Chapter 15: The Eye in the Broken Mirror |
Deep within the abandoned laboratory building, a completely renovated room lit up with a stark white light.
This was the ultimate stage Shen Mo had prepared for the mirror.
The walls had been demolished and replaced with an array of tens of thousands of individual LED beads, capable of instantly raising the indoor light intensity from pitch black to a level that would burn the retina.
The mirror was firmly fixed on a metal bracket in the center of the room, like a prisoner awaiting judgment.
Shen Mo stood at the control console, Su Wanying beside him holding a file, her expression grave.
"Initiating test of 'Light Interference Sealing' protocol," Shen Mo's voice echoed in the empty room through the microphone, as calm as if there were no ripples.
He pressed the start button. The LED arrays on the surrounding walls lit up instantly, and light flooded towards the mirror in the center like a tide.
Light intensity: 1000 lux.
In the mirror, a figure in an old teacher's uniform slowly emerged, its movements stiffly repeating the gesture of pushing a door, as if completely unaware of the external light.
The "teacher's" movements in the mirror began to show a slight delay. Each push of the door seemed to be stuck in viscous air.
5000 lux.
The light was already so dazzling that it was impossible to look at directly with the naked eye. The image on the monitor screen also turned white due to overexposure.
But the figure was still struggling, the door-pushing motion becoming frantic and futile.
"Increase intensity to 8000 lux," Shen Mo pushed the control lever again.
With a hum, the entire room seemed to have been thrown into molten steel.
In the monitor image, the "teacher's" image in the mirror let out a silent scream. Its entire figure, like a painting thrown into boiling oil, twisted, stretched, and split violently. Finally, after a high-frequency flicker, it completely collapsed, degenerating into a blurry black shadow writhing and struggling in the depths of the mirror.
"The critical value is 8000 lux," Shen Mo quickly recorded the data, a hint of satisfaction flashing in his eyes. "High-intensity strobe light can indeed destroy the continuity of its cognitive projection. This standard can serve as a physical guidance plan for dealing with similar 'echo objects' in the future."
"The physical solution is effective, but it's still there," Su Wanying pointed to the unwilling black shadow on the screen. "The obsession is the root cause. We've only interrupted its 'performance,' not weakened its 'script'." She opened the file in her hand and pushed it in front of Shen Mo. It was a photocopy of the original proxy speech draft from the "Yiji Hall Funerary Records" that she had found in the dusty archives of the city.
It was a passage of sloppy text written with a brush: "I am not the arsonist. I couldn't get out after pushing the door thirty-seven times. The students were already unconscious when the fire started. I carried the bodies to the door, but the door was locked. The world only remembers my name, but thinks I am the perpetrator."
A few short sentences told the final grief and unwillingness of a soul misunderstood to death.
"Let's try 'memory confrontation'," Su Wanying suggested. "Use the truth to attack the obsession built on lies."
Shen Mo thought for a moment and agreed.
He printed this text on A0 size paper and, using a robotic arm, slowly attached it to the front of the mirror.
The moment the text came into contact with the mirror surface, in the monitor, the black shadow that was originally just writhing suddenly began to tremble violently!
It was as if it had seen something extremely terrifying or infuriating. It frantically slammed against the mirror surface, trying to re-condense into the form of the "teacher," but failed again and again.
Shen Mo stared intently at another screen displaying the data stream, which recorded the mirror image's action delay.
"The delay has increased from 0.3 seconds to 1.2 seconds," he said softly, a hint of surprise in his voice.
This meant that this hidden truth was fundamentally shaking the cognitive core of the "teacher" echo, weakening the intensity of its obsession.
"It's effective, but not thorough enough," Shen Mo's eyes shone with the fervent light of a scholar. "It's trapped in the linear memory of 'failing to save people by pushing the door.' Then we'll use a logic it can't understand to completely destroy its cognitive loop."
He proposed a bold idea—the "infinite reflection paradox."
Soon, a second double-sided mirror was precisely set up in the room by a robotic arm, directly facing the ancient mirror carrying the "teacher" echo.
When the system was activated, an infinitely recursive reflection channel was formed between the two mirrors.
A bizarre scene appeared on the monitor screen.
In the mirror, the black shadow finally re-condensed into the form of the "teacher." It looked ahead blankly, then once again began its eternal action—pushing the door.
The first reflection was pushing the door, the second reflection was pushing the door, the third, the fourth... extending to the end of vision, countless "teachers" were doing the same desperate action at the same time.
When all the reflections synchronously repeated the seventh door-pushing action, the deepest reflection, the smallest and most blurry "teacher," suddenly paused.
Then, as if a domino had been pushed, this pause quickly spread forward.
The sixth, fifth, fourth reflections... their movements began to show slight differences. Some were half a beat slow, some froze in advance. The entire infinitely extending queue completely lost its synchronization in just a few seconds.
Finally, all levels of reflections, whether clear in the foreground or blurry in the distance, seemed to have been paused. They all froze in place, in various postures, like a row of instantly petrified sculptures.
"Success," Shen Mo looked at the footage captured by the high-speed camera and made his final judgment. "This 'echo' relies on a single, linear memory projection. It cannot handle infinitely nested self-images. This logical paradox, to it, is an incomprehensible and inexecutable infinite loop."
The mirror had become an ordinary piece of glass.
At least, that's what all the instrument test results showed.
To completely eliminate any potential risk of spread and to show the public the official determination to handle such incidents, Shen Mo decided to publicly destroy the mirror.
The destruction ceremony was held under the cordon of the city police. The long lenses of several media outlets were aimed at the center of the venue.
Shen Mo put on a pair of special dark polarizing goggles, his expression serious as he held a long-handled rubber mallet and walked towards the mirror that had been taken out of the lab.
It was vertically fixed on a stand, its surface so clean it could reflect the blue sky.
Under the gaze of countless cameras and eyes, Shen Mo raised the rubber mallet high.
"Bang!"
A crisp cracking sound echoed through the square. The mirror shattered on impact, turning into countless fragments of various sizes, scattering like diamonds on the black velvet cloth.
A wave of relieved applause and cheers erupted from the crowd.
Everything seemed to be over.
The staff began to carefully clean up the glass fragments on the ground, sweeping them into a sealed disposal box.
Shen Mo stood aside, supervising the entire process, his expression as calm as ever.
However, just as the last piece of glass, about the size of a fingernail, was about to be touched by the broom, Shen Mo seemed to catch something out of the corner of his eye.
He subconsciously glanced over.
In that small fragment, his own face was clearly reflected.
In that fleeting moment, the "him" in the reflection, to the him outside the mirror, gently, independently, blinked.
Shen Mo's heart felt as if it had been gripped by an icy hand, but his face remained impassive.
He bent down and, under the puzzled gazes of the crowd, personally picked up the piece of broken glass with tweezers, citing the need for a sample for research, and placed it alone in an opaque evidence bag.
Back in his own lab, he closed the door and placed the fragment on the stage of a high-power microscopic camera.
He replayed the moment he had just captured, magnifying the image to the extreme.
Confirmed.
That blinking action was independent of any of his own actions and clearly occurred after he had shattered the mirror with the hammer.
A chill ran up his spine.
He immediately pulled up the surveillance footage of all his activity areas for the past seven days, especially the clips where he was near the mirror or discussing the "mirror image" with Su Wanying.
He analyzed his facial expressions frame by frame in slow motion.
Soon, he found it.
In several inadvertent moments, when he thought he was just concentrating on thinking, the corners of his mouth would curve into an extremely subtle, fleeting arc.
That was not his, Shen Mo's, smile, but a cold smile that was a mixture of pity and coldness, like a god looking down on ants.
He violently turned off all the monitors. The room was instantly plunged into darkness.
Only a desk lamp on his desk was still on, illuminating the open notebook in front of him.
He picked up his pen and, under the page where the success of the "infinite reflection paradox" experiment was recorded, with a slightly trembling hand, he wrote the last line of notes:
It wasn't destroyed... it just, changed hosts.
Outside the window, the clouds above the city had dispersed at some point, and the sun was just right.
But at this moment, the glass curtain walls of the skyscrapers lining both sides of the entire street, as if a stone had been thrown into an invisible pond, simultaneously rippled with a strange, watery reflection.
(End of Chapter)