The City of Mirrors

I lifted my head and looked. The room was barren, like a cell. On the wall across from me, a wide, dark window showed my reflection.

I saw what I’d become.

I did not rise. I launched. I rocketed across the room and hit the window with a thud. Behind the glass, the two men lurched backward. Jonas and the second one, Sykes. Their eyes were wide with fear. I pounded. I roared. I opened my jaws to display my teeth so they would know the measure of my rage. I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. “Kill” is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died. They were yelling, screaming. I was not what they’d bargained for. The glass was bowing, shuddering beneath my blows.

A blast of white-hot brightness engulfed the room. I felt as if I’d been shot by a hundred arrows. I stumbled backward and fell curling to the floor. A clattering of gears above, and with a bang the bars fell, sealing me away.

Tim, I’m sorry. This was never my intention. Forgive me…

Perhaps he was. It made no difference. Even then, huddled in agony, I knew that their advantage was temporary; it held no weight. The walls of my prison could not help but eventually yield to my power. I was the dark flower of mankind, ordained since time’s beginning to destroy a world that had no God to love it.

—

From one, we became Twelve. That, too, is a matter of record. From my blood the ancient seed was taken and passed into others. I came to know these men. At first, they alarmed me. Their human lives had been very different from my own. They possessed no conscience, no pity, no philosophy. They were like brute animals, their bestial hearts full of the blackest of deeds. That such men existed I had long understood, but evil, to be truly comprehended, must be felt, experienced. One must enter into it, as into a lightless cave. One by one they came into my mind, and I into theirs. Babcock was the first. What terrible dreams he possessed—though they were, in truth, no worse than my own. The others followed in due course, each added to the fold. Morrison and Chávez. Baffes and Turrell. Winston and Sosa, Echols and Lambright, Reinhardt and Martínez, vilest of all. Even Carter, whose memories of suffering blew upon the dying embers of compassion in my heart. Over time, in the company of these troubled souls, I underwent an expanding sense of mission. They were my heirs, my acolytes; alone among them, I possessed the capacity to lead. They did not despise the world, as I did; to such men, the world is nothing, as everything is nothing. Their appetites knew no moderation; unguided, they would bring down swift and total destruction upon us all. They were mine to command, but how to make them follow?

What they needed was a god.

Nine and one, I commanded them, in my best god voice. Nine are yours but one is mine, as you are mine. Into the tenth shall be planted the seed so that we will be Many, millions-fold.

A reasonable person might ask, Why did you do it? If I possessed the power to lead them, surely I could have put a stop to everything. The rage was part of it, yes. All that I loved had been taken from me, and that which I did not love as well, which was my human life. So, too, did the biological imperatives of my remanufactured self; could you ask a hungry lion to ignore the bounty of the veldt? I do not note these things to seek the pardon of any person, because my actions are unpardonable, nor to say I’m sorry, although I am. (Does that surprise you to hear? That Timothy Fanning, called Zero, is sorry? It’s true: I’m sorry about everything.) I merely wish to set the stage, to place my mental contours in their proper context. What did I desire? To make the world a wasteland; to bring upon it the mirrored image of my wretched self; to punish Lear, my friend, my enemy, who believed he could save a world that was not savable, that never deserved saving in the first place.

Such was my wrath in those early days. Yet I could not ignore the metaphysical aspects of my condition indefinitely. As I boy, I spoke often to the Almighty. My prayers were shallow and childish, as if I were speaking to Santa Claus: spaghetti for dinner, a new bike at my birthday, a day of snow and no school. “If, Lord, in your infinite mercy, it would not be too much trouble…” How ironic! We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose. As a grown man, I mislaid the impulse, like many people. I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others. It is true that the events of my life brought me into a state of nihilistic despair, yet even in the darkest hours of my human life—the hours that, to this day, I dwell in—I blamed no one but myself.