13:60:04

Cornelius A. Fortune

     In the smudged-streaked and cracked mirror, I watch the faces go by, broken in two. Jagged-cut drenched rainbow color drains from colorless faces and whirlpool eye sockets between the camera-eye gates: blink…blink…And my swimming iris is pressed closed against the brisk wind—raised skirts reluctantly thrown up and hats balanced on regulation crew cuts like lavender quarters in perpetual spin.

     The half moonlight is creased by shadow and cloud amidst surrounding buildings stretching out in an impossible menagerie, dulled by technology: grayed reflection. Where are all the technological advances promised us: the weather-control devices, the flying cars…?

     After 2011, we stopped counting…literally—no years, no months, or hours to bother with. All the Januarys and Junes and Octobers were replaced with numbers. Today is 13:46:02. Tomorrow will be 13:60:04. There's no significance to either designation; they correspond to the mirrors that regulate subjective time.

     Ours is a city of mirrors—a city of mirrors in the flame of a dying sun…information is passed like perfumed love notes broken down into six digits, forming a union with our reality. The almost killing each other off through preemptive cowardice has left the world cracked, and our sun wounded. The world’s greatest minds were at a loss to explain the rapid aging of the star. It seemed time could no longer thrive in a world without seasons, and the government sent in their engineers to install the first mirrors, change bringing what was thought to be progress…

     We celebrate random time…multiplied images. You get used to them after awhile: the faces. There are always too many of them…overlapping. Those mirrors are like silver balloons suspended by an invisible string, the hundreds of women and men sauntering along the aluminum streets in knotted rows.

     I see a woman disengage herself from the throng of pedestrians.  She looks Middle Eastern, exotic, detached. I see her face refracted in a hundred mirrors in my shop. She pauses at the door, hesitates, then enters. Her dress shifts into different shapes and sizes every five seconds, and she smells the way the rain used to smell before it went away.

     “Is there anything I can help you with?” I ask.

     “No…just browsing.”

     “Those are on sale.” I point toward the old models, the obsolete ones, not yet upgraded to HoloScapeNET. People looked into them and liked to change their entire look…or the look of their living room. You could even plug into some of them and become your favorite celebrity—not that there were any left after the war. 

     She circles round them a few times before stopping in front of one of my new ones, just delivered. It is not, however, for sale. “How much for this one?”

     I can see why she likes it: it is hand-carved oak, about 6 feet wide and shaped into two serpents joining at the top. At the base, a bowl protrudes and rotates silently.

     “I'm sorry, that particular item's not for sale.”

     “I see,” she says, adjusting her sunglasses (a running defiance around here—there being no actual sunlight)

     “Then this is a display item?”

     “No, no. You misunderstand. I can't sell it. 

     “It's a gift for my daughter. Tomorrow is 13:60:04.”

     “Yes, yes," she says absently, "I seemed to have forgotten.”

     “Maybe I can interest you in something else?”

     “I'm afraid everything else seems so…outdated?”  She smiles weakly as if for my approval.

     “Few people can afford the new models. So I don't stock them.” I step away from the counter, pressing my weight on the cane I'd already grown too dependent on. “I could possibly see if we could special-order something similar…”

     “No,” she says flatly. “It must be this one. I've been looking for this particular model.”

     “I'm sorry, Ma'am.” I said. “It’s not for sale.”

     I had gone through several vendors, trading favors in to have it imported from Basra. I had waited since 12:41:16; tomorrow will be 13:60:04.

     “I simply can't. I hope you understand.” She stared out the window.

     “If you prefer, I can keep your information on file…”

     “Really that won't be necessary,” she says, brushing past me. “Thank you for your time.” And she is out the door, another body on the crowded street,  four-dimensionally rendered mirror refraction skidding off the edge of the polished frame…

     I wait at the underground terminal. Everything is underground now. The only ships in the sky are military ones.     Rumors are beginning to spread about possible colonization—no word on where or who will be the first selected.

     I’m seventy-two, and it doesn’t take much extrapolating to figure out that I’m not exactly in their target group. There are a few people scurrying about the terminal,  meeting with their families and friends. Tube 48 was due just before the end of 13:46:04. When I inquired they said, “We’re sorry. No word yet on a Tube 48.”

     So I wait.    

     A woman next to me frowns and complains: “Trouble with these things is they always run late.”

     I smile. “Yes, but what is late in a world without time?”

     “No,” she says. “We choose to ignore it and to rely on the wisdom of mirrors, but time still withers our bodies. Doesn’t matter if we ignore it or even if the sun chooses not to give us light--we’re bound by time. Only the gods are more fortunate.”

     She scoffs and reorders her graying hair, so that it reflects back scenes of old movies and e-mail messages from the last war. “I’ll bet you made the interim government’s waiting list.”

     “If what they say is true, I probably have.”

     “Someone special…?”

     “Pardon?”

     “Waiting for someone…special?”

     “My daughter: she’s sixteen.” I say. “Her mother and I…well…this’ll be the first time since the war that I’ve seen her—I mean without visual photogenes. We’re going to spend 13:60:04 together.

     And you?”

     “My lover.” She watches my face to see if I have a reaction.

      I don’t meet her gaze. I stare straight ahead. 

     “We’ve had holo sex twelve times already,” she says, “and I haven’t seen her face…the real one, not the mirror face. Derelith is a lovely city. Sometimes all we have are mirrors.”

     “Yes, it seems that way, doesn’t it?”

     And we sit there awhile longer until the attendant comes by…flushed and dabbing at his temples with a ventilation napkin. “Are you folks waiting for Tube 48?”

     “Yes,” the old woman says, “’bout how long you’d imagine it be delayed?”

     “I’m sorry, but there isn’t a Tube 48.” The attendant dabs at his forehead, his eyebrows creasing painfully. “I checked into it. There’s a Tube 48 for 17:43, but that’s quite a ways away. Are you sure it was for 13:46:04?”

     “Well,” says the old woman, “all of these numbers are so confusing…I really can’t say. Suppose you translate them into actual days and months for me…”

     “I’m sorry,” says the attendant. “But that would be rather confusing, considering we’re now under a numeric system.”

     The old woman is almost livid. “Are you implying that she made the whole thing up?”

     He tries explaining it again, but she pulls out a notebook and demands that he convert the numeric values to months and days according to her homemade flow-chart. I can’t blame her for not understanding. It is all too surreal. Mirrors lie, but so do people.

     I leave the terminal and watch my breath dissolve in the pluming air, drawing my lips tightly against the artificial wind as my tears turn to dust.

     I open the shop in the morning and stare at the mirror. Turns out that there was, in fact, a Tube 48—it was dispersed because of some technical problems they were having  (overheating); the passengers of Tube 48 boarded Tube 56 for arrival on 13:60:04.

     Tube 56 derailed on 13:60:04…and exploded. The list of survivors didn’t include my daughter’s name, nor that of my ex-wife. I see the bright packages in people’s hands, the children bouncing along in the street. Today is 13:60:04: the day designated for good will, and the exchange of gifts between family and loved ones.

     Today is the day my family died. The prime minister speaks. “A tragedy of tragedies,” he calls it, referring to our wasted world. I simply go through the motions. All of us do. Death is a release from the obligation of life, and we envy those who have found it.

     It is a few days later when the woman returns, and stares at the mirror again. “Did your daughter not like it?”

     “I think she might have.”

     “How was your 13:60:04?”

     “It was a tragedy of tragedies.”

     “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

     “No, not a joke, just someone’s observation.”

     “And your daughter?”

     “I think the answer’s obvious.”

     “Then, I am truly sorry for your loss.”

     “Look, do you plan on buying anything, or just wasting my time?”

     “I’m still interested in that mirror,” she says.

     At first I want to be angry with her. She seems so cool, so untouched by anything that matters to me at this moment, which is…what? A memory attached to another memory that hasn’t occurred?

     “I’d understand if you’d decline,” she says. “But I’m leaving tomorrow for Israel. I was hoping I could have the details finalized…”

     Maybe it is my loneliness, or her beauty, or the way the heat started rising when she entered the shop, but I can see no reason for holding onto that mirror. “What sort of details were you considering?”

     “A demonstration,” she says, running her fingers along the mirror. “I hear this model not only alters your reflection, but also allows the ‘reflected’ to step inside it—an improvement in cybernetic copulation hardware, wouldn’t you agree?”

     “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

     “I would, and I’m not ashamed to admit it,” she says. “I’m a dancer, and my clients are harder to come by these days. The competition is more fierce than in the ancient times.” She scoffs. “Now men prefer their women airbrushed and bare, not a follicle too curly or out of place—shaved like sheep. Please, show me the program installed on the mirror before I change my mind.”

     I step from behind the counter, my left hip aching as I approach her. I enter some digits on the keypad along the edge of the mirror. “Hold on, I need to check the manual.” I chuck in a few numbers and the menu comes up on the right-hand corner of the mirror. “It says you can select any participant or scene. What would you prefer?”

     “A bedroom,” she says, “with a fireplace and thick carpeting that’s velvety and soft beneath my feet, rose petals scattered across the bed (as an homage to sensual cliché), and…you, Mr. Salesman.”    

     I stare at her.

     “I don’t think I’m part of the program, but thanks anyway.”

     “I specialize in pleasuring techniques…to ease stress.”

     “I’m not interested in sex.”

     “I’m not offering sex,” she explains. “I’m asking for a product demonstration.”

     “Fine. Place your thumb here, so that it can read your cybernetic specifics.”

     She presses her thumb against the mirror. It shimmers. “Ahhh,” she sighs. “Now you.”

     I place my thumb on the mirror. It is pointless trying to argue with her, and I have decided that I want the mirror as far away from me as possible. Like our numeric system, ignoring what was in front of me seemed easier than confronting the obvious.     

     I feel the connection in my brain and the enzyme being released in my bloodstream. I bob unsteadily upon my cane.  “I never get used to that feeling.”

     “Yes,” she says, “it’s almost other-worldly, like getting drunk on the wine of the solar system. ”

     I program the scene as she has described it, and we gaze into the mirror—she in front, beautiful, voluptuous; me, behind her, old and wrinkled, my head balding and my face puckered like an ass turned inside out.     

     As I focus my eyes on my own reflection, I notice how everything around me begins to dissolve and coalesce, rippling and tearing away the very walls and roof of the building. But it isn’t really happening at all—it is my eyes that can’t  see clearly. My brain is moving into the programmed illusion, and the walls are miraculously pasted back onto the room.                       

     Suddenly, I’m staring at an old man in a small mirror above a mantle piece portrait; I feel strong…naked…and hot. We are projected inside the mirror, reflections of reflections, digitally  enhanced.    

     “Come sit beside me,” she says, her smooth skin arousing me. She balances strawberries on her tongue, her lips red-wet and sparkling. “Not bad, Mr. Salesman. What’s your name anyway?” (She sways to soundless music)

     “Bradley…um…Brad.” I say nervously. “I don’t think you really want to do this. I mean…look at me.”

     “Yes,” she says, “look at you.”

     She holds up a mirror for me to see myself. Reflexively, I lean on my cane, but there isn’t a cane to be leant upon. I am 40 years younger, and better looking than I ever remember myself being.

     “This is much better than the old mirrors,” she says. “Now let’s see if I can work my magic inside these reflective walls.”

     She pulls me atop her—inside her—the whole of her—playing with the muscles beneath her skin. How the veins tickle my fingers like seaweed, intersecting between the crosswalk of idea & fuchsia. (I read her thoughts…become her thoughts.) Thoughts have sounds like bells; the hundreds of mirrors surrounding us flicker with the suggestion of flame. In each one appears a different sexual position, some accomplished through grotesque means—eating away what stands  in our way, whether hands, arms, feet, or our own faces… Experiencing THE ONE Experience, beyond the room I see us—the other us, not the ones frozen on the other side of the mirror—staring in.

     “Will you stay with me?” she asks. Strawberries dance in her eyes.

     “Yes,” I whisper.

     She mounts me and thrashes about, her long dark hair growing longer—a dark sea spreading and flushing itself out between her legs, sliding across my chest, and scaling my shoulders, all tenderly lapping at me like a thousand tongues in synchronized rows.

     Her eyes glow. “Will you burn with me?”

     “Yes,” I whisper.

     The room—the mirrors—are engulfed in flames, and the heat cascades through my body. We roll around the flames, melting one into the other, the mirrors melting like wax.

     “No,” I mutter, “let’s stop this. It’s getting too…ow…rough… please…”

      In reflection upon reflection, in pain and pleasure, in male and female, we become insubstantial, know not where one ends and the other begins…I am about to climax.

     “Let it go. It’s all right,” she says. “Fill me with fire.”

     And the sun lies inert in the coldness of space, and I am inside the sun, ejaculating into its void… as it wraps its legs around my back…

     “Um…Branden?”

     “Bradley.”

     “Bradley. Show’s over,” she says. “You can let go now.”

     I blink and am behind her again…a little too close.

     “Oh…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…that was so…powerful…  I’ve never experienced anything like it…I mean, I don’t even, uh…know your name.”

     “That’s because men have forgotten how to worship me. But there was a time in which they praised my name and sacrificed their children and virgins unto me. They pressed mirrors into the ground—the hard black stones--and  reflected me into their huts and living spaces, and made love to me. In return for their love, I gave them crops rich in sustenance, warmed the earth and melted the snow. Love requires a name for most—so they called me: Helios, Shamash, Chamman, and many other names, but never was my true name ever uttered by the lips of men. I gave them long life, kissed their faces in the morning to wake them, walked upon their lakes and rivers in rippling form...helped them to understand time—true time—as it exists within infinity. But they have forsaken me, violated my sacredness with their technology, so I have turned my face from them.”    

     Her eyes dance, and she pulls on her sunglasses and smiles. "Here’s the address. Make sure it reaches its destination.” She hands me a slip of paper and walks to the door. “We’ll be seeing each other again. Soon.”  She leaves.

     I don’t know what that means…until I look at the paper. It says: c/o Colonization Program; Classified…

     The next day, a large Arab man comes and takes the mirror away. I am relieved to see it go. I read about sun worship in college—how the first reflections in a pond or a river were thought magic by our primitive ancestors. Even some of the early Christians worshipped the sun; in 250 BC, Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, set fire to a Roman fleet by using a mirror to deflect the sun’s rays. With solar power, the sunlight is collected and focused with mirrors to create a high-intensity heat source. Three ritualistic mirrors remain in the world. I have sold what was believed to be the first of its type.

     We live in a world of mirrors; today, in our world, it is 14:54:04, and there’s too much darkness. There are two possibilities after a supernova has finished: the extinguished core could become a pulsar. The other possibility is a black hole. No one would ever have believed the sun would walk right out of our solar system, but that is exactly what she did.  

     Earth is dying. Cold, bitter winter storms frost the cold, broken mirrors. I’m buried under a shaft of glass,  awaiting death. Violent winds tore our mirrors down. They dropped bombs on us and took away our food. We’re being left behind on a dead world without a sun: natural selection.

     Look at my face: jagged-cut, drenched rainbow—color…sound…space—smudge-streaked and cracked. I see her eyes and want to die within them. I see mirrors in flame.

The End