Scene 1. Reflection.

Lilly stands before the full-height dressing mirror, regarding the reflection of her imposing form, in thin nightclothes. Feeling vain, she smiles broadly and stretches her strong, full-figure, touching horns projecting from the thin silver mane of her head. She chants a spell, a question, into her reflection that appears as an evil queen from a fairy tale.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?

“It’s a rhetorical question, please don’t answer… Although I am ‘silver’.”

She dons a long-sleeved blouse and khaki pants of thick fire-proof material, her uniform for work as a laboratory assistant, and fabrication welder, for her employer, The Accelerator. She raises her forelimbs and turns to check herself again in the mirror.

These tight clothes make me look a lot cuter in the mirror than I am in real life. These clothes have become too uncomfortable for work. I either need to lose weight or buy new clothes. I’ll buy new clothes, diets are depressing.

Lilly lowers her forelimbs and stares deep into the mirror in serious contemplation.

The scientists at work mumble gibberish, about parallel worlds, parallel universes, the Multiverse, other dimensions, strings and things. They talk is if there is ‘a mirror world’ of ours out there, somewhere. With a nice, thin, cute version of me, perhaps?

If so, can I visit ‘the mirror world’ and return, like ‘Alice’, or is it a one-way trip?

Do mirrors eat people?

I love the nerds at The Accelerator. The nuttier they are, the more adorable. I can sit and listen to their nonsensical ramblings for hours. I wonder if anyone would be missed if I kidnapped…

She shakes her head to terminate her predatory fantasy. Then she paraphrases the line from before.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, throw me the farthest away from them all…”

Lilly hears or imagines a voice from her reflection in the mirror.

“Be careful what you wish for, my dear.”

Lilly frowns as she views her bedroom in the background, with discarded junk, disassembled dolls, vacuum cleaners, relays, and solenoids. Soldering irons stand at attention on her desk pushed against the far wall of her bedroom. The desk piled high with mechanical projects in process.

Once a guy sees how I live, I never hear from him again. I guess I will never win ‘homemaker of the year’. Plus, I am too hyper. I bounce around and scare everyone, although they say they like the ‘athletic type’. What they actually want is a weak, passive type, and that type is so, ‘not me’.

Lilly shakes her head as she walks from the hall and into the living room, cluttered with newspapers and books. Against the living room walls are her ‘sculptures’ standing tall on the floor, menacing contraptions of random pieces of metal that come to dancing and clattering life when plugged in. She moves to one and removes a few cobwebs. Then she collects her pack and walks out the front door.

I had better be on my way, or I will miss my buss.

Scene 2. Conveyance.

Lilly walks down the stairs from her apartment to the sidewalk. The city buss stop is not far from her apartment, but she sprints to it anyway, out of habit, with her usual violent motion. She startles the waiting passengers with her galloping approach.

Relax, I won’t explode… Maybe…

The passengers board the buss. Lilly enters last, showing her pass to the driver, then moves to the lone seat in the back the other passengers have always reserved for her. Lilly shuffles through her bag and pulls out a writing pad with her notes on her unfinished projects and new assignments for the day.

My bosses come up with things for me to do a lot faster than I can do them. Oh well, the time passes faster when I am busy.

The buss makes several stops in town before turning off the main street down a country road and out of the city.

I like the view from out here. I can see how big and important The Accelerator is to the city and the world. My contribution may be tiny, but I think it is important.

Lilly gazes out at the several stories of the large main building, with a long green and white wall out from each side, the actual nuclear particle accelerator tube device runs its length. The Nuclear Particle Accelerator is managed by The University. It was built using public funds as directed by politicians, fearing the country being overtaken by adversaries in scientific technology applicable to weapons. The Accelerator ‘accelerates’ atoms or subatomic particles to nearly the speed of light, attaining very high kinetic energy, down the long evacuated tube to collide with a target, creating exotic subatomic particles for research.

Lilly starts to bounce up and down in her seat, excited about her day’s work.

I wonder if others love their jobs as much as I love mine. No wonder no one wants to sit next to me.

Lilly and the remaining passengers exit the buss at The Accelerator, the last stop on the route. Lilly files to the guard checkpoint in the lobby of the main building, pulling her badge out of her pack and clipping it onto her blouse pocket. She then looks down to see her badge lying face up on her ample chest and reflects.

Maybe I should clip my badge to my neck choker, so that others can read it.

Scene 3. Cube-Farm.

Lilly smiles at the guard as she motions to butt the handle of the turnstile with her hip to enter.

That guard always seems to be embarrassed about something when he sees me. Maybe he can’t read my badge.

Lilly pulls her blouse down in front to present her badge forward toward him. His eyes widen as he covers his red face.

Scaredy-cat! Oh well, I would rather not date a guard, anyway. These pups are cops on the other days.

Lilly exits the crowded elevator into the third floor hall, files out to the door to the large room that houses the cube-farm. She walks to her cubicle near the center of the room as she notes the other office workers turning to avoid passing next to her. She is used to it.

Good! I hate gossiping and socializing with these dumbbells.

She enters her small cubicle and places her bag on a side table, and then sits down on the small, wheeled office chair that overfills with Lilly and complains with squeaks and groans.

Damn those trolls that keep switching my chair.

She ignores the chair for now and regards her desk, it is piled with the usual stack of reminders from the overly friendly bovine office secretary about upcoming office birthdays.

Oh look, a request from Danny! He wants me to fabricate this odd-looking apparatus.

Oh Danny, you are my favorite nerd, anything for you. You are so cute and so smart! A pity that you are married, and ‘off the deep end’ mentally.

But what is this damned thing? And what is if for?

Lilly looks around her cubicle for anything else out loose, unlocks her desk and secures her pack in a drawer. She then locks her desk again.

The last thing I need is for the office snoops to read my journal, their opinion of me is already low enough as it is. I am so glad I don’t have to do much work in this cell, I would go even crazier than I already am.

Lilly strides out of her cubicle, out of the cube-farm office, and down the hall to the main elevator.

Let’s see what the lab pups have cooked up for me today.

Scene 4. Laboratory.

Lilly exits the elevator on the main floor and walks to a double doorway on one side. She again notes the red light above the door. This device rotates a bright red light, sounds a loud horn, and powerful solenoids lock the doors, as it is dangerous to be in the hallway when The Accelerator is in operation. She stops to look down the dark and seeming endless tunnel of The Accelerator, a featureless green hallway with the blue two-meter diameter tube suspended from the ceiling.

I hope they will give me enough time to get out of the hall. I am glad this thing doesn’t run frequently, and they do post a schedule of operation.

The Accelerator tube extends all the way from the far end of the far side hallway, through the main building, through this hallway and ending at the target instruments located at the far end. She begins her long trek down the hallway before breaking into her usual sprint.

I should buy roller skates to transverse these long hallways.

At last, the monotony of the hallway is broken by a series of metal cubes clustered around the tube. The top cube has a plate reading “Magnet No. 3”. Doorways lead off from each side of the hall. Lilly presses the lever to enter the door on the left side, stenciled “Laboratory No. 5” and enters a large laboratory room with a vaulted ceiling. Around the room, various apparatus are standing on the floor or on tables, all lined up in and around the open space. Flat folding tables line the walls on the sides with various diagnostic instruments, with other doors leading to other rooms. At the front is the office desk of the laboratory manager. Hanging from the front of this desk is a card with the manager’s title, ‘Magnet Manager’.

Five laboratory assistants are hunkered down before apparatus items under construction or here for repair. The assistants look up together as Lilly enters, drop their tools and crowd up to her side.

“Hello you guys, I love your enthusiastic greetings, but I am only five steps inside the lab. Let me get to my table at least.”

The chorus speaks in unison.

“My wife made too many of these, so, these are for you.”

And suddenly Lilly is holding a pile of neatly folded handkerchiefs of treats, she smiles at their wagging tails.

I would give you all hugs, but I am afraid that I would break all of your little necks. You know you are ruining my diet. Do you little doggies like me fat? Are you planning to eat me?

Lilly nods her head in appreciation as she speaks.

“Thank you, thank you, but know, we are all going to be very busy today, figuring out what the heck ‘this’ is.”

Lilly unrolls the memo with the requested apparatus sketch as the laboratory manager walks from his desk and over to her, scowling.

“I thought I told you to wear something more ‘appropriate’, If you are going to work in my lab?”

Lilly looks down at the floor with a coy expression, not ashamed of her figure in tight clothes.

“I am sorry, but these are my only fireproof and tough work clothes. I have to wear a leather apron today anyway, as I will be welding. My friend is taking me shopping tonight, so I’ll buy conservative work clothes, as you directed.”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I understand that it is a safety issue. You don’t want anyone to get distracted by me and accidentally weld themselves to an apparatus.

Liz is a good clothing and fashion adviser, much better than I, she’ll find something for me that looks good.

I could use a tennis workout with her too.

Scene 5. Fabrication.

The lab assistants crowd against Lilly leaning over a drafting board, laying out the sketches from Danny for their review.

These pups can’t seem to get enough of me, so different from the folks on the buss.

After consulting her fawning staff, Lilly walks to the door of a side room labeled, “Drafting Department”. This room has long rows of drafting tables and mechanical drawing machines. Hard at work from their stools, are the draftsmen, essential, as every component of The Great Accelerator, started life here in this room. Lilly holds up the sheaf of Danny’s sketches. Several draftsmen rise for a sheet. She then walks around the room, from draftsman to draftsman, attempting to answer their questions about the components for this new device. Eventually, they draw up all but a few of the components. The remainder, Lilly could not explain with enough detail to draw diagrams for their fabrication.

Okay, we can get some parts started at least. Now I have to find Danny for a better explanation of the rest of the parts.

Lilly stands before another side door labeled “Machine Shop – Eye Protection Required”. She rustles through her bag and dons her goggles as she enters the room. She ignores the wolf-whistles from the machinists as she walks in.

At least they appreciate me in here, although afraid of me when face to face. They are just sexist pigs from a distance, but there aren’t very many women working on the mechanics out here in the hinterland. I guess they are starved for female attention enough to think that I am cute.

One by one, Lilly drops off the fabrication drawings to the machinists standing out to the sides of their machines, to indicate their availability, or to get a better view of her. As she passes the mills and the lathes, she wiggles her digits and smiles, saving the welding work for herself.

I’ll be damned if I am going to pass out all the ‘fun’.

She pulls out several sheets of different metals from the stock shelves at the back of the room and carries the sheets to the metal shear and chops off several pieces, then bends a few of the pieces with the metal-bending brake.

To the side of the machine shop is the fire-door labeled “Welding – Protective Equipment Required”. One welding stall is always reserved for her as she is welding something almost every day, usually her ‘artwork’. She smiles at the small medallion hanging from the entrance of the stall, “Reserved for Lilly”. The workers in the other welding stalls are very busy, producing showers of flying sparks in blinding blue arc-light. Lilly opens a tall metal locker and removes her welding apron, hood, and gloves.

I want to fabricate these parts, and finish as many of the other parts as I can, to show to Danny today, as he may want to have some made differently. And flirt, too bad he is so oblivious,

at least he is not afraid of me.

Scene 6. Nerd.

Lilly hoists a bag of the smaller components, and walks from the welding stall back to the main hall and on to the facility cafeteria in the main building.

I prefer to look for Danny late in the day, as I always know where to find him, playing ‘Dungeons’ with his cohorts and fellow nerds in The Accelerator cafeteria. I hope he likes what we have fabricated so far.

Lilly walks into the spacious dining hall, large enough to hold ‘all hands’ meetings with the several hundred employees of The Accelerator. Long lunch tables are lined up across the expanse of the hall. Danny is seated at a small table with three other nerdy-looking male figures seated slumped over on each side, all facing a game-board open in the center of the table with small die-cast metal figures and a pair of dice.

Danny, resembling a large rat, looks up through is thick glasses, tilts his head. He struggles to speak as he lisps over his large, projecting, incisor teeth.

“Lilly! Squeak! Thank you. You brought me my ‘parts’. Let me see, I’m winning, so I can’t get up.”

Lilly smiles as she passes Danny the bag of components and drawings with his original sketches.

“That’s okay. I’ll leave these parts with you to review later, at your convenience, but I did not bring the larger parts, also I have questions about some of the parts that we could not fabricate. So, please let me know when you are ‘available’. Bah.”

Danny ignores Lilly’s flirting bleat, he frowns as he stares down at his beloved game-board.

“Sorry guys, I have to go now.”

Danny turns around in his seat and stands, his head only comes up to Lilly’s chest. Danny’s diction improves as he speaks slowly this time.

“Lilly, I have something to show you, in my laboratory.”

Lilly stares at Danny, resisting the urge to crush him against her like a bug, thinking.

Come up and see your etchings? Oh, you cutey.

Don’t you realize the mortal danger you are in when you are near me?

Scene 7. Lair.

Danny walks with Lilly over and into one of the small laboratories of the main building. In addition to research at The Accelerator, specialized physics research is also performed at the facilities. Danny is a ‘condensed matter’ physicist, specializing in, among other things, ‘super-fluids’ and ‘superconductivity’. He is an acknowledged superior intellect, and he is a senior researcher at The Accelerator. He was a boy-genius, achieving an advanced degree in physics at a young age. However, he is still teased for his odd behavior and his odd looks, spoken of as an ‘idiot savant’ behind his back. His parents manipulated him into an early arraigned marriage for sustenance, observation, and protection.

Lilly enters with Danny into his closely guarded personal laboratory for her first time and views its unique interior, not terribly surprised, knowing Danny. His laboratory does not resemble any other laboratory at The Accelerator, indeed, likely none other presently on the planet. All the apparatus was designed and built to his specifications; thus his laboratory appears as a forge or magic factory from some distant past or fantasy cave of legends. The apparatus has a dark, black, melted cast-iron appearance, with no new shiny flat surfaces, no sharp edges, no familiar knobs or switches, everything is controlled by simple levers and winches. A thick layer of dust contributes to the ancient atmosphere. No one, including the cleaning staff, is allowed entry without an escort.

Danny waxes, poetic.

“I do believe that I have found the answer posed in the earliest days of atomic physics, 'What happened to all the antimatter?' The answer is simple and is visible right here in this room. All the matter and energy of the earliest point at the beginning of the universe had to be in a state of superconductivity, with each wave and particle inexorably entangled, compressed into a new matter state, the state of ‘Singularity’, such as in the center of Black Holes. It had to be. The Mirror of entangled particles separated into their realities quite naturally and instantly were partitioned off into matter and anti-matter as the first universe diversion of the unfolding Multiverse. ‘Like begot like’, after all.”

Danny pauses his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, having lost his audience, Lilly.

“I am sorry that there isn’t a lot of light in here. I need the dark to see the images of ‘the others’.”

“Others? What others?”

“Watch.”

Danny closes the contacts of a large knife-switch with a lever mounted on the near wall, and the room darkens further still. Lilly hears a sloshing sound and shivers with a chill as the room fills with a roiling, cold mist around their ankles. Lilly looks up at Danny, only reflections from his thick glasses and buck teeth visible, his head barely above the mist. He raises his forelimbs, as if he has become a sorcerer of old, chanting an evil spell.

“Come to me, my children.”

The table between them has a smooth glass-like screen facing up from the top. The table screen suddenly flashes to life. Amorphous glowing cloud-like shapes of pastel colors fade in and out from visibility on the tabletop screen. Lilly stares at the image in fascination, despite the cold.

Lilly is watching the tabletop screen when suddenly it becomes reflective, a mirror reflecting the dim room light on the sorcerer’s dancing glasses.

“Is this screen actually a mirror of some kind?”

Lilly leans forward to examine her reflection in Danny’s alchemist mirror.

“Something is not right about our reflections, we are distorted in some weird way. Look, my horns are gone, and so is my nose. Is this a carnival mirror or a fun-house trick mirror of some sort?

Something is ‘out of whack’ with the screen image, our reflections appear to have features that resemble us, and yet much of what I see is not ‘us’? The figures on the screen, who are they?”

“Are you going to tell me what this is and what I am seeing?”

Scene 8. Entanglement.

Lilly notices that Danny’s face appears mostly the same as what she sees above the table and below in the screen’s faux reflection image. He still has his thick glasses and buck teeth reflecting the dim room light and a sly, evil sorcerer’s grin behind them.

“This isn’t just any mirror, this is ‘The Mirror’, a quantum-entangled thin-film surface device.”

“You know that my specialty is ‘superconductivity’. And that materials that achieve superconductivity do not present electrical resistance. My co-workers have ignored the significance of the ‘no resistance’ property of super-fluids and superconductors. How can any large solid object have no resistance, or no friction at all? It makes sense if this only occurs at the lowest temperatures possible, near absolute zero, where these effects were originally observed. The technological breakthrough was the discovery of materials that exhibit superconductivity at the relatively high temperature of boiling liquid nitrogen, thus allowing for the development of a host of practical applications.”

“This tabletop material becomes a superconducting film when it is cooled to a temperature low enough. For there to be no electrical resistance to an electron that is supposedly moving by the influence of electric or magnetic fields across each element of a super-conductive domain, the electron must ‘disappear’ from one side and then instantaneously ‘reappear’ at the far side of the entire domain. In this super-conducting film, there is no electrical resistance between each atom and all atoms in the film are now acting in unison, as a single atom, instantaneously. This film works much like a ruby crystal, producing a single wave of coherent red light, perfectly in step, each atom of chromium in the crystal is linked, quantum entangled with every other atom. There does not seem to be a limit on the distance for entanglement, as long as coherence is maintained. Large molecular clouds in the galaxy emit coherent microwave radiation, even though they are light-years from one side to the other and the molecules are not even in physical contact with each other, only linked to each other by electromagnetic energy. All the entangled elements are linked into a single element that functions across all the component elements, truly instantaneously and outside the laws of causality that is limited to cause and effect no faster than the speed of light.”

“In addition to being a superconductor, the film is also super reflective. This film is an active device and its material can exhibit quantum vibrations that are induced by varying external electric and magnetic fields. Because the material is super-conductive, energy entering into it from the surface has nowhere to go but into another dimension, into the ‘branes’ of the Multiverse. Somewhere in the Multiverse, alternate versions of you and I are doing this demonstration, and this device, The Mirror, is connected to the ‘us’ there in that universe, by quantum entanglement. The connection can be to many others, maybe an infinite number of Universes in the Multiverse.”

“However, we can only connect to worlds that are similar enough to ours that they are performing this experiment, also possibly in the past or in the future, as well as the present.”

“Watch as I change ‘the channel’ to see other alternate worlds. My wand has a small magnet at the tip.

”Danny waves the wand over the screen and the image flashes. The figures in the faux reflection are different from before, the new figures are casting silhouettes with multiple forelimbs like insects. Wiggling the magnet again and the figures have long antlers sprouting from their heads, and wiggling the wand once more, and the figures have large triangular ears. Danny progresses through many channels that display ever more comical images of themselves. The last image with anything like a reflection of their figures in their room is a display of two amorphous blobs, wiggling tentacles and multiple eyes flowing down their sides. Continuing on, the channels are only blank screens of different colors, appearing as a solid surface of the desktop.

Danny chuckles and continues to expound, with his evil smile, and starts through The Mirror’s channels again.

“The channels naturally arrange themselves in the order of signal strength and exhibit a behavior similar to ‘signal capture’ with our radio receivers. Signal capture is an effect exhibited by electromagnetic wave receivers, where the strongest or most finely tuned radio station is the only one received, with no interference from the weaker signal strength of the other channels or any other interference. Watch as I select the progressively weaker channels, and watch as these channels display ‘reflections’ that are progressively less and less similar to an actual mirror reflection of our world. Eventually, The Mirror cannot form a link to any of our Multiverse universe ‘doppelgängers’, then it displays worlds with no visible features in the reflection of our world. Subsequent linking is only to natural phenomena that also produce super-conductive surfaces, such as black holes and emergent universes.”

“I have not fully characterized this behavior of The Mirror, but I theorize that these channels are arranged in the order of the amount of quantum entanglement with our universe. As the percentage of quantum entanglement decreases in the alternate universe, the less similar those universes are to our universe. From the beginning, the universes of the Multiverse eventually split off from one another, and develop unique characteristics through a process known as decoherence. And so, our reflections in The Mirror appear less and less like ourselves as we tune in on the descending channels.”

Lilly leans over the table to get a better look at her facial features in The Mirror, changing with each channel. The reflections progress from a normal mirror reflection to images at first with minor differences. Differences increase in each subsequent channel image until the images are unrecognizable blobs and blurs. Beyond this, subsequent channels have even weaker links until there is nothing, no links strong enough, with enough quantum entanglement, to form any coherent image.

Lilly is fascinated, seeing her image become progressively more comical with each channel, like joke sketches from a street artist. Curious, she extends a digit near the screen to feel the cold wind of fate. Alarmed, as her modified reflected image does the same, extending its bizarre digit version toward her, through the screen.

Danny squeaks in exclamation.

“Don’t touch The Mirror!”

Recoiling with Danny’s warning, Lilly hears muffled sounds coming from The Mirror. Danny shakes his head again and whispers.

“Keep your voice down. I wouldn't advise getting too close, either.”

Danny pulls the switch and the tabletop screen flashes back to black.

“If you can see it, it can see you.”

End of Chapter 1.