Shutdown (Glitch)

“Again.”
    *   *   *
    I sat with my friends at dinner and tried to lose myself in their easy banter. But mostly I just sat silently watching them all, like an observer watching lab specimens through a window. It’s how I felt a lot these days, like there was a sheet of glass between me and the rest of the world. After dinner, when we were rising to empty our trays, several of the refugees asked Cole to speak.
    Cole nodded and moved to the front of the room.
    Shunt, I’d forgotten it was Monday. I looked for a way I might exit quietly before anyone noticed. I’d heard about Cole’s impromptu Monday night talks, but I’d always managed to be absent from them. Tonight Ginni tugged on my arm so I was forced back down beside her.
    Cole remained standing while the rest of the room quieted. He took several moments, as if gathering his thoughts.
    “Though so many of us were drones,” he finally began, “we’ve been freed. We’re learning how to become human again. But we can’t reclaim the lost years. We can’t have our childhoods back, and,” he looked down, his eyes heavy, “we can’t undo the acts we performed when under the control of the hardware in our brains.”
    He looked back up. “It’s not our fault. That’s what I tell myself every morning. It wasn’t my fault. But the thing is, I still have the memories of the things these hands did.” He raised his metal reinforced palms. “I remember what it felt like to squeeze the life out of a man. I can still hear the screams of a woman as I hauled her off to an interrogation cell.”
    I found myself leaning in, interested in spite of myself.
    “But what’s surprised me most, in talking with so many of you here, is that this experience isn’t something unique to just former Regulators.” His eyes swept across the gathered crowd. “Even those of you who were never drones. I’ve heard your stories about the things you’ve had to do to survive. About the acts of desperation that hunger can drive a person to. About the ones you had to leave behind in order to save yourselves. So many of us bear a heavy guilt deep down in the marrow of our bones. It’s what this world they created has made us—they would crush us until we all cease to be men.”
    I had to look away from him. My heart beat erratically in my chest. I knew the kind of guilt he spoke of. I dealt with it just fine. By ignoring it. Him speaking about the dark thing I kept buried in the corners of my soul made me squirm in my chair. I looked up again at the exit.
    “So how then are we redeemed?” Cole’s voice was passionate as he asked the question. His eyes seemed to zero in on me, as if he could somehow sense I wanted to flee. “How are we made human again, if our humanity has been stripped from us one way or another? How do we turn steel—whether fused to the body,” he raised up his gleaming metal forearm, “or to the soul—back into flesh?”
    He paced back and forth at the front of the room. “It’s the question that’s driven me to look for answers wherever I could find them. There’s this one text I like. When speaking to a people who had lost their way, much like we have in our world today, God says he will give them new hearts. He says he will put a new spirit in them, that he will take away their hearts of stone and give them hearts of flesh instead.
    “I wept when I read it.” He paused and his voice grew soft, his eyebrows bunched together. So much emotion was on his face, it almost hurt to look at. “When I first was freed, I wanted the doctor to cut all the metal out of my body, even if it would leave me weakened and deformed.”
    My mouth dropped open a little. I hadn’t known that.
    “But God says, ‘I will take away their hearts of stone and give them hearts of flesh.’ It helped me realize that the metal in my body can’t touch my heart. I could be made a man again, and the process was less about my metal exoskeleton and more about the choices I make and whether or not I will live a life full of compassion and mercy.
    “But it means that we have to believe that forgiveness is still possible even if those we committed crimes against will not forgive us. It means that what matters most is how we live now. It’s what redemption is all about.”
    I shifted uncomfortably again in my seat.
    Cole planted his feet in the center of the room and raised his arms as he spoke. “If we can learn to love one another and lift each other up, then we will