The Mirror

A Story by Frank Moore

Amid rising safety concerns a new virtual reality technology is poised to change the world, but at a cost.

The Mirror

In the evenings Jim Sandoval rides his hyperbike the 47 miles from his work in Santa Monica to his home in Calabasas. He likes the scenic ride and the tight turns that make the internal yaw gyroscopes spin at incredible speeds. He likes the sound they make. And the sound of the high density rubber as it hums over the asphalt. He weaves in and out of the cars, passing them on his left and then on his right. He knows they must envy him. He knows how he felt when cyclers would pass him on his evening commute. With their sleek anti-friction suits and atmosphere separating face shields, flying by at 120 miles per hour. But it was the aggressive sounds of action that brought his eyes up from his magazine and coffee on his automated ride up the winding freeway. The clicking and whirring of the gears, the reckless and primitive panting. He had to have one. And after four years as chief development officer at Syntax, California’s premier software engineering firm, he more than deserved it. He swung his body hard coming around a tight curve. He winced and clenched tightly in response to the sudden g-forces. The wheels were designed to compress under extreme ambient force, warping into an oval shape. He pulled out of the curve and felt his body relax. The last ten mile stretch he covered in under five minutes, a personal best.
The rides helped him work off the stress born out of his pivotal role at the firm. It had been a long week at Syntax. The development team had been running tests on a new virtual reality program that was poised to reshape the entire VR market. The populace had become bored with run of the mill VR experiences like ground warfare or drag racing. Even space travel was now only appealing to those who couldn’t afford the real thing. Sales had been down for three years in a row. The Mirror was supposed to be something new. Something earth shattering. Something so revolutionary some believed, that it questioned the boundaries of ethics in virtual reality. It was to be a savior for Syntax, and thus the immense gravitational forces of an industry had been weighing heavily on Jim and his team for the past 759 days.
Jim rolled into his garage and stopped on the cooling pad. His face shield released itself as his fingers fell upon the shiny black surface of it’s jaw line. He pulled it off, twisting and rotating his mouth and cheeks to help coax the blood back to the skin’s surface. He hung the face shield on the garage wall and pulled off his gloves by the index fingers pressing his back into the door to the house and swinging it open. The house was dark for a split second before the soft orange glow of the hall light greeted him from above. The kitchen, living room and upstairs lights were next, followed by the television and computer. “Ok what have we got to eat” he said under his breath, and he stepped into the elevated kitchen. The refrigerator front panels instantly populated with images of meals that were possible given it’s contents and Jim’s style of cooking. Tuna Melt. Beef and Vegetables. Breakfast Cereal. Mixed Leftovers. The television played the news, “Sound off please” he said in a louder voice. Now the newscaster’s face moved silently above the ticker headline “ASIAN MARKETS CRASH IN WAKE OF WATER CRISIS”. He opened the fridge and removed a quart of milk, placing it in on the counter to warm slightly. He seated himself in front of his desk with a satisfied grunt.
Through the kitchen window a brilliant beam suddenly penetrated the dim light of the kitchen. Giant mirrored panels rotated at a glacial pace on the roof of his next door neighbor’s house and bounced the sunlight upward and out into the atmosphere. Responding to the flick of irritation brought in by the light, Jim stood angrily from his desk and pulled the curtain shut. This curtain was not like any other in his house. It was jet black and stitched of a heavy wool. It was the only thing that could keep out the concentrated ray of sunlight that intruded every day this time of year from 6:26pm to 7:40pm. Jim knew that his neighbor had ordered the installation of these panels in response to an upcoming trend of D.I.Y. global cooling; a fact that only made the intrusion more irritating. It wasn’t the global cooling aspect that Jim found aggravating, it was the brazen hypocrisy of the thing. This was the same neighbor who instead of having his trash picked up every Thursday by the collection bureau and disposed of the proper way, torched it by daylight, filling the air with vaporized particles that inevitably found their way through Jim’s open windows. The same neighbor who hunted for sport and lived his life otherwise unbounded by the less convenient constraints of eco-conservatism.
Jim stood for a moment regarding his desk, cracking his knuckles with his thumbs before sitting down again. With a wave of his hand over the desk a blueish white light shone from within a narrow horizontal slit in the desktop. Seconds later a semi-translucent screen emerged, and beneath his hands, a keyboard. There were emails that hadn’t been read, tens of them in fact, some weeks old. With a hopeless sigh he began cycling through the titles, starting with the week of September 18. Few of them warranted opening. Mostly junk mail. Something from traffic enforcement. Several items that shouldn’t wait but probably would. Suddenly a message window appeared on the screen. It was a greeting from Marcus Shohan, the development team leader working on The Mirror project. “Expect a delivery today, a gift from the team!” “Huh” Jim said leaning toward the screen as he sat with his arms crossed over his lap, his glasses having slid down the narrow bridge of his nose now barely clung to the bulge of his nostrils. Just then a chime sounded that reverberated through the house. It was the front door. He rose from his seat and stood looking sternly from behind his glasses toward the door. He approached the foyer and glanced at a monitor mounted in the wall that displayed a live video feed from the front porch. There was a delivery drone hovering patiently on the other side.
Jim opened the door and looked up at the mechanical errand boy. “Greetings Mr. Sandoval, I have a package from your friends at Syntax development group” it said in a warm human voice, and it extended a robotic hand. Jim shook and felt the familiar warmth of the ID scanner. The machine opened up it’s chest revealing a rectangular brown box. He reached in and removed the box. It was very light for a box of it’s size. “Thank you Mr. Sandoval, have a pleasant day.” said the bot, and it was gone. He returned through the front door with the box and stepped up to his living room. The TV still displayed the silent news, the anchors mouthing over Chinese subtitles, Jim hadn’t bothered to change them from the language of the manufacturer. He sat down on his couch exhaustedly with the box on his lap. An attached note read: “Congratulations on our first prototype, we thought you’d like to be the first to give her a whirl! With great gusto, Marcus and the rest of ‘Jim’s team’ ” “Hm” Jim said, and he peeled the lips from the sides of the box and slid out a smaller box. He opened up the top and there it was. The vision of the last two years come to fruition, a beautiful sleek machine of the lightest carbon composites that could be wrenched from the earth. The thoughtful ergonomic design, simple lines and clean curves felt like magic beneath the fingers. It was a headset built for the mind. An entire universe of explorative fantasy and impossible experiences waited within it’s simple form.
“Amazing” he said softly, lifting the machine out from it’s foam capsule. He tilted it to view his creation from every angle. It was lighter than he expected. He removed his glasses and gently placed the device upon his face, allowing the mask to fit over his eyes enveloping him in a serene blackness. He turned it on and instantly his vision returned. He saw before him his desk, his living room, his kitchen just as it had been. He stood up from the chair and glanced down over his leather soled shoes, pleated wool pants and woven cotton shirt, his hands, fingers. Everything in it’s place. The machine wasn’t producing a true virtual reality experience, not yet. For The Mirror was automatically set to “Record” upon it’s first use. What The Mirror was doing was creating a digital “reflection” of his surroundings. Storing the images of Jim’s reality to be reproduced virtually later. He walked through his house looking over every surface and around every corner, in every room, at every item. A series of infrared lasers was continuously scanning the walls, the paintings, the pictures, the images on them, the patterns of the tile floors, the milk carton on the counter, the light fixtures, the woven Persian rugs, reflecting what it saw and storing the data to be reproduced upon his next glance. He wandered through the house with only the digital reflection produced by The Mirror to see by, redundantly scanning every conceivable surface from all possible angles.
Jim stepped outside into the silent blue night. The chill of the autumn wind flashed over his face. He looked around like a child in a grand museum, seeing the world, the real world as a digital reproduction, for the first time. The brilliant white glow of the streetlamp, like stadium lights, bounced off the roofs and around the walls of the houses from the street, making his path faintly visible. The sky was dark and speckled with crisp white stars. The yard was rectangular and large. He walked the tan gravel pathways meandering through a low shrub garden encircling an apple tree before wandering out the back gate. It creaked and whined in the windy night. Stepping into the front yard, he paused for a moment, briefly blinded as The Mirror adjusted to the brilliance of the streetlamp some twenty feet away. The wind picked up now and ruffled the large bushy trees that loomed over the street and cast dark shadows on the pavement. The trees, spaced at eight feet on center, were purposed to bring life to the street that on one side was lined with imposing narrow houses and on the other a high concrete retaining wall, ten feet or so in height that followed the road along it’s round curves. The houses were silent, with their faces painted in the pale blue light of the streetlamp and separated by black voids of shadow between them. Each was high and angular and all sat at equal distances from the curved sidewalk. They were beautiful homes, all outfitted with the most modern amenities, patios, pools and optional in-home service-bots, the latter Jim had declined.
In the midst of the unfamiliar calm of the night Jim realized he was standing at the edge of his driveway. He had hardly remembered The Mirror over his eyes. It’s comfortable fit and impossibly lightweight construction made it invisible to his senses. He touched his face to be sure it was still there. He slipped it off and it ruffled his hair. He held it at his waist, looking for a moment, and then walked back inside. Entering his front door the warm light slowly crept up the walls following him as he traversed the path into his bedroom. The wind whispered softly at his windows, which meant torrential gusts assaulted them from the outside. He placed The Mirror on his nightstand and without bothering to untie them, removed his shoes with his feet, pressing on his ankles and flinging them forcefully off. He sat dejectedly on the side of his bed and unbuttoned his shirt. The wind was exhausting. Even the sound of it against the windows seemed draw out his energy, the way desert heat draws moisture from the pores. The skin of his face felt warm from the friction of the weather. The day had been long, and another added to several long months. He glanced at The Mirror on his nightstand. Finally, after so many months of agonizing planning, drawing, focus groups, conference calls, endless meetings, lunches, dinners, emails, it was done. The first functioning prototype had arrived.
Overnight, Jim had chosen not to go into work the following day, but the house, having been left uninformed, crept up the television volume until the stern voice of the newscaster crept into his dreamless sleep. The windows gradually became more and more translucent over several minutes, allowing a soft gray radiance into the bedroom. The smell of espresso. Jim sat up and looked at his phone, it was seven o’clock. The voices from the television were now clearly audible in the bedroom. They spoke of a cyber-attack carried out by digital terrorists. They had remotely mobilized thousands of weaponized bots to flood the streets of downtown Los Angeles and stand at attention in protest to recent government actions abroad. “Good day to stay home” Jim said to himself, flipping over the covers and swinging himself out of bed.
He picked up The Mirror and slid it over his face. A welcome message appeared. “ What would you like to do?” and below it were two options, “Record” and “Explore”. Now that a portion of Jim’s world had been recorded with yesterday’s use, the real magic of The Mirror could be tapped. Virtual reality was a middle-aged technology. User experiences had been gradually pushed to extremes over the past decades, but with The Mirror, new possibilities had emerged. With every user scanning the world around them, a digital record of the real world would quickly be created and available for exploration by other users. Real places, real people, even the personalities of people could be recreated through The Mirror’s psychological analysis of conversations recorded during use. The vision of Jim’s team was a world where a user could one moment be sitting at a desk steeped in work day misery, and then slip on The Mirror and walk out onto the street. Hail a cab and go to a ball game. Meet with friends at a nightclub, or visit a zoo in New York from the comfort of home in Colorado. Instead of having a conversation with someone via computer or phone, a user could slip on The Mirror and instantly be in a meeting room thousands of miles away, seeing their clients face to face. With the state of the art technology harnessed by Jim’s team, a virtual life was now possible, completely digital and by design utterly indistinguishable from the real one.
Jim selected the “Explore” function. In an instant, he was standing over his desk in the living room, where he had first turned on the device. The carton of milk was still on the kitchen counter. He looked around at his living room and chuckled in disbelief. It worked. It worked perfectly. A unique feature of the The Mirror was that it required no actual movement. The electrical systems in the brain fed into the headset via retinal pathways and allowed the user to move throughout and interact with the digital world seamlessly using only their thoughts. He sprinted into the kitchen and slowly reached for the milk carton. His fingers grasped it, and he felt it’s weight. He picked it up and examined it. He brought it to his nose and smelled it. It smelled real. He pinched the cardboard flaps forcing the mouth of the carton into diamond shaped opening and he tilted it to his lips. He tasted the milk. It was real. As real as anything. He burst into maniacal laughter. Overjoyed, he threw the open carton against the wall. It exploded in a magnificent shower of white liquid, small heavy drops suddenly peppered his face. He blinked, lifting the mask off of his face. Instantly he was back in his bedroom. It was done. Jim’s team had done in two years what the software moguls and gods of engineering had tried and failed to do since the dawn of the digital age. A new era of technological possibility was here. Jim began jumping and shouting erratically, “We’ve done it! Jesus God it’s done!”

A new shopping list on a free floating screen. The silence of a busy office free of ringing phones and ticking clocks. Casually dressed workers at their desks, bringing the air to life with their gloved hands. Silent. Urbane. Translucent screens blooming from nothing, shrinking, enlarging, emails in process, the continents crisscrossed with bright clear lines bouncing from one city to the next, a picture of global commerce in a new age. “We’re expecting some delays in materials” A soft faced man says to a coworker he can see on a screen. Her hair is pinned back into a tight ponytail that hangs to her neckline. She wears a piece of smooth thin metal behind her right ear, the foremost end is tipped with a small bead of glass that projects before her the face of her colleague. The shine of her pale pink lipstick makes her lips glisten at the other end of the screen. Her fine small features are reproduced in striking, sensually vivid detail. She frowns, playfully expressing her disapproval. There had been vast amounts of research wrought in the procurement of The Mirror’s materials. They had to be light enough to forget about, but durable enough to be stepped on, dropped, submerged in water. They had to radiate heat away from the user, they had to be thin enough to be inconspicuous and feel like glass under the fingertips. All of these traits were essential to the user’s experience. Essential in order to reproduce the richness in the sensory nuances of real life. Essential in order to forget that what you are seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting, is not real at all.
Jim hosted a dinner that night at an opulent downtown restaurant in L.A. All of his team members attended, as well as the deputy director of Syntax. It was a great show of success. A glorious evening that had been long anticipated and by now had been more than earned. “It was just amazing” Jim said smiling up from his wine glass. “Not a single lapse in perception.” He said with an air of amazement. “There really was no way to tell that it was not real life”. There was a wistful silence among the group. There had been so much talk about The Mirror over the last months that now at the victory table, there was little left to say. A member of the ethics and efficacy committee was also in attendance, Tom Bartow. Tom was a man of unyielding character. Incorruptible. And seemingly impervious to persuasion. And for this Jim seethed with hatred for him. Tom had fought the production of The Mirror at many crucial steps along the way. The social ramifications of the device were not yet known and little study had been devoted to the possible mal-effects of such intensely real experiences, and in Tom’s eyes, this brought user safety into question.
The restaurant bustled with waiters in white, gracefully carting silver trays and pouring champagne. Light music and soft light bathed the room in a casual elegant ambiance. “Jim, I love what you have done. I know how hard you all worked on this project. You know that, right?” Tom said, leaning back in his chair, twisting the edge of the table cloth tightly between his thumb and index finger. “Yes, of course I do. All of us do. We have all lent our talents to achieving this monstrous goal, and we’ve done it together. And we share in the fruits together.” Jim said, and he raised his glass and tilted it toward Tom before taking a drink. Jim smiled dismissively. “Definitely something to be proud of.” There was a pause. “I know we’ve been over this” Tom said leaning forward resting on his bent elbows “but now that it’s actually been completed” he said in a softer tone, “we have the product here usable right now, I can’t help but ask, what is to stop someone from doing something terrible with The Mirror? What’s to stop someone from doing harm to someone, someone they know, in the virtual world? And what does that do to a person’s instinct for empathy over time? It’s not like killing some faceless digital rendition of a person on an ancient battlefield Jim. You could kill your wife, your boss, your neighbor. What’s to stop them?”
There had been meeting after meeting about this. It was true that anything inside the bounds of physical possibility could be done in The Mirror, and with nothing within the human sensory faculty to distinguish the experience from reality, these acts would carry the same truth in the mind, and whatever psychological ramifications that might imply. “Tom, I don’t think you understand what we’re trying to do here. Yes, these things are possible, but possibility is exactly what we aim to produce.” Jim said with a pretentious chuckle. “As much potential as there is for evil, there is equal potential for good. There have been so many times throughout our history where we had to trust ourselves as a species or risk limiting ourselves forever into the future. This is one of those times Tom. And the future… we create the future.” Jim said, taking a sip of his champagne. Tom looked down and pressed his tongue hard against his bottom lip, circling it over his gum line. He shook his head, and stood up. “I appreciate the efforts on everyone’s part, the ingenuity behind this project is incredible but safety is not something we mess around with.” Tom retorted, shifting his glance quickly around the table. ”The safety of the device has not been proven and frankly I doubt that it can be. Thank you for inviting me Jim, you all have a good night.” he said, as he excused himself from the table and walked out onto the sidewalk.
Three months had come and gone since that dinner, and Jim had rarely been seen without The Mirror over his eyes. To the outward observer, Jim seemed to be wearing some kind of high tech eye-wear. He worked with it on, ate with it on, attended meetings with it on, and all the while making a record of his surroundings and interactions. His colleagues had come to accept him this way, and after while it ceased to warrant attention. And every day when he arrived home, he sat at his desk chair and went back to his office to relive his meetings with a prowess and operatic fervor of a great orator. The woman at the lunch counter who’s charming smile he had been too timid approach, laid in bed with him, and night after night he entered Tom Bartow’s office and beat him unconscious. Sometimes with with his bare hands, sometimes with a bronze sculpture that sat on Tom’s desk.
The beatings were new. It started with Jim subtly goading him into arguments, humiliating him, throwing a paper cup of water on him. Then after a week or so it progressed to throwing a mug of hot coffee into his face, which inevitably became a fist fight. Tom was a large man, with stout forearms and broad in the shoulders. He would win the fist fights and would hold Jim down until someone phoned the police. Jim would remove The Mirror, returning to his living room where he emerged panting heavily and with a racing heart. So it became a regular practice of Jim’s to sneak into Tom’s office while he sat at his computer and unleash his fury upon him. He would approach Tom while his back was turned and punch Tom’s head and face until his hands could no longer bear the blows, then he would kick Tom’s limp and bloody body, in his gut, his groin, in his face until he was out of breath or until Lisa, Tom’s secretary, would burst in and alert the office crowing like a frantic bird, paddling Jim’s back and arms with open hands.

There were more trials done and Tom was a fixture at every meeting. Always there to sound the alarm for the public good. Ever menacing, ever meddling. The testers loved The Mirror. They would sit at the table with the testing group and beguile them with stories of incredible realities. Day jobs turned into swing parties, dream romances come true, jobs quit and plane tickets to Tahiti purchased and among them all not a single instance of violence was reported. Jim was always pleased. Tom suggested that people were withholding information from the test group and recommended that the video from the explore sessions be saved and made viewable to the user group. Jim, obviously opposed, cited personal privacy violations and the idea was easily dismissed.
It had been six months and trials were coming to a welcome close. Things were looking great for Jim and his team. Still one significant hurdle remained; a meeting with the development team and the ethics and efficacy committee concerning Tom Bartow’s test of the device. “I’m going to f*****g lose my mind if he throws a wrench into this thing so late in the game, Marcus” Jim said, conserving his breath on his morning ride into Santa Monica. “Just relax, I talked to Sylvia yesterday, she says Tom had a great experience. I don’t think we should be expecting any problems, just enjoy the ride my friend” Marcus said through faceshield speakers in the black early morning air. Jim ignored the speed warnings flashing on the inside of his heads up display and groaned fiercely as he rounded the last tight turn through the McClure tunnel, and into Santa Monica.
He burst into the 4th floor corner conference room several minutes late, his hair still wet from the gym showers, and took his seat at the table. He quickly flipped open his notepad and removed a pen, trying hard to reflect calmly upon the rest of the group. There was awkward shuffling and shifting while everyone waited for Jim to be ready, and Tom stood patiently at the podium before the table. “Ok” Jim said letting out a shortened sigh, “Sorry Tom go ahead” he said looking up from a last glance at his notes. “All right, well. I just… I want to say that Jim, and everyone at the development group, you guys really did an amazing job on this project. You really did, I was blown away. Honestly.” Jim’s face tensed as he sensed things were going badly. He shifted his legs and looked down, licking his lips before returning a focused squint to the podium.“But, look we have to be realistic here. That’s my job you guys. I have to take all the dreams and aspirations you all work so hard to bring to reality and I have to look at these and think ‘how can this harm the public’. Is it safe? That’s my job. And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I told you all that this product is completely safe for public consumption.” Jim tried hard to maintain a stoic expression. The ethics committee was the last stop before the production line. Jim had seen Tom cancel years long projects in the runup to production. With the power of the censorship bureau behind him Tom had ultimate veto power and was not timid about using it. Jim knew what he was hearing was the end of The Mirror. The destruction of 25 months of work. Sleepless nights. Thousands of hours of painstaking labor. Every morning, evening and night of the past two years was spent on The Mirror, and now Jim sat watching Tom Bartow stand smugly before the makers of dreams at Syntax, and listen to his sermonized annihilation of it all.
He couldn’t bear it. What was the point in bearing it? He didn’t have to. The result would be the same. It was over. No sense in giving Tom the pleasure of an audience. Jim stood up and gathered his papers, tamping them succinctly on the table, and walked out. Everyone’s head turned and followed Jim as he rounded the corner of the table and removed himself from the room. Tom paused, briefly startled at Jim’s reaction, and then stuttered back into his sentence. Jim quickly made his way down the hall into his office and shut the door. He sat at his desk and stared blankly at the empty space before him. He kept replaying Tom’s self righteous comments in his mind. Two years he had listened to that jackal. Watched him circling and salivating, just waiting for the moment that he could rip into his side. And now the moment had come. He collapsed his head into his folded arms on the desk, and succumbing to a powerful cocktail of stress and exhaustion, drifted to sleep.

Jim awoke hours later to the orange evening light filtering in through his office window blinds. His neck was stiff and he bent it from one side to the other. The dread of defeat was instantly upon him, and he glanced at the The Mirror prototype that sat on a stand near a calendar on his desk. He lifted it off the stand and mulled over it. He held it in his lap for a moment, and put it on. The familiar text greeting appeared on the screen, and Jim selected “Explore”. He stood up from his desk and walked out into the hallway. The virtual office was completely silent, save for the soft hum of the building’s cooling system. Lights were on in some areas toward the far end of the hall to the right, and on the other end a single light held out amidst the approaching darkness. It was Tom’s office. Jim meandered slowly down the hall toward the lighted office. Through the fourth floor window Jim could see the headlights from vehicles on the freeway overpass shining brightly against the soft backdrop of the waxing Santa Monica sunset. Such a beautiful view, and not one spec of it real. “Incredible” Jim said quietly to himself. “Jim?” An invisible voice called from inside Tom’s office. “Burning the midnight oil Jim?” The voice continued. Jim stayed silent. He approached the triangular swath of light stretched across the hallway carpet from Tom’s office lamp. The tip of his shoe slid into the light and the light bent around it, causing it’s polished brown surface to shine.
Tom swiveled his chair around to face Jim standing in the doorway and let out a contrived sigh. “This is tough Jim. Really tough. But ya know, you win some you lose some.” There was a pause. “ I’m just about finished here, why don’t we go down to the tap house and let me buy you a beer.” He said it with a brand of whimsy that marked his neutrality to the whole thing. He clearly did not recognize the gravity of the moment. In truth, this was only a virtual rendering of a statement that the real Tom Bartow might have made, but nevertheless, Jim was deeply offended. No response came from Jim, and Tom swiveled back around and continued reading from his computer screen. “These conversations seem so real don’t they Tom?” Jim said, standing squarely in the doorway. “I’m not sure what you mean Jim” Tom replied despondently. “We did a great job.” Jim said, and he abruptly reached over Tom’s shoulder and grabbed the two pound lion sculpture, causing him to jump and turn his attention to Jim. The cold metal was familiar to his hand. “I’ve always liked this thing” Jim said pleasantly, “They gave you this for the Neonet project, right?” He said as he tossed it lightly in his hand and turned it over to read the inscription underneath. “Yeah, $4 billion in sales in the first quarter, we all got one” Tom replied, watching Jim. “Success is never final, failure is never fatal” Jim read aloud. He chuckled, “who would’ve thought it would be your success that would be fatal?” Jim said, shifting his gaze to Tom, his tone quickly turned hostile. “What?” Tom said with a look of disgust. Without another word Jim smashed the sculpture into Tom’s cheek, shattering the bone. Tom screamed and fell to the ground. Jim followed him down continuing to brutally beat the metal object into Tom’s face and head until his screaming stopped.
Jim stood up, breathing heavily over the body. He unbuttoned his collar button with bloody fingers, and followed the buttons down, opening his shirt to let the heat escape. He could hear footsteps running from down the hall, keys jingling wildly until they stopped at Tom’s office door. There stood a security guard clutching the door jamb, his mouth agape at the horrific scene. His eyes turned to Jim standing distantly over the destroyed man, and clutching the bloodied sculpture. Jim looked at his watch. It was getting late. Just a few more minutes and Jim would end the session and be off for home before darkness had fully set. The security guard knelt down and pressed his chubby fingers into Tom’s neck, there was nothing there. “He’s dead” the guard said as he stood up, on the edge of panic. He began breathing heavily, “He’s dead” he said again. He tilted his chin to the radio microphone clipped to his shoulder and uttered a cryptic numeric, then he looked at Jim. “Mr. Sandoval I’m placing you under arrest” he said reaching for Jim’s arm. Now Jim reached up to his face to remove The Mirror. He didn’t like cycling at night, and night was coming quickly. He had done what he had intended. The Mirror software would soon be rendered inoperable, and this would likely be the last time it could be used. He removed The Mirror and held it in his hand. To his horrified astonishment, he remained in the room. There he stood next to Tom’s lifeless body, being handcuffed by the security guard. “Stop!” Jim shouted, but it was too late to stop anything. “Stop! This isn’t real! It’s not real! It’s The Mirror! I’m in The Mirror!” he shouted in a violent fit of terror, panic quickly overtaking him. Everything seemed wrong, and yet nothing was. Sounds of sirens rose up from the distant streets. In desperation he smashed The Mirror on the corner of the desk, dissecting it, and slowly thereafter he abandoned his resistance. For the gruesome and terrible truth came upon him swiftly and mercilessly, and it could not be escaped.