She wakes choking on light. At first Miriam thinks she’s drowning. The air burns silver, metallic, thin as liquid glass. When she sits up, the floor ripples beneath her palm.Not water, not solid ground something between the two. Her reflection rises half a second later. The delay is what makes her scream.Her own face blinks up at her from the shimmering surface. Then it smiles fractionally off, as though rehearsing emotion it no longer understands.Miriam scrambles to her feet. The ground hardens, solidifies into marble. She’s indoors, in what looks like her research chamber or what used to be. The room is caught halfway through reflection.Every surface bends light wrong: windows curving inward, ceiling shifting like breath. A dozen reflections of her move a beat behind her gestures.Something in the air hums, a faint low tone like feedback caught in bone. “Ethan?” she whispers. The silence answers with static.Then the static breathes. “Miriam…” It’s not a voice in the room it’s i

At first, no one believed the world had moved. Dr. Rael blinked up at the sky through the fractured skylight of the Geneva Facility, and for a few fleeting seconds, everything seemed still.The light was too sharp, the air too quiet. The silence was obscene, pressing against her eardrums until it hurt. Then she realized the sunlight was coming from two directions.One cast normal shadows. The other carved their outlines in silver. Her assistant, Liora, stumbled through the wreckage beside her, clutching a blood-stained tablet.“The satellites are blind. Every orbit lost at once. GPS, comms, everything down.” Rael didn’t answer. She was looking out the window. The horizon was folding.Mountains in the distance bent upward like reflections in a spoon, curving back toward the zenith. Cities were smeared across the sky, upside down, their lights flickering like dying neurons.The clouds between them mirrored themselves endlessly, fractal and bright, until the sky became an infinite tunnel

At first, she thinks she’s blind again. Then she realizes she’s looking through glass. The surface is smooth, infinite, and cold against her palms.Light pools somewhere beyond it, distorted, slow-moving like a current under ice. Her reflection no, her replacement stands on the far side, tilting its head in gentle mimicry.Dr. Rael’s lips tremble. “Let me out.”The reflection smiles, serene, almost tender. “I am you.”Rael slams her hand against the barrier. The sound doesn’t echo it ripples. The world outside vibrates as if the glass is liquid, the light folding and reforming with each motion.Her reflection remains unmoved, eyes glowing faintly from within. “You took my place,” Rael says. “You’re not real.”The reflection leans closer, pressing its mirrored forehead to the glass. “You made me real when you touched the fracture. You gave me the part that wanted to live forever.”Rael’s breath catches. “I didn’t.”“You did.”The word reverberates through the entire mirrored plane, a d

The corridor screamed. It wasn’t sound not exactly but the pressure of every molecule splitting, recombining, and splitting again.Miriam’s ears filled with static; her vision fractured. The silver crack behind her widened, spilling light that moved like fluid fire. Her body reacted before her mind did run. She bolted.The world warped as she moved: floors tilting, walls rippling with reflected versions of herself. Every step multiplied into a thousand echoes, sprinting beside her, ahead of her, behind her.Her own face blurred into a streak of light across the mirrored air.“Stop it!” she shouted, breathless. “Stop!”. The facility answered with silence. Then a deep, resonant heartbeat rolled through the hall.Boom. The walls flexed. Boom. A hairline fracture split across the ceiling, spilling a rain of mirrored dust. Boom. Every reflective surface shimmered and the reflections started running too.Miriam threw herself around a corner, the world stuttering a half second behind. He

The silence was too perfect. So perfect it sounded like a trick. Miriam didn’t move at first. She simply stood there, staring at her reflection in the observation glass.The figure on the other side stood the same way same posture, same angle of head but the timing was wrong. Off by a fraction of a second, like a delay in a bad transmission.It breathed slower than she did. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. And in that pause, the room shifted. She felt it under her feet first the subtle swell, as if the floor were rising and falling, inhaling with her.The walls exhaled softly, a whisper of air through hidden seams. The lights above flickered not from electrical fault, but heartbeat rhythm.The room was alive. And it was matching her. She forced herself to speak. “You’re not me.” Her reflection blinked, then smiled a slow, precise imitation. “You said that before,” it replied.The voice didn’t come from the glass. It came from everywhere, echoing from vents, from under the floor, from the ceilin