The Face in the Mirror

Rough hands pull.

Pure white rooms close in.

The judge, wearing a black robe, slams the gavel down. A sound like a lock clicking.

* * *

You awake.

Sweat drips down your face, falling lightly on the white pillows. For a second you don't know where you are. Then it comes back.

Tau 32. Only a year ago it would have been called "Pleasure Tau." Considered one of the triad of Pleasure Planets it was home to the wealthy. That is until it withdrew from galactic civilization. A new government took over and plunges the planet into a sullen isolation, trapping those inside and denting the economy greatly. No ships had entered or left the planet in over a year.

A wealthy landowner you had your cake and ate it too. Power and wealth, it was all yours, until the Tau government took over, now you have neither. Pan Galactic Credits or PaGals were not an accepted currency on an "independent world." Luckily they had let you keep your property, unwilling to anger a member of one of the largest classes on the planet.

The dreams.... They had been going on for as long as you can remember. Vague scenes of courtrooms and operating tables have been infecting your sleep for what seems like forever, the only central theme, one oddly familiar face. A fear of doctors and physiologists has so far prevented you from getting anything but sleep medication. The dreams penetrate your mind anyway.

Pulling the woven sheet off you swing your legs off the bed. Slippers are unneeded, for the computer built into the house adjusts the temperature automatically. Hoping to wash away the dreams you stumble forward into the bathroom. The white tiles redden slightly as they heat. As you cup your hands beneath the spout water flows down into your hands. The water is, as is typical on Tau, non-reflective, some odd combination of minerals give it a perpetually muddy look that took you years to get used to. The feeling and taste of the water is grainy. A feeling that you were at one time surprised to find quite pleasurable. You look up into the mirror, an odd gray rectangle whose color is oddly off. You can only vaguely remember the dealer whom you purchased it from, back when they were so popular, everyone you know has one like it.

A metal arm extends from the side of the wall, holding a cup with toiletries inside. As you reach towards it you accidentally knock the arm towards the mirror. It slams against mirror and clangs as it bounces back, leaving a small crack in the mirror. You barely notice the crack. When the cup hit the mirror, for a second, the mirror flickered oddly and, for the smallest moment, instead of yourself, you saw the face in your dreams.

* * *

A leering face, knife in hand.
Blood dripping as shock penetrates.

* * *

The waking dream hits you with the force of a sledgehammer. You stagger back, falling against the wall and sliding down to the floor. With the hard floor pressing up against you all that enters your mind is a question. What is happening here? Pushing yourself up off the floor you complete the daily morning rituals with a distinct sense of unease. For some reason your mind seams to be actively trying to make you forget the event, but you don't want to.

Leaving the house you go for a stroll down the wide green avenues of Cet, the capital city of Tau. Hopefully the bright light and fresh air will clear your mind. As you pass the oblique windows of the shops, your reflection nothing but a colored blur, you notice the cameras erected around the city. Though they never seemed to bother you before, it seams as if they are following you now. Is that one swiveling to catch you in its lens? You speed your pace, striding quickly through the white pavement and green grass of the city, heading towards the central hub of the small city. Colorful propaganda posters supporting the new isolationist government plaster the walls. As you walk by their eyes seem to be following you.

Paranoia.

You shake your head. Not paying attention to your surroundings you walk forward. A lurch, and then you fall; your foot caught in a crack in the sidewalk, the pristine surroundings taking a tilt as you slam your head on the side walk.

* * *

"Murder!"

"You are found guilty." A judge in black robes stares down from the podium at you. Serious faces stare out of the marble white jury box. "Your sentence is -"

A face leans over you. Behind it is a clinical white ceiling "This won't hurt a bit. After were done you won't even remember."

"You'll be able to start anew...."

...you won't even remember....

* * *

"Are you okay?" Nondescript faces peer at you. A man in a suit offers his hand to help you up. Gripping it you feel the calluses on his palm. When you pull yourself up his grey eyes peer into yours, searching for something.

"Fine" you reply, though you are anything but. Your own name temporarily escapes you. Instead an unfamiliar nomenclature floats through your head. Sitting down on the hard green park bench you wave off anymore attempts to help.

You close your eyes and attempt to cast your mind back. Could you be recalling some show? Your memory fails quickly, fading into nearly nothing after the last few months. Oddly enough you can clearly remember facts about a few things, how the government changed, how you arrived, your previous situation and a few others. When you attempt to cast your memory even farther back, or try to remember specifics, a sharp pain enters your head. You close your eyes, trying to overcome the pain and remember.


* * *

A bright white light prevents you from seeing anything. Colored lights begin to flash in a cycle around the main white light.

"Begin sequence."

* * *

The pain in your head becomes too much to bear, a white hot poker in your mind. You open your eyes to a dim scene. The sun has slowly begun to set. Though it seemed much shorter you must have been concentrating for hours.

You've missed both lunch and breakfast but you aren’t hungry. Walking slowly you move down the street moving from darkness to polls of light cast by street lights. Suddenly you stop a yellow-orange sign catches your attention.

"Painter's Corner: Paintings, Frames and Portraits." Though you’ve seen it before, it never caught your attention, until now.
You walk through the door, which opens automatically. A ding sounds as you cross the threshold. Surrounding you are many paintings, nearby is a wall covered with frames.

Behind the desk is the portrait artist, wearing a Centari-Silk black shirt and pair of darkly-tinted shades. You ask him to do your portrait and he agrees. The two of you sit down opposite from each other and he pulls out a light-brush.

You can barely see the painter's eyes, hidden behind the grey tinted glasses, but when you finally make them out you notice that their not actually meeting your eyes. In fact they don’t seem to be looking at you at all. Instead the impartial eyes of the artisan flicker back and forth between his canvas and a corner of the glasses. You wait another minute to see if the painter looks at you, but he doesn’t.

Grabbing the man’s collar, you snatch the tinted shades from his face. Pushing them on, you can feel the cold metal rims and ends digging into your head. Just as you suspected, on the bottom corner of the glasses is a picture of a face that, until this morning, you had no reason to suspect as being any but your own.

"Who is this?" You bear your teeth angrily, giving the words a slight hiss, and shake the man by his collar. "What’s going on? This picture in your glasses isn’t the real me is it?!"

For the first time you see the look of utter fear on his face, not a grimace of pain or aversion, but full fledged fear for his life. He whimpers slightly from the back of his throat.

* * *

He whimpers slightly from the back of his throat. A man is curled up on the side of a dark, black, ally, staring in total fear at you. Surprisingly though, the voice you hear the loudest is a laugh. In front of you, wearing clothes that look as if they should be burned is the man with the knife. He’s leering at you. Smiling in a way you’d never want to be smiled at. Your hand is on the hilt of the other man’s knife, which is plunged into a pedestrian’s stomach, red rapidly spreading from the wound and staining the blue suit. From anyone else’s point of view you stabbed the man who is slowly falling to the floor in front of you. From your own you tried to save him.

"He saw you do it." The grinning face chuckle, its owner gesturing to the witness curled up in the corner. "You’re the killer now, not I. That’s what you get for butting in."

As the man laughs you look down at your hands. They are covered in blood, slowly dripping off your fingertips, like viscous water, in a slow unreal motion and splattering loudly to the ground. When you look up all you see is his slowly fading evil grin which disappears into the night like the Cheshire cat.

* * *

"Murder," pronounces the judge. "This court finds you guilty of murder."

"No!!!!" You yell, falling to your knees, banging them against the cold, unyielding, wood floor

* * *

"I’m not guilty," You shout with all your might at the painter. Then, frightened at your own vehemence, you release your grip on the trembling painter who scuttles away on all fours, leaving his valuable light-brush on the floor behind him. "It wasn’t my fault! I was framed!"

* * *

"The defendant may very well have convinced himself of his version of the sequence of events," pontificates a physiologist, wearing a conservative grey suit and slacks, nervously straightening out his tie. He sets his hands down on the wooden wall with a slap that is made small by the giant courtroom. "Or, even more likely, he has had some expert memory reconstruction done. I have heard rumors about black clinics who specialize in this type of operation. There are signs of some sort of trauma to the memory. It could be from shock, or from something else."

"So," the lawyer walks around to face the physiologist, his hands in his own dark blue pockets, "you would you say that the defendants own memory, and therefore his testimony, could very well be unreliable?"

* * *

You shake the errant memory out of your head. "I’m innocent," you cry. "I know what happened!" Pushing away from the painter’s easel you rush towards the door. Its cold metal push bar yielding to your hand and releasing you to the street. Once outside you set off in the opposite direction of your home. The green grass and brown shop fronts blending to one long smear you realize with a start that there is nothing on this entire planet that naturally shows your reflection, only those odd gray mirrors. Could there be others? An entire planet of blank minds and lost memories? A cold shiver runs down your spine. You have to get off world! There must be some way.

You bump into a man who is pulling some sort of weapon on you. In a confused motion you grab it out of his hand and push him away, holding the chrome stun gun in your hand as you run, its rubber grip surprisingly warm.

* * *

The knife’s grip is surprisingly warm in your hand as you stick the blade in the pedestrian’s chest and grin.

* * *

No! You push faster, farther forward. It can’t be, it is only a nightmare from too much of the trial. A proposal of the lawyers not an action in reality. You throw the stun gun away, afraid of it.

* * *

That was never how it happened! You think as your own lawyer gets up to cross-examine the witness. You can remember the moment in all it’s vividness. You shock and fright. You remember throwing the knife away next to the body and running in pure fear. The blood was on your hands but it was not your fault!

* * *

There is a carefully guarded spaceport only half a mile away, chances are nothing there will work since it hasn’t been used since the… You realize that the isolationist government could only be a convenient lie, the space port must be in use! You push forward, the wind created by your movement pushing the soft cloth of your clothing against your skin, rubbing gently. The spaceport is just barely in sight when you hear voices behind you. Rough voices are shouting stop and warning you, but their voices stream away with the wind and you push forward ever faster.

* * *

The police break the door of your home open while you are franticly trying to brush the crusted blood off your hands and the fear out of your mind. "It wasn’t me!" you shout. You were scared, you shouldn’t have ran but the hard thump of your frightened heart pulled you away.

* * *

You can just make out the frightened faces of the guards in front of the space port when a heavy man jumps on your back. Your knees buckle and you fall to the smooth floor screaming. Your throat is sore and your eyes burn from the wind. Something cold and metal comes up against your neck and your distance vision blurs even more. You try and shout. You’d rather take death then this, anything! But no, a doctor in a white smock kneels in front of you and you can only barely see him, then he leans in and you can see your reflection, your real reflection, in his glasses.

* * *

Your face stares out of the bright mirror. Behind you, you can see the smile of family and friends as they present the presents to you.

* * *

He reaches out his hand, he’s going to erase your memories again and there’s nothing you can do to convince him otherwise.

* * *

Rough hands pull.

Pure white rooms close in.