Chapter 2

Dave decided to call it a night at that point. He left the mirror on the coffee table, and laid out on the couch, thinking to himself. After a moment, he picked up the mirror and thinks of his favorite movie star. After a moment, the mirror shows the actress laying on her bed, asleep.

‘Must be warm, wherever she is,’ Dave thought, as his gaze travelled over her naked form. Lithe, with modest but proud breasts, and that angelic face unburdened in slumber, she was a beautiful sight. After moving the perspective around, Dave held his cell phone up to the surface of the mirror, dipping it slightly in before taking several pictures.

After placing the mirror back down, he looked at the images. To his untrained eye, it looked like a picture taken while in the same room as the actress, and thoughts of potential uses came up in his mind, leading to a whirlwind of thoughts that carried him off to sleep.

Dave usually wasn’t much of a dreamer, occasionally having vague memories of dreams that he experienced. The only exception for him was nightmares, which he had very infrequently, but tended to stay with him for days.

Tonight’s dream was not a nightmare, but nonetheless it was one that stayed with him. In it, he was laying in a cabana on a beach at night, surrounded by women he didn’t recognize. As he was looking at one of the girls, another reached over to brush his shoulder, before offering a piece of fruit to him. Looking her in the eye, he took the proffered fruit in his mouth, slowly sucking on her fingertips before withdrawing.

The woman blushed, before returning his look with a sultry one of her own, before moving off. Watching her shapely backside, another woman grabbed his attention, offering a goblet with a amber colored liquid in it. As he took a sip, he felt a warmth from the fruit concoction fill his whole being, before the woman behind him pulled his head to rest against her breasts, slowly running her hands through his hair in a strangely comforting way. Two women who looked like identical twins came up and laid on either side of him, covering his legs with theirs and slowly rubbing his chest up and down as they perched their heads in the crook of his neck, their warm breath intermingling over his chest.

As the warmth from the drink slowly diffused, Dave closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth and feelings of comfort he was receiving. Slowly, all faded away to nothingness, leaving Dave in a warm void, body floating weightlessly.

Time passed, and Dave realized that he could see a slight brightening in the darkness. It was gradual, like how the dark of night would slowly brighten, giving shape to shadows unseen moments previously, but almost at a rate imperceptible to the human consciousness.

As the void lightened, Dave could feel the warmth once again suffuse his body, before a voice, a caressing of his ear, spoke a single word, a promise, a prophecy, a vow.

“Soon.”

Dave woke up gradually, one of those mornings where you are slowly introduced to the day, no jarring sound of the alarm or pounding of the door, but that rare morning where your body just knew it had enough sleep, and gently prodded you awake.

After a tremendous yawn, and a stretch, Dave sat up, realizing he had fell asleep on the couch while holding the mirror. Getting up, he stretched again to get the kinks out of his body he always got when he slept on the couch, only to realize that he felt perfectly fine, with even the normal aches gone. Normally, he woke up with a stiff neck from they way he contorted at night, but even rolling his head around he didn’t feel anything.

Shrugging to himself, he went upstairs to his room to change into his running gear, before going out on his morning jog. His normal route was about 30 minutes, 3.5 miles. After donning his headphones, Dave started his normal stretching routine, before heading out.

Five minutes into his run, he suddenly thought of the mirror on his coffee table, causing him to almost stumble, before recovering his balance. ‘How did I forget about last night?’ he wondered, ‘Hmm, must have been more tired than I thought.’

Dave’s family made fun of him all the time, notorious for being a zombie first thing in the morning before his exercise or coffee. Dave’s running was a gradual wake-up for him, strange as the concept may be. The increased blood flow from exercise seemed to jump start his brain, similar to the jolt of caffeine on days he didn’t run. The few times that he was unable to run or have coffee, Dave managed to pour orange juice in his cereal, another time it was maple syrup, and mayonnaise on his eggs and hash browns instead of ketchup. It got to the point that the family would stop eating and watch Dave when he was in his zombie mode, to see what he would do next.

Continuing on his run, Dave thought about the mirror. Knowing that it could see and interact with different places, his scientific background demanded to find out the limitations of what it could do. Memories of last night flashed in his mind, and though he was very tempted to use it in such a manner, he wanted to ascertain it was safe.

Thinking of different experiments he could do preoccupied his mind until he realized he was approaching his house. Trotting over to the lawn, he looked at his watch. 25 minutes, and he wasn’t even winded from the run. ‘Guess I was in the zone today, thinking about the mirror,’ he thought to himself, before starting his cooldown stretches.

Freshly showered, changed, and sitting at his (dad’s) workbench with the mirror and a bagel, Dave thought about the tests he wanted to perform. Grabbing a notebook, he started alternating jotting down notes and taking bites of the bagel, pausing every so often to stare off into space before jotting down more notes.

After a few minutes, he popped the last bit of bagel in his mouth, before wiping down his workspace. Picking up the mirror, he absentmindedly thought of the image it showed of the moon last night, before it appeared again. ‘Well, at least i wasn’t imagining things,’ he thought. Placing the mirror on a digital scale, he measured it, coming out with a weight of 1.5 kg. Frowning, he looked at the scale again, taking the mirror off and making sure it was zeroed out.

Putting the mirror back on the scale, it showed a weight of .01 kg. After a few more tests, all of which were all over the place, he grabbed the calibration weight set his dad used for his balance scale, and placed each on the digital scale. For these tests the scale worked perfectly.

Scratching his head, he placed the mirror on the balance scale, and started adding weights. After he added all the weights, the scale still didn’t move.

Frustrated, he put away all the weights before picking up the mirror and moving to a different part of the lab. Here, he had a graduated cylinder large enough to hold the mirror, and had distilled water ready to be poured in. After measuring the amount of water he poured in, he placed the mirror in to measure it’s displacement. After waiting a moment, he realized that the object was floating at the top.

Puzzled, he stared at the mirror, then at the water underneath. Just from the weight in his hand, he knew that the object shouldn’t be buoyant enough to float. Prodding at it made it react like a balloon or a piece of styrofoam would - it submerged on the side he pushed, and would spring back up to the surface. Interestingly, the mirror itself seemed extremely hydrophobic, with zero water droplets on its surface. Looking closer, he realized the entire object was hydrophobic to the extreme ... it looked like the mirror wasn’t actually in contact with the water, but floating above it!

Pulling the mirror out revealed that it was completely dry, while his fingertips got wet from fishing it out. Going over to the sink, he held it under a stream of water, watching it run off the mirror and his had, but when he shut off the water, the mirror was dry once again. Interesting enough, the areas that his hand was touching the mirror was dry as well, but the rest of his hand was covered.

Picking up the mirror with the other hand, he ran the edge of it over the skin of his wet hand, finding it was able to “squeegee” his hand with minimal effort, leaving his hand completely dry with a few moments worth of work.

Going back to the journal, he wrote down his observations so far. His next planned test was to measure conductivity, but he was wary of the effects of electricity on the mirror. Putting an asterisk next to the test in the journal, he decided he’d test that after knowing a bit more.

Running upstairs to grab a soda, he thought for a minute about what he should do next. So far, the basic things he tried dealt with the physical properties of the object itself. It seemed that the object couldn’t be defined by physical properties such as weight, mass, and density, so perhaps he would be able to quantify the properties of what it could do.

Taking a few sips out of the can, he put the soda back in the fridge, eager to get started. Once downstairs, he placed the mirror between two alligator clamps attached to thick wire, allowing him to articulate the mirror in any direction and hold that position. He said, out loud, “my lab.”

Nothing.

He frowned, before slapping himself in the forehead. “Duh! It needs physical contact to work!” Chuckling to himself, he took the mirror out of the apparatus, and then repeated his earlier command. The mirror hazed, then showed a birds-eye view of his lab area, with him in the middle of it, holding the mirror. Moving around, he looked at the mini version of himself in the mirror, before the movements his arm holding the mirror caused the image to shift to a corner of the room.

‘Hmm, I wonder if there’s a way for it to stay focused on me?’ Dave thought to himself, before he saw the mirror’s image reorient to above his head. Moving the mirror around, the image remained fixed, and when he got up to walk around, the mirror tracked his movements, keeping him in the center of the view.