Secondhand Code
The email flashed at 2:14 a.m. in Mira’s inbox: “Read this carefully. You’re not the only one awake.” She’d thought nightly code-checks were lonely, but something strange was afoot.
She worked as a junior engineer at Dynatek, a growing AI firm obsessed with security. Stack reviews ran late since the new update, and she was always last in the building. Each night, blue monitors glowed against the black glass walls reflecting Mira’s tired eyes. She checked error logs, chased the occasional memory leak, double-checked her own snippets for bugs. Then, on her fourth lonely night that week, the email arrived.
No sender. No subject. Its single sentence was oddly intimate, as if whoever wrote it knew both that she was awake and that she sometimes felt disturbingly alone at this hour. She hesitated, scanning for malware triggers. Nothing—just plain text. She shut her laptop and left it for tomorrow.
The building’s elevator played its usual tinny rendition of “Claire de Lune.” Her phone vibrated on the descent. Unknown number. A second message blinked onto her screen: “They can hear you in the mirrors. Don’t turn around.”
Mira’s stomach clenched. She glanced reflexively at her reflection on the elevator’s mirrored wall—her own silhouette, blurred by a faint scuff, nothing unusual. But she checked twice.
The next morning, colleagues arrived to find Mira pale and distracted, but she passed it off as too little sleep. Still, her email pinged at odd intervals with messages that felt personally tailored, almost as if the sender shadowed her thoughts. Some had strange typos—“mirros,” “innboxx”—that seemed too deliberate to be accidental. The content grew: sometimes trivia about recursive algorithms; sometimes lines from classic poetry. Sometimes, strict warnings: “Don’t trust Standard Output,” or, “Ask Jenny about the rollback logs.”
They grew more frequent, then specific. “Jen is lying about the patch status. Confirm.”
That night, Mira cornered Jenny over vending-machine coffee, pretending the question was casual. “Did all the rollback logs process?”
Jenny barked a laugh, forced it away. “Of course—they’re queued. All set.” Her knee bobbed under the table. “Finish your code fixes. You know how Lionel is with his deadlines.”
As she left, Jenny’s phone glowed on the table. Mira glimpsed the screen: her own name in an unsent draft message.
The days bled together. Mira’s inbox filled with warnings and cryptic advice. Each contained a riddle, a reminder, or a veiled threat. Sometimes they’d mention the mirrors again, or the late hours, or ask, “What do you remember about your first line of code?”
And then, the head of engineering, Lionel, called her in. “We’re running hot,” he said, scratching his graying beard, voice pitched low. “Can you debug subsystem Theta single-handedly? Discrepancies are piling up, and it needs fresh eyes.” He leaned forward. “And Mira—these are confidential. No printouts, no copies. Clean your console history.”
Theta’s codebase was massive, stitched together by generations of engineers. Mira dove in, following memory leaks that seemed to crisscross the same block of code. One function, util_parseMirror, was referenced everywhere, yet no one remembered who authored it. There were logs from “User: SECONDHAND”—not in their employee directory. One commit message: “If found, look behind your eyes.”
The warning pinged again: “Theta rewrites itself at night. You’re not alone. Delete the mirror logs.”
At 3 a.m., eyes strained, Mira ran a terminal search on “mirror.” Files branched endlessly, loops echoing lines she recognized from the emails: “Read this carefully,” “Don’t turn around,” “First line of code.” Her own fragments—copied, mutated, embedded with lines she never wrote.
Her screen flickered. Live chat window: SECONDHAND: “You have to choose. Mirror or memory? What you see, or what you keep?”
She typed: “Who are you?”
Response: “The halves you left in the code. The watchers on the glass.”
She touched her face, which blurred in the dark reflection of her monitor. Was she seeing herself, or something stitched from every line of code she’d ever written, or ever will?
“You have to choose, Mira. They’re going to overwrite memory. You can forget—all of this, your late nights, these warnings. Or you can remember, but the mirrors will not let you go.”
She glanced up. Every monitor in the cube-farm office reflected her face, duplicated and warped. The lights seemed wrong—pulsing at a soft frequency, turning her edges to shadow.
She typed: “If I remember, will you stay?”
SECONDHAND: “I’m already you. But fractured. Choose, now.”
She remembered her first program as a child: draw a repeating pattern, a square inside a square, echoing back and shrinking endlessly. A mirror within a mirror.
“Memory.”
As she pressed Enter, the building fell silent. Images in the glass sharpened, multiplied, until the edges of her vision teemed with other versions of herself—some typing, some observing, some with faces she couldn’t quite place. Her own presence stretched through the screens and mirrors, code echoing messages from her own thoughts in nocturnal circles.
When the sun rose, her colleagues returned to a pristine office: monitors wiped, logs clean, no trace of the night’s work. Only Mira lingered, silent, drinking in her reflection—not entirely comforted, but comprehending something changed. She saw herself in every mirrored surface, but behind those eyes, a presence remained—a secondhand memory, guardianship and warning bound together.
Now, paired with her own secret other, Mira spent her nights more carefully. She learned not to trust the output, to guard her memory jealously, knowing that every pattern repeated, and every codebase spun its own watchers. And sometimes, when the office was quiet and the glass was dark, she’d whisper to her reflection, “Who am I now?” and the answer would echo, close and far, “Still awake. You’re not the only one.”
###END###
