Tales of the End of the Century

The gate was open. Not because I forgot, but because it wasn't necessary. Those who were supposed to come had already crossed the dirt road.

Bai Ye stood under the jujube tree, still clutching the small round mirror in his hand. On the back of the tin plate, the outline of a bird was pressed against his palm, its wings folded, its head tilted. He stuffed the mirror into his pocket, his hand still inside, his fingertips resting on the rim.

Three figures rounded the poplar trees and stepped onto the dirt path. The leader, wearing a gray coat, was of medium height and walked with a relaxed gait, more like a casual visitor than someone coming to arrest someone. The two behind him walked in unison, one on each side, their legs lifted neither too high nor too low, as if measured with a ruler. The gray-clad figure leaned against the other side of the jujube tree, and upon seeing the leader, his chin tightened slightly. Not out of fear, but out of confirmation. Like someone who had been waiting for something for a long time finally arriving, he let out a sigh of relief, then immediately tensed up again.

"Do you know him?" Tie Niu asked.

“He used to sit across from me in the intelligence analysis section,” the man in gray said. “His name was Vasily. He joined Project Aurora two years after me. After the project was disbanded, he took a batch of data and went west.” He paused, then added, “I thought he was dead.”

Vasily stopped at the courtyard gate. His gray coat was faded from washing, and the cuffs were frayed, but he was impeccably clean. His hair was cut very short, and his sideburns were much whiter than the man in the gray coat, with even the top of his head having a silvery-gray tinge. He looked around the courtyard, his gaze moving from the jujube tree to the main house, then to the window of the east wing, and finally settling on the man in the gray coat.

"So you were here after all." His voice wasn't loud, and it was a little hoarse, as if his throat had been swept by the northern wind and snow. "I've been looking for you for three years."

"What do you want from me?" the man in gray asked.

Vasily didn't answer. He took something out of his coat pocket and placed it on the doorstep of the courtyard gate. Old Hu, who was closest to the gate, glanced at it and his expression changed. It was a toothbrush. The handle was blue plastic, and the bristles were worn and frayed, as if it had been used for a long time. A name was engraved on the handle in Russian, the handwriting crooked and messy, as if it had been carved with a knife.

Bai Ye saw those three words and gripped the edge of the small round mirror tightly in his pocket. He recognized the name; it was on Sergei's list, first line: Korsak. The one listed "Left" in the Rift Period records.

"Korsak was my subject," Vasily said. "A week before the project was suspended, he sharpened the handle of this toothbrush in the isolation room and stabbed it into his left eye. He didn't die. After his left eyeball was removed, he said he could still see with his right eye. Not things outside, but things inside. He said that after his left eye was gone, his right eye could see more clearly. He saw himself standing at the door of the isolation room, wearing the exact same clothes as him, looking at himself with his left eye, which hadn't been stabbed."

Vasily picked up the toothbrush from the doorstep, turned it over, and saw words engraved on the back. They were very small, barely legible. Lan Susu walked over and looked down to examine them for a while.

"What's engraved on it?"

"Russian," she said, "'To Vasily. You should let me gouge out my right eye too.'"

No one answered in the courtyard. A breeze blew from the dirt road, causing the jujube branches to sway gently. A dried jujube fell onto the roof, rolled a few times, and came to rest on the edge of the ridge tile. Bai Ye saw Old Hu place the enamel mug he was holding on the windowsill, rubbing his fingers along the rim a few times without picking it up.

"You came to see me, not to show me this," the man in gray said.

"Yes." Vasily put the toothbrush back in his inner pocket. "I came to see you because Korsak died last month."

"Where will you die?"

"He died in a town less than a hundred kilometers from here." Vasily looked at the man in gray. "When he died, something was growing in his left eye socket. It wasn't granulation tissue, it wasn't a scar. It was something like a fingernail, translucent, pushing out of the empty socket. The landlord found him sitting on the edge of the bed, his blind eye now open with a new one."

“The landlord called the police. When the coroner arrived, the new eye was still moving. Left eye, right eye, both moving. In different directions. The coroner said he’d done autopsies for over a decade and had never seen a dead person’s eye move.” Vasily’s voice was flat, without any inflection. Behind him, two people stood motionless, like two machines turned off. “I came to see you because Korsak is dead, and I’m next.” Vasily put his hands back in his coat pockets. “Or you.”

The man in gray didn't answer immediately. The shadow of the jujube tree slowly crept up to halfway up the courtyard wall, sunlight filtering through the branches and casting dappled patterns on the ground. He pulled his hand out of his pocket, palm up. He bent his fingers back one by one, starting with the little finger and ending with the thumb. The order was the same as Bai Ye had seen before, contrary to normal habits. Bai Ye noticed that his finger-bending motion was slower than before, as if he were confirming that each finger was still there.

"Have you found the backup library?" Vasily asked.

"Found it."

"What's inside?"

"Sergei's notes. Complete. And a reflecting mirror."

Vasily was silent for a moment. The name caused a subtle change in his face, like a pebble striking water, the ripples quickly subsiding. "Sergei. Is he still alive?"

"I don't know," the man in gray said. "He's not in the backup repository, only what he left behind. The last few pages of his notes describe his state in the later stages of the Rift. He could no longer distinguish who he was, or rather, he had accepted that he couldn't. He called that thing 'Fellow Traveler.'"

"Travelers."

"He said it's not the enemy. It's just another mirror reflecting you. The longer you look at it, the more it resembles you. The more you fear it, the more terrifying it becomes. The more you accept it, the more—" The man in gray paused, searching for the right words, "the quieter it becomes."

Vasily pulled his hand out of his pocket. His fingers were thin, with prominent knuckles, and his nails were cut extremely short. He looked down at his hands, turning them over to examine his palms and the backs of his hands. Sunlight shone on his palms, highlighting the deep lines. He stared at his hands for a long time before putting them down. "Korsak wrote me a letter before he died. It was never sent; I found it among his belongings. The letter contained only one sentence: 'It no longer stands behind me. It stands in front of me. For every step I take forward, it takes a step back.'"

"And then?" the man in gray asked.

"There's another line on the back of the letter. The handwriting is different, not Korsak's. It looks like it was written with the same pen, the same hand, but suddenly by a different person. 'I see you.'" Vasily looked at the man in gray, then at the others standing under the date tree, as if swallowing the thought before speaking, "What did you say Sergei called it again?"

"Fellow traveler." The man in gray hesitated for a moment when he uttered the word, clearly not used to this calm.

Vasily pondered for a moment, then gave a dry, half-hearted laugh. He suppressed the laugh, put his hands back in his coat pockets, leaned forward slightly, and looked both exhausted and alert, like a spring that had been compressed for a long time. "I'm not here to reminisce. All twenty-three subjects from the Aurora Project's rift phase. Korsak was the last one alive, and now he's dead too. Only two people remain—one is me, and the other is you."

The man in gray lowered his eyelids and remained silent.

"We have another thing in common. We've both looked at the reflection mirror. Not passively, but actively. We've used the reflection mirror to observe the progression of the slit phase in the subjects. Every experimenter who looked at the reflection mirror had a slit phase that came in more slowly but was deeper than the subjects."

"It doesn't need to find you through the resonator," Lan Susu raised her eyes, her voice extremely low, "because you've already opened a path for it in the mirror."

“Yes,” Vasily said. “We think we are the observers, but every observation is a way of teaching it how to become us. From Sergei to Korsak, to every subject in the rift period.” He looked at the man in gray. “Now it’s our turn.”

Old Hu bent down, picked up the enamel mug, walked to the jujube tree, and handed it to Bai Ye. "Have a sip." Bai Ye looked down at the dark brown tea in the mug; the tea leaves had sunk to the bottom, and a layer of fine light floated on the surface. He shook his head, and Old Hu didn't insist. He placed the mug on a rock and squatted down beside it. "That mirror you were talking about," Old Hu wiped his mouth, "you kept saying it was bad, but Sergei used it until the very end, and Korsak also looked into it until the very end. The mirror didn't lie to them. It was what was in the mirror that lied to them."

Lan Susu turned her attention away from the list covered in scribbles. "Maybe it's not deception, it's learning. Mirrors never lie. What lies is what we think is the person in the mirror."

Bai Ye picked up the enamel mug and took a sip. The tea had gone cold and tasted bitter. He put the mug back on the stone and looked up at Vasily and the man in gray. Both of them were standing, one inside the doorway and the other outside, their shadows stretching in the same direction, as if the same person were standing in different lights.

“I have the same ‘rift period’ you’re talking about.” Bai Ye pulled his right hand out of his pocket, palm up, and placed it on his knee. The newly formed scab had already curled up at the edges, and the pinkish new skin gleamed slightly in the dim light. “The first thing I do every morning when I wake up is look at this hand, to make sure it’s still mine. I gave it a name, and I say it once before I go to sleep every night, and again when I wake up. What’s your confirmation ritual?” He looked at Vasily and the man in gray, noticing that they both simultaneously pulled their hands out of their pockets and opened them. Left hand, right hand. Fingers bent back one by one, starting with the little finger and ending with the thumb. The movements were exactly the same, like two people doing the same set of calisthenics. Bai Ye turned his right hand over, back of his hand up. There was a thin, almost invisible scar between his middle and ring fingers, one he himself didn’t know when he had gotten it. He pointed out the scar to them. “This thing is on my hand, I don’t know when it came. But I don’t need to know, as long as I know it’s here.”

Vasily turned his left hand over; on the inside of his wrist was an old, oval-shaped burn scar, about the size of a coin. The man in gray turned his right hand over; at the base of his index finger was a white line, as if cut into paper. The two men glanced at each other, almost simultaneously raising the corners of their mouths slightly, then simultaneously withdrawing their smiles. No one gave the order; their rhythm seemed to be calibrated by some unseen reflection in the mirror beneath the jujube tree.

After a long while, Bai Ye spoke again, her voice so soft it was as if she were speaking to herself: "You no longer need to make a sound to know what the other is thinking."

Vasily did not deny it. The man in gray put his hand back in his pocket and stepped aside, clearing a passageway for him inside the courtyard gate. Vasily did not stand on ceremony, stepping over the threshold, leaving the two men behind him standing there like two stakes planted in the ground. He sat down under the jujube tree, on the stone where Iron Bull usually sharpened his knife, and took out Korsak's toothbrush, placing it on his lap.

"I brought a car. A diesel one, fully fueled." He looked at the man in gray. "I know a place, in the north, that used to be a communications relay station for Project Aurora, abandoned for many years. It has complete backups of experimental records, including the original design drawings of the resonator. I stayed there for a while, and sealed the entrance when I left. The map is in my head, the key is with you."

The man in gray reached into his robes and pulled out a flat, oiled paper package, placing it on the stone. Unwrapping the package revealed a small, worn-out brass key, tied with a red thread. Seeing the key, Bai Ye suddenly recalled the inscription on the back of Sergei's photograph—"It gets a little closer to me every day." Perhaps Sergei wasn't referring to distance, but to time.

Vasily wrapped the parchment in oil paper, put it in his inner pocket, and placed it with his toothbrush. The two things made a soft sound when they touched, a dull thud from the plastic hitting the metal.

Lan Susu turned to the last page of the list and drew a small triangle next to Sergei's name with a pencil. Bai Ye bent down to pick up a jujube branch and drew an arrow on the ground pointing north. Tie Niu was already inspecting the tires of the "Bright Moving Company," and Lao Hu put the dried chilies that had been drying on the windowsill into his travel bag. The man in gray sat on a stone, the backup map spread out on his lap, already marked with a route extending north from the courtyard.

The sun was setting. The shadow of the jujube tree had already climbed over the courtyard wall and landed on the trunk of the poplar tree across the dirt road. The two men Vasily had brought were still standing in the same spot, not moving an inch. Bai Ye thought, perhaps they didn't need to move. Perhaps just standing there was enough, like two mirrors stuck in the ground.