BROKEN SYMMETRY: A Young Adult Science Fiction Thriller

by Dan Rix

  “I will,” the cop stammered.

  Damian spit out his cigarette in the direction of the rookie. “I’m already in jail. She’s innocent. I dare you to shoot.” He faced me and said calmly, “what’s your plan, Blaire?”

  Behind me, the noise of Joe’s grunts approached. “Arrest her!” Joe yelled.

  The rookie fumbled with the handcuffs on his belt.

  I blocked everything out and scanned the room. There had to be another solution.

  “Blaire, you do have a plan?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up . . .”

  My eyes fell to the floor, and then I saw it.

  Only the corners of the cells were anchored to the concrete. The bottom bars cut off a half inch above the floor, leaving a gap.

  I rushed forward and lay the mirror on the floor beside Damian’s cell, the ‘X’ facing up, and started pushing it under.

  Damian glanced between me and the package, and his eyes flashed with understanding. “No,” he said, pushing it back out. “You first. I’ll pull it in afterwards.”

  “Stop! Both of you.” The rookie raised his gun and fired a warning shot at the ceiling. The explosion made me freeze. “Get back!”

  “Go, Blaire,” Damian urged.

  I stared at the butcher paper at my feet. “I don’t know how—”

  He squeezed my hand through the bars that separated us. “Just jump,” he said. “Believe.”

  The door to the chamber banged open, and Joe stood in the doorway. “Holster your weapon, moron,” he ordered his partner. Then he snapped open a pair of handcuffs and charged at me.

  I plugged my nose and jumped. My feet ripped through the butcher paper, and I fell right through the floor. Joe’s arms closed on empty air above me. I landed on my stomach in room A.

  A moment later, Damian landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. He jumped up and slammed the red button.

  The scream of ultrasound cut off Joe’s voice. “What in God’s name—”

  The mirror shattered, showering me with broken glass. Then we were alone in room A, back in the source. And all was quiet.

  “Thanks,” said Damian, crouching down next to me, his shin brushing my shoulder. “Good idea to cover it with paper.”

  I wheezed, still barely able to get air. “You’re . . . welcome.”

  ***

  After school on Friday, I stole Damian’s couch at ISDI and kicked off my sandals, shut my eyes, and blasted indie rock for the rest of the afternoon. Charles knew better than to ask me to work. Not after those first two crossovers. A sixteen-year-old girl could only take so many conflicting emotions, shots of adrenaline, and near death experiences, after all.

  Though somewhere in the low eighties outside, the leather cushions stayed cool under the length of my bare legs exposed by my shorts.

  My reverie was broken when hands gripped my ankles and dragged my legs off the cushion, depositing them on the floor. I opened my eyes to see Damian propping open his laptop at the end of the couch.

  Um, no. I kicked him hard on the knee and forcefully repositioned my legs on his lap, making sure to obstruct his keyboard. His eyebrows knotted, and I could see his lips moving, chastising me. I cranked up my music to drown him out.

  He slid the computer out from under my calves and balanced it on top of me instead. The laptop’s weight pressed my legs into his thighs. My eyes sprang open.

  I was suddenly very aware that only a thin layer of denim separated my skin from his skin. Heat spread in my cheeks.

  I had expected him to throw me off again . . . he hadn’t. I liked that he hadn’t.

  I extended my leg fully, making myself comfortable and letting my skin rub against him. And I couldn’t stop my gaze from exploring the shadow under his cheek bones, the contour of his lips.

  He caught me staring at him.

  “You’re in my way,” I said, playing it off.

  “Find another couch,” he said.

  “No.”

  He held my gaze, and a hint of daring crept into his eyes. “Want to see something cool?”

  I nodded.

  “Come here.” He tilted his laptop so I could view the screen; his web browser displayed a live broadcast of a game show airing in the Midwest.

  I untangled myself from Damian and sat up next to him. We were alone in the office, since Charles had gone to run errands and Amy took Fridays off. At the thought, my heart rate elevated.

  “Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect?” he said.

  “The movie?”

  “If that helps you,” he said. “It has to do with predicting the future.” On his screen, the broadcast zoomed in on a lottery ball machine. “In a few minutes, they’re going to broadcast the winning lottery numbers.”

  “Don’t tell me you can predict them.”

  “No,” he said, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “But I can change them.”

  “But that’s halfway around the world,” I said. “Even if you crossed over, you’d never get there in time.”

  “I don’t need to get there,” he said. “All I need to do is change something . . . anything.” He set his laptop on the coffee table and propped up a makeup mirror next to it, so we could see the broadcast on his laptop and its reflection in the mirror.

  “I thought you said to only crossover using the mirrors upstairs,” I said. “Weren’t those the rules?”

  “I said those were tips.”

  “But you can’t even fit through that mirror—”

  “Shh.” He pulled his headphones out of the laptop, and the sound came on. I heard, “. . . mega million jackpot is a world-record six-hundred and forty million dollars . . . .phew. Let’s see that first number.”

  The first ball rolled out of the machine. “Thirty-six. And the next lucky number is . . .” The next ball revealed a fourteen. On the laptop, the numbers appeared next to each other, and in the makeup mirror propped next to the laptop, their reflections appeared too. A forty-three followed the fourteen.

  “Are you touching me?” said Damian.

  “What?” I jerked away from him. “No!”

  “Touch my arm. We have to break symmetry together.”

  “Oh.” I touched the tip of my pinky to his sculpted forearm.

  In a swift movement, he dipped his finger into the mirror, breaking its symmetry.

  Although the mirror still appeared to show a perfect reflection of the game show on the laptop, it was now showing a parallel world no longer connected to our own. And something strange began to happen.

  The muted announcers’ voices coming out of the reflection lagged behind the voices from the source. They were diverging.

  The fourth ball rolled out of the machine, and I waited, breath held, as it revealed its number in the source. A two.

  I checked for the two’s reflection in the makeup mirror, but didn’t find it. Instead, a forty-nine had filled the fourth slot.

  After all six balls came out of the machine, the numbers read on the laptop:

  36-14-43-2-4-16

  And in the reflection:

  36-14-43-49-27-5

  “But all you did was stick your finger through,” I said. “You didn’t change anything. How can they be different?”

  “Isn’t it obvious Blaire?” He gave me his infuriating, all-knowing look. “I did change something. When I stuck my finger through the mirror, I changed everything.”

  “Damian, what does you fingering the reflection have anything to do with a lottery drawing taking place in Milwaukee?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” he said. “I just know it works. Maybe my finger created a tiny shift in the light levels for a fraction of a second. Maybe in the reflection, a stray photon
went out the window that didn’t in the source. Somehow, those tiny changes propagated across the country and affected which ball came out. The key is things were just different. I don’t know how it gets there so fast, but it does.”

  “But how could it change so much?” I said, still astonished.

  “That’s why it’s called the butterfly effect,” he said. “A butterfly flapping its wings can make the difference between whether or not a hurricane forms halfway around the world. Things compound on each other. Maybe that number two ball got hit by an extra photon, which jogged its course ever so slightly. It bounced off another ball differently, and once it was off course, everything deviated faster and faster, until it wasn’t the number two ball that came out but the forty-nine ball. That’s what happens when we break the symmetry. Things deviate. It’s slow at first, but it speeds up. Crossover for a day, and the news stories you bring back won’t match the ones in the source.”

  “That’s spooky,” I said.

  Damian grabbed the mirror off the side table and tossed it onto the floor, where it landed and cracked.

  “You think that’s spooky?” he said. “You haven’t seen anything.”

  ***

  After Damian’s demonstration of the butterfly effect, I didn’t move away from him right away, but continued to sit next to him on the couch searching for something to say.

  “What happened to your parents?” I said.

  “Never knew them.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “So sue me.”

  “I’m not trying to irritate you,” I said. “I just want to know more about you.”

  His jaw tightened. “My father had an affair with my mother and abandoned her when she was pregnant with me. I don’t know who he is and I never want to know.”

  I studied the side of his tense face. “Which one was the carrier?”

  “My mom. She discovered her ability to crossover while high on LSD. The drug made her believe she could walk through a mirror, and all of a sudden she just did it, crossed over right in front of me—that’s when I learned, too. I followed her through, not knowing any better. It hurt so much, I came right back.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five.”

  His answer made my heart ache. I couldn’t imagine how destructive crossing over would be for a still developing five-year-old.

  He went on, and I listened, mesmerized by this scarred side of him I had never seen.

  “At first she used crossover to steal jewelry for more drugs, nothing very clever. She would just rob her friends over and over again in different reflections. Then she just vanished all of a sudden. I found the mirror she used to crossover, but I knew better than to follow her down. I took it with me in and out of foster care, kept it open for a whole year before I broke it; I can only guess what happened. She got lost, accidentally nested a crossover, and went into a deeper reflection when she was trying to get back to the source. It’s what eventually happens to all of us. At least the ones who learn how to crossover.”

  “So how’d you end up here?”

  He shrugged. “Eventually, a doctor told me I had forty-seven chromosomes and I was able to track down Charles—kind of like you did.”

  I was about to drop the subject, but his story reminded me of a question that had been nagging me. “You said you carried the mirror with you?”

  “For a whole year.”

  “Like I did last night?”

  “It was a medicine cabinet mirror, not as big as ours. I bought a suitcase that would fit it and just kept it there.” He chuckled to himself. “I kept hoping she would climb out.”

  “Why don’t you guys do that now?” I asked.

  Damian glanced over at me, and I could see the wounds in his eyes he had tried so hard to keep buried. “Do what?”

  “Carry the mirrors with you? That way you wouldn’t have to make the trip back.”

  He shook his head. “Way too dangerous. You risk breaking the mirror. They’re mounted on the wall for our own protection.”

  But another possibility had occurred to me, and I shivered at the thought. “Have you ever tried taking a mirror through another mirror?”

  “It doesn’t work,” he said.

  “Doesn’t whatever you touch go through with you?”

  “No, I mean it’s pointless. It doesn’t help you, no matter how you spin it—”

  “So it is possible?” I said.

  “Theoretically, but all you’re doing is creating a maze for yourself. What you’re talking about has a name. It’s called recursion.”

  “Recursion,” I repeated.

  “You crossover, detach the mirror on the other side, and take it with you through a deeper crossover . . . to a deeper level. So now you’re two levels down, but you have two blue mirrors. Two mirrors that lead up. If you keep recursing like that, the mirrors begin to self-reference. You create branches of a fractal tree that expand exponentially. Trust me, recursion makes simple nesting look like kiddie play.”

  I felt my forehead tighten as I struggled to make sense of it. “Two blue mirrors . . . does that mean you could have two mirrors that lead back to the source?”

  “It doesn’t work,” he said. “They’re all dead ends except one. You’d have to retrace your steps exactly to the source mirror. You’d have to go down before you could go up. I told you, you’re just creating a maze.”

  “Okay, but what if you take the first mirror through the second mirror, and then detach the second mirror and take it through the first?” Just imagining such a scenario elevated my heart rate.

  “Double recursion.” He shook his head. “It cancels out. You’re back in the source and you get a mirror that jumps levels. We’ve tried everything, Blaire. Crossing over makes branches. They only spread out, they never circle back. They never make a loop. No matter how you arrange it, there is always only one mirror back to the true source. Period.”

  ***

  Charles stepped into the office, and I instinctively jumped away from Damian. Upon the realization that we’d been sitting so close, my face flushed. Charles handed each of us an envelope.

  “What’s this?” I said, eyeing the ISDI seal printed on the front.

  “Your paycheck.”

  “I get paid?”

  “Second and fourth Friday.”

  “Really?” Grinning, I tore open the envelope. When I saw the number though, my excitement fizzled out. “Twenty three dollars and fifty-seven cents. You’re kidding.”

  “That’s from your crossover time. Office hours haven’t been counted yet,” Charles explained. “You get eight dollars an hour. Your first training trip with Damian was forty-five minutes, and your first mission was an hour and forty-five minutes. I rounded it up to two—”

  “You woke me up in the middle of the night to break into a police station and I get twenty-three dollars?”

  Charles frowned. “I gave you overtime pay for that. That’s fifty percent extra, so twelve dollars an hour.”

  “I can do the math,” I grumbled.

  “It’s not as high as you think because of income tax and social security deductions.”

  I ignored him and watched Damian opening his envelope next to me. “How much did you get?” I said, my voice accusing.

  “That’s impolite,” he said.

  I shoved him. “How much?”

  He smirked. “Three thousand.”

  “Three thousand dollars?” My jaw fell open. “You get three thousand dollars and I barely get enough to buy coffee and a matinee?”

  “You’re an intern,” he said. “I’m an employee. Besides, we don’t need money. There’s a trick.”

  Charles sighed. “Don’t show her the trick. She’ll figure it out on her
own.”

  “Yeah, I’ll figure it out on my own anyway,” I said, “so show me the trick.”

  “Don’t show her the trick, Damian.”

  “I think I better,” he said. “Blaire, with a handful of mirrors and a hammer you can create the best counterfeits in the world.” Damian surveyed me from head to toe, a teasing glint in his eyes. “At least that way you can afford some decent clothes.”

  Charles clapped his hands together before I could maul him. “Come you two. Damian, I scheduled an MRI for you today.” He turned to me. “Blaire, I want you to go with him, to make sure he goes. And I scheduled one for you too. We do one every month—to see how your body’s handling crossover.”

  ***

  I went first. In the hospital, they laid me out on a narrow cot, clamped headphones over my ears, and slid me into what looked like an Apollo space capsule—or a human sized cryogenic freezer.

  For forty-five minutes, the guts of the machine hummed and chugged around me, eclipsing my thoughts.

  After it was over, while Damian was being fed into the huge MRI chamber, a nurse led me to an empty exam room, where I awaited the verdict.

  The MRI was going to show how much of us was left after all those crossovers.

  “As expected,” said Dr. Johnson, coming into the examination room a half hour later and shutting the door gently behind her, “you’re handling crossover extremely well. I presume Charles already explained the advantage of having duplicate chromosomes?”

  I raised my eyebrows. She had used the word crossover. “So you have it too?” I asked. “The crossover gene?”

  “No, but I have Charles’s trust,” she said, and seeing my blank look added, “he and I go back a ways. We went to med school together.”

  “So there’s nothing wrong with me?” I said. “No brain damage, hemorrhaging, tumors, radiation sickness, or anything like that?”

  “Not a trace.” She opened a folder next to her computer and scribbled out a note.

  I nodded. “What about Damian? He’s okay too, right?”