The First Report

When Chilton took his shot, I jumped into the mirror room with the laptop bag, thinking anywhere was better than here. Right at that moment, it seemed like a good play. Guns were out and people were already dead. What did I have to lose? Don’t answer yet.

The old McTeague luck is holding up great, pops. Trust me, you’d be proud.

From the lab at San Francisco university, the mirror room inexplicably opened onto a shallow sea beneath a wall of diamond hard pinpoints of light. I goggled and stumbled and laughed. The water was warm and tropic, the low rock islands steaming, and I could taste metal in my mouth. Then the mirror room folded in on itself like an origami in a way which felt like someone had grabbed both sides of my brain and was twisting them; pulling them apart…

Before it was gone, I was gone.

I woke sometime later, head in the mud, soaked in warm water, the lone occupant of this place. I stood. I shouted. Knee deep clear water, low rock islands. Nothing. No mirrors. No people. No life. When I breathed too fast, I began to feel happy and stupid. The computer was ruined. Shorted out in the water, but there was some damp paper. A pen. Some M&Ms.

I sat for a time trying to catch up with what the world had become, for me. I took off my shoes and soaked my feet. 

Then, the last indignity. The moon rose; crazy-close. Huge and unblemished as a child’s face. It’s surface white and perfect and empty, like the eons and epochs ahead of me, that will toil on without me, forward, until my birth again.

 I’ll write my last report here. Hell, the first report. I’ll write the first one. I am the first agent, now. It’s all I have so don’t deny it to me, okay? 

Dear V-Cell, do not enter the mirror room. Do not let John enter the mirror room. Destroy Auroratech. Destroy the mirror room. Destroy John. Destroy the world. Dear V-Cell, nothing is real and everything is alive. The end has come and will come and come again. 

Find my bones here and see. Know. Wait for me. I’m coming. But time moves so slowly…