Novelette: Quantum Mirror (Part 2 of 12)

Grief can trap you in the past. Genius can try to rewrite it.

Elias’ eyes snapped open, breath ragged and shallow. Panic clamped down on his chest, like steel claws raking through his ribs, dragging him under. His hands trembled as he fought the spectral pressure. For a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. As the weight of absolute helplessness of that night crushed in from all sides to his present day.

He had tried, again and again, to bury the memory. Cast out the nightmares. To forget the sensation of her slipping away in his arms. Of the eternity of watching the instant her light dimmed, then vanished. And then — worse — the hollow terror that followed, as the realization set in: his world had shattered, and times arrow ensured there was no way back.

Fingers curled tightly around the edge of the table. Its cold metal grounding him. He exhaled, slow and deliberate, as the crushing force eased and his vision and mind began to clear.

His gaze lingered on the floating image ahead, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He didn’t need to. After three years, the holo-portrait of Clara was etched into his consciousness, every detail burned into the neural latticework that shaped his waking experience of the world.

It was those same neural pathways that now betrayed him. Comforting and tormenting him in equal measure. They replayed her smile, her laugh, the way she looked at him when he lost himself in thought. These memories — weightless and intangible — had soaked into every corner of this place. They had become its architecture. A prison, rebuilt each night in dreams, rebuilt again each day he woke.

This lab — his lab — hadn’t always felt like a cage. Elias had years ago claimed this basement space as a kind of buffer, a quarantine zone for his research clutter. It was a compromise, designed to contain the spread of chaos and preserve the order Clara loved upstairs in their brownstone.

Its central location and natural isolation had made it perfect for deep work. Here, he’d pursued what Clara had called his wicked problems. Puzzles that danced between the abstract and the empirical. He had vanished into those pursuits for weeks, even months, at a time throughout their life together.

But now, another kind of problem had overtaken him. One without equations, without variables. A question maddening in its simplicity: why?

That question had twisted this space into something else. It was still a refuge, but one steeped in grief. Still better than the rest of the house. It had become a minefield of memories. Here, at least, the ghosts were contained.

Still, he spent hours every day facing that ghost: the holo-portrait on his bench. A gift from Clara for their thirtieth anniversary, it had arrived just a week before everything changed. Of all the recordings they had made, this was the only one that truly captured her spark at its apex— the light in her eyes, the quiet joy, the warmth that radiated from within.

“Simulation Alpha-Seven-Delta-One has completed,” said Nyx, his AI assistant.

In the first weeks after the accident, Elias had configured Nyx’s voice to mimic Clara’s. Within hours, he’d undone it. It had felt wrong— like hearing a soul-less echo. He reverted the voice to default.

It took him a moment to surface from the memory. “What do you have for me?” he asked quietly.

“Current configuration model has completed with a PD of 99.5%, or p < .015, based on simulation parameters.”

Elias blinked. “Whoa.” He pushed back from the table, rising to his feet, already moving toward the interface. “Confirm those numbers.”

A beat of silence. Then a soft pop from an unseen speaker: “Results confirmed.”

“Show me.”

Before him, numbers bloomed into patterns—fractals of data coalescing, pulsing with meaning. The holofield shimmered, casting shifting light across his face. As Nyx streamed the results, the air seemed to hum with potential.

When the display dimmed, Elias turned slowly toward the far wall. There, dominating the lab, stood the installation: a vast obsidian surface where his old additive manufacturing equipment had once been. It loomed, monolithic and inert, emanating a faint, cold glow that seemed to drink in the room’s light.

At the corner of his mouth, something flickered. A line curved upward— small, fragile, almost foreign. It was his first smile in nearly three years.

“This might just work.”

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