by Dan Rix
The silence fogged my brain up with fear. A car crash in a reflection. What did it mean?
The other car started up again and rolled to the other side of the intersection, where it waited for me.
A lump formed in the back of my throat. I yanked the wheel and followed the other driver, pulling off the road in front of him.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. How stupid could I be? I was the driver at fault. I had run a red light because I’d been fingerbanging the goddamn radio.
The other driver stepped out of his car, clearly shaken, and touched the dent in his door. He looked nice. Like one of my teachers, or a friend’s dad . . . maybe driving home from the airport after a long trip to be with his wife and kids. Or recently divorced, taking a night drive because he couldn’t sleep. Because he missed her.
I hated myself for what I did next.
I stepped on the gas, and the Jeep gave a shudder and picked up speed down the street. I watched the bewildered driver’s face in the mirror, the victim of a hit and run. I felt his distress as my own, the soreness in my heart, and felt my face flush with shame.
***
A single upstairs window glowed at ISDI, the only light among rows of dark warehouses, making me forget my guilt over the hit and run. Was Charles here? Defending the place even at three in the morning?
I wrapped my fingers around the keys, ready to crank it if I saw movement. But nothing stirred. Only my heart boomed in the stillness.
He probably just left the light on.
I gathered myself, exhaled a full breath, and stepped out of my Jeep. A breeze sliced through my thin T-shirt and raised goose bumps. Chills crept up my legs, culminating at my neck in a bout of violent shivers which subsided only when I stepped into the warm office.
It reminded me of a few nights ago. Damian. Could you even call it a first kiss? Whatever it was, it still made my heart race.
I pushed him from my mind. The Joint Center for Structural Genomics had my DNA in its lab, and that was not okay. Charles knew something about the artifact we didn’t, and I was here to find out what. And how it connected back to me and my father.
I crept through our gloomy workspace, past my cubicle now piled high with folders and unfinished work Charles had delegated to me.
Above me, the office creaked.
I froze, one foot barely touching the floor. At the top of the stairs, did I hear the sound of a man breathing? Or my imagination.
No, Charles was a normal human. He didn’t come here in the middle of the night on a weekend. But Damian?
Maybe he had a secret mission. Maybe while I was here spying on Charles in a reflection, he was spying on me. Even now.
Toe poised over the floor, I stood perfectly still until my calf cramped up, yet heard only my own nervous heartbeat. My imagination. I moved upstairs.
The door to Charles’s office rested ajar, spilling a reddish hue into the hall. I passed rooms A and B, still cloaked in darkness. The mirrors in those rooms were like escape tunnels, holes in the universe through which you could hide.
Only you’d eventually have to come back up. They were just pits.
I peeked around the door into Charles’s office. A single lamp glowed on his desk, its maroon lamp shade the source of red light. I tiptoed inside.
Why was I tiptoeing? There was no one here. Charles had just left the light on.
I started with his filing cabinets, thumbed through a drawer packed with hanging file folders, but didn’t catch so much as a single label. My focus lingered on the dim rectangle of hallway visible through the door, still ajar.
Concentrate, Blaire. I’m alone. Okay, but what was I even searching for? Papers, computer files . . . how would I know when I found it?
My panicked breath came in shallow gasps. I closed the filing cabinet, frustrated, and glanced toward the desk, where a folded back magazine caught the lamplight. I rounded the desk and leaned in to see what it was: an ancient, dog-eared issue of Discover Magazine, dated June 2011.
My hair filtered the red glow like tinsel. I brushed it out of the way and read the title of the article which lay open—and immediately felt chills skittering down my back.
***
Our Universe May Be a Giant Hologram
Charles had highlighted a portion of the text itself and in the margins scribbled notes, long since smeared. I read the highlighted text, all of it a mirror image.
The strangest version of all parallel universe proposals is one that emerged gradually over 30 years of theoretical studies on the quantum properties of black holes. The work culminated in the last decade, and it suggests, remarkably, that all we experience is nothing but a holographic projection of processes taking place on some distant surface that surrounds us. You can pinch yourself, and what you feel will be real, but it mirrors a parallel process taking place in a different, distant reality.
Fake. In other words, our universe was fake. Just like reflections.
The magazine rested on top of a stapled stack of paper. I slid it aside, revealing another article bearing a similarly eerie title, this one from The Scripps Research Institute and more scholarly than the Discover Magazine article.
The Holographic Principle In Relation To The Artifact
At the top of the list of authors, circled, was a name I recognized—Dr. Sal Benjamin. My neighbor.
The article’s publication date was April 12—I consulted the calendar on my phone—April 12, the day before he committed suicide.
The day before Damian paid him a visit. Again, Charles had highlighted and annotated lines of text. Some of his notes jumped out at me.
My eyes fell to the bottom of the page, to a single statement he had written in the bottom margin—and prickles danced across my scalp.
We exist in a reflection
No. I shook my head. That was just Charles’s paranoia.
But the articles—sure, this was a reflection, but I had broken symmetry an hour ago. These articles also existed in the source, where Charles had been reading them.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered, flipping to another page.
“But doesn’t it?” said a voice from the doorway, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
***
Charles leaned against the wall, arms crossed, eyes drilling into me. Standing there for who knew how long.
Just watching me.
He unfolded his arms and ambled into the room, his wide shoulders brushing against the door frame.
And I understood, more than ever, how large and powerful a man he was.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just wanted to figure out what else you knew about the artifact and my DNA.” I paused, biding my time. “So you think we’re in a reflection?”
“It’s occurred to me to ask that question,” he said. “Blaire, you could have just asked me.”
I edged around the desk toward the door, the tightness in my throat forcing me to swallow. I had expected this. That’s why I’d crossed over in the first place, so everything I did could be undone.
I had handled worse than Charles in reflections—all I had to do was slip by him. Get home. Return to the source. Break the mirror.
Undo it all.
“I didn’t think you would tell me,” I said, “since it was my DNA and you wouldn’t want to scare me. I thought you’d want to protect me from the truth.”
Almost imperceptibly, Charles shifted closer to me, studied me. His eyes narrowed slightly, intent on my own eyes, then the rest of me.
“You have a very symmetrical face,” he said. “Symmetry is attractive. That’s one of the reasons you’re so striking.” He flipped on the light in his office, and the fluorescent glare blinded me, forced me to shield my eyes. “And such perfect skin. Not one flaw.” He continued to
scrutinize me under what now felt like a spotlight.
He was looking for something.
I backed away from him, now scared. He wasn’t acting right.
“I want your keys back,” he said. “I don’t trust you with them anymore.”
I hesitated, but knew I had to get him to trust me again. There was no harm in giving up the keys; they were reflections. I pulled the keys out of my pocket and struggled to unloop the ISDI keys from my car keys, hands trembling.
He watched them intently, his eyes tracking every movement of my fingers.
Finally I got them loose and tossed them to him. “I’m sorry, I’ll just go,” I said. “You can fire me if you want.”
He caught the keys. “Just like that, Blaire? Don’t you care about this internship? About your father?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake coming here.”
Smiling, he jangled the keys and pocketed them. “Actually, the mistake you made,” he said, “was doing an action that requires dexterity. You’re left-handed Blaire, yet I just saw you favor your right hand when you took the keys off the ring.”
I said nothing, just stared at him, as fear froze my heart. Caught.
He continued. “I suppose that means I’m just a reflection.” His eyes took on a darker hue. “Naturally, that troubles me.”
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“Put yourself in my shoes, Blaire. What if one of us—say, Damian—snuck into your bedroom in the middle of the night and told you that you were a reflection, that you weren’t real. What would you do?”
“Who cares?” I said. “We do it to each other all the time. This is no different.” I gestured to the articles he’d collected. “Besides, you don’t even think that’s the source up there, anyway.”
“It’s one step closer to it,” he said. “Don’t tell me you honestly expect me go on living my life down here, knowing I’m living in the orphaned world you left behind . . . when I can go higher.”
“Too late. You’re already in the source.”
“But you broke the symmetry, Blaire. The source Charles isn’t me anymore. The source Charles doesn’t have this conversation. We’ve diverged, and I want me to live, not the source Charles.”
“I can’t take you back,” I said. “That’s one of your own rules.”
“And another one is never engage a fellow carrier’s reflection. Now you see why.” He paused, jangling the keys again. “I’m guessing you didn’t use rooms A or B—otherwise, you would have had to break into ISDI before you broke symmetry. No, you would have done it from someplace safe . . .”
I stared at him, horrified, as he worked out the details of my betrayal, and undid my last hope of keeping him down here.
“A friend’s house,” he mused, studying my expression. “No, Damian’s the only one you trust who knows about crossing over, and you wouldn’t want him to know about this. That means you used a mirror in your own house. Probably a full length mirror in one of the bedrooms. But which one . . .” He massaged his chin. “It’s only your fourth crossover, so you’re still scared of it. I’m guessing you crossed over from the safety of your own bedroom.”
“I didn’t,” I whispered.
His eyes lit up with glee. “Seventy-three twenty-two Via Capri, if I remember correctly, is the address of your house.” He grinned. “Good luck explaining my disappearance and why you’re backwards to Damian and my daughter. I wonder if you’ll ever tell them, or if you’ll just suffer away by yourself while the poorly reflected laws of physics slowly deteriorate your body from the inside out and drive you to suicide.”
Then he was gone.
I stared in shock at the dark hallway where he had stood an instant before. He was going to my house. Charles’s reflection was going to my house, and if he made it there first, he would orphan me before I got there. And then do what? Kill his own source?
The rattling of the office’s front door downstairs threw me into action. It was a race for my life and the integrity of the source universe I’d left behind. I bolted after him, my heart clawing itself into my throat.
I had to beat him home.
Chapter 17
By the time I made it to my Jeep, the headlights of Charles’s Prius had already disappeared around the corner. I revved the Jeep’s engine and peeled out after him, nearly stalling in the process.
He had a head start on me, but he also drove the slower Prius. On the freeway, my car should gain on his. I rounded the corner and spotted his red tail lights a quarter mile ahead. My toes bottomed out the petal, and the growl of the Jeep’s engine rose to a roar.
Just south of a hundred, the tachometer redlined in sixth gear. My maximum speed. Intersections whizzed by, and I prayed my path stayed clear, though I wasn’t sure who’s jurisdiction this was—God’s or Satan’s. Miraculously, I caught a string of greens. Yet Charles’s red tail lights taunted me just out of reach. I hadn’t gained an inch.
Now that I thought about it, a Prius was built for highway travel, a Jeep for off-roading. Maybe my car wasn’t faster.
My heart thundered. If I didn’t make it to my house before him, I would be orphaned down here. A fate I’d never really considered. All those precautions and all that protocol created the illusion of safety, the illusion that everything was under control.
When nothing about crossing over was ever safe or under control.
Charles’s headlights veered onto the freeway onramp, and I backed off the pedal, dread replacing my stomach acid. I had already lost. The freeway was the fastest route to my house, and on a straight shot like that, no way I could beat him.
Come on, think, Blaire. I rolled through another intersection going the actual speed limit, wasting precious seconds, unable to commit to either the freeway or my shortcut home through city streets, which I knew took longer than a freeway trip. Then it hit me.
The speed limit.
The freeway was only faster because it allowed cars to drive nonstop at eighty miles per hour, but that didn’t mean it was the most direct path.
I yanked the wheel and veered onto Morena Boulevard instead, which would take me over Soledad Mountain Road. If I could manage to average sixty on the city streets, which wove a more direct path through the hills to my house, even if Charles drove a hundred on the freeway I would beat him.
Minutes later, I careened onto my street, and scanned the block for his Prius. Relief flooded through me. I was first—
A pair of high beams swung onto the street at the opposite end of the block and burned my retinas. Charles. My house waited in the middle, directly between us. I floored it, and the acceleration shoved me into my seat. A hundred yards away, he did the same.
It was going to be a game of chicken.
***
Hopefully my Jeep weighed more than his Prius, because I had no intention of letting up on the gas. Right in front of my lawn, we collided head on with a sickening crash. The impact threw me forward, crushed me into the air bag.
The speeds weren’t fatal, though. We both jumped out of our cars at the same time. But my driver’s side faced my house, his faced away. By the time he circled his vehicle, I had a two second lead, and I flew toward the front door. His guttural intake of breath sounded right behind me.
I crashed into the door, jammed the key in the slot and twisted the lock open. I dove inside and kicked the door shut just as Charles slammed into it behind me. The frame trembled.
I leapt to my feet and locked the door, cranked the deadbolt, and slotted the security chain. And then I stood there, panting. I had made it—
A crash from the kitchen made me jump. A dark figure tumbled onto the counter, square bits of glass showering off his dark hulk. He’d plunged right through the window. And with incredible speed, he charged.
> In the darkness, I hardly believed it. My eyes couldn’t adjust in time. He materialized before me, burning in the glare from the porch light now spilling through the torn butcher paper, and he threw me to the floor. His hands groped up my chest for my throat.
I twisted and writhed out of his grip and scrambled up the stairs on all fours, desperate to escape his iron grip. He trailed me, panting like a wild dog, and his fingers latched onto my ankle, yanked me back. I jammed my other leg back, hammered his face with my heel. He grunted and sank back, and I scaled the remaining stairs to the top with him still probing blindly right behind me.
But my bedroom was downstairs, at the end of the hall.
He didn’t know that.
I scuttled sideways on the landing, scarcely resolving his silhouette in the pitch black. He froze, listened. But he’d hear my thundering heart. He’d sense me, now cornered less than an arm’s reach away against the railing.
The wooden balusters dug into my back. The railing guarding the landing’s edge.
I had no choice.
I dragged myself up and swung my legs over the railing, and leapt.
The air rose to a whistle and my stomach floated up my throat. I dropped blind for what seemed like eternity, and then pain shot through my legs and my body crumpled to the floor at the bottom of the stairs.
No time to assess the damage. I rose to my feet and ran up the hall to my bedroom, ignoring a sprained ankle. Hearing my movement, Charles cursed and barreled down the stairs after me.
I darted into the pitch black cave of my bedroom, and Charles plowed through the door right after me. He fumbled for a light switch, slapping every square foot of wall around the doorway, and without a sound I slipped back through the mirror into the source.
My fingers coiled around the axe handle, and I raised it over my head. Through the mirror, Charles found the lights, and my reflected bedroom flooded with brilliant light. Our eyes froze on each other through the glass, him in the reflection, me in the source.