Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  Helm made use of the door’s knocker to sound out three hefty booms into the still silence. Almost immediately, there came the answering sound of an explosion from the far side. Marcus glanced back at the stairs, wondering if he could make it up all of them at a run, but before he could make a decision either way the door began to grind open ominously, and he instead tightened his grip on Death’s staff, bracing himself for whatever horrors he might find on the far side.

  Smoke billowed out from within, obscuring the shape of the figure that stood to greet them. Visions of the monster from Eira’s dream shot through Marcus’s head and were promptly skewered as this figure stepped forward and revealed itself to be a perfectly ordinary, if somewhat melancholy-looking, human being, waving smoke out of its face.

  “Oh, it’s you,” the apparition said glumly, addressing Helm. “What do you want?”

  “I bought you your new toy,” Helm said, indicating Marcus, who waved cautiously.

  “Oh right, our saviour,” the spectre said, with a notable absence of enthusiasm, “We forgot you two were coming, late as you are. Bought him down the back way to freak him out, eh?”

  “I’ve no idea what you mean,” Helm said. “Let us in, Niko.”

  The man stood aside, and Helm strode past. Marcus followed them apprehensively through the fading smoke and into the strangest room he had ever seen. Perfectly round, it was dominated by its centrepiece, which Marcus could only comprehend as a giant, complicated thingy. It began at ground level with a large mirror, held in a frame that was itself part of the tall towers of technology that surrounded it. These cold, metal machines were sporadically decorated with all manner of knobs, buttons, big red levers and small screens that displayed either incomprehensible stacks of fluctuating numbers or sporadically pumping heart-rate monitors. Thick cabling held the ensemble together, and wound upwards to the space above the mirror, where they supported a wide glass sphere that appeared to contain that same swirling mass of colour and shape that Marcus had seen in the sky of the Mirrorline the previous day. More cables let out of the top of the sphere, running into another stack of towers that hung down from the domed ceiling and helped create an overall impression of a stalagmite and stalactite reaching out to each other and making magic. Rubber piping snaked out from the central structure to the edge of the room, where they connected to additional frames of all shapes and sizes, above which hung appropriately sized mirrors, ready to be loaded for whatever purposes they served. More frames and mirrors hung from the ceiling all around, reflecting warped approximations of the central structure off into infinity and compounding the room’s weirdness quotient. The scattered desks, abandoned coffee cups and minor mountains of paperwork that filled the rest of the lab’s floor space served as oases of quiet normality that helped Marcus’s mind adjust to the fact that this room really did exist, and that he was standing in it.

  “Welcome to the labs, Marcus,” Helm said, in the tone of one who’d seen it all before and had no time for gawping tourists. “Niko, can we-“

  Whatever Helm had been about to say was lost in the sudden crash from the far side of the room, where a man had been teetering dangerously on a stepladder while changing a mirror, and was now on the floor amidst shards of said mirror. Cursing, Niko ran off to try and extract the other person from the remnants of his reflection. Marcus glanced at Helm, who shrugged with sharp emphasis.

  “The labs people are a bit weird, and generally don’t get along well with others,” the other man said, without a trace of self-awareness. “Several council decrees keep them in this basement.”

  Marcus opened his mouth to reply, but before he could think of some suitably sharp words to throw in Helm’s direction, there came a distraction; Niko had reappeared, still picking tiny shards of glass from his colleague’s crumpled purple suit as they strode in Marcus’s direction. This sharply-dressed elder gentleman wore his greying hair long, curled around his face in a way that distracted one’s attention from the wrinkles of settled age that bedecked it. This might have lent him an air of elegance, were it not for his wonky glasses and the cloud of dust that followed him as he bore down on Marcus, led by an outstretched hand that snapped up one of Marcus’s own and pumped it vigorously.

  “Well met, Marcus good sir! Well met indeed! I must say it is a pleasure to finally meet you in person! Welcome to our humble domicile,” the man continued, indicating the room around them with wildly flailing arms, “the labs! My name is Wilfred, but I am known one and all as Tec, for reasons that I’m sure you can figure out without any help from me. Now,” he added, clapping, “as you know, you’re here today so that we can, for want of a better word, experiment on you, but don’t worry about the ethical ramifications of that – we try not to. In any case I can promise that it probably won’t hurt. We have just suffered a, er, minor setback in our preparations, so if there’s any questions you’d like to ask me while we work on getting back up to speed, then fire away, by all means!”

  Behind Tec, Niko rolled his eyes and trudged away with a melancholy gait. Marcus grabbed a question from the throng that had been quietly gathering since he’d entered the labs.

  “Why so many mirrors?”

  “Aha!” The faint twinkle in Tec’s eyes exploded into a supernova of pleasure. “A scientist! We have a scientist. Niko, do you hear? He’s interested in the tech!”

  “Fantastic,” came the other man’s sorrowful dirge from behind a pile of burnt out machinery.

  “Indeed,” Tec said. “Well anyway, the work we do down here is on a much higher and more complicated level than everyday Linewalking, and we learnt to our cost many years ago that if we don’t take necessary precautions, all sorts of trouble might unfold. With that in mind, everything about this room is designed to provide additional stability to our own personal pocket of the Mirrorline, so that we can experiment in peace. The very shape of the room, the ability to install extra mirrors to reflect into the hub” – here he gestured at the room’s twisted centrepiece – “it all helps to provide the strength we need, and the interchangeable nature of the various shapes, sizes and thicknesses of our mirrors allows us to tweak our little world to be exactly how we want it. Basically, it’s health and safety, but fascinating. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “It is interesting,” Marcus said, leaning on his staff. Someone snorted from off to the side, and Marcus reluctantly remembered that Helm existed. “What?” he asked, turning to where the man was perched on a desk, wearing a sour expression.

  “Oh don’t mind him,” Tec said dismissively. “Young Helm there’s a new breed, unfortunately. Doesn’t care for the science, no matter what he might say. Considers himself a sigh-collie-gist, eh? Well, a man who makes his business the mind is, in my mind, most likely to consider everything to be the fault of the mind. Not that I’m saying you’re wrong,” he added, as Helm opened his mouth to snark back, “just woefully misguided. Yes, there is a point of view that ascribes much of what we do to mental faculty, but there’s plenty of evidence that mirrors on their own have power, before we even think about doing anything slightly related to anything interesting with them.”

  “I didn’t ask for the direction that my Talent took me in,” Helm said through gritted teeth, “but in any case I don’t see any harm in being proud about it. And all I’ve ever tried to suggest is that maybe your ‘evidence’, entirely anecdotal as it is, is retroactively assigning some idea of power that doesn’t exist outside of your own mind. It’s no better or worse of a theory than your own.”

  “Ah but it is worse,” Tec said, “because your theory doesn’t explain how the Mirrorworld began, and mine does. What does your sigh-collie-gistic thought process have to say about that, eh?”

  Helm groaned. “The fact that your completely invented theory happens to cover more bases than mine doesn’t make it any more valid, unless you have any proof. Found any yet, Tec?”

  “Personal experience forms all the proof I need,” Tec said simply, “
and that’s probably why I don’t tend to get along with you empirical types. Besides, if both our theories are flawed by a lack of coherent evidence, then I’m probably just going to stick with my own, because it’s mine and I like it.”

  “What is your theory, Tec?” Marcus asked, as Helm descended into incoherent spluttering.

  “I’m glad you asked me that, Marcus,” Tec said, beaming, “because I’m tired of talking to Helm. I do so value an outsider’s opinion, because, well, when I originally put this theory before the council, they gave me an A for effort and a rapid promotion to this basement, where they wouldn’t have to hear me talk about it again. Now I mostly only have Niko to talk to about work, and to be honest he’s been a somewhat dour conversationalist ever since that accident with the refrigerator, which left his mood clock stuck on some sort of weary melancholy.” Tec paused, and shrugged. “Yes, one has to be quite broken to work in the labs. But it’s entirely self-sufficient really, as this line of work is really good at creating broken people. And whatever else it is, it pays the bills, eh?”

  “I see,” Marcus said, seeing. “But what was the theory?”

  “Oh yes,” Tec said, clapping. “Terribly sorry. As I was saying, I don’t get to have prolonged conversations about this sort of thing very often, not since the wife took out a restraining order on me talking to her about it. She says I get way too over excited about it, you know?”

  “No,” Marcus said, aghast. “I don’t believe that for a second. The theory, Tec?”

  “Right, right. Okay. Well, what I think is that mirrors remember. The humans of Earth might have thought they were simply making use of natural materials when they first figured the value of reflective surfaces, but I reckon there’s more to it than that. There’s something inherently magical about a reflection, in part because there’s no on/off switch, is there? Think of the sky, passing over a calm lake. Every mirrored surface, even when dormant, never stops making reflections. That’s a lot of information – a whole world’s worth of inverted images. All of that existed here, in this same place, linked by its relative location on the far side, and it all sort of became smushed together into the mish-mash that we call the Mirrorworld. It explains the age issue as well – we don’t know exactly how long there has been a Mirrorworld, but we can be reasonably sure that it hasn’t existed for as long as there has been an Earth. Developing human civilisation has made it so that mirrors have become less rare and valuable over the past centuries, to the point where many homes likely have more than one. Maybe that saturation of images was the bump that all of this absorbed energy needed to come together into a coherent world.”

  “Okay,” Marcus said, after digesting all of this. “That.. actually seems quite reasonable. Not that I’m an expert or anything, but it.. makes.. sense? Yeah, sure. Why didn’t your council like it?”

  “Because,” Helm put in from off to the side, “the role of the council is to watch over the Viaggiatori. They are a necessary authority for conservation, the point where the buck stops. The Master might be our official leader, but even she has to listen to their advice, because ultimately we are here to preserve the Mirrorline, not to meddle with it for our own ends.”

  “So says Helm,” Tec said wistfully, “a tragic tale of one who’d be down here meddling with the best of us if they’d let him, but since he can’t be, prefers to sit on his high horse about it.”

  Marcus chuckled, and, to the strains of Helm grinding his teeth, took a moment to consider what the Viaggiatori council might think about Marcus Chiallion, theoretical saviour of worlds. It seemed a safe bet that he was much happier not knowing.

  “We’re ready,” Niko said, gloomily reappearing from around the back of the central hub.

  “Excellent,” Tec said, rubbing his hands together gleefully as the rolling light force trapped in the glass sphere overhead began to pulse and glow with frenetic abandon. “Well Marcus, step through the mirror when you’re ready, and we’ll get cracking.” He indicated the large mirror that was hooked up to the central hub. “Are you taking that staff with you?”

  “Will it make a difference?” Marcus asked, somewhat reluctant to part with it.

  “Well, the more we take with us, the more strain we’ll be putting on the Mirrorline. It probably won’t make a difference though, up to you.”

  Remembering his last experience with an out-of-control ‘Mirrorline’, Marcus very carefully propped the staff up somewhere where it wouldn’t do anything that could induce strain.

  “Ready,” he said.

  “Excellent. Are you coming, Helm?”

  “Of course,” the psychologist said. “I wouldn’t miss it for either world.”

  “Jolly good. Well, after you, Marcus.”

  Marcus strode up to the hub and stood before the mirror, which was shimmering faintly with an ethereal haze. He caught the eye of his reflection, looking apprehensive, but not too scared, bathed in the urgent glow of foreign machinery. He reached out to touch the surface of the mirror, and his fingers went through, sending ripples across the glass; his reflection quivered in a pulse of light. With a shrug, he stepped all the way through, and entered the world of the Mirrorline.

  7

  If ever there were a time, Marcus thought glumly, as he sat staring at his beer, that I could find a way past this damn curse of mine, then I would love for it to be now. It wouldn’t be, of course. No more so than it had been the last five, or ten, or fifteen times that he’d wished for it. Whatever the irksome genie or quirk of genetics that was responsible, they would not be moved by his pleas. Marcus knew, even as he tried with all his might, that he’d never get drunk tonight. So he sat and brooded about it, whilst the wake continued on around him, the raucous celebration of his father’s life undeterred by his solemnity.

  “Hey,” the barmaid said, next time she came by. “Are you okay?”

  Marcus met her eyes, which were a vivid, pretty hazel. “What?”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” she said, stacking up the many glasses that his table had accumulated. “But you’ve had a few, and you’re sitting there all creepily silent. I just want to know if you’re planning to freak out and cause any trouble or not, and if you are, I’d like it if you wouldn’t, you know?”

  Marcus chuckled darkly. “You’re asking me that? With these people in the bar?” He indicated the revellers whom he had carefully extracted himself from, just as they broke into a beautifully off-key rendition of one of his father’s favourite songs.

  The barmaid rolled her eyes. “I know they’re going to be trouble,” she said with a smile. “You’re more mysterious. I have no idea what you’re planning.”

  “I’m planning to finish this,” Marcus said, raising his glass, “and then have another.”

  “Well alright then,” the barmaid said, smiling again. “But I’ve got my eye on you.”

  Marcus paid her the same respect as she walked away, swaying slightly with the tower of glasses she was carelessly balancing in the crook of her arm.

  “She seems nice,” someone said, and Marcus glanced sideways, surprised to discover that he had been joined at his table by an elder gentleman in a purple suit, who was now peering over the rims of his spectacles at the departing barmaid. “Someone important?” the man asked.

  “Who are you?” Marcus asked, curious at the sense of half-recognition that this man inspired.

  “I was afraid you might ask me that,” the man said, still surveying his surroundings. “I’m Tec. You don’t know me? Don’t remember where we just were?”

  “Buddy, I’ve never met you before,” Marcus said, without confidence. “I’d remember.”

  “Not if you haven’t met me yet,” Tec said. “Which you haven’t. Now you need to listen to me, Marcus, because there’s something you need to know before we go any further; this isn’t real. I know it feels like it, but actually, this is just a memory. One of your own, hence the familiarity.” The man paused for a moment to produce
from about his person a strange device that put Marcus in the mind of a portable television, and squinted at the screen. “This thought is twelve years old,” the man informed him. “You’ve remembered it well! There must be something good about this one!”

  “If so,” Marcus said irritably as Tec waved his strange device in his direction, causing it to start beeping frantically, “it’s definitely not this part where I’m talking to you.”

  “This is actually really interesting,” the other man continued, “but also incredibly dangerous. See, according to this thingy of mine, there are actually two of you right now. There’s the Marcus who is sitting here, living out this situation for the first time, and there’s a future Marcus, the one who knows me and is actively reliving this memory. You should be doing so from outside of your own head, but for some reason all of the safety barriers I have that prevent this sort of thing from happening fell apart as soon as you hit the Mirrorline. I’m actually quite curious about that, as well.”

  He’s right, Marcus thought, surprised, an image of the Viaggiatori labs suddenly springing to mind.

  He’s mad, Marcus thought, dismissing the image and reaching for his drink.

  This isn’t how this memory is supposed to go, Marcus thought, and it could have been either.

  “Listen, Marcus,” Tec said, more urgently. “Bad as this is, we can fix it. All you have to do is-“

  No, thought a Marcus, and the memory dissolved in a fan of colours.

  Bang, bang, bang, a-went the knocking at the door, as it had been doing for the last five minutes. Marcus wished it would end, because there was already plenty of banging happening inside his skull, and this extraneous noise really wasn’t helping with his colossal hangover. Gritting his teeth, he hid underneath his pillow and waited for the sound to end. In due course, it did, only to be replaced with another, far more fearful symphony; the sound of keys jangling in the lock. He heard the door open, then slam, and noises on the stairs, and groaned. What a terrible time to get robbed.