On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 265, of 266 so far.

The Mirror

When they built the Mirror, it was meant to be a component in a quantum computer. The design, though ingenious and complex, was a small part of the overall machine. When they noticed the minor aberration in readings during testing, the project as a whole was immediately cancelled.

The Mirror became the new project.

If you were to look at the Mirror itself, you’d see only a void. Major advances in nano-materials fabrication had created a carbon-polymer coating which absorbed virtually all visible light; consequently, the substance itself appeared to be blacker than black, like a hole cut into the fabric of reality. The absorption also affected infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths, causing the material to be prone to super-heating when exposed to unfiltered daylight. So, no-one was ever in the position to look directly at it.

The Mirror was parabolic, and mounted within an enclosure, liquid cooled and attached to heat exchanging grids, with a sophisticated sensor array positioned on a receiving arm. To a layman, it was an eerily, confusingly black satellite dish kept locked inside a perpetually-humming ceramic box the size of a bus. It was a mirror in the sense that it reflected only very specific segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, intended as a signal filter that worked via pure physics rather than digital sampling. But it was so much more.

The aberration was first noticed in the microwave interval. A propagation delay of the order of picoseconds, not explainable by any consequence of the device’s construction, but entirely consistent. Questions were asked, experiments conducted, and eventually, suspicions were raised. The project’s budget was multiplied by a factor of a hundred overnight.

The fifth generation prototype was the first to be taken into orbit. It was pointed towards the galactic central core, calibrated, and switched on. The telemetry arrived at its control centre on Earth almost instantly, and three of the suspicions were confirmed. The aberration did extend to other intervals on the spectrum, it did progress logarithmically in proportion to frequency, and it did cross an axis within the visible wavelengths. The gamma rays emerging from the Mirror’s ultra-black surface and striking the detector arm, for example, had a positive t-coefficient of just under twenty-six million.

To a layman, they were from approximately forty-three weeks in the future.

Before the Mirror, we could at least have offered the excuse that we couldn’t have known what would happen. But that was no longer true. We could know. We did. In a way.

It took only a few days to determine how to shift the processed signal back into terrestrial wavelength intervals, including radio, microwave, and — eventually — even visible light. It took even less time to find an astronomical object that naturally reflected those wavelengths back toward the Earth, so that we could eavesdrop on our own signals as they bounced back to us. Or rather, our future signals, bouncing back to us in the present.

The greatest blessing was also the greatest curse: the Mirror was an international endeavour, governed by scientists, and for once beyond the reach of any military that sought to sequester or destroy it. The reward was a one-way stream of information from almost a year ahead of us in time.

We noticed two further anomalies in due course. First, as we found out almost immediately, there was no mention of the Mirror in the billions of our own future broadcasts we received. The second discovery took almost a full Cycle to become clear, a Cycle being the exact temporal gap between ourselves in the present, and the future origin point of the Mirror’s data stream. We discovered that we could not deviate from that future in even the smallest way.

Our first Cycle since the creation of the Mirror has just elapsed. We now occupy the time period which we first observed after fully calibrating the machine in orbit. This outcome, in retrospect — a very troubling word for us now — was inevitable. We forgot about our original purpose, the quantum computer, and why we thought we needed the Mirror in the first place. The quantum Zeno effect has taken hold, and because we never shut the Mirror down during its entire first Cycle, we are now locked.

We are perpetually observed, by ourselves in the past, and so the quantum superposition of states has broken down permanently. Observing our own future made it deterministic, and by the time we realised that fact, it was far too late.

Philosophers have debated for millennia the question of whether free will exists, but we can now say with certainty that we have eliminated it.

The Mirror’s telemetry abruptly stopped being received at the control centre as we reached the very moment of Earth’s future that we’d first properly observed. The machine remains up there, and all attempts to interface with it or even to destroy it, have been unsuccessful. Nothing works. Engines and thrusters fail to operate. Telecommunications handshaking protocols receive no response. Attempts to deviate from what we know has already happened are physically impossible.

The Mirror’s eye, blacker than black, remains open to the stars and to our future. It no longer tells us its secrets, but it still looks, self-sustaining and unblinking.

And we are fixed, held rigid forever, in its gaze.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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