MirrorWorld

“What do they want? Aside from dominance. Because from what I can see, they’re moving away from primal dominance and closer to a kind of psy-ops war.”

Lyons leans back against a counter, twisting his lips, eyes on the ceiling.

“It’s a simple question,” I say.

“With a complicated answer, in part because we’re not entirely sure.”

“So let’s skip to the end game for now. Ignore the why. They’re spurring on violent mobs around the world, building a fear-fueled frenzy between governments, turning the whole world on itself. But to what end?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Lyons says. “Fear is one of the strongest emotions. Enough of it can destroy logic and fuel paranoia. When this happens en masse, we see genocides, mass murder, and war.”

“They’ve done this before?” I ask.

Lyons nods. “Undoubtedly. But not at this scale. The human race will soon be at each other’s throats. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, nation against nation. There will come a point when world powers fear each other more than they do the mutually assured annihilation their nuclear arsenals provide.” He pauses for a breath. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“They want us to do their dirty work for them,” I say.

Cobb, still steadying himself, asks, “But why? Two weeks ago, the world was fine and dandy. Then everything went nuts. What changed?”

Lyons turns to Cobb. “I have no idea.” Back to me. “But it started when you took that finger all those years ago.”

“This is my fault?”

“How would you feel if the animals in the slaughterhouse suddenly understood why they were there and who was responsible for it? They know we know. That we can detect them.” He raises a hand toward the Documentum room. “That we can collect and study them. Kill them. Consider what we do in less severe situations. When an animal population gets out of control, maybe it’s predators attacking livestock, or deer wrecking cars, what do we do? It’s a tradition going back through all of recorded human history, and is likely responsible for the extinction of several ancient species as well as several more recent extinctions — wolves in the U.S., sharks off of Australia, deer in the Northeast.”

I see where he’s going, and in a horrible way it makes perfect sense. “It’s a cull.”

Lyons nods. “I think they mean to set the human race back. Reduce our numbers. Remove our technology, without which we have no hope of detecting them or resisting their influence. They’re going to return us to the Stone Age, and themselves to the shadows, where they’re safe from us.”

“From me,” I say.

“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.”