The Mirror Protocol
Bedridden after the Collapse, Mae recorded everything she could remember—even the things that didn’t make sense. Maybe, she thought, her memories could someday save someone else.
They called it Mirrorfall, though no one knew who coined it first. I remember the moment: cool cotton under my arm, windowglass smeared by April’s last rain, my hand trembling over the notebook. Outside, luminous shapes scrolled across downtown sky, silent and geometric, vanishing as quickly as they appeared. I had been logging the signals for weeks: pale blue symbols on mirrors, windows, windshields—always reflective, always vanishing just before they could be photographed. People claimed they felt something shift, deep in their bodies—vertigo, nausea, a humming ache behind the eyes. The physicians called it psychogenic, branded us all hysterics. But the symptoms spread: not just vision but voices, not just voices but memories. Confused, jumbled recollections, stolen from strangers. People woke up with the childhoods, scars, and secret codes of others lodged in their minds.
I began writing everything down the day after my own slip. My mirror showed me—a movement, a smile—half a decade younger and thinner, the haircut not mine. I blinked, and my reflection’s lips curled with someone else’s smirk. The room behind her was wrong—the wrong wall color, the wrong painting of a wolf running through snow. It was not my room. It was not my life. My memory now: that reflection, who might have been named Ella or Edie, humming as she drew a bright red line through a page in a notebook just like mine.
The Mirror Protocol emerged on the sixth day of the Collapse. No one knew who started it. We found rules painted crudely in stairwells and subways: Record your memories. Form daily circles to verify past and present. Don’t trust reflections. The city was already splitting. Half of us retreated to dark rooms and shrouded windows, while others prowled gleaming plazas, drawn to any shining surface, repeating whispered passwords they could not remember inventing. We called them Echoes.
Recording became my salvation. The notebook thickened with small, panicked script: details about my family, the shape of my mother’s hands, the noise of my cat’s claws against hardwood, the taste of lemon cough drops. Some nights, reading over my lists, I didn’t recognize the words. Were these really mine? Whose handwriting was so small and slanted? I started finding entries I couldn’t recall writing. At 2:03 am, May 4: “Mother has green eyes, sings off-key.” My real mother was blind, and couldn’t hum a tune. I underlined those lines in red.
Dr. Vaughn, a long-retired neurologist from the apartment across the hall, became my Circle. He maintained his own log: diagrams, faces, lunch menus. “There is coherence in patterns, Mae,” he whispered through the crack in his door. “Memory is a civil war. History isn’t exclusive to nations.” On our best days, we traded objects—souvenirs, small tokens, a chipped mug bearing the university crest—and described their origins in detail. On the worst, we sat back to back, reciting our own names, like children learning to speak.
One afternoon, as city sirens wailed and Mirrorfall swept further in, Vaughn’s mug began to change. First, the crest, then the color—shifting each hour, catching glimpses of new glyphs when tilted just so toward the light. Another day, the mug was gone entirely, replaced with a porcelain fox I recognized from Ella-or-Edie’s room. Vaughn wept when I handed it back; neither of us remembered who the fox originally belonged to.
As the protocols spread, so did the fracture. Some people tried to reclaim their sense of self with tattoos, recording birthdates and names up their arms. Others—Echoes—began talking in layered voices, broadcasting memories like static, no longer sure which past was truly theirs. The city’s last newsletter announced the “final mirror cull;” all reflective surfaces to be covered or broken. Shopkeepers smashed their glass. Skyscraper windows were painted black. Still, at night, the symbols thrummed in the puddles and shimmered over damp tiles.
On the last evening before Vaughn vanished, I found a note in his neat, looping hand wedged beneath my door: “You must look directly. The Mirror will not remember you if you do not remember yourself.” I didn’t sleep. The notebook lay open by my head. That night, I dreamed of the red-lined page, and a song I had never heard, sung by a woman I would never meet.
The city emptied. Food grew scarce. I stopped venturing beyond the apartment, curtains pinned firmly. Sometimes, strange names spun through my mind like rain—Nico, Carol, Jin-seo, Rina—bright fragments of stories cut off mid-sentence. The Circle dwindled to one.
A week after Vaughn, someone knocked. I almost didn’t answer, but the voice—hoarse, uncertain, familiar in a way I could not place—spoke my name. Standing in the hall, swaying with exhaustion, was a young woman with tangled hair and eyes I remembered but could not source. “Mae?” she asked. “You wrote it all down. You’re the one, aren’t you?” She thrust out a notebook. My notebook—or its twin, edges ragged and ink-smudged.
Her name, she claimed, was Edie. Her hands were not as I remembered, but her hum—yes, that song—and the line of red ink across a torn page. We sat on the floor, comparing notes, searching for overlap, feeling the swirl of not-quite-shared history settle around us like dust. “We’re Echoes,” she admitted, her voice fraying at the edge. “But we remember…enough. I think we do. Or maybe this is what’s left, now.”
At dawn, we did what Vaughn had begged: we faced the glass together, holding each other’s notebook, reciting out loud the catalogues of memory, mapped and mismatched and at last our own—or at least, together enough to span the gulf. The mirror flickered—once, twice. I saw myself; I saw Edie. For the smallest moment, I saw Vaughn’s face behind mine, saw a laughing child I could not name, saw the whole city behind us in a thousand windowpanes refracted like stars.
We stepped back. The world was still cracked and thin. But now, when I looked at Edie, something in my chest uncoiled—a trickle of certainty, or maybe just hope. Sometimes, I think I see the symbols in the gleam of her eyes. Sometimes they vanish before I can describe them.
But we keep writing. We fill page after page with the details of bad dreams and small kindnesses. Sometimes, late at night, she hums that unknowable tune, and I remember—not everything, but enough to know I am still here. Even if the world forgets. Even if I do, someday. The act is all that remains. The Mirror will not remember us, but maybe something will.
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