NOTE: I wrote this story very, very late at night. It’s a really, really complex sci-fi version of the classic Greek myth of Narcissus, the hunter who fell in love with his own reflection. If you’re interested in alternate dimensions and... confusion, this is the story for you.
“Infected By a Reflection: How Telfer’s Invention Ruined a Teenage Girl’s Life.” I read the headline and feel a shiver of disgust crawl up my spine—at myself. It’s the feeling you have when you hear your name echo through a crowd of people, or see a letter addressed to you that has been peeled open and left to sit on the kitchen counter. It’s the feeling of having your issues commercialized and romanticized for greedy human consumption. I picture it as a crowd of thousands of flailing hands, reaching for pictures of starving children and cities buried under dust, reaching for headlines of suffering and heartbreak. I feel my windpipe twist. I’m upset. I place my tablet down and stand up. I know when I’ve had enough—enough of reading my name in paragraphs written by strangers, enough of physically feeling the judgment brought upon you when you make the mistake of... of... “It wasn’t a mistake,” I spit out suddenly. I’m alone again, and so is she. “Of course you weren’t,” another voice echoes mine. I look towards the slender mirror tilted against my bedroom wall. I admire its sleek metallic frame, and simple yet complex interface covered in dozens of small digital buttons, embedded into the reflection. But most of all, I admire her. A tall, lanky frame, with a jilted bob the colour of rain; moon-shaped eyes warped with emotion; long legs covered in silky pajama bottoms. Me. Her. “Misty,” I say, shuddering at the sound of my own name. “I know you’re upset,” she says, her face grimacing in a way I could never imitate. “But— you do realize, I’m only an animation, correct?” I’ve heard this spiel before—from mom, Misty, and even Telfer himself, after I sent him fanmail, a poem about falling in love with my Surreality Mirror. I don’t think I had ever felt so dejected in my life.
I look at Misty’s sharp dotting of freckles constellating across her sharp cheekbones, framing her genuine smile. I look at her soft hands clasped at her waist. I look at her eyes, eager for my confirmation. “It’s not like that, Misty,” I reply, twisting my fingers in the way I do when I’m unbearably sad. The body language sensors still haven’t caught on to this minor quirk. “I... I’ve been reading.” Misty leans forward to inspect me. “You’ve been reading? Yeah, right. The only thing you’ve read is a cereal box, and even that’s a stretch.” Oh how I adore the self-deprecation setting. “Well, yeah, I just picked up this book. Well... I found it in my bag. I don’t know how it got there.” I stroll over to my bed where it’s lying face up, pages sprawled open, warped from spilled coffee. Jotted notes, scrawled dangerously over the text, glare out in red. Misty looks concerned as she stares at the page. “Have you been taking your meds?” “Yes,” I retort. No, I think. I hold out the book for Misty to see. “It’s not quite as... mad as it looks. I promise. I... I’ve just been thinking.” A roll of excitement rumbles through me. I lean in to whisper to Misty. My nose touches the reflection. We look into each other’s eyes, deeply. “I know that we’re soul mates—and I know that you know it, too.” She gulps, visibly. “Misty—” “So I’m convinced I have it all wrong,” I say, my voice speeding up, and I let go of my finger which I have almost twisted a full 360 degrees. “I know that you’re real. I know it. I know it because I know the truth.” “Misty, what are you talking about?” “I know because of this book I read. It’s by this guy, Reznik—he’s this philosopher and time theorist--he just published this book, and I just--” “...” I lift up a page. “I’m not real, Misty. I’m not real. I’m not real.” I point at the words—alternate reality transferring. “I lost myself when I met you, and just when I lost myself, you—” The mirror switches off. I look into it. I’m gone.
“How the hell did she find out?” He bursts into the room, dragging his hands, ripping off the body sensors that cover my face, hands, feet. My skin throbs with pain, and I feel the circles where they were once suctioned begin to swell. I hold back my desire to slap him. “You think she wouldn’t find out once Reznik wrote that exposé? You’re stupid thinking that firing him and transferring him would solve our issues in this reality—” Telfer’s face scalds red, his sleepless hair matching his burned out eyes. “You’re fired. Your stupid alt-real can suffer the consequences of losing you. I shouldn’t have let you two get so close, anyways.”
Without her, I talk to no one for five days straight. My mom comes into the room and leaves the second she smells the state of the room, and sees the state of my mind. My fists are buzzing, electric. My heart is humming with heartbreak. My pills are nowhere to be found, and I am on fire, and the Reznik book is nearly torn to pieces. I am seeing words in the margins that I didn’t notice before. Notes scrawled in blue.
Reconstitute image.
Process personality.
Abandon affiliations and articles. None of it means anything, yet it all means so much. My mom finally reappears on the sixth day only to leave me with a threat: “If you do not knock off the state you’re in, I’ll call the press again.”
I ignore her. I know she hated the attention as much as I did.
Instead, I read the book again. Trying to piece it together. Pinch myself so hard that my fingers finally slip through the mirage.
I’m not real.
Telfer calls me on the seventh day since I lost her. “We’ve got news.” I return to the headquarters and rush into his office. He’s surrounded by associates. They grab my arms as I enter, pin me against the closet doors. I look at Telfer’s twisted sneer, his clench on a single piece of paper. “You broke a code, didn’t you?” He lifts the paper towards me, points at a line. Crossing over, without full authority from the team, is completely prohibited. I shut my eyes, deny what I’m seeing, conjure an image of Misty, think of the book. I think of her heart, how it must be twisting inside of her chest. “Just let me talk to her one last time.” Telfer swipes an assortment of objects off his desk. One of them, a glass paperweight, shatters against the marble floor. He doesn’t flinch, nor does he when he takes my finger and rotates it. My finger has not been stretched like hers. It snaps immediately with a sickening crack, and I kick the associate that’s holding me by the shoulder. His leg buckles, and he collapses. But not for long. The other associate pins me back against the wall, and Telfer takes a single shard of glass. “When you do something like that, something that goes against the values of our esteemed company,” begins Telfer, “I can’t help but want to end your dreaded connection with her once and for all. You were never supposed to fall in love with yourself, you narcissistic freak of a woman.” No. No. “I—” “This trial is over. It’s over. It’s done enough damage in her reality. This stupid invention is doomed; it’s cursed. Everyone over there are already attached to their own idea of themselves from birth. And now so are you. And I thought...” He edges the glass closer and closer to my jugular. I gulp, looking into his steel eyes. And then I run.
I know I’m not real—a carbon copy of a girl that once was. I know that she switched when she was offered the job. I know that I’m...
“Alternate reality transferring,” I read aloud, to the ghost of Misty, who no longer appears at my mirror. I found this paper at the edge of the mirror this morning when I woke up. “Transferring the soul of one alt-real into another dimension, leaving behind a carbon copy of their body behind in the previous dimension. Telfer mastered this technique in a way to capitalize on his mastermind idea—the ‘artificial intelligence’ mirror. For the lonely people in this broken 23rd century to repair their empty lives and find a connection with the person that matters most in their lives: themselves. “His trial run existed in the 27th dimension. Misty Raju, from the 13h dimension, volunteered herself as a human guinea pig to partake in this ‘experiment’. Telfer’s soul- consuming electron-masking technology—too complex in the 13th dimension for the human mind to understand—forced her into the 27th dimension in little time. Suddenly she was at the face of a promising new invention that promised self-love and acceptance. “Back in the 13th dimension, it was advertised and described as extraordinarily clever artificial intelligence technology. In the 27th dimension, Telfer and his team were the only ones who knew of the technology, and hid it well. Until Reznik, of course, hacked into his system, digging up windfalls of information on this complex and dastardly technology. Disguising himself as a member of the team, he pulled off what would be known as one of the greatest ‘heists’ of the 27th dimension; disguising as a Telfer Associate and using the technology to find his own way into the 13th century, where he disguised as a philosopher intent on “theorizing” about the use of this technology .
“Oh, but this is where it all turns to dust. Misty Raju, whose carbon, soulless alt- real, found herself lost without what we could only describe as her ‘second half’... herself. Falling in love with her reflection was easy, but who knew it could go both ways? The authentic alt-real version of Misty, the one working for Telfer, found herself falling for this other Misty. She began forming a plan to reunite the two of them.
“And so she, like Reznik, began switching back into her previous dimension, leaving behind traces, clues. Reznik’s Theology on Reality Tranferring; for example. However, her copy’s pills, prescribed for her diagnosis of schizophrenia, disallowed her to see her alt-real. Quickly, the authentic version of Misty discarded these pills, hoping to return in order to finally visit herself again. “Her final object, her final clue, was a single piece of paper, explaining the complexity of the experiment for her copy to understand. “Misty. I’m not dead. I’m here. As long as the pills aren’t in you anymore, you won’t dismiss me as an illusion. I am you. You are me.”
I turn from the page. I drop it to the floor. Chills crawl up every part of my body. I see her now. She is in front of me. Embracing me. “Misty,” we both say in unison. I am me. I am me. I am with me. I am— It suddenly occurs to me we are one. Our dimensions have united, and I am no longer a carbon copy. I am whole, and I have found my soul mate. There is one dimension, at least for us—but no one will deny it when I describe our love as multidimensional.
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