Broken Mirror Read Free

his only hope to prevent permanent catatonia.
    “What’s going to happen to me?” Victor asked.
    Granfa Jeff’s expression darkened, and Victor felt the blankness rise up again.

Chapter 2
    Let me be clear. We’re not talking about slavery, imprisonment, chemical lobotomization, or any of the other rumors and lies flying around about the Commission’s work.
    The protections proposed by the Commission are reasonable, proportional, and necessary to prevent another Carmichael incident.
    Class Threes will live freely with supervision and annual re-evaluations.
    Class Twos will contribute to society through decent work in self-sustaining communities that will ensure their well-being.
    Class Ones will receive the best care available in facilities equipped for their special needs.
    This approach is about the health and safety of our communities. It’s about helping those who suffer from mirror resonance syndrome and about the safety of their families and friends.
    This is about a better world for everyone.
    —Mía Barrias, public comment, SeCa Classification Commission records (1978)
    Semiautonomous California
    21 June 1979

    The vidscreen on the wall of the Ludlum Middle School classroom showed houses destroyed by fire and bodies crushed under the tires of self-driving vehicles. By now, at age twelve, Victor Eastmore had seen the vidfeed many times. Having survived the massacre when he was only four years old, he’d experienced for himself the horror that Samuel Miller had inflicted on the town of Carmichael.
    Every year on the anniversary of the incident, as part of a nationwide mandatory remembrance ceremony, the documentary played in schools and public buildings throughout Semiautonomous California. Now a woman with haunted eyes described how she survived the massacre. Victor recognized her, of course: Mía Barrias, the woman who’d saved him from one of Samuel’s booby traps. She detailed her encounter with the killer on the day of her honeymoon, how she’d watched him murder her fiancé with a quantum-triggered Dirac stunstick pulse to the head, and how she’d escaped and got help from police in a nearby town.
    The vidfeed was all too familiar.
    When the Man from Nightmareland’s crimes introduced Semiautonomous California to the dangers of mirror resonance syndrome, the government responded by developing the Classification system to gene-scan and control people with MRS.
    Being classified was worse than being any of SeCa’s other untouchables.
    The Catholics—weakened, anemic, and banned from other nations in the American Union — were tolerated only on the outskirts of Oakland & Bayshore, not downtown. The Asian Refugee Act had expelled from Oakland desperate refugees from the Great Asian War, forcing them onto the farms in Long Valley and the slums of Little Asia on the San Francisco Peninsula; they couldn’t settle in Bayshore.
    People with MRS were the enemies within: unpredictable, dangerous, terrifying.
    Victor, with his blood-soaked, strange, and prescient dreams, had always felt different — no, not just different, peculiar — and completely out of step with the people of SeCa, who, from the days of the first Cathar settlers, had exalted in freedom from violence. The single incidence of mass killing in the nation’s history — Samuel Miller’s campaign to destroy Carmichael — had led to the demonization of people with MRS.
    Best to keep them in facilities and ranchos in the nation’s hinterlands. “Out of sight, out of mind” could have been the national motto.
    Victor didn’t dare ask to be excused from watching the vidfeed. Earlier, two girls had passed him in the hallway talking loudly, saying that they could spot a Broken Mirror without trying, everyone could, it was how they looked at you — no, hard to say exactly what it was, but definitely they were easy to spot.
    Victor was desperate to avoid sticking out because, like Samuel Miller, he believed his dreams were premonitions. Not