Glitch Read Online Free PDF Page B

panel.” He switched it from keyboard to draw mode.
    I nodded and leaned over closer to him. A curly strand of hair fell out of my clip, but I was too focused on explaining as I sketched to care. I used my finger to sketch the first quadrant on his forearm and then looked up to see if he was following me.
    I almost bumped into his nose because he was leaning in so close. There was this look on his face. Like he wasn’t thinking about synapse quadrants at all. His eyes were on my neck. He reached up and rubbed the escaped strand of my hair between two fingers.
    “So soft,” he breathed out.
    “Maximin,” I said. He dropped the hair and went back to the sketch, and I quickly pushed the stray strand behind my ear. My arms were frozen and tense.
    What just happened? That was certainly anomalous behavior. Could it be some sort of Monitor’s test to see if I would report an observed anomaly? Was I being watched from here? Or could it be…?
    Hope bloomed inside my chest. What if I wasn’t the only one who glitched?
    But when I looked again, Maximin’s face was completely blank, without a trace of the energy and alertness I’d seen a moment before. Of course. Once again, I’d been so focused on my own emotions that I was starting to see them everywhere.
    I struggled to keep my shoulders from sagging. Maximin wasn’t a glitcher like me. He was part of the Community, part of a greater whole where each person was a small but necessary node, Linked in thought with all the other nodes. Humanity Sublime. It’s what I missed the most when I glitched, that feeling of wholeness and connection, of belonging to something bigger than myself. Now it was just me. What good was it to have color and happiness when I couldn’t share it with anyone?
    Community first. Community always. Hot guilt swept over me again, that constant heavy sense that I was bad. Wrong. Broken. After all the lessons I’d been taught about how individuality and selfishness were destructive, here I was not only refusing to report myself, but looking for a companion. Actually wanting Maximin to be broken, too. What was wrong with me? I was beginning to understand the dangers of the barbarian human traits that caused the destruction of the world.
    Lunch ended and Maximin’s body bumped against my side as we walked down the dimly lit hallway to my last class of the day. I looked over at him curiously. The four-foot-wide hallway was crowded as always and, true, it was a narrow fit, but not that narrow. His face was blank though. I stopped in front of my last class, Algorithm Design. Maximin continued on down the hallway, turning to take a long glance back at me. Then he was lost in the mass of subjects.
    I turned in to my classroom and only barely managed not to stumble in surprise. The tall green-eyed boy was there, sitting in the seat next to mine.
    Everyone else sat down methodically, calmly pulling out their tablets and typing on their arm panels to check the day’s lesson. I sat down, conscious of the boy’s long gangly limbs stretching underneath the table into the row in front of us. Extraneous space was an unnecessary luxury in sublevel buildings, so all classrooms were small. The room-length metal tables and chairs were lined up tightly to fit as many students as possible, five rows to a room.
    I tried to breathe normally. There was no reason to panic.
    I just needed to cut out all other thoughts and concentrate on the lesson about algorithm development. But I couldn’t help discreetly sneaking glances at the boy. He was typing calmly on his forearm. At least for once he wasn’t watching me, and even though his limbs were long, he wasn’t touching me. Almost as if he was being careful not to touch me.
    Suddenly, the professor stopped talking. All the students tilted their heads up expectantly. Must be a Link announcement, I thought. I hoped it wasn’t too important. I tried to make my face mimic the others in the room, as if I were concentrating on