April 17, 2052, was a Wednesday.
Fay Lind had always had a mild phobia of mirrors. She should have thought twice about taking a part in this godawful horror flick. The Fairest, she thought. What a fucking joke.
There’d been that time when she was what, ten? Their only bathroom, down the hall from her tiny bedroom, hadn’t had a vent or a heater, so the big mirror across from the shower always fogged up, and the rippled glass shower door played with the glow from the bathroom ceiling light. It couldn’t have been the first time it had happened, but it was the first time she’d noticed. Young Fay pissed herself right there in the shower when she saw the optical illusion through the shower door.
Her blurred, shadowy reflection had stared back at her, its eyes gleaming with the dead blue of false light.
Every time they’d practiced for today’s scene, the one where her character would see a monstrous reflection of herself, Fay would imagine those eyes from her childhood memories. And every night for the past week, she’d woken up gasping in terror as a shadow with dead, gleaming eyes climbed out of the bathroom mirror she hadn’t seen in twenty-some waking years.
But today was the scene, and she didn’t care how many times the director asked her to do it again, but by God, if he wanted any reshoots, he could take a spoon and dig them out of his ass.
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When she drove onto the set backlot, the sun had yet to crest the horizon, though the pink sky above the hills of their rural Connecticut location helped brush away the last wisps of the night. Jesus, let’s get this over with. All downhill from here.
Fay took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then exhaled long and slow. Then she got out of her car.
“Li?” she called when she found the makeup trailer empty. She flipped the lights on inside, though one glance at the bulbs glaring around the mirror made her wish she hadn’t.
There wasn’t enough coffee in the world for those lights.
Something banged a few yards away, making Fay jump, but it was just the crude plastic door to one of the portable toilets. Li strolled up to her, scrubbing his hands with a few sanitizing wipes. The sharp odor made her want to sneeze, but she knew she’d be smelling it all day anyway, what with the latest bug going around.
“Ready for your fright face?” Li asked goodnaturedly, and Fay smiled. The result might be scary enough, but watching the layers go on bit by bit was always fascinating. Even though she could never meet her reflection’s eyes.
The early morning air was still cool, but she noticed that Li was sweating. He didn’t look great, she thought, and hoped it was nothing. Li had a dangerous allergy to vaccines, so everyone on the shoot had made sure to get boosted. But you never knew these days. The news said the latest strain was a bad one.
End of days, Fay caught herself thinking. We killed ourselves when we let the permafrost melt.
Li stumbled on the low step into the trailer and cursed.
Following him inside, Fay didn’t realize she’d touched the same spot on the door jamb that Li had—but her hand came away sticky with something that could have been sweat, in the same way that a house fire could be called warm. She suppressed a shudder, surreptitiously wiping the sticky moisture on the back of her jeans.
Li was over at the sink now, washing his hands again, thank God, scrubbing again with sanitizer. Fay heard him curse but thought nothing of it at first. Taking her seat in the makeup chair, she stared in the mirror as Li’s reflected arms began to show blisters erupting from under his skin.
She pulled her phone out, barely looking at its screen as she tried to call emergency services.
“I—oh, shit.” He sounded near tears. “Fay, I need help. Oh, God, please—”
The chair tipped over as Fay spun around and sprawled on her ass, her phone spinning out of her hand, the number undialed.
She had always thought the horror movies where everyone tripped over everything were the least realistic of them, but now she couldn’t even get her feet under her as she slipped on a power cord, scrambled over a wastebasket, heard herself screaming as she saw Li, his skin—Oh, dear fucking Christ!—his skin was melting, muscles dripping blood, and then his hand, bones showing, reached toward her, and she couldn’t move.
Time slowed, stopped.
There was only that ghastly hand and the strange, brief silences beneath his retching moans, beneath her cries. Part of her mind felt detached, waiting, watching in emotionless calm as the dripping bones of Li’s hand touched her arm.
Time started up again.
Fay felt herself rise. She wasn’t even shaking anymore. She felt surprised at her ability to be calm now.
She took a sanitizing cloth from the dispenser by the sink and wiped Li‘s blood off her hands before picking the phone up off the floor.
She sat down in front of the mirror.
Fay’s last thoughts were of how strange it was that she wasn’t seeing her childhood mirror-monster. Instead, it was her own face, her own eyes, familiar as waking up in the morning, but it was no longer herself looking back.
Something else held the phone; something else dialed emergency services.
“Yes,” the thing that wore Fay Lind said, giving the address. “I need an ambulance. Please hurry. Something terrible has happened.”
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Slowly, subtly, it passed from one person to another, always careful to disguise itself as one illness or another. It ate the memories of the bodies it wore as it traveled, learning, always looking for the next opportunity.
It could be your mother. It could be your son.
There would be a gradual weakening, something not quite right. It might be hair falling out or unlooked-for wrinkles on a teenaged face. Always, there would be a need for solitude, an aversion to being touched.
You would wonder and worry, of course.
And one day as you looked at them, there would be the thought that it was someone else, some other thing, looking back behind eyes you no longer recognized, despite having known those eyes forever.
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Then the thing would smile, would touch your cheek or take your hand, and your helpless mind would watch as you became the thing you did not recognize.
Watch as the one you loved fell to the floor, their skin bubbling and melting.
Watch as your hands took your keys.
Then watch nothing else, as you sank into your memories, as your memories became its food.
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It took years for anyone to notice. People called them crackpots, conspiracy theorists. Only the worst of the fringe sites even mentioned it among all the other things the government didn’t want you to know. Police officers who took it seriously found themselves suspended; detectives who mentioned it were sent off for psych evaluations.
Eventually, finally, a task force was formed. Then disbanded for lack of evidence. Formed again as the grisly deaths or mysterious disappearances continued, always somehow connected to the previous one.
A college student would go missing, then their best friend would be found gruesomely dead, then the friend’s father would seem to drop off the map on a business trip…
A year or more later, someone would report meeting the vanished man in another state—but that someone would soon grow ill themselves or disappear.
It moved, it hid, a mythical serial killer with no weapon. Not even a suspect to arrest. Authorities traced it back through the past and could not find a firm beginning. They did find a halfway famous victim, though—a B-list actress who, a few short months after calling in an emergency, had died the very same way. Her husband had subsequently gone missing, and the chain went on from there.
They began to call it the Fay Lind phenomenon.
And then they simply called it the faylind.
It wasn’t a disease or a serial killer. There were no cattle mutilations, either, and no crop circles.
But it was a harbinger.
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July 20, 2153, was a Friday.
At 3:07 pm in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a DARPA physicist entered a sequence of instructions into the supercomputer controlling a phase-lock engine. That engine, in turn, controlled a prototype particle collider.
The phase-locks cycled on. Virtual particles danced in spirals and vanished again. Danced and vanished. Danced—
—and did not vanish.
Someone else said, “Oh, shi—”
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In an elsewise and otherwhen place, a creature who could have given both Diogenes and Plato an existential crisis placed a bead into a hollowed out scale on the blackened shell of a dead egg. It sang several notes, the rustling voices of the tree-like beings around it echoing the song.
The bead vanished.
The dead egg cracked.
Across two worlds, a cataclysm began.
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To most people on Earth, the end looked like this:
You are waiting for a taxi, perhaps, or waiting for your class to end. You’re standing on a subway platform, or ordering a burger. Maybe you’re cleaning the grout around the shower, cursing that one spasming muscle in your back.
If you’re outside—and live to tell the tale—you see the sky disappear, though you’ll never be able to describe what took its place. Not without sounding insane, even to other people who also survived the end of the world.
If you’re inside and survive what comes after, you’ll never be able to believe what others swear to have seen out there. But then, of course, you’d never have believed any of this, anyway.
There’s something that might sound like a shout, but only if volcanoes could shout. It’s the unbearable noise of an outraged planet preparing to shake life off its surface like a dog shakes off fleas. The air everywhere is wracked by a sonic boom of displacement as the screaming planet does something planets aren’t meant to do, as an elsewise and otherwhen world abruptly replaces the Earth’s molten core, expands outwards, and becomes a here and now global catastrophe.
If you don’t survive, it’s because millions of tons of earth that were under your feet are now on top of you. Or because your altitude has undergone a critically rapid shift. Maybe one of the hundreds of flash-cyclones, each spawning dozens of tornadoes, sucks you away (and your little dog, too). Most likely, you die before you can even reach for your phone, let alone -dial any emergency numbers.
It’s probably for the best. You could have been one of those poor bastards in a plane, instead.
If you’re lucky—or unlucky—enough to be an astronaut in low Earth orbit, you may see long walls of sudden fire webbing the continents as all the tectonic faults split at exactly the same time, giant plumes of lava shooting into the air well over the speed of sound to land, moments or minutes or hours later, catastrophically. Many never land, the brutal force of an alien atmosphere exploding from the depths causing too much of the planetary surface to simply shrug helplessly into nonexistence.
If you were an astronaut, your scant remains—and whatever’s left of the flimsy craft that once kept you breathing—are now scattered across the surface of a world that impossibly crashed its engorged surface into you.
If you live past the initial crisis, though, it’s because you’re lucky enough to happen to be in a particularly stable location on one of the continents. There’s very little overall chance of making it past the next few days, but pockets of life do survive here and there. After a few days of utter chaos—firestorms, tsunamis, hypercanes—you may find yourself still buried beneath rubble, only to find huge, scaled hands (or fur-covered talons, or wing-claws) delicately lifting you to safety in a world that’s no longer your own.
The sky has come back, but it’s no longer your sky.
On the other hand, if you happen to be a rover scuttling across the rusty surface of a nearby world, you might be startled—if rovers could be startled—to find the sky blinking off like a momentarily doused lightbulb. Whatever might be out there, your simple electronic brain can’t see it. When the sky returns, the sun is smaller and in the wrong place. The stars, when they come back out, look ever so slightly askew. But the Earth, if you have a telescope to see it, is now startlingly large. Your two oblong moons float now, along with your rusty little world, among the eddies of an only slightly perturbed asteroid belt. Any navigation equipment you might have that uses star positioning is now useless.
Good luck phoning home, too.
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To many people on Inur, the end looked like this:
The sky blinks off, replaced momentarily by the incomprehensible movement of something vast and terrible, and a sense of dread fills you. You’ve heard myths about that awful sky, about what’s happening, though you probably never believed them. You look for anything that might save you, but it’s already too late. The air shrieks as it’s ripped open by hundreds of miles of rapidly falling molten rock—the underside of a fragmentary continent abruptly residing where you and your entire kinship nation once did.
If you live in the mountains, you instinctively dive to the ground, hoping you can make it before the air burst shreds your wings. If you manage to make it to a safe cave or crevice, that may not save you, as tons of rock and ice avalanche down. If you’re lucky enough to cling precariously to a peak, though, you’ll probably survive.
Probably.
If you live in a forest, the trees’ singing may have warned you in time to seek shelter in the cathedral and pray the interwoven branches will save you. If you’re young and small enough, you may even be able to tumble along with the insanity of the winds and have a chance for a tale to pass on that may eventually become only a long-ago myth.
If you live in the ocean, you know to dive as deep as you can, staying there as long as possible. For the things that roam the lightless depths, it’s an orgy of feasting; for you, it’s a better chance than you’d have in shallower waters. After all, your feast will come later, when you meet new prey that has never encountered your kind before.
If you’re far enough belowground to miss the warnings of the sky and winds, you may survive the earthquakes that will trouble the world for centuries to come. You sift blindly through the ruined soils of civilizations lost in forgotten histories older than the oldest myths. Many-legged and many-minded, you search for the minerals and poisons that long-dead creatures became.
But if you do survive the next few days, you know from the stories what comes next.
If, on the other hand, you live in the deepest depths, mouthlessly devouring the heaviest elements for what might loosely be termed sustenance, you and your kind are the only reason the world has become so large without collapsing under its own gravity.
You may have even been there, eons ago, when the world was still small.