by Cody Sisco
In a low voice, Granfa Jeff said, “We have to scuttle the research into your cure.”
Victor’s mouth felt dry. He blinked, not believing what he’d heard, waiting for Granfa Jeff to correct himself. They couldn’t do that, could they? Victor peered into the hospital’s gloomy atrium. “Where’s Dr. Tammet?”
“I’m closing Oak Knoll, Victor. I let the staff go, you see. Another doctor will see you privately from now on. We’ll make arrangements.”
After years of therapy, hundreds of appointments, and who knew how many ounces of Victor’s blood drawn for tests, Granfa Jeff was going to shut down the research program? A cure was his only hope to prevent permanent catatonia.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Victor asked.
Granfa Jeff’s expression darkened, and Victor felt the blankness rise up again.
Chapter 2
Let me be clear. We’re not talking about slavery, imprisonment, chemical lobotomization, or any of the other rumors and lies flying around about the Commission’s work.
The protections proposed by the Commission are reasonable, proportional, and necessary to prevent another Carmichael incident.
Class Threes will live freely with supervision and annual re-evaluations.
Class Twos will contribute to society through decent work in self-sustaining communities that will ensure their well-being.
Class Ones will receive the best care available in facilities equipped for their special needs.
This approach is about the health and safety of our communities. It’s about helping those who suffer from mirror resonance syndrome and about the safety of their families and friends.
This is about a better world for everyone.
—Mía Barrias, public comment, SeCa Classification Commission records (1978)
Semiautonomous California
21 June 1979
The vidscreen on the wall of the Ludlum Middle School classroom showed houses destroyed by fire and bodies crushed under the tires of self-driving vehicles. By now, at age twelve, Victor Eastmore had seen the vidfeed many times. Having survived the massacre when he was only four years old, he’d experienced for himself the horror that Samuel Miller had inflicted on the town of Carmichael.
Every year on the anniversary of the incident, as part of a nationwide mandatory remembrance ceremony, the documentary played in schools and public buildings throughout Semiautonomous California. Now a woman with haunted eyes described how she survived the massacre. Victor recognized her, of course: Mía Barrias, the woman who’d saved him from one of Samuel’s booby traps. She detailed her encounter with the killer on the day of her honeymoon, how she’d watched him murder her fiancé with a quantum-triggered Dirac stunstick pulse to the head, and how she’d escaped and got help from police in a nearby town.
The vidfeed was all too familiar.
When the Man from Nightmareland’s crimes introduced Semiautonomous California to the dangers of mirror resonance syndrome, the government responded by developing the Classification system to gene-scan and control people with MRS.
Being classified was worse than being any of SeCa’s other untouchables.
The Catholics—weakened, anemic, and banned from other nations in the American Union—were tolerated only on the outskirts of Oakland & Bayshore, not downtown. The Asian Refugee Act had expelled from Oakland desperate refugees from the Great Asian War, forcing them onto the farms in Long Valley and the slums of Little Asia on the San Francisco Peninsula; they couldn’t settle in Bayshore.
People with MRS were the enemies within: unpredictable, dangerous, terrifying.
Victor, with his blood-soaked, strange, and prescient dreams, had always felt different—no, not just different, peculiar—and completely out of step with the people of SeCa, who, from the days of the first Cathar settlers, had exalted in freedom from violence. The single incidence of mass killing in the nation’s history—Samuel Miller’s campaign to destroy Carmichael—had led to the demonization of people with MRS.
Best to keep them in facilities and ranchos in the nation’s hinterlands. “Out of sight, out of mind” could have been the national motto.
Victor didn’t dare ask to be excused from watching the vidfeed. Earlier, two girls had passed him in the hallway talking loudly, saying that they could spot a Broken Mirror without trying, everyone could, it was how they looked at you—no, hard to say exactly what it was, but definitely they were easy to spot.
Victor was desperate to avoid sticking out because, like Samuel Miller, he believed his dreams were premonitions. Not that he would ever tell anyone about them. Sometimes beliefs are so horrific that they’re easy to keep secret.
After the vidfeed ended, Victor rushed out of the classroom, collected his feedreader from his locker, and blasted through the exit doors, only to find himself surrounded by Alik and his friends in back of the school.
Alik called out, “Hey, freaky face. Why didn’t you cry during the vidfeed?”
A thunderstorm gathered in Victor’s mind. They always picked on him. They made fun of him for the way he talked, or they teased him for staying silent and for the way his facial expressions almost but did not quite mirror theirs. The problem lay deep in his brain. He couldn’t win.
“Look at his hands. He’s gonna rip your face off, Alik.”
It was true. Victor’s fingers were rigid and curled like talons.
“Maybe he’s a Broken Mirror,” Alik said.
“I am not!” Victor yelled.
Alik got closer. Sweat gathered under the boy’s eyes, and heat radiated from his skin in shimmering waves. “Who’s next on your list, sicko Samuel?”
Victor cringed and kept quiet. After Carmichael, he couldn’t be called a worse name.
Someone shoved Victor from behind, causing him to lurch forward. Alik punched Victor’s face. Rage took hold of Victor. His fist struck the underside of Alik’s jaw and sent him reeling into the crowd.
Alik lifted himself, nostrils flaring, and launched into Victor’s belly. The two boys stumbled through the cheering kids. Alik slammed Victor into the wall of the building. Victor tried to evade the fists that Alik rammed into his gut, but the blows kept coming.
Victor twisted free, panicking. He slipped on something slick and grabbed Alik’s shirt to keep from falling. Victor fell anyway, and Alik staggered past Victor headfirst and slammed into the side of a dumpster.
Elena Morales, his friend for as long as he could remember, helped Victor to his feet. She’d always been strong: meaty limbs, broad face, and a loud voice when she wanted. Even her carmel-brown hair had a luster and seemed to glow from within. She whispered in his ear, “That was some first-class martial arts.”
“I wish,” Victor said. He gripped his aching stomach and searched for an escape.
A girl screamed. Victor turned and saw Alik lying limp at the foot of the dumpster, eyes closed, blood trickling from his head.
A male administrator appeared and asked, “What’s going on?” He spotted Alik and yelled at the crowd, “Back away, all of you! Get back!” He spoke into his fist-sized MeshBit to summon an ambulance.
“This is supposed to be a day for peace and healing. What happened?” The administrator scanned the crowd of students.
Heads swiveled back and forth between Victor and Alik’s body.
Victor’s left eye was swollen shut. He took an unsteady step in the direction of the bus stop.
The administrator pointed at him and said, “Don’t move.”
A siren wailed and grew louder. Victor slumped to his knees. Elena squeezed his arm and said, “Don’t worry.” He focused on the feel of her next to him, relieved and gratified that her love of underdogs made her root for him.
An ambulance rolled onto the paved path just beyond the squat school buildings. Pink-uniformed paramedics burst out, spotted the waving administrator, and darted forward. Though the siren had been silenced, Victor’s ears were ringing in a kind of rising and falling brrrrnnnnngggg that co
incided with the throbbing in his gut.
The ambulance’s green and yellow lights flashed on the children’s shocked faces as they watched the paramedics load Alik onto a stretcher and carry it into the vehicle. Strong arms pushed and lifted Victor, and he found himself in the ambulance. The vehicle lurched forward.
When they arrived at the hospital, a female nurse led Victor inside the hospital and down a corridor, where a pair of brightly lit near-white Helios lightstrips ran along the ceiling like burning-hot steel rails. She brought him to a small examination room and asked for his name and MeshID, entered them on a type-pad, and then examined and treated his eye. She left the room and shut the door.
Victor looked down at his hands. Specks of dried blood hid under a thumbnail. He picked at it with another nail, but tiny red stains remained in the hard-to-reach crevice. He scratched again, deeper. New blood seeped from the worn-away skin. Pain flared as sparks from his fingers. He watched them bloom with each painful dig: beautiful, multicolored, ephemeral things, like confetti aflame. They were his secret magic tricks and worth the pain they cost.
He sat in the room for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to come and tell him what a bad person he was for hurting Alik. If he had a MeshBit, he could call his parents, but his fa had refused to purchase one. They were pieces of Euro-fascist tech, according to his fa, that kept nations in the American Union from reaching their full potential. Ma never let Fa’s assertions stand, and always countered that the benefits of Mesh access outweighed any nebulous, jingoistic, proto-nationalist-revivalist nonsense, as she called his fa’s rationale. Victor didn’t know much about politics; he just wished he could call his parents, though the school might have already called them. Victor listened for them through the door.
At one point, footsteps tromped closer, and someone knocked. A scowling man came in wearing a starched canvas coat adorned with the snake-and-staff logo surrounded by a circle. His name tag identified him as Dr. Rularian. He held Victor’s chin with one hand, which reeked of bleach. “Open your mouth,” he instructed. He roughly swabbed the inside of Victor’s cheek. Just as abruptly as he’d entered, the doctor left the room, shutting the door behind him.
Victor was alone again.
Alik would probably get many visitors during his recuperation. Well-wishers would stream into the hospital with their flowers, cards, and packages. Balloons would float around Alik’s bed, holding vigil until he woke. If he woke.
No one would care about Victor if he’d been the one so badly hurt. He’d been in fights before, never voluntarily, and he usually lost. Now he would be known at school as vicious and dangerous in addition to strange and “problematic,” as he’d once heard a teacher call him. The one time he won a fight was worse than all the times he’d lost.
Dr. Rularian returned. “Come with me,” he said.
Victor followed him to a room packed with electronics. Two technicians—always two—stood by, men in their mid-twenties wearing translucent gel surgical masks and canvas hats. The burlier of the two unbuttoned Victor’s shirt, pushed him into a reclining synthleather seat, and stuck small sensors on his forehead, neck, chest, inner elbows, and wrists. The other technician had a flat face as if he had no nose at all beneath his mask, and his skin looked perfectly smooth, like plastic.
“I’m going to remove your pants,” the flat-faced one said.
Victor started to tear off the sensors. The burly technician with unblinking lizard-like eyes placed a firm hand on his chest. “Relax,” he said, “you’re safe here.”
Victor let his head fall back into the cushioned headrest. “You could have just asked me to undress,” he said.
The flat-faced technician undid Victor’s belt buckle and tugged his pants down to his ankles. Victor felt the smooth sensors’ cool metal against his inner thighs and panicked again, gripping the hems of his boxers to hold them up.
“Hold still, please,” the doctor said in a low voice. “You can keep your underwear on.”
The flat-faced technician placed a helmet-shaped device on Victor’s head while Lizard-Eyes tapped on a type-pad. Victor gripped the arms of the chair, feeling a strange buzz course through his skin.
The doctor activated a control, and Victor’s view of the room disappeared, blacked out by the helmet’s visor. Then an image of a snarling cheetah sprang to life in front of his eyes. His heart beat faster. As suddenly as the cheetah had appeared, it vanished, replaced by a close-up vidfeed of a beautiful woman’s face. She cried. Streams of tears ran down her cheeks. The rawness of her emotion—the way her eyes seemed to recede into their sockets—pulled at Victor. More images popped into view and disappeared: a bloody body, two men nuzzling each other, a female-female couple, a male-female couple, all staring at each other close-up and smiling. Victor felt himself start to smile in response. Then he remembered he was sitting half-naked in a cold hospital room, covered in sensors.
His heart thudded in his chest. He tried to lift the heavy helmet off.
“I said hold still!” The doctor commanded through a sonofeed in the helmet.
“We got a clear reading,” one of the technicians said.
Dr. Rularian said, “Okay, then, let’s move on.”
The helmet’s visor turned transparent.
“You have to cooperate with us, Mr. Eastmore,” the doctor said as he frowned at Victor. “We need to verify your diagnosis.”
“What diagnosis?” Victor asked, but he knew already what the doctor would say. He’d had many dreams of being classified, though they’d all felt more real than this.
“You are being classified for mirror resonance syndrome.”
Victor tried to leap from the chair, but the technicians’ hands restrained him. He shouted. “I’m not a Broken Mirror!”
“Don’t be vulgar,” Dr. Rularian said, “and please cooperate. Your genetic test is being processed now. It’s standard procedure.”
“Why aren’t you testing Alik? He started the fight.”
“We will when he wakes up. We are required to test anyone brought to us by emergency services.”
“It’s not my fault!” Victor said.
“We’re not concerned with determining fault. Now, I’m going to read you a set of questions. Please answer whether you strongly agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, or strongly disagree.”
Victor waved a hand at the paper the doctor was holding. “You don’t need to ask me any questions. I’m a not a Broken—I’m not a mirror resonance person. I didn’t start the fight. I shouldn’t be here.”
“Please focus, Mr. Eastmore. The first statement is: ‘I have a hard time controlling my anger.’”
“My granfa owns this hospital. He could fire you like that.” Victor snapped his fingers.
Dr. Rularian knitted his brows. “I’m merely following protocol. As a man of medicine, your grandfather will understand that, I’m sure. Please. With regard to difficulty controlling your anger, do you strongly agree, slightly agree—”
“Yes! Fine, I strongly agree. Especially right now.”
“‘My mood can shift between periods of extreme anxiety, sadness, or irritability in just a few hours or days.’ Do you agree or disagree?”
Victor folded his arms in front of his chest, but the lizard-eyed technician motioned for him to move them by his sides. He complied. “More like seconds or minutes.”
“I’ll put that down as ‘strongly agree.’” A smile appeared fleetingly on the doctor’s face and vanished. “‘Sometimes I am confident in myself and my abilities, and other times I doubt myself and my abilities.’”
Victor frowned and took a breath into his lungs. “Strongly disagree. I know what—”
“Excuse me, Doctor.” The flat-faced technician pointed toward one of the vidscreens.
Dr. Rularian examined the readings and turned back toward Victor. “It’s very important that you tell the truth,” the doctor said.
“I am,” Victor said.
&n
bsp; The flat-faced technician looked down at him. “That helmet may not look like much, but it’s recording your micro-expressions at a subdermal level. We know if you’re telling the truth or not.”
Victor couldn’t see the technician’s face clearly behind his translucent gel mask, but the crinkled skin around his eyes showed the man was smirking.
They have me, Victor thought. No matter what I do, say, or even think, they’ve got me in their trap.
Dr. Rularian said, “Please, let’s get through the rest of these questions. ‘I experience blank moments—’”
The door swung open, nearly swiping Lizard-Eyes’ backside. Granfa Jeff walked into the room. Tall and wiry with short-clipped fuzzy gray hair and dark freckles on brown skin, he flicked his gaze toward Victor, the sensors, and then to each technician in turn. Victor felt thunderous anger gather on Granfa Jeff’s face like a storm about to break. “I’d like a word with you, Doctor. Outside, please.” The doctor left the room first. Granfa Jeff glanced sideways at Victor. “Tidy yourself up.”
The flat-faced technician objected, “Sir, we’re in the middle—”
Granfa Jeff turned to him and glowered. “This is my hospital. You should have alerted me as soon as my grandson arrived.”
Victor pulled the sensors off his body and removed the helmet, dangling it from two fingers, and asked, “Who wants the evil crown?”
Lizard-Eyes took the device in both hands and placed it on a nearby table. Victor slipped around one of the chair’s arms, stood, and pulled up his pants. Through the open door, he saw his parents sitting on a couch in an alcove. He rushed over to them.
His ma hugged him, saying, “I’m so glad you’re all right. We were worried.”
His fa placed a hand on Victor’s shoulder. “What happened? Another fight?”
Victor glanced back at his granfa, who was pacing in front of Dr. Rularian and drawing the attention of nearby nurses with his raised voice.
“I tried to get away, but they cornered me,” Victor said. “Alik started it. I slipped. It wasn’t my fault.”
