Repeat Rewind: Tales of Time Travel

Mirror, Mirror: Part 2

What I really want to talk about is the thing I saw when I unlocked my front door, and walked straight into the kitchen for some food to make me feel more alive.

She was sitting at the table, bent over a glass of water and looking exactly the way I felt. I couldn't see her face clearly from the way her chin was angled, but I recognized her suit, the line of her jaw.

When she heard my footsteps and turned her head, we saw each other, and... And I'd never seen that kind of pure horror anywhere until I'd looked into her eyes.

My eyes.

***

"So let's get this straight," Roxanne said, holding up a pale hand to stem the tide of Cortez's hoarse words. "Are you saying you met a version of yourself there? From an alternate timeline, or from a different point in ours?"

Cortez shook her head, sending her long black tresses fluttering around her face. Roxanne hadn't noted before how greasy her colleague's hair was, but that was no surprise—Cortez had been on the run and evading capture, wearing these same clothes, for close to four days now.

"You're not paying attention, Agent Craig," she said simply. "It wasn't an alternate self of mine. It was me. My double."

Roxanne blinked. "All documented cases of—"

"Fuck your documented cases," Cortez said softly, but the words cut through the impending lecture on doppelgangers like a knife. "Listen to me."

Something in those three words made Roxanne lean back in her chair and nod stiffly. She sensed the weight of Nina's gaze from behind the mirror, but couldn't tell who her friend was looking at right now. "I'm listening. Go on."

***

I killed her, of course.

At least I can sleep a little easier knowing that she attacked me first. She jumped to her feet, snatched up a knife from the rack, and went straight for my stomach. I'll be charitable and say that I'm not surprised. My training covered every kind of interaction with alternate selves from different points in spacetime, but we looked at each other and we could both see that we were entirely identical, down to the last strand of hair. If she hadn't attacked me... I might have been the one to throw the first punch, just to put an end to that horrible sight of my own eyes staring at me from across the room.

After I'd bashed her head into the edge of the countertop enough times to make her stop moving, I bent down to go through her pockets, hoping to find something to reassure me that I hadn't just made a terrible mistake. And I did find it, I think. She had the exact same things in there that I always carry: tissues, chapstick, a wallet with my ID and my Tenebris pass, pepper spray, my keys. I could say "her keys," I suppose, but that would feel wrong.

If you went home feeling like something horrible happened to you, and then you looked up and saw someone wearing your face walk through the door... Wouldn't your first instinct be to defend yourself?

When I could think straight again, I cleaned up the blood and hair in the kitchen, of course, and did what I could to make the body unidentifiable. Then I wrapped it up with butcher paper and a few garbage bags, and dragged it under the porch, just out of sight. It was only temporary until it would start to smell and I'd have to figure out a better way to hide it, but... your friends in Inspection took that little worry off my shoulders. I packed an overnight bag and went to sleep in the first motel that would let me check in at such an hour. I just couldn't stay in that house for a minute longer.

I tried to call in sick at Tenebris the next day, but the HR person who replied to my call said I'd already been registered in the system as clocked in that morning. And so I knew... there were more of me, and they were out there.

I remembered those moments of having quadruple vision before I blacked out in that filthy alley, and I figured that there had to be at least three doppelgangers of me, created by whatever anomaly in spacetime I'd been beamed through. I'd already killed the first, and the second was at work.

I didn't do this to them for fun, you know. I was worried about what it'd do to the spacetime continuum if there were three full copies of me at large in the city. Look at me, thinking about work even at a time like this... as a good little Tenebris goon should. But there was more than that. I just couldn't take the thought that I wasn't the only person alive with that face and that brain, with those memories and those feelings. Especially because they might have done something I wouldn't have approved of if I left them alone. You know how fragile the present is and how many variables factor into our every moment, Agent Craig. Even if those three all had my personality, there was no way I could predict what they would get up to in the next minute, and that made me a little... anxious, as you can imagine. I have no idea if the first two doubles I'd found knew there were more of them. Probably not—if I hadn't hunted them down, I think they would have met and killed each other anyway. It's what I would have done, if you'll pardon the paradox in that wording.

You wanna know the worst part of this whole business? I saw the same thing every time I looked one of them in the eye.

They all thought they were the real me.

***

Agent Cortez paused, clearing her throat. The raw sound fell into utter, stunned silence on both sides of the mirror.

"Could you get me a cup of water, please?" she asked softly when the silence had gone on too long. "My throat's killing me. I've been doing a lot of talking in the past few days."

Roxanne looked hard at the glass hiding the surveillance booth, then back at Cortez. "An Inspector will get you one. Continue, Agent Cortez."

Cortez glanced up from her gloved hands... and now there was no hiding the tremor in her fingers. "There's not much left to tell. But sure. You should know the rest, too."