Chapter 4
I WOKE EARLY, confused about where I was until I felt Adrien’s arm draped lazily across me. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help smiling. I tried to slide out of Adrien’s grasp without waking him, but he stirred anyway.
“Hey,” he said as I sat up.
I looked down at him, his hair crumpled from sleep, his eyes blinking open slowly. I’d never seen him this way before. All dreamy, before the weight of the world had fully settled back on his shoulders. I loved the way his brow jutted out to shadow his eyes, and the smooth aquiline cut of his nose. I could have stared at him forever.
“Keep sleeping,” I whispered, but he rubbed his eyes and sat up.
“Nah, I’m alright. What time is it?”
I raised my arm and looked at the readout on my suit. “Six. I’m serious, you should get more sleep.”
He got to his feet. “Can’t,” he grinned, his eyes still sleepy. “View’s too nice to close my eyes again.”
I smacked him on the shoulder, but felt a slight blush come to my cheeks anyway.
He pulled me close and nuzzled a kiss in the curve of my neck. Even through the suit I could feel the gentle pressure of his touch. But still it wasn’t the same as really being able to touch him. I cursed my allergies for the millionth time.
He pulled back and gestured to the curtain that hung as a sleep partition. “After you.”
Jilia was already up. She stood at the counter with her back to us.
I looked around the room, impressed again at how many conveniences they had in spite of the fact that this was a mobile building in the middle of nowhere. A small kitchen area was set up in the corner, complete with a sink and a food thermal unit. A table with six chairs took up half the room, and the other half was filled with research equipment. An extensive four-screen console was open on the desk in the corner. The screens were filled with text and diagrams of the brain.
Jilia filled a pot with steaming hot water. Her hair was in a bun again, but with the full morning light coming through the plastic window, I could see a few gray tendrils tucked in against the brown above her ears. She wore a simple faded red tunic. She paused when we came in and smiled warmly at us. “You two are up early.”
“Is that coffee?” Adrien yawned loudly. “I could really use some.”
“What’s coffee?” I asked.
Jilia laughed. “You Community dwellers really are deprived. But since you both are up so early, there was something I was hoping to do this morning.” She set the pot down.
“What is it?” Adrien asked, grabbing a mug from a hook on the wall and pouring out some of the steaming black drink.
“Well,” Jilia said, “I’ve been studying glitcher brain phenomena for a long time, almost as soon as the Rez rescued me and I could get my hands on a console system.” She turned to me. “I was hoping I could do a scan of your brain to further my research. I’ve been eager to study you ever since Adrien told me about the things you’ve been able to do with your power.” Her eyebrows were raised, the excitement clear on her face. “I have some theories about glitcher mutations and I think gathering data points from a scan of your brain would really help.”
I thought of all the years getting poked and prodded at the hands of the Community when they implanted new hardware. I swallowed nervously. “Will it be invasive?”
“Oh no, not at all. All external. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I should let you get some breakfast first.” She leaned over to pull some protein pouches out of a box.
“No, that’s fine,” I said quickly, my stomach turning at the thought of the thick goo she was offering. Until they learned more about the extent of my allergies, it was all I was allowed to eat. The bottom of my helmet had a complicated mechanism whereby a straw could be inserted safely. But I knew from trying it last night that the grainy protein mix tasted horrible.
“Great.” Jilia’s face lit up. “Come on over here, then, I’ll show you.” She hurried across the room to her console station. She clicked a button and a 3-D model of the brain rotated in a projection cube beside the desk. I leaned in to look closer. It seemed like a normal brain.
“Help me grab this exam table,” Jilia said, and Adrien helped her pull out a padded black table that had been folded in half against the wall.
“Zoe, if you’ll just lay here.”
I laid down and Jilia rolled over another machine level with the table. She positioned three metal arms around my head.
“The suit won’t interfere with the scan?” I asked.
“Nope, no problem at all. Now let me hook this up here—” She hooked a cable into the machine, then sat at the chair in front of the console. A few more clicks and I heard the machine beside my head whir to life. “Now lay as still as you can,” she said.
I looked at the ceiling and tried not to twitch. The machine clicked and rotated around my head, making a complete circle. My eyes tracked the spinning metal arms.
After a few more moments, Jilia announced, “All done. Now, let’s look at the data.” The excitement in her voice was palpable. Adrien pulled the scanner away from the sides of my head and helped me sit up.
“If you can tell I’m a glitcher from a brain scan, why can’t the Community? Or the Chancellor? She could use it to find potential glitchers and recruit them.”
Jilia was typing and clicking on the console. “Luckily, their equipment isn’t as fine-tuned as this. I’ve spent years developing software to detect these subtle differences, and only because I knew what I was looking for. The best the Chancellor could do is detect glitcher brain activity after six months of glitching. And by then, the glitcher has usually been reported and ‘repaired’ or been rescued by us.”
She leaned in closer to the screen, looking at what was just a long string of gibberish to me. “Wow,” she breathed out.
“What is it?” Adrien moved in closer.
“I’ll show you,” Jilia said. “It’ll be easier than trying to explain it.” She tapped on the screen a few more times, then turned to the projection cube. “This is a typical brain.”
An image of a brain rotated in the orange light. “This is what a non-glitcher brain looks like. The sparks of blue represent neuron activity.” She pointed at various portions of the brain where minuscule blue dots lit up, making small bright clouds. “And this—” she said, then tapped the screen a few times, “is a glitcher brain.”
I leaned. “They look the same to me.”
“Here, I’ll show them side by side. See the frontal cortex here on the glitcher brain?”
I looked closer, glancing back and forth between the two images. “There’s more blue light,” I said, looking up at Jilia.
She smiled. “Exactly. At first we thought glitchers simply had an increased neural capacity due to the brain adapting around the Link hardware the Community installed. But now, it’s clear that the actual number of neurons has been increasing exponentially. There are genes that usually lay dormant that, in glitcher brains, are finally finding expression. The electrical impulses and connections your brain is able to make—it’s not the same leap as the difference between primates and humans, but it’s still impressive.”
Jilia tapped in the screen a few more times. “Now, hold on. This is Zoe’s brain.” The blue lights on the new model covered almost the entire frontal lobe. Adrien gasped and took a step back. I blinked, certain I was seeing it wrong.
“But what does that mean?” I asked. I was suddenly queasy. My powers, the uncontrollable seizures, Adrien’s visions of me as a powerful leader. All of it must be explained by the brain scan in front of me. Solid proof that I was different. My stomach dropped. I didn’t want to be different. I didn’t want to have all this power capped up inside me. I just wanted to be a regular glitcher.
“To be honest, I don’t know.” Jilia’s eyes were still trained on the model, and as she leaned in to look closer, her face was bathed in reflected blue light. “I’ve never seen this before.” I couldn’t read the look on her face—it seemed like a mixture of surprise and excitement. It was clear Jilia only saw strength and possibility when she looked at the model of my brain, but I saw it for what it really was: dangerous.
“Do you have any unusual symptoms? Headaches? Surges in power? New abilities?”
