“I know what you’re going to say,” said my reflection as it stepped out of the mirror. “This is impossible. I don’t believe what I’m seeing. I must be hallucinating.”
Actually, I had been wondering about how I’d put on so much weight, but I guess the appearance of a whole other me in the bedroom mirror would stack on the pounds. Sure, it was a surprise, but if Reflecto-me thought the best I could do when faced with an unexpected encounter was baggy cliché dialogue, maybe I didn’t know me very well at all.
I kept quiet and let myself do the talking.
“We don’t have much time, and lots to do. The fate of all the universes depends on you,” Reflecto-me said. Or should that be Mirror-me? Sounds a bit Austin Powers mashed up with Star Trek. Reflecto-me has more of a sixties Marvel Comics vibe. Beware the Curse Of Reflecto-Me, guest-starring The Fantastic Four. Yes, I am aware I’m babbling. You would too if another version of yourself interrupted you when you’re late for work. I’m already on a warning. Darren, my manager, is right up my arse about the Q2 figures and there’s no way I could pull another sick day right now, not after those four days around the audit after George’s monster birthday do in Fuerteventura—
“Sorry,” I said to me. “I missed that last bit.”
Reflecto-me glared at me-me over a pair of chromed Aviators. I—he really was taking the interdimesional warrior theme a bit far. The costume was Ghostbusters with a dash of cyberpunk. Boiler suit, heavy boots, utility belt with overstuffed pouches. No proton pack, but there was a big silvery rifle slung over one shoulder. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced I was pulling it off. Maybe the mirror wasn’t fooling about the extra weight.
“I said,” I said, “the Cross-Dimensional Interstice is crumbling much more quickly than we feared. Tetra Bluu and her gang of Reality Pirates have the Multi-Variant Tunneller and are on the rampage. They’ve already taken Alternative Prime. If we don’t act now, Nexus Zero is doomed.”
I paused for a second, opened my mouth, closed it again. Mirror-me (fuck it, let’s get Trekkie with this) tilted his—my head expectantly.
“That all sounds like English,” I said. “It’s in proper sentences with full stops and everything. Your grammar’s impeccable. After that everything out of your mouth makes as much sense to me as Trump being President.”
“Look, it’s simple. There is a gigantic multi-universal conflict rolling through creation to which a version of me—that is, you—has become a pivotal element, and I’m here to keep you safe before you can be used as a weapon—wait. Did you say Trump as President? That’s a joke, right? This is the same Donald John Trump I know? With the hair and the perma-tan and the massively dysfunctional sex drive?”
I nodded. “He was President. One term. Felt like a decade.”
Mirror-me winced and pinched the bridge of my nose. Not my nose. I mean, he didn’t reach over and give it a wiggle to make sure it was firmly attached to my face. His nose. That’s what I mean. Fuck, this is confusing.
“Ok,” Mirror-me said. “This is a big fucking problem, but we can work with it. I just need to keep you away from any potential incursio-abduction scenarios.” He took one look at the look of bewilderment slackening my jaw and sighed. “I mean, stop any other interested agencies from reaching out through a reflective surface and grabbing you for their own nefarious purposes.” Mirror-me grabbed the duvet off the bed and draped it over the big bedroom mirror. “Any more?”
“Just the bathroom.”
“Off you trot then. I’m going to take some readings and see if your universe has broken the Implausibility Index. Trump as President? Felch me gently with a chainsaw, you’ll be telling me the British voted for Brexit next.”
I decided to keep quiet. Mirror-me was having a stressful enough time of it as it was.
He pulled a chunky lump of tech, the mutant love child of a Rubik’s Cube and an eighties-era mobile phone, out of one of his pouches and poked it. The device lit up and let out a synthesised belch.
I left him to it and took the three steps from the bedroom to the bathroom. My flat is tiny, the bathroom little more than a broom cupboard with a sink and a shower cubicle. It also now contained, to my surprise, a willowy dark-haired lady in skintight blue leather and an eyepatch. She turned as I banged the door open and somehow winked at me.
“Took your time,” she said. Her voice was a low contralto, worryingly familiar. As was the angle of her jaw and the colour of her eye.
“Oh, please gods no,” I said.
“Oh hecky hell yes. Aren’t multiverses fun? You never know who you’re going to bump into.”
I sagged against the door of the bathroom. Mirror-me was bad enough, but Sexy-Pirate me was really mangling my frontal lobe. Darren was not going to buy this story, that much was for sure.
Sexy-Pirate me grabbed my shoulder and hauled me up with no apparent effort. “No time for lolly-gagging. You and I have a date with Nexus Zero. Two dimensional variants of the same person at the same time at the core of the multiverse should cause some delicious chaos.” She dragged me close. She smelt like roses and gunpowder. There was rum on her breath. I wasn’t repulsed.
“Not so fast, Tetra Bluu.” Mirror-me was framed in the door to the bathroom, rifle drawn and aimed. He had to stand outside, there was no way he was squeezing in with me and the dimensional variant of me who was apparently a major threat to peace in an infinite number of universes.
And Darren said I’d never amount to anything.
“Oh goody,” said Tetra Bluu. “Buzzkill in a boiler suit. I thought we’d shaken you off after The Reality Pirates chain-reacted The Spider Nebula into a big fat ball of boom.”
“It takes more than cosmic holocausts to stop me, Tetra. Let the dim-bulb go. They’re an unevolved loser with zero potential.”
“Don’t talk about me like that,” Tetra and I said together. We looked at each other. She winked again. How the fuck could she do that?
“First of all, you know you’re insulting yourself. There are elements of our pal here in you, me and every other variant of us in existence. How do you know there’s no potential in this—” She looked me up and down and grimaced faintly. “—this?”
“Thanks,” I muttered under my breath.
“Second of all, perhaps they just need the right push. I mean, jeebus louweebus, I know there’s that saying about your own worst critic but frankly—dude, come on, step off. Give ‘em a chance to be a better human being.”
“By joining you and setting every universe on fire?” Mirror-me leveled his gun, the red pinprick of his aiming laser steady on my forehead. “Makes more sense to pop the dweeb now and stall your plan at the kerb.”
Tetra shrugged. “Third of all, your safety’s on.”
Mirror-me glanced at his rifle. Just a flick of the eye. Half a second. It was all Tetra needed. She magicked a knife out of somewhere in her costume (gods know where, there were no tell-tale bulges in the leather and I’d been looking) and whipped it in a vicious overhand lob, point-first into Mirror-me’s left eye.
He gurgled, farted, dropped the gun, and fell over.
“Judgmental weasel,” Tetra said.
She turned her full, ferocious attention on me. “So, how about it? I won’t force you. This isn’t a kidnap. You can stay here.” She glanced about at the tiny, dark, damp bathroom, at the two small rooms beyond. “You can go back to your job and your petty little life, under-appreciated, belittled, bullied. Maybe there’s someone out there who cares for you.”
She moved in, not difficult in the confined space of the bathroom, suddenly very close and very warm.
“I doubt whoever it is cares as much as I do. How could they? I know who you are.”
I tried to keep my voice steady and my eyes on hers. “You want me to go through the mirror with you and cause multiversal havoc.”
“I want you to be all you can be. Is that so much to ask?”
I thought about it for all of five seconds. About the flat. About Darren. About universes full of danger and plunder and adventure, and the person I could share them with.
“To the ends of everything,” I said, and kissed her.
Look, if you’re going to embark on an epic voyage of self-discovery, it helps if you like the person you see in the mirror.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 