Glitch Wipe

Mum couldn’t afford martial arts, so I got a language chip for my birthday instead. Sure, that’s cool and everything, but French doesn’t exactly save you from getting beaten on at school. “Stop hitting me,” isn’t a particularly effective method of getting someone to back off, no matter what language. And it most certainly didn’t work against Eric Jay Benson. He was a rich asshole. Which also made him a black belt rich asshole. His parents had gotten him so many fighting chips he was practically a ninja. The other day at school, he’d even done a triple backflip off the roof when the teachers weren’t watching. Bloody show-offing dick.

And of course, all the girls loved him too. They never even glanced at the rest of us. Wasn’t French supposed to be the language of love? Guess big flips and a fancy haircut worked better. Merde.

Yep, Eric Jay Benson and his band of brawny buddies basically owned the schoolyard in every way possible. I couldn’t even make myself feel better, with the hope they might work for me one day because they were ridiculously smart too.

Their big-shot Daddies made sure they got all the chips budding soon-to-be billionaires needed. The band of goons were topping every class: Science, Math, English, hell even Art. They even knew stuff the teachers didn’t, years of uploads throughout their childhood, basically the equivalent of an MBA chip. To put it simply, life wasn’t fair.

Sure, I got the stuff I needed to pass the tests: hours, and hours of uploads. Plugged in from 8AM till 3PM with a break for lunch. But it wasn’t the same. The goons basically never stopped uploading.

But Mum wouldn’t hear any of my complaints. “You know, you should count your blessings” she’d told me when I asked for the umpteenth time if I could start working in the factories, “in some schools they can’t even afford chips. Some students are still being taught by reading textbooks and scribbling notes on paper. They would kill to be given chips like yours!”

I’d just rolled my eyes and said they could have mine. She’d glowered at that. But I’d kept talking, “If I worked at the factories, I could afford so many more chips. Better chips. Who needs Shakespeare anyways? When am I ever going to use that one?”

She’d just sighed. “Yes, if you started earning money you could probably get more chips,” my eyes widened when she said that. She was actually agreeing with me! Was she finally going to say yes? “But…” she said, and all my hopes were dashed, “knowing you, you wouldn’t spend that money on education chips. Would you? Be honest with yourself. You’d just get kicks and flips and all the fighting techniques, not to mention gaming chips.”

“But…” I thought back to the new martial arts chip I’d been drooling over, now with num chuck functionality, and knew she was right.

“Tell me I’m wrong.” She’d said, already a look of triumph in her eyes.

I couldn’t lie to her, and she knew that. She always managed to sniff it out. I wonder if lie detection was part of the complementary parent chip they gave out when kids were born, or if was just a skill she’d developed herself.

“Fine.” I spat, and headed off to my room, slamming the door.

My only chance of ever beating Eric would have to be winning the lottery chip. But that was about as likely as getting glitch wiped.

Glitch wiping was when a chip got corrupted. It wiped your files instead of uploading new ones. Sometimes that meant erasing uploads, but rumour had it, it wiped memories too. But I wasn’t sure if that was true or not. According to Mum when the chips came out there were a bunch of hackers. And glitch wiping was everywhere. Basically, no one would get chips for fear it’d mess them up. The government had practically had to give them out for free. Lucky.

Now the firewalls on the chips were solid. You practically never heard about glitch wiping, and even then, that was just something that happened in the outlying districts or to idiots that bought pirated chips. Getting a chip that wasn’t configured to your specific brain wave patterns was beyond stupid, practically asking to be wiped. A lot of people did it in the early days, but after all the horror stories, the practice was practically extinct.

Glitch wiping nowadays was most commonly used as an insult; a way of calling someone an idiot of the highest tier. I used to call my little brother a glitch wipe before my mother found out and got unbelievably mad at me. She’d destroyed one of my gaming chips. Not confiscated. Destroyed. She’d crunched it under her boot right in front of me. I’d practically started crying – I was at level 70! It’d taken me three years to get that far!

It wasn’t my fault the kid was behind in all his classes after all. Wasn’t like I was the first one to call him that either. Based on our family’s wage tier, we were only supposed to have one kid to ensure we could keep up with the cost of education chips. But here he was anyways.

“He’s our little surprise.” She’d said when he was born, cuddling him close. Surprise was putting it nicely.

If little glitch wipe hadn’t been born, I’d probably have at least three martial arts chips by now. Birthdays used to be so much better before she had him. Cute or not, every bloody nose felt like it was his fault. I knew I couldn’t blame him though. Even if it was really easy to.

The world was just a shitty place. With or without the little glitch, Eric Jay freaking Benson would still have more chips than me. He’d still be getting better and better at throwing punches. No matter what, all I could ever do was prepare to get hit in the face.