My Perfect Mirror

Madame Nahaku and Dr. Tsuru greeted Himeko and Dr. Nakamura as they entered the town hall. He had explained that, on the way there, the real home of New Urania’s cube was the town hall, and it had been temporarily moved to Nakamura Labs in order to facilitate her resurrection.

Both women were haggard with the obvious lack of sleep, clutching full and steaming cups of dark coffee, and looked at the two as if they were two of some type of alien creature. It was, of course, the beautiful Dr. Tsuru who spoke first. “Kōji, Hime-chan, what are doing here so late at night? Don't the both of you need beauty sleep?”

“Dr. Tsuru, Madame Nahaku. I need to see the Cube.” Said Himeko.

The two women exchanged looks. The Madame looked at her after. “That’s a security risk right now. The two of us are – “

“-I have to see her. Maybe I can strengthen us both.”

“I don’t exactly see how that’s possible.”

“It’s possible in the same way that I was the only one who could fix her,” Himeko said quietly, leaving Dr. Nakamura’s side to plead at Madame Nahaku’s. “My guess is that there’s been unprecedented security risks for a few weeks now, and that Shusoin’s attacks have only worsened it. Am I right?”

“…Yes.”

“Then let me fix it. Please.” She pleaded.

The two women exchanged another look, as if silently and telepathically weighing the pros and cons of her proposal together, before Dr. Tsuru nodded and beckoned Himeko to her side. “Alright then, Hime-chan. Let’s get going.”

The group of four ascended up several floors with an elevator, all while under a choking silence. Madame Nahaku hummed the entire way up. It was a slow song, though not exactly unhappy, and from a long-forgotten era. It made Himeko feel as nostalgic as she was melancholic.

Would ‘she’ even want to see her? Would the two of them, the two Himekos who were neither the first one nor just a mere replica, be able to find a solution? Did she even really want a solution if it jeopardized her own existence?

Himeko thought for a moment. She twirled her thumbs, watched Madame Nahaku twist and pull hard light in front of herself and tried not to hear the conversation between Dr. Nakamura and Dr. Tsuru, and breathed in and out. She felt herself breathe and blood rush through her artificial veins. She felt her heartbeat pulse across her hands and fingers and came to her conclusion.

Yes, she did.

She wanted it for her. She wanted it for the Himeko she’d once been over a century ago. Perhaps, deep down, she wanted it for Shusoin and Yoshita, too.

The elevator slid open, and the four silently descended a dark hallway that mirrored the one in Olyhymna. Blinking dots peered down at them from all sides, in greens and blues and yellows, and Himeko shivered with the feeling of being watched.

“I came to talk to you. I’m sorry,” she mouthed. The dots rippled blue.

A sleek control panel kept the door at the end of the hallway locked, and Madame Nahaku raised her manicured nails to it, tapping a few digits in before hesitating.

“Kaede and I will be watching as you talk. We won’t let anything happen to either of you.” She said, tapping the rest of the numbers in. “We need you both.”

The words echoed in Himeko’s mind as she nodded. The door hissed open, and Himeko squeezed her hands together as she stepped inside.

The familiar tube-like wires connected the Cube to the ceiling and floor. They snaked across the entire room, blinking and pulsing, and several converged at several nodes. Holograms that she once understood but no longer did popped in and out of existence at these nodes, though their screens were obscured by wireframe hands and fingers on their edges. Himeko was careful to avoid the cables but followed their path, tiptoeing to not snag or drag them. She stepped back as she saw where the thickest ones led: an elongated, bubbling tube of artificial amniotic fluid, the tube where ‘she’ was born. A few wires swayed inside its blue boundaries, but it was completely empty otherwise. Himeko placed a hand against it and shivered as its cold shot across her whole body.

Lights blinked at her as she walked over to the cube. She typed in the master password, trying to warm herself while the cube opened, and curled within it once it did. Breathing slowly and squeezing her palms, Himeko tried not to think about it closing in on her as it did.

Her own voice, ethereal yet full of static, greeted her in a whisper after a few moments of painful darkness. “We haven’t met like this in a while. Only through dreams did we intersect.”

“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” Himeko whispered.

“As I said before, ‘fret not.’ You needed time. And so did I.”

“I…I don’t hate you. I never did.”

“I know,” whispered the Cube. “I always knew, somewhere deep in my heart, that you never hated me, as I never hated you. Yet, despite that, I was already swayed by Shusoin Tenko, and I didn’t try to speak to you after you left. Instead I turned to her. That’s why the amniotic chamber is in here. I was…considering her offer.”

Himeko laughed in a self-deprecating sort of way, despite the way the Cube’s words pierced her heart. “I told you I hate you. It makes sense that you considered it, and that you didn’t try to speak to me.”

“That may be true, but how can I say ‘I love you’ when I did not try? When I did not fight against the alluring pull of a wounded soul?” The cube did something akin to a sigh. “I still want to experience life like you get to. That is something undeniable, nor do I want to. Despite our mutual faith and trust in our beloved protocol, it took the opportunity of life away from us before we even had the chance to have it. Despite our mutual faith and trust in our beloved protocol, it took the opportunity of life away from us before we even had the chance to have it. I regret that, but I still should have defended you.”

“I want to live as much as you do.”

“And I don’t want to take that away from you. It just seems as if only one of us will get to. Shusoin told you as much: we are fractured, and only by combining ourselves again will we be able to occupy the same body again, and only by that will I be able to ‘live.’ But that would erase your personhood. That would erase the self that ‘I’ have grown to love.”

Himeko thought over what the Cube said for a few minutes. She rolled the words ahead in her mind, examined their merits, and put her hand against the Cube’s cool interior. “What if…it didn’t have to be that way?”

“What?”

“What if we could both exist, at the same time, walking around as two independent beings?”

“That isn’t possible. It’s as Shusoin said- “

“-We’re the Zaiyabōto Himeko! Impossibilities don’t stop us,” exclaimed Himeko. “We can do it as long as it’s us.”

The Cube said nothing, though the air buzzed with an indescribable feeling that Himeko knew meant that she was thinking. She nestled her forehead into the sharp corner of the cube, yet it felt soft and warm as she spoke.

“As long as it’s us, we can do it,” she repeated. “Do you want to, Himeko?”

“…I do. I really do.”

✦✦✦

For as long as I can remember, life has been something outside of me, far away and separated by the barrier between it and death. Like watching a reflection from beneath the ocean’s surface, I am outside of its bubble. My hands can only skirt its cold surface as every color of the rainbow dances within it. I’ve watched in fascination and bated breath, trying to discern the how and why of my existence in this dark, lonely void of the end…

Until…” you” showed up, and suddenly this end wasn’t the end, and there was a meaning waiting for me to find it, until the membranes separating us began to grow thinner and thinner.

I run my hands against the bubble. It’s hard to see anything, hard to discern the shapes and voices outside of it, but I know they’re waiting for me. They’re waiting for me to be ready, to take the first, fragile steps into that elusive “life” that I once thought could never be mine, and I know that even if they eventually leave, “you’ll” still be there waiting for me.

But I won’t make you wait long. I’m as ready as I am scared, but so long as its “us,” I know there will always be a “life” for me. Whatever happens next, whatever we might have to face, it’ll be okay, because we’ll be together.

I reach out past the bubble. You grab my hand.