Broken Mirror (3 page)

Victor looked down at his hands. Specks of dried blood hid under a thumbnail. He picked at it with another nail, but tiny red stains remained in the hard-to-reach crevice. He scratched again, deeper. New blood seeped from the worn-away skin. Pain flared as sparks from his fingers. He watched them bloom with each painful dig: beautiful, multicolored, ephemeral things, like confetti aflame. They were his secret magic tricks and worth the pain they cost.

He sat in the room for twenty minutes, waiting for someone to come and tell him what a bad person he was for hurting Alik. If he had a MeshBit, he could call his parents, but his fa had refused to purchase one. They were pieces of Euro-fascist tech, according to his fa, that kept nations in the American Union from reaching their full potential. Ma never let Fa’s assertions stand, and always countered that the benefits of Mesh access outweighed any nebulous, jingoistic, proto-nationalist-revivalist nonsense, as she called his fa’s rationale. Victor didn’t know much about politics; he just wished he could call his parents, though the school might have already called them. Victor listened for them through the door.

At one point, footsteps tromped closer, and someone knocked. A scowling man came in wearing a starched canvas coat adorned with the snake-and-staff logo surrounded by a circle. His name tag identified him as Dr. Rularian. He held Victor’s chin with one hand, which reeked of bleach. “Open your mouth,” he instructed. He roughly swabbed the inside of Victor’s cheek. Just as abruptly as he’d entered, the doctor left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Victor was alone again.

Alik would probably get many visitors during his recuperation. Well-wishers would stream into the hospital with their flowers, cards, and packages. Balloons would float around Alik’s bed, holding vigil until he woke. If he woke.

No one would care about Victor if he’d been the one so badly hurt. He’d been in fights before, never voluntarily, and he usually lost. Now he would be known at school as vicious and dangerous in addition to strange and “problematic,” as he’d once heard a teacher call him. The one time he won a fight was worse than all the times he’d lost.

Dr. Rularian returned. “Come with me,” he said.

Victor followed him to a room packed with electronics. Two technicians
—always two—
stood by, men in their mid-twenties wearing translucent gel surgical masks and canvas hats. The burlier of the two unbuttoned Victor’s shirt, pushed him into a reclining synthleather seat, and stuck small sensors on his forehead, neck, chest, inner elbows, and wrists. The other technician had a flat face as if he had no nose at all beneath his mask, and his skin looked perfectly smooth, like plastic.

“I’m going to remove your pants,” the flat-faced one said.

Victor started to tear off the sensors. The burly technician with unblinking lizard-like eyes placed a firm hand on his chest. “Relax,” he said, “you’re safe here.”

Victor let his head fall back into the cushioned headrest. “You could have just asked me to undress,” he said.

The flat-faced technician undid Victor’s belt buckle and tugged his pants down to his ankles. Victor felt the smooth sensors’ cool metal against his inner thighs and panicked again, gripping the hems of his boxers to hold them up.

“Hold still, please,” the doctor said in a low voice. “You can keep your underwear on.”

The flat-faced technician placed a helmet-shaped device on Victor’s head while Lizard-Eyes tapped on a type-pad. Victor gripped the arms of the chair, feeling a strange buzz course through his skin.

The doctor activated a control, and Victor’s view of the room disappeared, blacked out by the helmet’s visor. Then an image of a snarling cheetah sprang to life in front of his eyes. His heart beat faster. As suddenly as the cheetah had appeared, it vanished, replaced by a close-up vidfeed of a beautiful woman’s face. She cried. Streams of tears ran down her cheeks. The rawness of her emotion
—
the way her eyes seemed to recede into their sockets
—
pulled at Victor. More images popped into view and disappeared: a bloody body, two men nuzzling each other, a female-female couple, a male-female couple, all staring at each other close-up and smiling. Victor felt himself start to smile in response. Then he remembered he was sitting half-naked in a cold hospital room, covered in sensors.

His heart thudded in his chest. He tried to lift the heavy helmet off.

“I said hold still!” The doctor commanded through a sonofeed in the helmet.

“We got a clear reading,” one of the technicians said.

Dr. Rularian said, “Okay, then, let’s move on.”

The helmet’s visor turned transparent.

“You have to cooperate with us, Mr. Eastmore,” the doctor said as he frowned at Victor. “We need to verify your diagnosis.”

“What diagnosis?” Victor asked, but he knew already what the doctor would say. He’d had many dreams of being classified, though they’d all felt more real than this.

“You are being classified for mirror resonance syndrome.”

Victor tried to leap from the chair, but the technicians’ hands restrained him. He shouted. “I’m not a Broken Mirror!”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Dr. Rularian said, “and please cooperate. Your genetic test is being processed now. It’s standard procedure.”

“Why aren’t you testing Alik? He started the fight.”

“We will when he wakes up. We are required to test anyone brought to us by emergency services.”

“It’s not my fault!” Victor said.

“We’re not concerned with determining fault. Now, I’m going to read you a set of questions. Please answer whether you strongly agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, or strongly disagree.”

Victor waved a hand at the paper the doctor was holding. “You don’t need to ask me any questions. I’m a not a Broken
—
I’m not a mirror resonance person. I didn’t start the fight. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Please focus, Mr. Eastmore. The first statement is: ‘I have a hard time controlling my anger.’”

“My granfa owns this hospital. He could fire you like that.” Victor snapped his fingers.

Dr. Rularian knitted his brows. “I’m merely following protocol. As a man of medicine, your grandfather will understand that, I’m sure. Please. With regard to difficulty controlling your anger, do you strongly agree, slightly agree
—
”

“Yes! Fine, I strongly agree. Especially right now.”

“‘My mood can shift between periods of extreme anxiety, sadness, or irritability in just a few hours or days.’ Do you agree or disagree?”

Victor folded his arms in front of his chest, but the lizard-eyed technician motioned for him to move them by his sides. He complied. “More like seconds or minutes.”

“I’ll put that down as ‘strongly agree.’” A smile appeared fleetingly on the doctor’s face and vanished. “‘Sometimes I am confident in myself and my abilities, and other times I doubt myself and my abilities.’”

Victor frowned and took a breath into his lungs. “Strongly disagree. I know what
—
”

“Excuse me, Doctor.” The flat-faced technician pointed toward one of the vidscreens.

Dr. Rularian examined the readings and turned back toward Victor. “It’s very important that you tell the truth,” the doctor said.

“I am,” Victor said.

The flat-faced technician looked down at him. “That helmet may not look like much, but it’s recording your micro-expressions at a subdermal level. We know if you’re telling the truth or not.”

Victor couldn’t see the technician’s face clearly behind his translucent gel mask, but the crinkled skin around his eyes showed the man was smirking.

They have me, Victor thought. No matter what I do, say, or even think, they’ve got me in their trap.

Dr. Rularian said, “Please, let’s get through the rest of these questions. ‘I experience blank moments
—
’”

The door swung open, nearly swiping Lizard-Eyes’ backside. Granfa Jeff walked into the room. Tall and wiry with short-clipped fuzzy gray hair and dark freckles on brown skin, he flicked his gaze toward Victor, the sensors, and then to each technician in turn. Victor felt thunderous anger gather on Granfa Jeff’s face like a storm about to break. “I’d like a word with you, Doctor. Outside, please.” The doctor left the room first. Granfa Jeff glanced sideways at Victor. “Tidy yourself up.”

The flat-faced technician objected, “Sir, we’re in the middle
—
”

Granfa Jeff turned to him and glowered. “This is my hospital. You should have alerted me as soon as my grandson arrived.”

Victor pulled the sensors off his body and removed the helmet, dangling it from two fingers, and asked, “Who wants the evil crown?”

Lizard-Eyes took the device in both hands and placed it on a nearby table. Victor slipped around one of the chair’s arms, stood, and pulled up his pants. Through the open door, he saw his parents sitting on a couch in an alcove. He rushed over to them.

His ma hugged him, saying, “I’m so glad you’re all right. We were worried.”

His fa placed a hand on Victor’s shoulder. “What happened? Another fight?”

Victor glanced back at his granfa, who was pacing in front of Dr. Rularian and drawing the attention of nearby nurses with his raised voice.

“I tried to get away, but they cornered me,” Victor said. “Alik started it. I slipped. It wasn’t my fault.”

Finished with the doctor, Granfa Jeff walked slowly toward Victor, Fa, and Ma. “I’m sorry. If I’d gotten here earlier, I might have held them off. I think we all understand this was inevitable.”

Victor looked at his parents. They nodded. “You talked about this? You suspected I was a Broken Mirror and you never told me?”

“Shh, honey, it’ll be okay,” his ma said. “We weren’t certain. We’ll take care of you. Everything will be fine.”

***

One week later, Granfa Jeff brought Victor into his office and told him he’d been designated Class Three.

Victor looked at the carpet. “There’s no cure, is there?”

His granfa smiled, and the lines around his face deepened. Clearing his throat, he said, “If I can cure cancer, I can cure anything. Truly, Victor, with the Holistic Healing Network’s resources, there’s nothing I can’t do.”

One might expect technological progress to be slowed by the hoarding of advancements behind proprietary walls. Rather, the reverse is true. The clustering of talent in ghettos of learning, be they academic or corporate, has accelerated our scientific endeavors. Everyone benefits from close links among brilliant minds. The wheel turns faster and faster.

—Jefferson Eastmore’s
The Wheel of Progress
(1989)

Victor said, “You said you would find a cure. You promised me!”

“I wish . . .” Granfa Jeff’s chest labored with every breath. “Our research into a cure took a very wrong turn. But this isn’t the end for you. I think we’ve been mistaken. You’re not ill. Mirror resonance syndrome isn’t as debilitating as we believed. We gain nothing by pathologizing it. I see that now. I’ve tried to tell the other members of the Health Board, but
—
”

“What’s going to happen to me?” Victor repeated.

“Your own progress—the progress of the pilot project
—
has convinced me that under the right conditions, it will be possible for you to live a normal life.”

Victor felt as if he were in free fall, blankness rushing up to consume him. He whispered Dr. Tammet’s refrain,
The wisest owl listens before he asks, “Who?” The dark forest hides the loudest cuckoo
, but it wasn’t working. He was slipping away.

Granfa Jeff reached out, but Victor backed away.

Victor slapped his own cheeks with both hands and kicked a potted plant to counteract the blankness. “You call
this
normal?”

His granfa sighed and hung his head. “I don’t mean normal in a rigid sense. Of course there’s natural variation. One can expect an individual to have idiosyncratic gifts and challenges.”

Victor felt as if he were a balloon floating far above the ground, watching his foot shove the overturned plant, a fern, and scatter dirt across the concrete. “I have
gifts
now? I guess I don’t need to take Personil anymore either. I can still see a therapist once a week, but just for
fun
. You’re right. Everything’s real fucking normal.” Victor reached down, wrapped his hands around the fern’s root bulb, and heaved, but the pot was too heavy. He barely budged it from the ground.

“Stop that and listen. You control your destiny.”

Victor laughed. “Destiny!” he shouted. “I know
all
about destiny. Read my dreambook sometime. It’s all in there. Chronicles of the future, as told by a perfectly normal,
gifted
”
—
with each word Victor hefted the fern
—
“destiny-controlling heir to your stupid, pretentious, useless company.”

The fern finally shifted and slipped free from the pot. Victor squatted and pulled, twisting, and sent the plant sailing at his granfa.

The man dodged the fern, which landed with a dull
thunk
next to his feet. He opened the glass doors, retreated inside, and locked them behind him. Victor sprinted right at the doors, crashing into them with a low clang, but the glass held. He bounced off and rolled onto the ground.

Victor stood, looking for something to throw. He found a small trashcan. It rattled as he lifted it over his head. Paper slips and cardboard containers rained down. He lunged, yelling and hurling the can.

Metal met glass with a sharp, pleasant shattering sound. Cracks fanned out, but the panes held. Victor laughed and hefted the trashcan again, howling, a smile stretching across his face. He threw the trashcan again, but it glanced off and careened harmlessly across the entranceway’s paving stones.

The MeshBit in his pocket buzzed. Space swallowed him, and darkness filled his vision. A roar surged in his ears. The feeling of falling returned.

The buzzing repeated faintly. Victor swatted at his pocket with numb fingers.

His mind went blank.