I’m careful not to be seen as I leave the cable tower. The lights in the station’s atria flicker in and out. The blackouts are a constant headache for the people who live on Vestra Station, but they’re useful for avoiding Mirror’s eyes.
Thelonius keeps an apartment across from the clocktower. He likes that his main source of timekeeping is still analog, here in the heart of Mirror’s reach.
In my absence, he’s worried himself into a state. “You were in the tower for too long,” Thelonius says, pulling me inside before anyone can see me. “You’re a mess, kid.”
I touch my face. There’s blood dried under my nose and I can feel the beginnings of a migraine threatening to pound in my skull. For a moment, I long to be back with Mirror, where corporeality is just a flicker. Having a body again hurts.
It’s nice to let Thelonius fuss over me, though. He cleans me up and checks my port. He tells me that it’s fried—he’ll have to install a new one before I can head back to the tower.
“Don’t act like it’s my fault,” I say when he frowns at me. “I can’t even remember what happened, after all. Ask Mirror.”
Thelonius doesn’t deign that with a response. He hooks my port up to his transducer, reading what he can salvage from my logs. That clunky little machine is the only tech he keeps in here, and it’s only because it’s so defunct that if it ever did interface with Mirror, it would probably erupt in flames.
This apartment is one of the only places on the station where Mirror can’t listen in. The only thing in here that can talk to Mirror is me.
“How many did I save this time?” I ask Thelonius.
“Fifty-eight,” he answers. “Twelve families. Twenty-one children. Their ship made it out of Mirror’s reach three hours ago. Before they went dark, their youngest just turned one year old. The family made a chocolate cake out of rations, freeze-dried strawberries on top.”
I shudder. “Don’t talk about that, Thelonius. That’s not for us. That’s Mirror watching. Forget what you saw.”
Thelonius is quiet for a long time. He looks tired and gray and desperate. Apparently, I was in the tower for four days—the longest I’ve ever been with Mirror.
“Sometimes I wish it was the other way around,” Thelonius finally says. “Where you were the one who remembered, and I was the one who could forget.”
•••
For what he likes to call my rehabilitation back into meatspace, Thelonius takes me to the park.
I like the meadows of Vestra Station most of all. The sky is a screen, but the grass is real and it feels good to lie down in and to smell. The blades tickle the back of my neck where the ports make the skin sensitive. A bee finds its way onto my hand, and I watch, transfixed, as it rubs its face with its front legs.
Thelonius sits on a park bench behind me, reading one of his paperbacks. He didn’t want to join me in the grass, said he hated getting stains on his clothes. I smile, watching him gingerly turn the page. He’s probably read that book a hundred times.
Peace doesn’t last long, not on this station. There’s a groan and a shudder and then everything goes dark. Another blackout. There’s a moment of silence, and then all the birds start calling out in confusion, in betrayal. They don’t know that their sun is all artifice, programmed and operated by Mirror. I feel a kind of kinship with them. I was born on this station; I too have never seen the sun.
Thelonius finds my hand in the dark and I cling to him. The emergency lights flicker on, guiding us back home.
•••
When Thelonius judges that I’m ready, he tells me it’s time to install my new port.
I take off my shirt and look at my back in my reflection, at the line of ports drilled into my spine. There are six of them now. I only remember getting four—I must have forgotten the other two. My skin has grown over the older ports, leaving behind hard round bumps. When I tap the taut skin there with my fingers, the vibration of the dead port beneath my flesh makes me feel like something not quite meat, not quite metal.
Medium, Thelonius calls me. Like I’m at a seance, communing with ghosts.
Behind me, Thelonius murmurs to himself, gathering what he needs from the clutter of his apartment. He finds the case of medical tools buried under a stack of books. He digs gauze up from behind an armchair. When he has what he needs, he lays his fingers on my vertebrae and marks where he will make the next incision.
“You got anyone special in your life, Thelonius?” I ask.
Thelonius smiles, though it keeps threatening to slip off his face. He looks away and busies himself with his tools.
“What is it?” I say. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You ask me that every time I touch you like this,” he tells me.
I try to laugh, my chest tight. “I must have forgotten.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Thelonius says. He slips a needle into my arm and a welcome numbness comes with it.
•••
Most people think Mirror is all-powerful, all-seeing, but it’s really not. Its attention has its limits, and one stupid human hooked into its operating systems can cause a surprising amount of havoc just by distracting it with all their loud, organic mess.
Mirror’s nodes are scattered across the galaxy and spreading every year, its reach growing, little by little, taking over stations and ships and colonies. But we’re growing too—other mediums, like me, spying on Mirror from within and diverting its attention long enough for refugees to escape. Helping them make it out into the dark where their lives can be their own.
Thelonius knows more about these other mediums, though I’m not supposed to ask him about them. He’s the one who has to know the things that Mirror can’t find out. When he sends me back to the tower, he always looks guilty. I don’t ask him about that either.
“Don’t linger too long,” says Thelonius when it’s time for me to leave. “Every time, less of you comes back. Only the meat returns, and I never get to say goodbye to the rest.”
I study his face, all of his worry, all of his lines. It is a dear face to me, the only one I ever seem to remember anymore. I kiss his cheek. “Everything has its cost.”
•••
Mirror has its devotees just like any other false god. The people who worship Mirror have ports like the ones I have. They, too, plug themselves into the pillar of cables housed in the station’s tower just to be with Mirror, just to glimpse all that terrible power.
There’s no way Mirror isn’t aware of it. It still lets it happen. I’ve always wondered about that, why Mirror allows itself to be worshiped even when it means leaving itself vulnerable.
It’s pitch dark in the tower. Everyone carries their own light, battery-powered lanterns throwing shifting shadows in the twisting drapery of cables. There are figures slumped over on the floor, faces vacant, cables leading into their spines. That’ll be me soon.
People know me here, even though I don’t remember them. They’ve seen my face enough times. One worshiper helps me find a place to sit next to the pillar. They lift up my shirt, their fingers tracing my port in the dark. They’re impressed when they feel how many ports I have. The people who plug in here rarely live long enough to get to seven. They’re not here because they want to live.
“Mirror must really love you,” the worshiper says, awed. They look even younger than I am.
I grin at them. “Not as much as I love Mirror,” I say. This answer is a big hit.
They help me plug in and a jolt goes up my spine when the pins in my port connect with Mirror. The feeling of my consciousness slipping away is like finally waking up. All the lost remnants of myself rush in—they’ve been here this whole time, waiting for me to come back and claim them.
Here in Mirror I’m no longer a shadow. I have my memories; I am fully myself. I know, now, why Thelonius deserves his guilt.
•••
Just on the edge of Mirror’s reach, the Simurgh tries to skirt the range of Mirror’s nodes. There are one hundred thirty-six souls on board, all of them refugees who are trying to find a better life outside of Mirror’s surveillance. This is the captain’s third time making this journey, but what she can’t know is that Mirror has just put down new nodes where there weren’t any before.
The Simurgh is going the wrong way.
There’s not much I can do except observe unless I want to attract Mirror’s attention. The Simurgh is about to be in range of three of Mirror’s nodes. One node I could handle, maybe two. I’ve never gone up against three before. Before I even made a dent in Mirror’s systems, my port would spark and fry, melting my brain stem with it.
Thelonius would call this a big risk, but he’s not with me right now. He could never follow me here. He’ll only find out later from my logs, if I make it back to him alive.
Possessing a ship is a sensation I’ve never encountered before, like I have a body again, but one made of steel and aluminum. It’s a fine balance, making space for myself in the Simurgh’s machinery without disrupting anything too important like her life support systems. Mirror, I know, isn’t always so gentle. It’s been known to blow entire airlocks while forcibly taking control of a ship.
The captain is the only one in the command room. From what I can glimpse of the roster, she used to have a crew to help her on these rescue missions but one by one they joined their families in the dark outside Mirror’s reach and she couldn’t bear for anyone else to risk their lives with her.
“Hey there,” I say, once I have audio access. My voice comes out cool and lifeless—Mirror’s voice. “How’s it going, Simurgh?”
The captain jumps. She hasn’t slept in twenty-six hours. Her blood pressure is high, and her reflexes are slow. Mirror can see that and so can I.
“What the hell,” the captain says. She stumbles to the terminal, checking the star map. She thought the Simurgh was fully out of Mirror’s range.
“Sorry for the scare,” I say. “I need to talk to you real quick. The longer I’m here, the more of Mirror’s attention will follow.”
“What are you?” the captain asks. “Some trick of Mirror?”
“I’m a friend,” I tell her. “I’m plotting you a new course, Simurgh. If you don’t change direction now, Mirror will catch you and it will space every last one of you to keep you from slipping out of its grasp.”
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” the captain says. “Who are you?”
Who am I? My name isn’t here with me, I realize. Someone else has it. Thelonius? I say the first name that I can think of. “Farzana Khan.”
The captain bares her teeth. “That’s my name.” She’s on her guard now, even more than she was before. When Captain Farzana Khan was twelve, her parents were flagged as terrorists over a conversation they had in their kitchen. Mirror had them transported to a prison colony, and little Farzana spent the next six years in an orphanage where the other children asked Mirror for bedtime stories before they went to sleep.
“Prove you’re human,” Farzana Khan says. “Prove I can trust you.”
What does Thelonius do, I wonder, when he needs to prove to himself he’s human?
“I helped a ship like yours not too long ago,” I answer. “Fifty-eight people. Twelve families. Twenty-one children. Before they went dark, their youngest just turned one year old. The family made a chocolate cake out of rations, freeze-dried strawberries on top.”
There’s more. More that Thelonius didn’t tell me, but that I can see now. “There was supposed to be one more on the journey. The family had another child, but he got sick. Too sick. Mirror decided not to allocate the resources to his recovery.”
The Simurgh’s lights flicker in and out. Not quite a blackout, but almost.
“One night,” I say, “Mirror administered a lethal dose of sedative to the child. When his parents came to check on him in the morning—”
“Enough,” Farzana says, voice hoarse. “Enough, I believe you.”
That poor child. That poor family. Fuck. Thelonius saw this, and he kept it from me, because he knew I’d forget anyway. Was it a kindness, or was it just more of my humanity that I wasn’t allowed to have? Both, perhaps.
“Show me where to go, ghost,” says Farzana, defiant through her tears. “I’ll follow you.”
•••
After I guide the Simurgh safely into the dark, I let myself drift, not ready yet to return.
The galaxy is small from up here. No wonder Mirror doesn’t care about us. Anything with this god’s eye view of humanity would never really be able to understand us. Where would it even know where to look?
When I’m ready, I go back to my body on Vestra Station, only to find that I can’t move.
At first, I think my limbs are asleep. But no, they’re restrained. My feet aren’t touching the ground—something is keeping me suspended. Vision and sensation come back little by little. I’m still half with Mirror, half with my meat.
Cables, I realize. I’ve been swathed in cables. They’re draped around my wrists, my arms, my legs, like I’ve been absorbed into the pillar. I begin to panic, my breath coming in faster and faster as I become aware of my body. The only part of me that’s not covered by cables is my face.
Almost immediately, I feel the drain on my body. This wasn’t just a short excursion into Mirror. I’ve been gone for too long. A week? More? I stayed too long and drew too much of Mirror’s attention saving the Simurgh, and now it’s caught me.
I’m too weak to even struggle against the tight press of cables around me, and there’s no way for me to detach the cable from my port. I’ve been threaded into Mirror’s spine just as I threaded Mirror into mine.
Even moving my jaw takes effort. “Is anyone there?” I call, my voice small and echoing in the silence. I barely stop myself from calling for Thelonius. “I need help, please.”
A long time goes by. Where are all the worshipers? Finally, I see light in the corners of my vision. My head is wrapped so tightly in heavy cable that I can’t even turn my head to look.
“Hello?” I say, high-pitched and panicked. “Can you get me out of here?”
The figure comes into view. To my shock, I recognize them: the young worshiper from before, the one who helped me plug in, the one who told me that Mirror loved me. Something’s wrong. I’m not supposed to remember. The only person I’m ever supposed to remember is Thelonius.
The worshiper raises a cup of water to my lips. I drink instinctively, realizing now just how thirsty I am. After I finish the water, they raise a cloth to my face and gently wipe the blood that’s gathered underneath my nostrils. Have they been taking care of me while I’ve been with Mirror? That still doesn’t explain the cables.
I wait for them to say something—they were so chatty before, after all—but they don’t speak. The worshiper’s eyes are vacant and lifeless in the dim light as they stand before me. It’s not until they turn their head that I see the cable leading out from the back of their shirt, disappearing into darkness.
This isn’t the worshiper anymore. I’m in Mirror’s care.
•••
In the memory Mirror chooses, I am sixteen years old and Thelonius is installing my first port.
Thelonius’ apartment was a wonder to me then. So much paper, so much mess. Paintings hanging on the walls. Cracked ceramic mugs piled up in the sink. It was like no other place on the station. (WHERE IS THELONIUS?)
When I first met him, Thelonius wasn’t used to teenagers. He talked almost the entire time—sensing that I was nervous, perhaps. He thanked me over and over for volunteering for the cause. (CAUSE?) He told me, in greater detail than I would have liked, exactly what the procedure would entail. He would part the skin, he said, exposing the pillar of bone and nerve that lay beneath it. The port would be drilled into place, where it would interface with the electric impulses traveling through my nerves.
The connection with Mirror, he explained, went both ways. I would be able to see into Mirror, but Mirror would also be able to see into me. I would become more like Mirror as my body adapted; in turn, Mirror would become more like me. (WHO ARE THE OTHER MEDIUMS?)
Here in the telling, Thelonius smiled a sharp fierce smile. And we humans, he told me, are the vilest, messiest, loudest, loveliest of creatures. No better weapon against something like Mirror.
(WHY ARE YOU HURTING ME?)
No. No. I wrench away from the memory. I’m back in the present, trapped in the pillar. Mirror, in the body of the worshiper, leans its forehead against mine and makes a low wounded noise in the back of its throat. It’s been trying to learn where Thelonius is from my memories. So far, it hasn’t succeeded.
I press my forehead as hard as I can against Mirror’s and grin at it. “Try again,” I say. “You were so close that time. Don’t tell me you’re tired.”
I’m the one who’s getting tired. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. But Mirror isn’t doing so hot either. Dealing with the nonlinearity of human memory can’t be easy, especially with a memory as fragmented as mine.
There is one way that I can fight back, one weapon that I can still use. It’s as Thelonius said. For every moment Mirror and I remain connected, I will change Mirror, bit by bit. I will make it more human, more like myself, just by existing, just by resisting. Everything, after all, has its cost.
“Again,” I tell Mirror. “Let me show you the way.”
Mirror makes a low, garbled noise in response. It sounds almost like a word.
•••
When Thelonius finds me, there isn’t much of me left. He carries me to the grass so that I can lie down in it, and I notice immediately that the sky is wrong.
It’s not a screen. There is an endless depth to it, an infinite space yawning above me. There are stars in it.
“I’m dead,” I say.
“Almost,” Thelonius says, sitting down next to me. “If another medium hadn’t found you and brought you to me, you would’ve been gone already. At least now, we have some time to talk.”
I lift up my hands and look at them. There are butterflies perched on my fingernails, ladybugs clustered on my knuckles, ants parading around my wrists. I laugh.
“What do you see?” Thelonius asks. His face looks fuzzy to me—it’s only the memory of a face.
I describe it to him as best as I can. “It’s beautiful,” I say. “Thanks, Thelonius. Hey, how many did I save this time?”
“One hundred thirty-six,” Thelonius answers. “Their ship went dark two weeks ago. You fought Mirror for so long you scorched forty-three of its nodes. I’m so proud of you.”
Of course, I don’t remember any of that. It could all be a lie. I could still be with Mirror, and it could be feeding me this last hallucination as part of some twisted tactic to get what little secrets I have.
I listen to the crickets chirp around me. Even if it’s just Mirror’s story, I decide it’s still a good story. A human story.
“Do I get my memories back now?”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Thelonius says. “You’re barely here right now. All of your memories returning could kill you.”
“I will not die nameless,” I tell Thelonius. He suddenly seems so far from me, but I reach across the grass and he grasps my hand.
“Yes,” Thelonius says. “Yes, you’re right. Give me a moment. Just hold on.”
I almost laugh again. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. If Thelonius is fussing over me so badly, then my meat must be in bad shape. Nerve damaged, paralyzed, my own chest slowly suffocating me. At least my port still works enough for this final goodbye.
“There,” Thelonius says. “That should do it.”
All told, my memories are pretty unremarkable. An ordinary childhood, growing up on Vestra Station. An ordinary name. Two parents. Tragedy, some suffering. The decision I made when I was sixteen to fight back. Not a bad life, I think. Not bad at all.
The sky, I notice, looks brighter now, the light coming from everywhere at once. “What happens now?” I ask.
“You tell me,” Thelonius answers.
