“I’ve never met anyone like you.…” I paused, trying to find the word. “Someone else who’s…”
He reached over and squeezed my hand, his eyes still facing forward. “You aren’t the only one, Zoe. You’re not alone anymore.”
He removed his hand and put it back on the wheel, but his touch left behind a lingering warmth. I ran my finger over that part of my hand in wonder.
“Can you talk and navigate at the same time?” I asked. “Because I would like to hear some of those answers you promised earlier.”
“Soon,” he said. “We’re almost at the checkpoint. Besides…” He glanced over at me. “My mom can explain it all better than I can.”
“Your mother! You mean, she’s not…”
“Nope, not a Link drone.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t even imagined the possibility of parents who were free of the Link. I looked out the window, upset and confused about what I was feeling. This was an emotion I didn’t have a name for. My eyes stung and when I reached up under my glasses to rub them, my fingers came away wet. Everything was happening too fast. I couldn’t sort out one confusing thing before another came up.
“What about your father?” I asked. I knew there were more pressing questions, but I was still stunned by the thought of parents who weren’t Linked. After adulthood and the final V-chip installation, subjects never glitched. They only worked at their Community jobs all day and night until their bodies become unproductive and they were deactivated. Glitching parents were an impossibility.
“He died when I was small,” Adrien said. “It’s just been Mom and me for as long as I can remember. She’s kind of a hard-ass.”
He glanced over and must have seen my confusion at the term. “She’s really protective of me. My dad died doing work for the Rez, so she shuntin’ hated it when I started working for them a few years ago.” He gave a short laugh.
“Why do you do it, then?”
“We’ve been on the run our whole lives. I don’t know anything different.”
He looked over at me, his eyes intense. “I have to crackin’ believe the world can be different. That we could be safe and … free.”
I nodded slowly. Free. The concept was foreign, but … yes, it felt so right. It felt like the perfect word to encapsulate exactly what I’d been longing for.
Suddenly, he sat up straighter.
“What?” I asked.
“We’re at the city gate.”
I looked up and saw a huge gray concrete wall ahead of us. The road led straight into a tunnel through the wall, but as we slowed down to a stop, I saw armed Guards in front of the huge sliding steel gate.
Adrien laughed once, nervous. “Now we’ll see if Mom was able to contact the Rez in time. Otherwise, this is going to be one short godlam’d trip.”
Chapter 6
“SORRY,” ADRIEN SAID, looking over at me. My terror must have been clear on my face.
“I’m sure she got the message to her guys. They always come through, okay? Nothing to worry about. I’m going to open the window now so just keep your glasses on and stay still while I talk to them.”
I reached up a trembling hand to make sure my shades were still on straight. I closed my eyes but popped them open again when I heard a light ping, ping, ping on the windshield. Rain. My chest seized as I thought of the rainstorm that terrorized me when I was first glitching. What if Adrien was wrong about it not being toxic? There were too many things to be completely terrified about right now for me to even see straight. I didn’t realize I was gripping my seat so tightly that my knuckles were white until Adrien reached over to squeeze my hand.
“Hey,” he said. “It’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry. The Rez does stuff like this all the time.”
He let go of my hand and pushed a button that retracted the window.
A man in a gray uniform approached. The Guards weren’t full Regulators but I could see some bionic modifications, like the metal eyepiece that covered the upper left portion of his face as he scrutinized us. He was wearing thick outer gear and a helmet but not a biosuit or even a respirator.
I looked away as he leaned over. My heart jumped with every drop of rain. It suddenly seemed impossible we wouldn’t get caught and deactivated. In the rhythm of the drops I seemed to hear the word repeating in my head like a ticking gear “deactivate, deactivate.”
“What is your business?” the Guard asked, leaning into the window.
“Alpha Six Gamma Fifteen Approach and Release,” Adrien said, enunciating each word precisely.
The Guard suddenly stood up straight, his face completely blank. He made a motion with his arm and the gate opened smoothly. Adrien pushed the button to raise the window. We drove slowly through the gate, entering the tunnel.
“What did you do to him?” I whispered after we passed. “Why did he let us through?”
“Auditory trigger to a sleeper subroutine the Resistance implanted. I wasn’t sure if they’d get my message in time to hack today’s Guard, but it looks like they came through.”
“But won’t he realize something’s wrong? Or one of the other Guards when they see him?”
“Nope, it’s a stopgap memory installation. It’ll self-erase in two minutes and it’ll erase the video taken from his eyepiece recorder stored on his memory chip, too. All he’ll know is he doesn’t remember those two minutes very clearly.”
I shivered. It sounded a little too much like what the official had done to me. I glanced over at Adrien.
“But how could they, what did you call it, hack them? Did they use some kind of hardware?”
He was concentrating on the road as we entered the tunnel. “No, the Rez has a way to do wireless memory hacks. It’s one of our big one-ups lately. Central Systems thinks they’ve killed all outside wireless access to the Link network, but we’ve developed tech that can get around it, at least for Regulators and Guards.”
“Why only Regulators and Guards?”
The light from outside only penetrated about twenty feet into the tunnel and then it was darkness. Adrien switched on the vehicle’s lights.
“They already have subroutines installed in their architecture for memory erasure. Because of some of the terrible things they make Regulators do—it was affecting them emotionally.”
“Emotionally?”
“Yeah. The V-chip can only strip away so much humanity. Some things are just, you know,” he shook his head, “so shuntin’ horrifying, that the emotions are too intense for the V-chip to stamp them out entirely. It was triggering glitches, and trust me, you don’t want to see a glitching Regulator. So they have a remote memory-erasure feature to delete memories right after they happen. And that’s how we can get in with the hacks.”
I nodded in the darkness and didn’t ask any more questions. I didn’t want to think about what kinds of things Regulators did that would be horrific enough to cause the kind of glitching Adrien was talking about.
The tunnel we drove through was longer than I’d expected, not that I’d exactly been able to gauge the distance well as we approached. I was so nervous, every second felt like an eternity. After we’d gone about three hundred feet into the black tunnel, the only light coming from the car’s headlights, Adrien slowed to a stop.
“What are you doing?” I asked, glancing back nervously for Guards. “Is something wrong?”
“This is where we get out.” He clicked the release on my seat belt, then reached across me and popped my door open.
“Why are we getting out?” I whispered.
He got out and hurried around to my door. He pulled it farther open and held out a hand. “Come on, we gotta hurry.”
I heard the driver’s-side door open, and a strange man stepped in. Fear flushed me, but I managed to squelch the yelp of surprise in my throat. Adrien reached in and grabbed my hand, quickly pulling me farther into the dark.
“It’s okay. That’s Brandon. He’s going to keep driving the car so it looks like a routine maintenance
vehicle continuing on to its destination. If anyone checks satellite images, it won’t seem out of place.”
“What about cameras? You said they were everywhere.” I walked as quickly as I could behind him in the dim tunnel, feeling exposed even in the darkness. The air felt thick in my throat, like I was breathing through a suffocating blanket. The hallways and tunnels back home were always dry—too dry even, people got nosebleeds sometimes—but it was necessary for the intense air-filtration systems. Or so I’d been told.
“Don’t worry so much.” He laughed. “Didn’t I tell you we do this all the time? They’ve disabled the cameras, too.”
He stopped and the metal door scraped as he opened it. A single light panel shone inside, illuminating a dirty stairwell. I went through the door willingly, glad to go anywhere that led underground and out of the reach of atmospheric particulates and the unnerving rain.
Adrien led me down the stairs and opened a circular service hatch on the floor at the bottom. A ladder led down into shadows.
“You go first. I’ll follow right behind to secure the hatch. Make sure to get a good hold. It’s a long godlam’d way down, and the ladder can be slippery.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I dropped my legs into the dark space and got a foothold on the ladder. I descended carefully in the dark, tapping my arm panel for light. I could still only see the ladder and a small area around me. I glanced down but the ladder disappeared after a few feet into the thick darkness.
I moved down rung by rung, trying not to think about the long drop into the empty space below. It was cooler down here, but it smelled horrible. The ladder was slick with what felt like slime. I tried not to think about the potential of radioactive sludge. Adrien’s footsteps sounded on the ladder above me. I glanced up just as the crescent of light disappeared when he locked the hatch behind us.
“It should be about forty more feet down or so.” He called down quietly, his voice echoing. “Once I get down, I’ll grab a flashlight from a stash we keep there.”
I nodded, even though I knew he couldn’t see me. I concentrated on getting a good grip on each slick rung. My feet splashed into something wet when I stepped off the ladder.
“What’s on the floor?” I asked nervously. I waved my arm panel around to try to see better but the ground just looked black. Adrien dropped down the last couple feet beside me. I heard a metallic click and light flooded the space.
“Oh!” I gasped.
We were in a huge cathedral-like space, complete with massive concrete supporting arches leading up to the ceiling. But it was the sludgy water I’d landed in that concerned me more. I could feel it soaking through my socks. Huge rats scurried away from the light and I shrieked and jumped back up on the first rung of the ladder.
“I was going to warn you but I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”
I glared at him in the dim light.
“You seem to be doing that a lot!” I whispered. “Next time, just warn me!”
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay, will do. It’s a little gnangy down here and I’m not denyin’ that there’s a … bit of a rodent population. But it’s not dangerous.”
He handed me some thick rubber knee-high boots. “Here, put these on. We keep ’em stored here along with flashlights.”
I shook my foot to try to get the excess water out of my shoe, slipped one leg into the boot, then the other. Adrien held out a hand and I dared to step back into the ankle-high water. It was black and oily, with a thick scum covering the surface. And it smelled horrible, like rotten eggs and rancid butter mixed together.
“Here’s a flashlight.” He handed me a heavy black flashlight. I wiped my hands on my pants and took it. The chamber we were in was huge and rectangular, with arched concrete struts that led to the ceiling, which was so high I could only barely make it out. As we made our way down the chamber, I realized that what had looked like black circles on the wall were actually other tunnels leading out.
“What is this place?” I asked softly. “Are you sure it’s safe? No cameras?”
“Nope, not down here. This is an old combined sewage and storm-drain tunnel. It used to be called the Deep Tunnel. It goes for hundreds of miles all throughout the city.”
“Then how have I not heard of it? I mean, I live underground.”
He nodded. “Downtown, most of these old tunnels were demolished or rebuilt as part of the infrastructure of the underground city. These ones were too prone to flooding, so they left them alone.”
He motioned me forward and I followed him, keeping my flashlight beam in front of my feet so I’d know where I was stepping.
I put one arm over my nose at the smell. “I think I might vomit.”
“Sorry,” Adrien said. “Just try not to think about it. It’ll get better once we get out of the central chamber.”
I nodded and followed him, trying to move my feet through the water smoothly rather than taking big splashing steps. As we came to the end of the chamber, I peered down the circular entrances that opened in the walls like giant gaping mouths. The light from the flashlights only cut through the first ten feet of darkness down each tunnel.
Adrien stopped. “Third tunnel on the right. Here we are.”
He pointed his flashlight toward a tunnel at least thirty feet in diameter. He stepped up, his boots splashing up the foul water as he went. I followed, trying to lift each foot slowly to keep the splash to a minimum. I swept my flashlight ahead but could see only the endless tunnel until it curved out of sight to the left.
“How far are we going?”
“Far,” Adrien said. “A mile down, we’ll branch off again to a narrower tunnel that leads to my mom’s place.”
“You really know your way around here.”
“I grew up haunting these tunnels.” He walked smoothly, sure-footed even in the sludge. “We spent a lot of time here when I was small, running ops into the city. Sometimes a cell would get cracked and my mom’d have to stow me away somewhere safe, like these tunnels. Always with a map to memorize and a backpack full of provos in case she didn’t come back.” His voice quieted at the end.
“Adrien…” I felt so sad for him suddenly—imagining him as a small child, cowering in the dark all alone—but I didn’t know the right words to express it. I thought about earlier, how he’d squeezed my hand when I was afraid and how it had made me feel better. I reached over and took his hand.
He seemed caught off-guard by my touch.
“Thanks. It’s okay.” His voice was a little rough. “Long time ago, you know. Anyway. You said you had a bunch of questions. We have some time, so ask away.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, thinking. All the little bits of information he’d haphazardly given here and there jumbled together in my mind. “You said D-day never really happened. But how is it possible that the Community could deceive everyone so completely?”
He shook his head. “History isn’t all fact—it’s just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it’s been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.”
“So then what is the truth?” I asked in exasperation. “What really happened?”
He stepped around a buildup of mud and sludge that had caked up against one wall. I grimaced, but at least he’d been right: The smell didn’t seem quite so bad anymore. I didn’t know if I was getting used to or if it wasn’t as strong in this side tunnel.
“People in the Old World had been talking about a Global Community for a while,” he said. “Some globally spanning corporations were formed and they got more and more powerful. Especially Community Corp. It was an impressive technology company with military connections. Then there were the major breakthrough advancements with the creation of bionic supersoldiers. That’s when they realized the potential of the V-chip for soldiers.”
He shook his head. “Some shunting genius realized they could use the V-chip as an artificial amygdala.”
“The amyg
dala,” I said, my mind going back to my neurotech text. “That’s a vestigial part of the brain. It’s useless, like the appendix. That’s why they put the V-chip there, because it won’t interfere with the necessary brain processes.”
“Another lie,” he said gently.
He led me around another buildup of gunk and garbage. I saw movement in the dark. Rats. I’d never seen rats before today. Really, I’d never seen many animals in my whole life other than flies or gnats or sometimes roaches. We didn’t have any meat-processing centers in our sector. I shuddered and moved away, even though it meant I was walking through the deeper water at the center of the tunnel.
“The amygdala’s supposed to facilitate emotional response,” Adrian continued, oblivious to my reaction to the rats. Either that, or he was trying to distract me. “But the V-chip dampened feeling ’til emotion was done away with completely. Then the Link was expanded for military use so that a unit of soldiers wasn’t a group of individuals anymore—they were a single entity, all Linked together to a single commander. I mean, think about it.” He waved his hands as he explained. “With a completely obedient army under their command, an army that had no patriotic loyalties, no conscience, no fear, Comm Corp suddenly had a huge amount of power.”
He looked over at me. “And that’s when they planned D-day. They could finally wrench control away from governments and bring the V-chip to the masses. And the masses agreed to it willingly.” He laughed darkly and shook his head. “The ultimate corporate acquisition. Our own minds.”
A shiver went down my arms as I realized just how much people had given up, and all for a lie. How could they? I couldn’t believe that anyone would volunteer their freedom, their mind, without a fight. As a drone, I’d never known what I was missing until now, but for them—they’d experienced freedom. They knew exactly how much they had to lose.
“People will do a lot of things that don’t make sense when they’re scared,” Adrien said. His voice was gentle now; it had lost its dark sardonic edge. “Comm Corp was producing implants that they said could protect people from the aftereffects of the bombs. It’s totally cracked, I know. But people will grasp at anything if they believe their survival is at stake, no questions asked. They went to Comm Corp for help, and they all left with V-chips.”
Glitch (Glitch - Trilogy) Page 6
