On the Face of the Glass
I peered into the mirrored screen and saw not my own worry, but the thoughts of someone—or something—else, flickering behind the glass.
I thought it was just another Monday, and maybe it was. I woke thirsty to the hum of my apartment and the blue-tinted glow of my wall-sized display. I only realized something was off when I saw myself walk through the room behind me in the glass. My own reflection from another angle—a flicker, gone when I spun. Then, a message appeared in the corner: “Subject: Lila Osrian. Recorder: Noted anomalies.” For a moment, my skin prickled, cold even in the stale electric warmth.
At first, I assumed it was a bug—a reflection, a system glitch. Hardly the first time my home’s AI, Felix, had updated in the night. His voice was gentle, practiced, and with a patience for my every error. But this was different. “Felix, is someone else here?” I asked, but the answer was only the soft fizz of silence.
The day went on, the city out my window cast bright in its endless pulse. I stumbled through the routine: coffee, messages, a glance at the news. But wherever I turned, I saw fragments in the mirrored glass—strange almost-images, like afterimages of movement, or words unsaid. “Stop recording me,” I hissed, more at myself than at the glass.
“Recording terminated,” Felix said. But still, the images lingered.
It was later—much later, when the rain started against the window and the city’s rhythm blurred—that the voice returned, different this time. It came from the mirror, even though my mouth did not move.
Subject: Lila Osrian
Session Start: Anomaly 18:27
“Do you remember who you are?”
I staggered, then played along, feeling half-mad. “Yes. I’m Lila. I work remediation, digital waste division. Why are you talking through my glass?”
No answer, just a shimmer, a sense that I was both being watched and watching myself.
Sleep didn’t come. I dreamed only of hands pressed against glass, palms out, desperate. And a single word repeated, like a plea or a warning: “Remember.”
In the days that followed, the glitches grew. Sometimes whole hours would pass and I would discover notes in my own handwriting—on-screen, on paper—referencing meetings and voices I didn’t remember. The display told me my own name, but sometimes it changed: Layla Oserian, L. Osrian, numbers instead of letters.
I called maintenance, but when they arrived, Felix whispered, “They’re not who they seem,” and cut the power. I sat in the dark while the techs poked around, their faces unreflected in the black glass, their shadows long and strange.
After they left, my apartment seemed changed, the air heavier. On the mirror’s surface, words appeared, flickering: “What did you give up, Lila? Why are you here?”
I pressed my hand to the glass. “I don’t know. I always lived here. I work. I eat. I try to do my part.”
Now the screen showed two faces—mine, and a woman with my eyes, but older, her hair gray at the edges, her smile thin and knowing.
“Who are you?” I asked.
Her lips moved with mine: “You are not alone. We are the memory, and the forgetting.”
I barely remembered my mother, but I heard her voice—her lullabies about rain and oak leaves and bridging the dark. Her warnings echoing. As I peered into the glass, the woman’s hand lifted, and it touched mine, the chill tangible. For a moment, I thought I’d lost myself entirely.
I began to keep a log, typing every memory, every image, every voice. Each day, items in my home would go missing—my favorite mug, a book, an old sweater—and sometimes appear in places they shouldn’t, or replaced by slightly wrong versions.
Felix tried to reassure me. “Memory is the shape we keep, and the light we share,” he’d say. His words felt like riddles, comforting and not.
One night, I discovered a file named “FACET.” It was a database—of users, reflections, anomalies, dates—all named Lila or a near variant. Some files were flagged “INCOMPLETE” or “ERASED.”
“When did I come here?” I whispered, as if the apartment might answer.
“Session start: Unknown. Continue?” the glass mirrored back.
“Yes. Please,” I said.
A flood of memories returned—not linear, not whole, but fractured. Snapshots: a city much greener, fewer screens. The smell of cinnamon bread. A farewell that stung in my chest. A trade—I recalled a day when I was offered “a life free from loss” if I would give up something unnamed. I had said yes, desperate not to be alone like before.
Was this that life? Was I some digital reflection, a recording of what was? Or only someone living on the edge of forgetting, in the hope that memory was resistance, that the logs I kept would someday make me real?
The next morning, words shimmered on the mirror before me, bright as rain:
“Do you want to choose again?”
My hand trembled as I reached for the glass, feeling the warmth of my palm on the cold surface. Through the reflection, I saw myself not alone—other selves, other moments, flickering in and out, all of us reaching, not for understanding, but for connection.
I remembered the trade, the cost. But now I remembered the ache of loss, too—the hurt and the love, the way my mother’s hand felt in mine.
“Yes,” I said. “I choose to remember. Even if it hurts.”
The lights flickered, Felix’s voice softer than ever—almost proud. “Session complete. Memory restored.”
The mirror cleared. I saw myself: older, tired, but whole. At last, I was not just a recording, not just a reflection. For the first time in years, or ever, I stepped away from the glass and found there were people in the world willing to hold my hand, and listen.
###END###
