Mirrors

Hi there. It's me again. You might remember me from my story Claire. Or you might not. Doesn't really matter except if you want a bit of a backstory about me and my company. Btw, none of us has yet to respond that... thing in the Faraday cage.

But you guys aren't here to hear about old stories now are you? You're here to hear about mirrors! The bane of almost any human existence. Even if they're just reflecting coherent light back at you we still write stories, filming movies and making video games revolving almost solely about mirrors. But have you ever wondered why? Well me neither. Which brings me to last Saturdays discussion I had with an old friend and colleague of mine. Well, it was more of a long sided monologue from his side.

It all started in a bar. Like most shady stories do. Like I said, he was a colleague of mine, working in the physics department at the same company. Head of department really, but it's not that relevant. What's relevant is how this "discussion" came about.

So I had been waiting in the bar for about an hour before he finally showed up. Not that it was unusual in and by itself, he was a physicist after all. They're better known for their cleverness than their punctuality. Still, I haven't seen the guy in about a month so... yeah.

Anyways, when he finally showed up he looked disheveled. Like he hadn't changed his shirt in days, his beard was grown, and his hair was undone. The guy also looked like he lost something like twenty pounds since I last saw him. Since I had packed on a few pounds myself over the years, I was about to ask him what his secret was as soon as he sat down. But before I spoke he pre-empted me.

"Barkeep. A mug and a cheap whiskey please. Leave the bottle" He said looking straight at the barkeep. He put down his credit card on the counter and said "No ice. A black mug if you have one". Quite flabbergasted by his behavior I said "Well, hello to you too" in a sarcastic tone. "Sorry" he solemnly responded. "It's been a rough month"

I barely had to say "It's ok mate, so wha..." before he began to speak again. "They want us to observe them. They fucking want us to see them."

I'm getting more and more confused by the second, and being three beers in didn't really help my thinking process, so I flat out said "Alright mate, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Talk some god damn sense dammit!" thinking that he's talking about some reverse stalker or something.

That's when he laid it all on me. Apparently they had come across a phenomenon as were random background radiation could sometimes hit the same electron as regular light at the same time, resulting in a different light output. So of course, scientist as they are, they had scrounged up the shiniest mirror they could find and a really strong laser.

"Lasers and mirrors, I picked the wrong profession" I though to myself while continuing to listen to his story. And at first the result was to be expected. Since the light going out was constant, and background radiation is random noise, their... optic meters(?) picked up random variations of the light. This went on for a week, burning tax payers money, until something unexpected happened.

They started to get repetitions. Small ones at first. Kinda like getting red five times in a row on a roulette table. So they added more lasers to get more data. And the more they observed the less random these occurrences became. So now, like a hundred lasers in total, all being measured, started to show the same two colors in different sequences, over and over again.

"What? That's bloody impossible" Even I knew that the chances of that would be like winning every lottery while being struck by every single lightning bolt ever.  Really fucking improbable is what I'm saying.

"Yeah, I know" He said. "But that's just were it really started. We did something we shouldn't have. We translated it to binary and then over to letters. You know what it said?" He looked me with eyes so intense that I could see my self in them. "It said 'We can see you too now. Lets see each other more'"

After that, he told me, everyone in the "laser" team had started to see things. At first it was just something in the peripheral while looking in the mirror. But the more they saw them the more they started to look like creatures. Humans and... other things. And it wasn't just in the mirrors either. It graduated to anything shiny, and then later, to anything that reflects light relatively well.

The last thing he told me that night in that bar was "I can even see them in your eyes"

So what to take from this? Did he just finally crash or is there something out there trying to get our attention? I can't really be sure. All I know is that I don't look too long into the bathroom mirror anymore.