Shutdown (Glitch)

walking back and forth. I’d always thought of the General as a project of his, another person to save. But now I wondered if it wasn’t the other way around. He barely functioned without her. Did that mean he loved her more than she did him? If it had been the reverse, and he’d died, I knew she’d have gone on as if nothing had happened. Seeing Henry so broken made me wonder if her way wasn’t better. Maybe it was better not to love anything too much.
    But that didn’t stop me from walking to the darkened Med Center where Adrien lay submerged in the chamber in the corner. The sides were made of glass, and it was lit from underneath, which made the blue regrowth gel look luminescent. Otherworldly.
    Adrien’s slim form, wearing a tight bodysuit, seemed just as alien.
    An oxygen mask covered the lower half of his face, and wired patches were placed at strategic points around his body and all over his head. His eyes were closed.
    I put a hand to the side of the tank.
    His head moved so quickly to look at me, I almost fell over backwards. He stared at me, but nothing registered on his face. It was as if he was staring past me at the wall. His eyes seemed focused, but nothing else from his expression would suggest he knew me. I swallowed hard and leaned forward again. It was just the heavy sedatives Jilia had given him, I tried to reassure myself. The sessions in the chamber always lasted five days, and it was better if he could sleep through most of it. I placed my hand where it had been before.
    The gel inside was warm, I could feel the heat through the glass. But seeing Adrien suspended in this sensory deprivation tank still made me feel cold. Jilia believed it would help his neural patterns learn to rewire themselves if he started from a blank slate of stimulus and response, at least during periods of amygdala tissue regrowth. I’d known he was going in for another session, but I had hoped he’d be out by the time I got back.
    Of course, I’d planned to be out starting a revolution right now. In my secret dreams, I’d envisioned the world free of the Link. Sure, I’d known it would be a long fight. But I’d dreamed of its end; maybe a year from now we would have captured enough strategic points to install a new government. And the regrowth therapy would have finally begun working and Adrien would stand by my side as we looked out on a new world.
    I thought back to one of the times he’d visited me in the lab hideout where I’d spent several months last year.
    He’d been sitting beside me, wrapping one of my long curls round and round his finger. “What would you do if the war was over and you could do anything?” he asked.
    “Hmm,” I said languorously, dropping my head to his shoulder and relaxing against him. “I guess we’d be working every day to help people who’d been freed from the Link. We’d have to make sure that food production didn’t waver and that basic utilities continued so everything didn’t descend into chaos and—”
    “Not like that,” Adrien laughed. “I mean, what would you do if there was no war? Like if you lived back in the Old World and were free and there was no government telling you what you had to do. Or if we lived in some alternate universe where instead of Comm Corp coming to power, everyone was free and at peace with each other. What would you do then?”
    I frowned. “I don’t know.” I shifted a little so that I could look up at him. “I can’t imagine a world outside this one.” I smiled and kissed him. “You’re the dreamer. What would you do?”
    “Okay, I’ll go first,” he said, relenting. “But don’t think I’m not gonna come back to the question.”
    I laughed. “Okay. But you tell me first, so I know what kinds of things you mean.”
    He laid back on my bed, his hands under his head, elbows out. He looked up at the ceiling, but the way his blue-green eyes glistened with possibility, I could tell he wasn’t seeing just a ceiling.
    “I’d own a house by a river. A small river, not one of those big ones that boats would go down. And there would be woods nearby. Thick woods that I’d be able to see out my window when I woke up each morning.”
    “And what would you do in this house in the woods by a river?” I asked, half teasing. But he didn’t take the bait; he just kept that goofy grin on his face.
    “Well, first of all, you’d be there beside me waking up each morning.” He moved so quickly I didn’t have time to