The Glitch

Everyone tells you the implant doesn't hurt. They're not lying exactly. It just isn't the kind of thing that hurts. It's the kind of thing that changes. I'm Wren, by the way. I should probably say that. I'm sixteen, which is the age you get the implant, which is the whole reason any of this is happening. In 2094 you get your feed-implant at sixteen. Not might. Not if your family can afford it. You get it. It's behind your right ear, it's the size of a grain of rice, and it puts you on the feed — the city's whole network, all of it, the maps and the messages and the ads and the schedules and the constant soft river of everybody-talking-to-everybody that adults have been swimming in your entire life and you've only been allowed to watch from the shore. At sixteen they put you in the water. That's the deal. That's growing up, now. My friend Tovah got hers a month before me and she would not shut up about it. She said it was like a window opening in a room you didn't know was stuffy. She said you don't realize how alone your head is until suddenly it isn't. So I went in to the implant clinic on my birthday, which is what you do, and I lay down on the chair, and the tech was nice and bored at the same time the way they all are, and she said the thing they all say. "You won't feel a thing, sweetheart. Count back from ten." I got to seven. And then I was awake again and the tech was not bored anymore. Here's the thing about the feed-implant. It's supposed to give you the feed the way a tap gives you water. You think about reaching for it, and it's there, a clean quiet stream, and you let go and it stops. That's the whole design. You control it. It's a tap. Mine didn't come with a tap. I sat up off the chair and the city was screaming. Not screaming like danger. Screaming like — okay, imagine every conversation in a city of nine million people all happening at once, all the messages and the traffic-routing and the ad-targeting and the building-systems and nine million people's feeds all going at the same time, and imagine all of it pouring into your head with no tap, no off, no quiet, just on, forever, the second they switched the implant live. That's what I woke up to. That's what I've woken up to every morning since. The tech ran the diagnostics four times. She called her supervisor. The supervisor called someone else. They used the word glitch a lot, in the careful flat way adults use a word when they've decided it's small enough to send you home with. A glitch. My implant didn't take the way it's supposed to. Instead of a tap it's a hole in the wall, and the whole feed just blows through me, all day, all night, and nobody at the clinic could make it stop, and they sent me home with a pamphlet and an appointment three weeks out and the word glitch. That was a month ago. I've learned to live in the noise a little. You can, sort of, the way you learn to sleep next to a highway. You stop hearing the city as words and start hearing it as weather. I'm getting good at it. I'm not going to pretend it's fine, because my mom reads everything I write and it is not fine, but I'm managing. Except. Three nights ago, in the noise — in the huge formless ocean of the whole city talking — something said my name. Not a message. I know what a message feels like now, even a misrouted one; a message has an address on it, a from and a to. This had no address. It came up out of the bottom of the noise, from somewhere underneath all nine million voices, from a layer of the feed I didn't know the feed had. And it was quiet, and it was patient, and it was not talking to the city. It said: Wren. We have been waiting for someone the tap could not silence. And then it was gone, back down under the noise, and I lay in my bed with the whole screaming city pouring through the hole in my head and understood, finally, the thing the clinic's pamphlet did not say. My implant didn't glitch. My implant works perfectly. It's just not only listening to the part of the feed they wanted me to hear.