The Grid

I. Glitch

"We can be anyone except the person we really want to be. The one who matters. The last piece of difference left on this miserable planet."

"You're going beyond being thorough. I think you're a little obsessed. What do you mean by 'difference'?"

"You know it all as well as I do. Every nook and corner. It doesn't bother you? One smidgeon that's out of our control? A dead link is a pinprick, but it means the map is 0.0000000001% away from perfection."

"It's probably just a small glitch or an oversight. You're devoting too much time to something that will probably sort itself out. You realize how long we've been at this."

"You're too confident. We've never seen this before. Watch her through any of the machines. You'll never know what's running around in her head, and I haven't learned anything in over two hundred hours of surveillance. She never stops singing."

"Singing? Are you sure? Who's around her for more than two hundred hours with a consistent vantage point?"

"Her cat."

"We've got the cats now?"

"No, just the one who matters."

"A recurring theme."

"You know what I want out of all this? To see through her eyes, breathing the air as she breathes it, blissfully ignorant and undeniably deliberate as she confounds us with the purest form of chaos. We're not moving on until she's accounted for."

"Music isn't powerful enough to trump their internal schedules. The humans use ten percent, and we've given them the ability to use ninety."

"Unless you come up with a scientific explanation and proof to back up your false notion that I am simply paranoid, I'm going to keep watching."

"Like I said. Obsessed."



***

The blood of the grid flowed with flawless predictability on a schedule that had amplified the potential of the human race. They found simple contentment in the rehabilitation that the grid had provided for them, and as they strolled in their suits and overcoats to dozens of different corporate lobbies on a dozen different blocks around the city, none of them were without a role of purpose. They were no loiterers or hustlers or jobless bums. No one stood still on a sidewalk.

They all moved with the flow commanded by the checkerboard of control. Some took cabs. Some lived close enough to their pre-assigned professions to walk the entire way. Some "stroll pooled" in large groups, wearing shiny pins with iconic corporate logos. There were the BioCorp ninth floor members issuing friendly nods to the PharmoCorp sixth floor members as they intersected the block they shared between two reaching skyscrapers.

None of them had any clue that their perfect mass of routines were about to derailed by a cataclysmic shift of twisted unpredictability.