided for me to study. I’d taken basic programming and computer interfacing, but all of this was way beyond my sphere of knowledge. So I’d studied the model for hours and made sure I knew exactly what to do so I wouldn’t make a mistake.
    I raised my hand to the projected screen and clicked through several data directories until I got to the central programming vector.
    I pulled out the fingernail drive Simin had given me with the rebooted Link programming. He’d worked on it for months. The Link feed in everyone’s head should automatically stop, along with the submission impulse. We’d uploaded simple instructions to broadcast what had been done to them and where they could go to acquire weapons if they wanted to join the revolution. The adults would most likely mindlessly follow the new instructions and fight with us. We’d had qualms about forcing them to fight like that, but it was better than the alternative plan of releasing an EMP. Setting off an electromagnetic pulse in the upper atmosphere had been General Taylor’s plan to destroy the Link hardware in all the drones’ heads Sectorwide. While it would have freed everyone under eighteen from the Link’s control, it also would