Glitch: A Short Story (Kindle Single) by Hugh Howey Read Free Book Online Page B

welds provide a play-by-play of his last brutal fight—one
of the most violent I’ve ever seen. The Berkeley team that lost will be
starting from scratch. By the end of the bout, Max had to drag himself across
the arena with the one arm he had left before pummeling his incapacitated
opponent into metal shavings. When the victory gun sounded, we had to do a
remote kill to shut him down. The way he was twitching, someone would’ve gotten
hurt trying to get close enough to shout over the screeches of grinding and
twisting metal. The slick of oil from that bout took two hours to mop up before
the next one could start.
    “You look
good,” I tell Max, which is my way of complimenting Peter’s repair work without
complimenting Peter directly. Greenie joins us as I lift Max’s pincer from the
workbench. “Let me give you a hand,” I tell Max, an old joke between us.
    I swear his
arm twitches as I say this. I lift the pincer attachment toward the stub of his
forearm, but before I can get it attached, Max’s arm slides gently out of the
way.
    “See?” Peter
says.
    I barely
hear him. My pulse is pounding—something between surprise and anger. It’s
a shameful feeling, one I recognize from being a mom. It’s the sudden lack of
compliance from a person who normally does what they’re told. It’s a rejection
of my authority.
    “Max, don’t
move,” I say.
    The arm
freezes. I lift the pincers toward the attachment again, and his arm jitters
away from me.
    “Shut him
down,” I tell Peter.
    Greenie is
closer, so he hits the red shutoff, but not before Max starts to say something.
Before the words can even form, his cameras iris shut and his arms sag to his
side.
    “This next
bit will really piss you off,” Peter says. He grabs the buzz saw and attaches
it to Max’s left arm while I click the pincers onto the right. I reach for the
power.
    “Might want
to stand back first,” Greenie warns.
    I take a
step back before hitting the power. Max whirs to life and does just what Peter
described in the car: He detaches both his arms. The attachments slam to the
ground, the pincer attachment rolling toward my feet.
    Before I can
ask Max what the hell he’s doing, before I can get to the monitors to see what
lines of code—what routines—just ran, he does something even
crazier than jettisoning his attachments.
    “I’m sorry,”
he says. The fucker knows he’s doing something wrong.
    ••••
    “It’s not
the safety overrides,” I say.
    “Nope.”
Greenie has his head in his hands. We’ve been going over possibilities for two
hours. Two hours for me—the boys have been at this for nearly twelve. I
cycle through the code Max has been running, and none of it makes sense. He’s
got tactical routines and defense modules engaging amid all the clutter of his
parallel processors, but he’s hardset into
maintenance mode. Those routines shouldn’t be firing at all. And I can see why
Peter warned me not to put any live-fire attachments on. The last thing we need
is Max shooting up a four-million-dollar trailer.
    “I’ve got it,”
I say. It’s at least the twentieth time I’ve said this. The boys shoot me down
every time. “It’s a hack. The SoCal team knows they’re getting stomped in two
days. They did this.”
    “If they
did, they’re smarter than me,” Greenie says. “And they aren’t smarter than me.”
    “We looked
for any foreign code,” Peter says. “Every diagnostic tool and virus check comes
back clean.”
    I look up at
Max, who’s watching us as we try to figure out what’s wrong with him. I project
too much into the guy, read into his body language whatever I’m feeling or
whatever I expect him to feel. Right now, I imagine him as being sad. Like he
knows he’s disappointing me. But to someone else—a stranger—he
probably looks like a menacing hulk of a destroyer. Eight feet tall, angled
steel, pistons for joints, pockmarked armor. We see what we expect to see, I
guess.
    “Max,