Read Glitch: A Short Story (Kindle Single) for Free Online

door behind him. The smell
of his sweat lingers in the air around me for a moment, and then it’s gone. An
image of our old garage barges into my brain, unannounced. Peter and I are
celebrating Max’s first untethered bipedal walk. I swear to God, it’s as joyous
a day as when our Sarah stumbled across the carpet for the first time. Must be
the smell of sweat and solder bringing that memory back. Just a glitch. We get
them too.
    ••••
    The
Gladiator Nationals are being held in Detroit for the first time in their nine-year
history—a nod to the revitalization of the local industry. Ironic,
really. A town that fought the hell out of automation has become one of the
largest builders of robots in the world. Robots building robots. But the
factory floors still need trainers, designers, and programmers. High-tech jobs
coming to rescue a low-wage and idle workforce. They say downtown is booming
again, but the place looks like absolute squalor to me. I guess you had to be
here for the really bad times to appreciate this.
    Our trailer
is parked on the stadium infield. A security bot on tank treads—built by
one of our competitors—scans Peter’s ID and waves us through. We head for
the two semis with Max’s gold-and-blue- jowled image
painted across the sides. It looks like the robot is smiling—a bit of
artistic license. It gets the parents honking at us on the freeway and the kids
pumping their fists out the windows.
    Reaching the
finals two years ago secured the DARPA contract that paid for the second
trailer. We build war machines that entertain the masses, and then the tech
flows down to factories like those here in Detroit—where servants are
assembled for the wealthy, healthcare bots for the infirmed, and mail-order sex
bots that go mostly to Russia. A lust for violence, in some roundabout way,
funds other lusts. All I know is that with one more trip to the finals, the
debt Peter saddled me with is history. I concentrate on this as we cross the
oil-splattered arena. The infield is deathly quiet, the stands empty. Assholes
everywhere getting decent sleep.
    “—which
was the last thing we tried,” Peter says. He’s been running over their
diagnostics since we left the hotel.
    “What you’re
describing sounds like a processor issue,” I say. “Maybe a short. Not
software.”
    “It’s not
hardware,” he says. “We don’t think.”
    Greenie is
standing on the ramp of trailer 1, puffing on a vape .
His eyes are wild. “Morning, Greenie,” I tell him. I hand him a cup of coffee
from the drive-through, and he doesn’t thank me, doesn’t say anything, just
flips the plastic lid off the cup with his thumb and takes a loud sip. He’s
back to staring into the distance as I follow Peter into the trailer.
    “You kids
need to catch some winks,” I tell Peter. “Seriously.”
    The trailer
is a wreck, even by post-bout standards. The overhead hood is running, a
network of fans sucking the air out of the trailer and keeping it cool. Max is
in his power harness at the far end, his cameras tracking our approach.
“Morning, Max,” I tell him.
    “Good
morning, Samantha.”
    Max lifts an
arm to wave. Neither of his hands are installed; his arms terminate in the
universal connectors Peter and I designed together a lifetime ago. His pincers
and his buzz saw sit on the workbench beside him. Peter has explained the
sequence I should expect, and my brain is whirring to make sense of it.
    “How’re you
feeling, Max?”
    “Operational,”
he says. I look over the monitors and see his charge level and error readouts.
Looks like the boys fixed his servos from the semifinal bout and got his armor
welded back together. The replacement shoulder looks good, and a brand new set
of legs has been bolted on, the gleaming paint on Max’s lower half a contrast
to his charred torso. I notice the boys haven’t gotten around to plugging the
legs in yet. Too busy with this supposed glitch.
    As I look over
Max, his wounds and