The Glitch Saga- The Complete Collection

by Stephanie Flint

  I just hope I’ll still be around for the next ball.

  I squint into the stream of water, trying to ignore the fact that the CLS Legion Spore has intestines behind its ivory shower walls, then sputter as hot liquid gets in my mouth. I spit out the water. Just a couple more minutes, and I’ll be out. I step from under the stream, comb water from my hair, and then nudge the opening where the soap is held. A tiny hole emerges in the wall and dispenses honey-colored shampoo into my hand before squelching shut. I cringe, but lather the shampoo between my fingers and through my hair. The faster I get this over with, the sooner I can get out. I cringe as soapy water runs into my eye, burning—

  An earsplitting scream erupts behind me. I leap from the shower and my back slams against the closed door.

  For the love of the Community…

  A half-formed body writhes through the steam and watery downpour on the other side of the shower. My stomach twists in knots. The body is muscle and bone, no skin covering its arms. Female—judging from its upper torso—the only part formed from the flesh of the floor, which has reverted back to its unfinished stage. Skeletal arms cradle the creature’s midsection, and its gaping, toothless mouth contracts.

  My heart thuds. What is it?

  Eyeless sockets, half its skull showing through its hairless scalp…

  I swallow hard and press against the membrane door. Sealed.

  “Legion Spore—” My voice catches in my throat.

  The glitch, the ghost cranes its body toward me. It scrabbles at the metal grate with knobby fingers, slowly dragging itself in my direction.

  “Legion Spore…” I repeat, my voice higher. I can’t sense the cold, disjointed tech of the vessel’s intelligence matrix—just jumbled ones and zeroes and bits of code that don’t add up.

  The body tilts its head, mouth open wider than a mouth should open. The glitch reaches toward the water and droplets splash against its open muscle. It screams in agony. I stand rooted in place as the head dissolves into a shapeless mass of organs. The membrane behind me snaps open and I fall backward, tumbling into dry air. I stagger to my feet and snatch the towel by the door. I wrap the soft, fluffy thing around my shoulders. Commander Rick never mentioned a ghost like that. Forget using the Legion Spore’s teleportation—I run to the central command unit, hair dripping warm water down my neck. I shoulder the towel higher, clutching its soft ends between my fingers. The bone floor is warm under my feet. At least the design program is back online.

  “Legion Spore—” I shiver, half-holding the towel over my waist and my chest as I manually pull the records from the computer. “Unusual activity?”

  There has to be something here, something that would trigger that kind of glitch, and I’ve got to get these glitches removed before Val’s premonition about me being “gone” from the next Camaraderie ball turns out to be more accurate than either of us want to believe.

  I asked Benjamin to try making me a teleportation ring for times like this, for when the Legion Spore fails to be responsive, but he said he would start work on it after he finished his current contraption. Given that he’s been working on that thing since I met him, I doubt I’ll be getting a teleportation ring anytime soon.

  Master Zaytsev, our logs indicate a missing gap in our records. Is this what you refer to?

  I take a deep breath. There must be a logical reason the glitch activated. “Show me records prior to the gap.”

  The screen shifts to indicate water usage, flight altitude, and direction. None of these are directly related. I twist my lips in frustration and hug the towel tighter. “Legion Spore, look into my memories. Is there anything correlative to the time of the gap?”

  You felt a sensation of pain when you got soap in your eye, half a second before the glitch occurred.

  Huh. Pain—a scream. The half-formed body. “The glitch formed a partial body that cradled its stomach, hunched over, but still had the capacity to call for help. Based on these symptoms, do any of your files indicate the cause of pain?”

  There is a moment while the vessel searches, and then a clip appears onscreen. Though mute, the video shows a man hunched in the same position, his mouth moving in what might have been a plea for help. He’s in a small room made of clouded walls, water streaming from a shower spout above him.

  I raise an eyebrow, uneasy. “Is he being tortured?”

  No, Master Zaytsev. This is security footage from a beast production facility. The subject is in a cleansing room. In order to remove contaminants, which may create an aversive reaction in the tanks, subjects are showered in a mixture of light acid and hot water.

  Blood rushes to my hands and I jab my finger against the screen. The video ends. Despite only wearing a towel, the humidity of the living airship presses against me, and I’m shaking hard enough not to mind the heat.

  Master Zaytsev, you are showing unusual levels of anxiety. Our medical records suggest you should take some form of anxiety medication.

  Before I can respond, the vessel teleports me in front of the bathroom sink. Faint veins of blood pulse beneath the warm, cramped walls. Sweat beads on my neck. The walls have reverted to their unfinished stage, to muscle and skin. I take a short breath—it’s hard to breathe. A tendril shoots from the wall and opens the cabinet mirror, revealing an assortment of bottles and boxes. “I’m fine—” I start, but my stomach churns and I collapse on the toilet seat, nauseous as the slender tendril presses the bottle into my hand.

  One of these should suffice. Let us prepare you a glass of water.

  I shake one of the capsules into my hand. We had these in the Community—general anxiety medication. I cap the bottle and start to put the pill on my tongue, then pause. We had other pills in the Community, too, and those pills didn’t always do what they said.

  I roll the bottle in my hands.

  Allow to dissolve in mouth before swallowing. No more than two tablets within twenty-four hours. Side effects may include headaches, dizziness, confusion, irritability, sleep disturbance…

  Confusion isn’t good when dealing with telepaths—especially a glitchy telepathic vessel. “I’ll be fine,” I say quickly. The pill rattles as I drop it back in the bottle and sit the capsule on the counter. Sweat pours down my back, but if I take deep breaths, if I count to ten, I’ll be okay. One. Two. Three—

  “Young man! Why haven’t you taken your daily pill?” A disembodied mouth scowls at me from above the mirror.

  I stagger off the toilet. “I’m fine! I don’t need to take the daily pill.” I glance at the door. Two glitches in ten minutes. If I run, I might make it to my room before the Legion Spore makes me take the cursed thing.

  “That’s no excuse. Take this now, or I will call security,” the mouth says sharply.

  I swallow hard. No way am I taking that thing. I propel myself out the door. I need to get back to the command—

  A hand grabs my arm and yanks me against the corridor wall. I careen to the floor, shoulders twisted uncomfortably behind my back. The mouth reforms on the opposite wall, this time with a nose and lower cheeks. Now a chin.

  “I don’t need the pill.” I mentally check the tech and my chest squeezes tight. The Legion Spore’s intelligence matrix is offline again.

  “I will call security, young man. Take it. Now.”

  Just below the chin, a hand forms and extrudes outward, some weird combination of tentacle and arm, then produces a pill at its fingertips.

  Despite the quivering lump in my throat, I keep my voice firm. “No.”

  The hand slams me against the wall and presses against my cheek, slimy. A salty odor assaults my nose. I jerk free, but the skinless fingers force the bitter pill between my lips and clamp my jaw shut. I clench my teeth together, keeping the pill between my gums and inner cheek. I can’t let it win. Where’s that AI? It’s got to be buried beneath the jumbled code somewhere.

  “If you continue to resist, you will be arrested.”

  I purse my lips, holding the pill in place,
and swallow hard. The action seems to do the trick; the hands release me. I spit out the pill and sprint for the ladder. Tentacles lash around my ankles and I crash against the grate. My ear rings from the impact. I gasp for breath as the tentacles drag me across the floor. The metal grate catches the bare skin on my back. I cry out, grappling at the holes, fighting for a hold, but the ghost encloses me in the bathroom before I get a good grip. Heat rises to my cheeks. It can’t make me take the pill; I’m in charge! “Legion Spore, answer me!” I pound my fist against the membrane of the door.

  “I wish we didn’t have to do this.”

  I pause. Same male voice. Based on his insistence that I take the pill, he might be some kind of counselor. My breath catches as steam in the chilly air and my hairs stand on end. Frost encrusts the mirror. I take a step back.

  Coolers. The glitch is mimicking the cryogenic freezers that the security forces use. I slam my hand against the wall, and my skin sticks against a thin coating of ice. Pain tugs at my hand—there’s no use pulling free. Worse, I lost my towel in the corridor. There’s no warmth to be had. More ice coats my feet. Biting. Numb. Frozen in place. My heart skips a beat.

  If this continues, I might suffer from frostbite, or even death…

  Goosebumps crawl up my legs. I mentally search for any hint of the Legion Spore’s tech, but the AI is locked out. Maybe… I reach out with my powers and sense that my tablet’s on my bed. I coax the technology to life. It’s like a warm fizzle of code in my mind. There’s got to be a loophole somewhere.

  Ice coats my kneecaps and spreads across my arms. The intelligence matrix is down, but not the powers.

  That’s it. Powers. I need to focus on what powers this thing is using. I dive into the elemental section of the list. The ice powers—

  Are locked.

  I swallow hard, my teeth chattering. It’s hard to concentrate. I skim the list of powers available to me. Ice crawls across my neck. Come on, there’s got to be something here…

  Fire elementals. I tap into that and a small poof of flame lights the air, momentarily instilling heat across my back.

  Good.

  Air next.

  The air elementals move thin streams of flammable gasses beside the ice at my hands. I trigger the fire program. Ice pools into water droplets at the tips of my fingers. My hands release from the door. I rub my fingers together, taking what little warmth I can from friction. But the fire is quickly eating what air remains. The glitch is still active, still lowering the temperature to a level resembling the coolers. Maybe—

  Maybe I can trick the glitch. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fooled someone into thinking I’ve taken adominogen.

  I add a bit of code. A line that says I took the pill.

  Air rushes into the room, into my lungs, and my head spins in relief.

  Master Zaytsev, is there a reason you are encased in ice?

  I shake my head. The Legion Spore actually sounds perplexed, even a bit cheeky. My teeth clack too hard to speak coherently. Mind helping me out? I assume it’s reading my thoughts.

  Of course.

  The temperature increases and feeling restores to my extremities. I beeline to the bedroom and grab my uniform, finally get dressed, and then spend the rest of the morning—and most of the afternoon—researching where that particular ghost came from.

  I manage to remove the latest glitches, and then check back through the records to find any glitches I haven’t yet fixed. There’s still the song about Seth Black that activated a while back, and I haven’t yet found the code for that glitch. I try humming the tune to prod the glitch into action, but its code remains elusive.

  For all that these glitches are technologically based, I’m starting to feel like I need to be looking at this from a different angle. In hubs, glitches are an occasional voice, a misfire of powers. They’re… resistance. Due to the nature of telepathy, the hub’s user might experience a “ghost.” Seems the more correct term for these glitches would be hauntings—residual events repeated indefinitely, like being trapped in some kind of time loop.

  Before the Community and before theophrenia, people had strange beliefs about ghosts, spirits, and the afterlife. Though these “ghosts” aren’t mythical in the slightest, there may be something that can help me there. Some idea that I’m not exploring, that I’m missing, because I’m not as familiar with these myths.

  So I turn my research the direction of the time stones. Their designs seem to be based in mythology, and if I find more information on Catonian relics in general, it might help. It seems most of these relics have some kind of spirit attached to them, much in the way Benjamin used his life-spirit power to attach himself to the pendants. Perhaps my first order of business should be finding more information about spirits who were life elementals.

  After reviewing an article about a spirit that possessed a brain-dead child, I find several related articles from the time shortly before EYEnet was founded. One is about a man listed as Agent Knight. According to the text, he took an unruly team from the Super Bureau to remove a cult leader who tied the spirits of his followers to metal photographs—some superstition about photographs stealing a person’s soul. But the methods weren’t magical. The cult leader used life-spirit powers to bind his followers to a separate object, where he could better control them.

  Unusual that he amassed so many followers without the use of persuasion, the Legion Spore notes. I jump at the Legion Spore’s voice and drop my tablet in my lap. Before now, the vessel has been content to silently pull articles from its database.

  “Well—he did have powers.” I feel a bit ridiculous that I’m talking conversationally with a ship. “We know he was a life-spirit elemental. He might have had other powers, too.” Most people have two to three powers, so it’s entirely possible he had persuasion as a secondary ability.

  Indeed.

  I shake my head and flip to the deep-rooted Camaraderie files, trying to see if Agent Knight had any other dealings with spirits, but he ventured too close to the Camaraderie’s origins and disappeared from public record.

  Every other article the Legion Spore pulls for me is steeped in myth—passages from religious texts, fictional novels, and far-out claims in long-forgotten documentaries. Nothing explains were the glitch’s song might have come from, or where I need to look to remove the glitch.

  Master Zaytsev—

  I sigh. “Yes?”

  Are we a demon?

  A passage appears on the computer screen from some mythological text—a Christian bible. I frown as several more translations from various texts appear, all suggesting the same thing.

  We are legion. Are we a demon?

  Go figure an organic AI would start reading the texts I’m investigating.

  “You’re called the Legion Spore because you are comprised of many people in one massive unit” —the text highlights “because we are many” and I rub my forehead in frustration— “and a spore because of the many individual units, which gave rise to a new organism. Blame Lady Winters for the name.”

  Lady Winters is dead.

  I groan. “Because I killed her. I know.”

  She deserved her death. She caused pain.

  I cautiously sit my tablet aside. That wasn’t an answer I expected. “Legion Spore—”

  Yes, Master Zaytsev?

  “Do you show preference toward me over Commander Rick?” I crane my neck to the ceiling.

  We do not give preference, Master Zaytsev. We are incapable. Such a task is not in our programming.

  I rub my chin. A test, then. “Legion Spore, who would you rather pilot you?”

  You have proven to be a capable pilot, Master Zaytsev. You are not bossy.

  “And Commander Rick is?”

  Yes.

  There’s a hint of annoyance in the disjointed voices, and my lips twist into a hesitant smile. Judgment might not be in its programming, but it’s plenty capable of the feat. “Looks like I have another glitch to fix.”

&n
bsp; Master Zaytsev?

  “A matter of preference.”

  The vessel doesn’t respond, and I clear the documents from the screen and return to my search. “Don’t worry; you’re an organic airship powered by a dual hub. You’re not a demon.”

  Demons don’t exist, anyway. Only spirits do.

  We are not concerned, Master Zaytsev. There’s that annoyance again.

  I smile. Once I get rid of the singing glitch, I’ll have to search through the coding for the cause of the AI’s development of preference.

  I wrap my fingers behind my head and lean back in the chair. According to my research, residual hauntings are where a ghost travels a similar path in life. They repeat commonplace or traumatic events without regard to their surroundings. Unknown triggers cause the event.

  Commonplace—I sit upright. Perhaps the singing is actually the repetition of a common event in life, not a traumatic one. I’ve been looking in the wrong files.

  “Legion Spore, bring up the records on the beasts used in your creation.” The singing might have been retained as a skill, not a memory. Just like Lady Black’s beastie retained its interest in musical instruments.

  After a moment of searching, there it is—a small segment of code in an armored beastie’s file. I grin. “Problem solved.”

  Congratulations, Master Zaytsev. Shall we alert the commander of the situation update?

  I nod and relax back into my chair. One glitch down, one to go.

  I’m dreaming again. Lady Black has visited my cell twice now. The first time, after my rebuffs, she stormed out. Her hair fluttered behind her. I smiled as the door slammed shut. Metal clanged against metal. This is a small victory I can’t afford to deny.

  Not many can resist her advances.

  Now she strokes my cheek, tracing the smooth ovals of her fingernails along my rough skin. I chuckle and wrap my arms around her. Bring her closer. Her voice is hot in my ears as she nibbles on my earlobes.