Mirrorworld (10 page)

“Marcus?” came a voice that he recognised. “Where are you?”

He groaned again, because this was worse than being robbed, and dragged himself from the deepest crevasse of his bed. His eyes sent notes of polite refusal in response to his brain’s request to know what they could see, which arrived as jolts of pain filtered through the light of a too-bright morning. Eventually, his vision caved to its master’s demand, and the indistinct figure that stood before him with hands on hips like a judgemental deity unblurred into the form usually worn by his sister, Rina.

“You look well,” she said icily.

“Bleh,” came Marcus’s succinct response.

“Do you have any idea what day it is?” Rina asked.

“Tuesday?” Marcus guessed.

“It’s Friday,” Rina snapped. “Friday the twenty-fifth. Now, what does that mean?”

“Can we not play guessing games?” Marcus asked weakly. “I’m not good at them.”

Rina slapped him, sending him sprawling back over the bed. “God damn it Marcus, what the hell have you been doing? You disconnected your phone? Who does that? Mama is worried sick about you, since for some reason she still seems to think you’re worth giving a damn about. She sent me over here and I was half expecting to find you dead, but guess what, you’re just dead drunk, of course!”

“Not drunk,” Marcus said, raising a finger. “Don’t get drunk. Just get hangovers.”

“
Whatever
,” Rina said venomously. “Well, time to get up. Friday today means Saturday tomorrow, and since I’m sure you forgot, or just didn’t care to remember in the first place, that means I’m getting married in the morning. And I will have my brother there, if only to make Mama happy. So
get up
!” She span around and stormed off across the no-man’s-land that was his floor.

“Wow, what’s her problem?” asked the long-haired, well-dressed old man sitting next to Marcus.

“We’ve never gotten along,” Marcus told him. “She always expects better. It’s a teacher thing, I think, tough love for the unruly student who needs a firm hand to guide him through life.”

“Right,” the other man said, staring at the strange device he was holding. “Why did you jump so far away? This is ten years later than the last memory. Were you running from me?”

“Jesus, don’t you ever tidy up?” Rina yelled from across the room. “And what the hell is this?” she added, holding up an ornamental mask that she’d just unearthed from a pile of discarded pizza boxes.

“It’s Buddha,” Marcus said weakly. “I have his hand around here somewhere as well..”

“More pointless trinkets from your grand world tour? I’d love to know how much of Nana’s money you sank into that endeavour. Well, you must have some left, else you’d have to go out and get a job rather than drinking yourself into a stupor every night, wouldn’t you?” she tossed the mask aside disgustedly. “Are you getting dressed, or not? God, somebody send me another brother.”

“That’s harsh,” Tec said.

“Who are you anyway?” Marcus asked, directing his sudden anger towards this strange man. “And how do I know your name is Tec?”

“You’ve forgotten again?” Tec asked, looking worried. “Oh, this is bad. Wait, maybe it isn’t. Don’t you remember what I told you on the night of your father’s wake, ten years ago today?”

That’s right,
thought a Marcus.
I lived this already. Now it’s just a memory..

This one is even worse,
replied another Marcus.
But we could do better..

Back to the start, then?
asked a Marcus.

Or close enough.

“Marcus!” Tec called, from far away. “Listen, just-“

The fan waved again, and the memory unwound as Marcus plunged into his past.

Though the sun hung high in the clear sky, it was a cold, wintery day. Nonetheless, it was with enthusiasm that Marcus stepped out into the yard, ready to savour these fifteen minutes that were his own between lessons. What would he do today? Kick one of the balls around for a while? Use the building blocks? No, no, none of that. There was only one thing that any self-respecting five year old would want at a time like this, and it was the buggy.

But it was not to be. Though Marcus had run with all his might (except for at the points where he knew the teachers would be nearby and might tell him off), Joe had still somehow beaten him here, and was already pedalling off into the horizon, or the far side of the yard – whichever came first. Every time! Every single stupid time in the last two weeks, that slightly-more-popular boy had made it to the buggy and hogged it for the entirety of playtime, and there was nothing to be done. Most of the children’s parents were stood nearby, enjoying the sight of their children at play, as were a couple of teachers. He couldn’t do anything under those watchful eyes. Could he?

And then Joe looked back and stuck his tongue out, and Marcus knew that there were no limits to what he could do. Powered by an explosion of dormant, long-suffocated rage that had built and built for months and would now by stymied only by action, he strode across the playground with vengeance in his heart. He reached Joe just in time to watch the other boy crash the buggy into the fence, and with one swift movement reached in, grabbed him, yanked him out and deposited him on the asphalt. Before anyone could realise what was happening, Marcus had taken his foe’s place at the controls, and, powered by the pure thrill of success, begun to pedal his way towards destiny, accompanied by the shrill shrieks of Joe’s watching parents and the suddenly piercing noise of the playground whistle erupting in protest.

“What happens next?”
Marcus wondered listlessly, as the sounds of the memory faded.

“I imagine that you are caught and admonished severely,” someone said, and Marcus jumped, surprised to discover that someone was there to hear his thought. He peeked out from under the buggy, and some of the various incarnations of himself that were floating in his mind recognised the man who was walking alongside him as the eccentric who would occasionally haunt his future. “You!”

“Yes,” Tec said tiredly. “Me again. What are we doing here, Marcus?”

“What are
you
doing here?” Marcus challenged him. “I live here.”

“No you don’t,” Tec told him. “Unfortunately, part of you thinks that you do.”

“You don’t make sense, mister,” Marcus said, continuing to pedal.

“Sorry,” Tec said, keeping pace with him. “I am trying, but you keep running away on me. What I’ve been trying to tell you is that all this, these memories.. none of them are real. We’re in the Mirrorline. You remember stepping in, right? I know you do. A part of you does, at least. Well, what you stepped into is a program that I very cleverly devised for the purposes of reliving one’s memories. I thought that we might make good use of it with you, to delve your memory and see if we couldn’t find any hint of what connected you to Keithus, but unfortunately, something has gone wrong. Are you with me so far?”

The Mirrorline..
wondered a Marcus, that vision of the labs flashing past again.

Don’t listen to him,
urged another Marcus.
Pedal faster!

This feels more real to me,
said another Marcus, discarding the image of the labs.

“You’re wrong,” Marcus told Tec aloud. “This is real. I know it is. This is my life.”

“This is the life of the version of you that lived it at the time,” Tec told him hastily, “but not of the real you, the present day Marcus who I entered the Mirrorline with. This is the nature of the problem, as I was saying back in the bar. The Mirrorline is playing out all of your memories simultaneously, complete with representations of your consciousness at the time. Normally that’s just a really cool fact that I can use to blow people’s minds, but today it’s a serious problem, because you’re lost in here without the barriers that separate your present self from these other versions of you. You’re all jumbled up with a million voices who will all swear that their respective memories are reality, and if you let them convince you that they’re right, then they’ll sweep you away again, and I honestly don’t know what will happen. But if you can clear your mind, and concentrate on the version of yourself for which these visions are all just, just.. dreams from the past.. then maybe we can fix this.”

I understand,
thought a Marcus, but it was a different, far younger one who spoke; “mister, I don’t know half what you’re saying to me, but I know real from dreams well enough, and this is real.”

“Is it?” Tec asked. “If so, then what
does
happen next? Look around..”

Marcus did. The schoolyard had gone. There were no people but himself and Tec, no props but the buggy that he was still diligently pedalling across a sky full of swirling, colourful clouds. Where had everything gone? Were there to be no repercussions? No ground to ride across? What was this?

“The memory ended after you got in the buggy, Marcus,” Tec told him gently. “This is what frames your experiences; wild Mirrorline energy, harnessed by me. There is no reality here.”

This is
wrong! screamed several Marcuses, horrified at the world around them.
This is not where we should be! Come back to us, come back into our lives,
they chanted, bludgeoning into submission the very small voice of a Marcus who knew that he had seen those clouds somewhere before.

Away,
he thought, and away he went, the colours whirling once more.

On and on and on, cartwheeling through the recesses of memory, the many minds of Marcus invited him into their homes, welcomed him to a recollection of days gone by. With a hop, skip and a flying leap he hurtled through his school days, the days his parents had forever insisted would be the best of his life, and tried not to wince at the painful memories. Oh, some of them were fine; he chuckled at the image of himself wearing a colander on his head, and his teacher’s exasperated insistence that it really wasn’t a stylish hat, and rolled his eyes at the sheer excitement he felt at finally being the one who had been on holiday and bought back sweets to share with the class. But for every one of those there was an instance where social inability or some sick perversion of circumstance left a nasty taste in his mouth; how could his teacher not have seen that the more obnoxious personalities at his table had been the ones defacing the insects and blaming it on him? His weak cries of outrage seemed all the more feeble and insufficient relived a second time over. How could he have ever thought it was cool to follow the girl he had a foolish crush on around until she started to get creeped out? Surely he had never been such an idiot… and yet here was solid, undeniable proof that he had.

He turned to his home life for solace, and found little. Throughout his entire life he struggled with how his family felt about him, always feeling like his parents valued his brother and sister far more than they did he, but never daring to voice such a complaint for fear that they’d pull out their facilitating voices and gently convince him that he was overreacting, and that of course they loved him.

I never did,
thought a Marcus from later,
and so I never knew. But I’m sure I was right.

Distant parents were hard to love back, and that was how Marcus found himself once again at the occasion of his father’s wake. The news had rather deflated his plans for his eighteenth birthday celebrations the week before, and he’d found himself shipped home from college, sitting numbly through a funeral, unable to decide if he was in shock or just didn’t care, and genuinely worried that he felt like he was leaning towards the latter. Struggling with that had left him almost catatonic at the wake, until a pair of hazel eyes had jolted him back into reality..

“So, blonde hair. What do you think?”

Marcus shrugged.

“That’s it?” Alice asked, eyeing him. “You’ve no input?”

“I was reading,” Marcus said, indicating his book.

“Yeah you were,” Alice said. “That’s all you ever seem to do. Sit and do things and don’t interact with me. And when you do, you don’t have anything to say. When did you last ask me how I was?”

Marcus snapped his book shut and met her eyes. “How are you?” he asked.

Alice made a noise of disgust, and left the room. A moment passed, and she reappeared briefly, pausing the doorway. She was wearing her jacket. Marcus ignored her until she left.

How did it come to that?
asked a Marcus of a different time, somewhere in the vortex.
For five years we lived and loved together. We taught each other how emotional relationships worked. I was sure that I’d marry her, that we’d spend our lives together.. and look how that turned out.

There is no joy to this,
said a Marcus who knew that there was a place called the Mirrorworld, and had seen it with his own eyes. His voice was louder than before, raised enough to cut through the muted buzzing of a million memories.

It is what it is,
Marcus thought, reopening his book.
My anger is fully justified.

Forget your anger,
Marcus roared.
You shouldn’t have let her leave!

But it was too late, because the Marcus of two weeks later knew how it ended. Alice was gone, and with her went the only human connection he’d ever had any faith in. A distant mother, more preoccupied with her favourite progeny. A brother and sister with whom he had little more than passing disdain. Friendships that had grown out of his childhood, requiring a minimum of attention and providing a minimum of social satisfaction. It was at this point that Marcus began to think that maybe something was wrong. So he did what he’d always heard one should do in times of personal crisis: he went to the Far East, to find himself. That handy inheritance that he’d been planning to put towards the wedding.. well, it could be useful in a different way, perhaps.
I’ll find out,
he thought to himself with satisfaction as he boarded his first plane.
I’ll soon figure it all out.

“What did you do today?” asked the girl from the bunk across the way.

“I went to the zoo,” Marcus told her blandly. “And then this evening I wandered down to the square, had a couple of beers and lost some games of pool.”