MirrorWorld

“It’s a preemptive strike against humanity before we can really fight back.” He looks at me with deadly serious eyes. “Now, show me.”


I take a step away from him and focus my whole body and all of my senses on what is just beyond reach. I can feel it now, the change within my body and mind, as I let the Dread part of me, and its senses, become dominant. At first, it’s subtle, like the stretch of an elastic band that then snaps, painfully. I feel the shift to the world between, and then, with a shout of muscle-shaking pain, darkness. I’m fully in the other realm but still inside the oscillium confines of Neuro. The building is jet-black in all directions, lacking any kind of light. There are no interior walls—and no floors.

But in this mirror dimension, where physics are the same, there is gravity. And it tugs me downward. My stomach lurches as I fall from a height of seven stories.





28.

I reenter the dimension of reality I call home, seven feet lower than I’d been standing, just in time to collide with a desktop. The internal discomfort of shifting between frequencies is temporarily overpowered by the external impact. I hit the surface hard, crushing stacks of paper, a lamp, a stapler, and other odds and ends. Momentum carries me and most of the desktop debris over the side and three more feet down to the floor.

Pens spill from a jar and roll across the cold linoleum. I watch them race away and stop against a pair of white shoes. An African American woman dressed in white pants and doctor’s jacket stands a few feet away, leaning back against a counter, where she must have leapt upon my arrival. Her hands are covered by blue rubber gloves and her hair is tied up in a tight bun. A glass slide is clutched between her fingers. She might be cute, or not, but I can’t really tell because the eyeglasses she’s wearing, with round, light-blue magnifying lenses framed by LED lights, make her look like some kind of sci-fi cyborg.

I push myself up, grunting from various ailments, and stand. “You’re not a cyborg, are you?”

“W-what?” the woman says.

I’m standing, but her eyes are still looking down. I follow the angle of her magnifying eyeglasses. “Ah,” I say. “It’s far less impressive without the magnification.”

That snaps her out of it. She looks up and lifts the lenses away from her eyes. “You’re naked.”

“You are cute,” I say, now able to see her wide, dark-brown eyes. And she’s right: I’ve once again left my clothing behind, taking only the plastic pendant and chain, the nonliving extension of myself.

She looks around the lab. It’s empty except for the two of us. “Where did you come from?”

I point to the ceiling. “Seventh floor.”

She looks at the laboratory door, then me. “You don’t have a key card. You’re naked.”

I smile. “Don’t get a lot of naked men in the lab?”

“Not live ones,” she says. “How did you get in here?”

“I’ll show you.” I point to the door. “That the way to the elevator?”

She nods. “Hey, wait, you’re Crazy, right?”

“With a capital C?”

“Yeah.”

I look down at my naked self, not a trace of embarrassment. “Kind of obvious.”

“Yeah,” she says again. “I’ve looked at your brain cells under a microscope.”

I step back toward the door. “How do my cells look in the macroworld?”

She smiles. “Far more interesting.”

“But not quite human?”

The smile fades. “There are … aberrations, but I don’t know why … Do you?”

“I’m starting to,” I say. “Ready for a demonstration?”

Buck naked, I sprint toward the door without getting an answer.

“Wait,” she calls after me. “You need a key c—”

I leap at the wall.

Focus.

Shift.

Pain.

The woman’s voice drops away as I slip into the mirror dimension. Just as gravity starts pulling my jump back down, I return to the real world and land on the other side of the wall.

Inside a lab table.

The sudden, jarring stop is like a punch to the gut, accentuating the systemic revolt created by slipping in and out of dimensions. I nearly vomit on the tabletop, but my surprise at being stuck inside a table helps distract me from the pain, which, if I’m honest, isn’t as powerful as before. In fact, most of the pain is now in my body. My head and eyes are mostly pain-free.

“This isn’t good,” I say, looking down. I’m waist-deep inside a black granite-topped table with two sinks.

A gasp turns me toward the door behind me. The woman scientist is there, hands over her mouth. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

“Not sure,” I say. I wiggle my toes. Can feel them. I haven’t been cut in half.

She rounds the table, squats down, and opens the cabinets.

“Am I there?”

There’s a pause, and then, “Uh, yeah.”

“Any blood?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Good news,” I say. “Matter moving from one dimension destroys matter in the other.”