Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  “Pfft,” Kendra said. “I haven’t given up!”

  Marcus didn’t reply, as at that moment they reached the end of the corridor, and the light exploded into Keithus’s private quarters. It was not subtle. The room they were in was overly decorated with purple wall hangings, twisted lamps and sketchy, spiky paintings that Marcus suspected were the wizard’s own work. Along one wall, a row of pegs held a series of identical pointy hats. Billowing curtains and soft pillows were everywhere. A four poster bed that rivalled the one Marcus had slept in in Portruss for sheer opulence languished against the back wall. And on the central table, over which was draped a blue tablecloth decorated with moons and stars, there sat a large, translucent glass sphere that teemed with whirling clouds. A crystal ball. Of course. Marcus couldn’t quite believe how much everything looked exactly like he’d expected it to. The only thing missing was a star map, the study of which would surely say that today was his lucky, lucky day.

  He kneeled down by the crystal ball, peering into it curiously, then moved over as Kendra poked him, so that she could kneel down next to him. “How does it work, do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kendra admitted. “Try touching it.”

  “Okay..” He reached out and touched it. The clouds inside began to whirl around faster. Suddenly, they cleared, sweeping aside to reveal some words floating in the air inside. Marcus leant closer, to try and make them out. They were ‘Search’, ‘Archive’, and underneath, ‘Replay Last Video’.

  He glanced at Kendra, who shrugged. Turning back, he poked at the crystal ball, aiming for the lowest option. Thrown off by the curved surface, he accidentally opened the archive, and the screen filled quickly with tiny renditions of landmarks he recognised from Earth, ranging from Stonehenge to New York and back via a great pyramid and a vaguely familiar mountaintop temple. He quickly found a curved arrow to poke, which took him back to the previous listing of options, and this time successfully managed to select ‘Replay Last Video’. The clouds whirled together once more, and the floating words dissolved into them. A new word appeared, very small, at the bottom of the ball’s visible spectrum.

  Buffering…

  After a few minutes, the clouds cleared again, and this time a scene was visible. Marcus and Kendra could just about make out large towers of machinery, and people buzzing around them like ants. They leant closer, but the image was still too small.

  “Is there any way to make it bigger?” Kendra asked. Marcus frowned softly, then reached out and tapped the ball’s surface twice in quick succession. The effect was instantaneous; Marcus felt the image tug at him, and then it was getting much bigger very quickly as he felt himself lifted from his kneeling position and falling head-first into it. Voices and sound came from all around as the room vanished in a blur, and he fell forwards into a vision of the past.

  Marcus hit the ground hard. Luckily, the ground was soft and bounced him back up, where after a moment of airborne confusion he sorted his limbs out and was able to land on his feet amidst the strange mists that curled all around. Only before him did they relent, scything apart like stage curtains to reveal a life-size enactment of the scene he had been viewing before. Ahead, there stood two rows of complex towers of machinery that reminded him of what he’d seen in the Viaggiatori labs, monstrous mechanisms that kept the Mirrorline in line. They in turn flanked an even taller central tower, a bulging mass of machinery that spat forth thick cabling that linked everything together. More cables ran off into the mist: brightly-dressed people ran back and forth along their lengths, checking their attachments. More people stood staring at their towers, seemingly reading from their output screens.

  There was a strange warping sensation in the air next to Marcus, and Kendra dropped from the sky and bounced back up onto her feet just as he had. “Whoa,” she said. “Where are we?”

  “Inside the recording, I think” Marcus said. “But what are we looking at?”

  Kendra ran her eyes over the scene that was unfolding before them, taking it all in. When she spotted a certain figure strolling through the general bustle, she did a double take.

  “Oh wow!” she trilled. “That’s Rashalamn! He’s a hero of the Viaggiatori! And he looks so young and dreamy – I mean, yes, so young. This must be, like, a long time ago.”

  “Huh,” Marcus said, surprised. “He does look kind of familiar. But I never met him, did I?”

  Kendra shrugged. “This.. it must be! This is the famous Rashalamn experiment!”

  “And that is..”

  “It’s a major, major thing. It was almost thirty years ago – there was meant to be a big celebration in the works for the anniversary next year, I guess it kinda got sidelined by all the Keithus stuff. Uhh.. basically, before this, the only way to travel between the Mirrorworld and Earth was by opening a portal and physically stepping into the Mirrorline, where you then shaped yourself a completely separate portal to exit out the other side by. Slow, dangerous, ungainly stuff. But then Rashalamn went and did his thing, and bam, suddenly we’re in a world of instant travel! We learnt so much in such a short while, had this huge burnout of creativity that basically informed everything about the way we travel between worlds today. It was a fascinating time. Before I was born, of course, but it’s all written in the Storie.” Kendra’s grin was as wide as Marcus had ever seen it.

  “Yeah,” he said, “right. I think Eira mentioned this once. But what’s it got to do with me?”

  “Ssh,” Kendra said, not really listening. “He’s about to start talking!”

  Marcus sighed, and turned back to the scene, as the man known as Rashalamn cleared his throat.

  “My dear fellows,” he began, and paused as something crazy happened in the sky. “My dear fellows... thank you all, for being here today. We are about to undertake an experiment which, if successful, will mark a momentous step forward. If we are able to successfully bridge a connection between the two places we have selected, then theoretically we can make travelling between Earth and our world instantaneous. I know many of us, myself included, have considered the possibility of this for some time. Today, we find out. Today, we make history.”

  The man paused dramatically. Kendra made a gesture that was equal parts ‘see , told you’ and ‘damnit that’s what I was just saying’. Marcus wasn’t impressed.

  “Let us begin!” Rashalamn roared. There was much whooping from the assembled Viaggiatori, and they all reached up to pull the big red levers that were attached to their every tower.

  “Why are they always red?” Marcus asked. He wasn’t really expecting an answer and didn’t get one, as at that moment two towns coalesced into existence in the air above them, distracting the attention of both everyone in the recording and Kendra, who oohed and aahed at the sight of them.

  “Hang on,” Marcus said, wrinkling his brow. “I know that place. That one’s my home town. Didn’t recognise it at first, don’t often see it floating in the sky like that.”

  Why am I looking at this? This isn’t what I asked for, he thought. And then blinked, because he hadn’t thought that, but the thought had appeared in his mind anyway. He glanced at Kendra, and derived from the look of confusion on her face that she had just undergone the same experience. He opened his mouth to ask her about it, but as he did, a series of clicking noises echoed out around him, and with a sudden whooshing sound, the recording unfocused and twisted out from under them.

  Recalibrate, the voice in his head said. Show me my parents.

  They landed with another soft bump in the middle of a room that was still building itself, the frame of its walls gently unfolding away from them until it met itself coming back around the other way, and went on a second lap to add the detail. A sofa sketched in here, a cabinet there, trinkets and furnishings painting themselves into existence in such a mismatched way that Marcus didn’t realise at first that he knew this room – indeed, that he had done a substantial amount of growing up in it. But he had, b
ecause that armchair in the corner wasn’t just any armchair; it was the one in which his father would sit and read his newspaper and fall asleep, secretly suffering from the exhaustion that would ultimately kill him. The dining table was the very one at which he had not so long ago sat, disillusioned, listening to his sister drone on and his Mama needle him about his mistakes, sleepwalking through a birthday dinner at his childhood home. It was not something he had ever expected to see again, at least in so strange of a context. In his head, warm nostalgia came up against the cold recognition of how this room’s mundane normality seemed now so alien to him, until both thoughts united on the bigger issue of how it could be here at all, and his mind imploded quietly.

  “How long ago did you say these experiments took place?” he asked weakly.

  “Better part of thirty years,” Kendra said, looking around. “Why? Where’d we go?”

  Marcus reeled. It was haunting, how little had changed; his last sight of this room had been chronologically several decades later, and yet it was hardly different at all. All that was missing were a few ornaments that had been added over the course of his lifetime, and one wall, which seemed to have vanished as a feature of the recording, allowing the viewer to see that the Viaggiatori were still working away elsewhere. But it fit with the ideology that his parents had lived by; that times had been better once, and that if you couldn’t go back to how things were, you could at least prevent yourself from moving on. In the past, their stubbornness had angered him, but now the thought just made him sad, and he was overcome with a terrible urge to not see this room any longer.

  “Come on,” he said, making for the door. Reaching down for the handle, his hand passed straight through it, so he decided to follow suit with the rest of his body and walked straight through the door. After a moment, Kendra joined him in the hall.

  “This is freaky,” she confided. Marcus nodded, walking down the hall and up the stairs, trying not to notice how the pictures on the walls hadn’t changed at all in thirty years. At the top of the stairs, he heard voices, which appeared to be coming from where he was heading; the first door on the left – his own bedroom. This time, he practically ran through the closed door without hesitation.

  They were there. In a room decorated in baby blue, he saw his mother and father standing over a cot, beaming down at the child lying within – his younger self, for sure. His brother was there, at this point a toddler clutching his mother’s leg. His sister wasn’t there, because she wouldn’t be born for another couple of years, yet. Her absence was a marker for time. He could not be older than two, but something told him he was far closer to zero. The atmosphere of the room, maybe. What he could see before him was a proud, emotional scene, that of a young family admiring its newest member. Looking at them now, seeing the pure love in which their gazes wrapped their child, Marcus felt a wistful longing, and a great sense of how they were now a world away, blown from his life in such a way that he’d spared little thought for them in the time that had elapsed since. Yet at the same time, it all seemed wrong. He held in his head no memories of their having loved him with anything like the intensity that they were demonstrating here. If they could love as they did here, why could he not recall their ever having done so? Had his own thoughts corrupted it, at the time? Was it only now, by the power of detached hindsight, that he could appreciate the affection he had always secretly supposed to be an act on his parent’s part? Perhaps it was just another broken thing..

  “Marcus,” Kendra said carefully, having followed him into the room. “What’s happening? Where are we?”

  “This is my house,” Marcus said quietly. “Those are my parents, and that’s me.” He pointed at the crib, through the bars of which he could just about make out his young form. Kendra moved over to stand next to his parents, peering down into the crib.

  “Aww,” she said. “What a cute baby you were. And blonde too, I see. Guess you grew out of that.”

  “What?” Marcus said, feeling his stomach twist suddenly. He moved over towards the crib, but before he could acquire an unobstructed view the disembodied voice took over his mind again.

  Who are these people? This crystal ball is useless. Look, let’s try again. All I want is to see my parents. I’m visualising them right now. Okay..

  The series of clicking noises started up again, and with another whoosh the scene fell apart around them. Clouds span and twirled around them, dragging them up from the town they had been in, leaving them floating with the entirety of the scene laid out below them, and dropping them again, this time into the other town, with such sickening aplomb that Marcus decided to close his eyes and just wait for it to be over. As it turned out, this didn’t help, as it allowed his mind to run wild with the horrific implications of the sounds of a new reality building itself around them.

  “Now where are we?” Kendra asked giddily, and he opened his eyes.

  The new scene was an almost exact reproduction as the one they had just witnessed. In another room, in another house, a baby lay in its crib, staring blankly up at its mother and father, whom were smiling down at it. Maybe it was because he had just been looking at them, but these two new adults bore striking similarities to Marcus’s own parents. The mother had the same long, flowing hair and porcelain face, the father the same impressive moustache and stooped posture. There were differences, but they were nowhere near as striking as the similarities.

  That’s more like it, the voice in his head said, satisfied. Gonna have to reboot this thing if it doesn’t start getting its act together. You hear that, ball? Magic is supposed to be reliable technology.

  “Who is that?” Kendra asked. “And why is he in my head?”

  “I think..” Marcus paused, distracted by an inexplicable sadness that was growing in his gut. “I think it’s Keithus. We’re seeing his recording from his perspective, and hearing his thoughts, I guess.”

  “He’s in my head?” Kendra asked. “Ick.”

  Marcus didn’t respond. The sight of this mysterious woman, who was presumably Keithus’s own mother, was somehow niggling at his memory. Although he had no idea how it could be, he was sure he had seen her before. He watched as she leant down and picked up her child, cradling him to her breast and humming a quiet lullaby, and was overcome with a terrible déjà vu.

  “So Keithus used his crystal ball to see what his parents were doing,” Kendra mused, “and this is what he saw. But why Rashalamn? Why did we visit his dudes and then your parents before? Even if it’s faulty magic, well that explains your guys, but why the Viaggiatori? Something’s not right.”

  Something’s not right, the disembodied voice echoed, having seemingly gone through the same thought process. Kendra put her hand to her forehead. Zoom out.

  “No!” Marcus yelled to the departing scene, without really understanding why.

  They came to a rest back where they had started, on ground level – if such a term was even applicable in this setting – with the Viaggiatori amassed before them. They were all staring, wide-eyed, at the bridge that Rashalamn had been busily forming between the two worlds that the towns represented. It had started out as a simple white affair, but was now starting to twist and writhe, changing shape even under the Viaggiatori’s firm grasp. The man stood sweating from the effort, but steadfastly refusing to give up. Overhead, the towns still hung there, sort of in the Mirrorline and sort of not, but Marcus and Kendra found their vision replaced not with the wide view of each urban expanse that they had seen before, but with a window into the two rooms of two sets of parents that they had just visited.

  “Wait,” Kendra said, watching Rashalamn. “He’s not doing that right.”

  “What?” Marcus asked, absently.

  “Uhh.. Well, the whole main thing with the Mirrorline is that it’s a barrier. We use it as a path between worlds, buts its main function is to keep them apart. Worlds that reflect each other.. they aren’t meant to touch. That’s how you get things exploded. There are
notes in the Storie, Rashalamn himself wrote them, about how if you build a bridge backwards, pulling the worlds together to link in the middle rather than starting there and reaching out to them, then they’ll leak.. Oh, of course!” she said, suddenly brightening up. “This must be where he got that knowledge from! Marcus, something is about to go spectacularly wrong!”

  “That’s wonderful,” Marcus said, not really listening. He was focused on the portal through which he could still see Keithus’s apparent parents, cradling and fussing over their child, oblivious of what was happening around them just as all of each town’s residents would be. The scene seemed so hauntingly, inexplicably familiar, and suddenly, he realised why. This scene, this day, this memory; he had seen it before. Startled, he had discovered it, tucked away in the corner of his memory, travelled to it on foot over long-eroded neural pathways during his time in the Viaggiatori labs. On that day, he had stood outside of it as he did now, hearing that strange snatch of lullaby that spoke so profoundly to him, and now again echoed in the edge of his hearing as it was recited lovingly above. Before, he had dismissed the painful sadness that the memory and melody had inspired in him, because it had been too awful to hold onto just for the sake of understanding. But now, there was nowhere to run. He saw the memory again, and knew that the wrongness in the face of his Mama was not borne of faulty recollection. No, the Mirrorline sky had filled in the gaps where memory had failed, but it had not changed a face. He’d done that himself, dismissed the difference to stave off the impossible truth, because the Mama he’d thought it to be had not been the one he’d known his entire life, but rather the one who now stood here, singing a song he’d never hear again.

  With his entire being focused on the face of this woman as he saw her now, he felt the doors open in his mind, and recollection burst forth from wherever it had been hiding. His memory wriggled, reformatting itself to reflect the truth of the situation; that at that time, when he had been so young as to not even realise, it had been this woman who had been bestowing her maternal love on him. And as this new memory settled in, Marcus knew without a doubt that it was the correct version. With the realisation, the sense of irreparable, hopeless loss that had so haunted him when he’d relived the memory before, and had been hanging in the air around him waiting for its moment, descended.