Spidersilk World

“So, what did Mr. Coulter teach you, Mary?” she turned to her niece, trying to put out of her mind the fact that the girl had mentioned the words spell and mirror in the span of a very short sentence, smiling and addressing a male stranger by his first name in the process.

“Look, look at the mirror,” Mary happily obliged.

The mirror was black, the one inside it had decided to remove himself for the purposes of the exercise. Mary touched a few symbols on the table in front of the mirror, symbols that looked like they were painted on buttons and reminded Lucille of rune stones, only they seemed to be woven together in a dark fabric that allowed them to move up and down. She was too mesmerized by the movement of the painted buttons underneath Mary’s fingers to notice that the screen had turned bright yellow, and when she finally did she jolted backwards involuntarily.

“I’m sorry I asked,” she uttered in a raspy voice after she regained her wits. “I’m not so sure about this, Mary, between the blood and changing the color of things around you, this can’t be good, can it?” she asked her niece, hoping she will contradict her.

“Actually, she can only change the background of the screen,” the one in the mirror explained.

“You mean the color of the reflective surface itself,” Lucille clarified.

“Yes,” the one in the mirror replied.

“What about the mirror’s frame? Can you change the color of the mirror’s frame?” Lucille asked.

“Not from the software, no,” the one in the mirror replied.

“But you can change it,” she said.

“We can print another case, yes.”

“Print, how?” Lucille’s eyes widened.

“We can bring in a 3d printer, that’s how we made most of the components of this console,” the one in the mirror tried to explain, and upon seeing the perplexed look in Lucille’s eyes, he came up with another idea.

“Wait!” he said, then disappeared from view again and allowed another mirror to open up in his place. Inside it Lucille watched in disbelief how a strange looking mechanical contraption seemed to conjure up solid objects out of thin air.

“Is it summoning matter out of nothing?” Lucille asked, panicked.

“No,” the one in the mirror reassured her. “It weaves a plastic polymer, almost in the same way spiders build their webs. See? If you look closely you can almost see the thread.

“What’s a…”

“Plastic polymer? It is a synthetic substance we make in a lab, here is what its formula looks like, he opened another mirror, and in it appeared an animated strand, endlessly long and spinning around a cloud of C’s and O’s and H’s, like fresh spun yarn on a spool.

Lucille spent some time quietly, staring at the continuously unraveling thread of letters, wondering how much deeper the knowledge of the mirror went, completely removed from Rosemary’s never ending power struggles and the fact that it was getting very late, just watching the light that shone in Mary’s eyes. She’d never seen the girl so happy, or so interested in anything, her niece looked almost unrecognizable when she tried to concentrate on those tiny painted buttons like they were the meaning of life itself.

Thank you for reading.

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