Chapter 16: What You See Is Not Yourself |
That strange reflection was like a silent command, making Shen Mo's heart skip a beat.
Without any hesitation, he turned and strode back to the forensic center.
The piece of broken glass, still lying quietly in his pocket, now felt like a scorching hot iron.
He immediately sealed the winking glass fragment in a special military-grade light-proof box, isolating it from all light sources and prying eyes.
Then, he tightly wrapped the box with three thick layers of lead foil, as if sealing a highly radioactive cursed object.
Finally, he personally stored it in the deepest evidence refrigerator at the forensic center, where the temperature was kept at a constant minus twenty degrees Celsius, labeled "Top Secret-001."
After doing all this, Shen Mo did not feel the slightest bit of relief.
He returned to his empty office, locked the door, and pulled down all the blinds.
He pulled up the surveillance footage from his personal mobile phone and all angles of his office for the past seven days, a total of more than one hundred and sixty hours.
Time passed, minute by minute. The light and shadow on the screen flickered across his face.
Finally, in a video from the afternoon of the third day, he pressed the pause button.
It was a conversation he had with the intern, Lin Xiaoya. At the time, they were discussing a burglary case involving a mirror.
The moment he mentioned the keyword "mirror reflection faking an alibi," he saw himself in the picture, the corner of his mouth twitching very slightly, almost imperceptibly.
It was a micro-expression that lasted no more than 0.2 seconds.
Shen Mo enlarged the image and analyzed it frame by frame.
The angle of the twitch, the texture of the muscles involved, was identical to the compassionate yet cold smile he had seen on "his own" face in the broken glass from the fire ruins.
A chill shot from his tailbone to the top of his head.
It didn't start imitating from the mirror. It had long been lurking in his body, like a perfect mimic actor, waiting for the signal to take the stage.
He immediately grabbed the notebook beside him and wrote three lines with all his strength, the tip of the pen almost tearing through the paper.
"I am Shen Mo."
"I was not at the fire."
"I have not been forgotten."
He took a picture of these three lines and set it as his phone's lock screen wallpaper, and also set a mandatory hourly alarm reminder.
This was not just a psychological suggestion; it was a spiritual anchor, the first line of defense he had built for himself in this silent battle for identity.
Just as he was staring at his phone screen, Su Wanying's call came in.
Her voice was filled with an irrepressible urgency. "Shen Mo, the latest test report on the broken glass from the museum is out. You'd better come over in person."
Half an hour later, in Su Wanying's independent laboratory, a mass spectrometry analysis report was presented to Shen Mo.
The report indicated that there were indeed trace amounts of organic matter remaining on the surface of the broken glass.
After DNA comparison, its sequence completely matched Shen Mo's skin flake sample.
But the strange thing was the next line of data in the report: the activity of these cells was abnormally high, and their division rate was 3.7 times that of normal human epidermal cells.
"That's not the strangest part," Su Wanying lowered her voice and pointed to another spectral analysis graph. "In a completely dark environment, the sample spontaneously emits an extremely faint fluorescence. We've compared it. The wavelength of this fluorescence is identical to the energy spectrum of the 'premature action' of the mirror reflection that you recorded earlier."
She looked up, her eyes filled with gravity and a fear that even she couldn't understand. She said, word by word, "Shen Mo, it's not attached to the glass... It's using your body to regrow."
This sentence, like a cold bullet, shattered the last bit of luck in Shen Mo's heart.
That night, Shen Mo returned to his apartment where he lived alone.
He deliberately avoided all reflective surfaces, even covering the TV screen with a cloth.
Exhausted, he walked into the bathroom, ready to take a shower.
However, when he turned on the water heater and warm steam began to fill the air, on the bathroom mirror directly in front of him, the fog, instead of blurring everything, condensed into a clear line of words in a way that defied the laws of physics:
"You should have seen me sooner."
Shen Mo's heart contracted sharply, but there was no fear on his face.
After a whole day of shocks, he had moved from initial shock to a cold, as if facing a great enemy calm.
He didn't smash the mirror in a panic. Instead, he immediately turned off the water heater, cutting off the source of the steam, and at the same time, pressed the switch for the exhaust fan.
Before the fog dissipated, he calmly picked up a black marker from the shelf and, under the line of words, wrote another sentence, stroke by stroke:
"You are not me."
After writing, he took out his phone and took a picture of the mirror as evidence.
The next morning, he imported the photo he had taken last night into his computer and performed an infrared enhancement process.
On the screen, the black words he had written with the marker were still clear, but under the line of condensed steam, another fainter line of handwriting, as if it had seeped into the glass, was vaguely visible:
"But you have already looked for seven minutes."
Shen Mo's pupils contracted sharply.
He suddenly remembered—when he was shaving last night, he had indeed stood in front of the mirror for a long time.
Looking down to rinse the razor, looking up to check his jaw, adjusting the tie of his shirt... his gaze was intermittent on the mirror surface, but the total time he stayed there was indeed close to seven minutes.
He thought he was observing the mirror, but little did he know, it was the "it" in the mirror that was observing him, and even "absorbing" him.
He immediately found his tools and, without hesitation, removed the entire bathroom mirror from the wall, replacing it with a pre-prepared frosted, non-reflective acrylic panel.
The contamination was deepening, and it was beginning to affect the outside from the inside.
To verify this terrifying conjecture, Shen Mo designed a "double-blind cognitive test."
He invited the intern, Lin Xiaoya, who was most familiar with his words and actions.
He told her that this was a recognition test for an AI imitating human micro-expressions.
He played a clipped video. The footage was of himself stating the facts of a case.
But half of it was a real clip he had recorded a few days ago; the other half was a forged image generated by the most advanced AI technology, deeply simulating his voice, mouth shape, and expressions.
He asked Lin Xiaoya, without her knowledge, to point out which segment she thought was "least like Shen Mo."
Lin Xiaoya watched very carefully.
After the video finished playing, she pointed to a segment on the screen with almost no hesitation and said, "This one, Teacher Shen. When he speaks, his left eyebrow shouldn't move like that. It feels very deliberate."
Shen Mo's heart sank to the bottom.
Because the segment Lin Xiaoya pointed out was precisely the real footage he had shot himself.
And that unnatural "left eyebrow twitch" was a new micro-expression that he himself had not noticed in the past three days, but had been captured by the surveillance.
He silently turned off the equipment and thanked Lin Xiaoya.
He had already gotten his answer.
The contamination was no longer just an internal cellular erosion; it had begun to affect the outside world's perception of the identity of "Shen Mo."
"It" was tampering with others' memories of him, overwriting old impressions with new habits.
"It" was living for him.
Late at night, Shen Mo was the only one left in the forensic center's laboratory.
He replayed the microscopic footage of the broken mirror winking. This time, he didn't look at the momentum, but slowed the footage down to one percent speed, analyzing the path of its neural reflexes frame by frame.
He suddenly noticed a detail he had overlooked: the muscle contraction sequence of that blinking action was the complete opposite of a natural human blink.
When humans blink, the orbicularis oculi muscle contracts, causing the eyelid to close, and then the muscle relaxes, and the eyelid opens.
But the "eye" in the video, its sequence of movements was to first present a closed state, then the muscle group would forcibly "pull" the eyelid open in a reverse relaxation manner, and then suddenly "snap" back to a closed state.
The entire process was like a "rewind" of a normal blinking video.
Rewind...
A thunderclap exploded in Shen Mo's mind. He suddenly realized.
That was not his reflection, it never was.
A reflection is a forward, real-time imitation.
But this thing was reverse, constructed.
It was an existence called "the teacher," using himself as a data template, reverse-engineering the process from the result, and reverse-constructing a "pseudo-me."
The mirror was just the initial medium and incubator.
He stood up abruptly, closed his laptop, grabbed the phone, and with slightly trembling fingers, dialed Su Wanying's number.
The moment the call connected, he said in an almost hoarse voice:
"Wanying, I understand... It doesn't need the mirror anymore."
Su Wanying's confused voice came from the other end of the line: "What do you mean?"
Shen Mo leaned against the cold lab bench, feeling the myriad lights of the city outside the window. The light reflected in his eyes through the glass, but it could no longer illuminate the darkness in his heart.
He said, word by word, the conclusion that sent a chill through his entire body.
"As long as someone 'sees' me, it can exist."
(End of Chapter)