The Mirror of Ezekiel
Fiction. 1.3k words. Mildly spooky, but the seed of existential horror that grew into this fic is a minor piece of the result. Happy Halloween!
Why didn’t I write more, sooner? Some events are too raw when fresh, and one wants to wait until the wound has scabbed over enough that brushing against it will not bring forth a ready flow of blood. But by that time, the details have started to fade. One might even suspect that’s why it becomes tolerable. But tonight I have decided to possibly lose one of my old friends and allies, and the need to order my thoughts outweighs my reluctance.
I could begin the story of my relationship with Professor Elliot many places, but the shortest tale starts with the Mirror of Ezekiel.
Professor Elliot came into possession of the Mirror after he and I liberated it from a particularly nasty man named Ezekiel. I had gotten onto his trail because several clients had been hacked by him, and gotten serious about it when a contact at the FBI told me that something weird was going on.
Ezekiel was a hacker of unparalleled skill, acquiring obscene amounts of money and putting them to obscene ends. But he didn’t have any the markers of genius, and he wasn’t using any exploits that the forensic computer scientists could find. It was as if he had a digital skeleton key.
But this story is about Professor Elliot, not Ezekiel. When the dust settled, Ezekiel and his companions were dead, his financial victims were somewhat restored, his physical victims were as restored as medical science could make them (that is, painfully little), and Elliot had a rectangular prism of a dark material just larger than a Kindle, with edges so sharp it would cut skin to handle it if you weren’t careful.
Ever practical, I built a frame for it. It wouldn’t do for Elliot to end up with fingers crisscrossed by fine scars like Ezekiel. I left the framed Mirror with him along with Ezekiel’s notes because he had the time and inclination to figure out what the Mirror was and how it operated.
Time passed. I was called elsewhere to deal with other business, and every now and then a letter from Elliot would make its way to me, with an update on his life, his other work, and sometimes the Mirror.
He quickly pieced together that the Mirror listened, and responded to sound. If asked a mathematical question while touched, the answer would immediately appear, written in glowing and ghostly Babylonian numerals.
But don’t get too excited. One of the earliest such reports detailed how Ezekiel himself came into the mirror. He had been apprentice to another, not named in his notes, who had owned the Mirror, and Ezekiel had one day tricked his master into asking the Mirror what the largest prime was.
“It was as though he shriveled away to nothingness before my eyes,” Ezekiel had written in his notes, and then gone on to use the Mirror to fuel his life of crime, apparently without a moment of remorse or reflection on the dangers involved. Even Ezekiel, knowing as little as he did about the information infrastructure that underpinned modern society, knew that if you could figure out what the prime factors of a very large number were, you could pretend to be anyone. Most importantly, you could pretend to be a bank.
That the mirror understood all languages and only spoke one worried me immensely, but the Professor merely saw its convenience. If it had had buttons, perhaps it was an alien calculator running Shor’s algorithm, but neither Ezekiel nor Elliot ever found a computation that took it a perceptible delay to compute. He used it as a curiosity and sometimes to aid his mathematical research. It was too cumbersome to ask it to solve optimization problems of any real size, where this supernatural power could have been used productively. It could not be asked to provide a proof, just a number, to an arbitrary degree of precision, if asked the right thing in the right way, with the meaning of ‘right’ unknown to us unless we were willing to turn to human sacrifice.
Tonight I received a call from Professor Elliot, clearly agitated, his voice slurred by the effects of alcohol. I managed to restore his calm then asked him what was the matter.
“The Mirror,” he said. “I can’t say too much over the phone, but you know what its previous owner wanted to do, who he wanted to call in to help. I was talking with a professor in the political science department and he mentioned how many near misses humanity had faced. Even civilians know about Arkhipov, and wonder what would have happened if another man had been on the crew of that fateful vessel. You and I can wonder what would have happened if your aim had ever been a little less true, or your feet ever a little slower to dodge, just once over your long career. Each dark plot, each opportunity for destruction, should shave a bit of possibility off worlds with peace and prosperity and hand it over to worlds with misery and death.”
He sobbed. I waited for him to continue. “So when I returned I asked the Mirror, 'In what percentage of worlds do humans survive?’ and it responded as instantly as ever.”
There was silence on the line. I knew what he was going to say, but I needed to hear him say it. But after a second I realized he needed me to give him permission to share this fact. “Say it already.”
“0%, to as much precision as I could ask. I thought of asking for the first nonzero digit, but then thought of Ezekiel’s old master.”
Professor Elliot was no novice to this world, but it still took more than that to phase me. Though perhaps I was simply more pessimistic to begin with. Having seen what I’ve seen, I would have guessed that at the start and never needed to ask the question. But…
“Wait. You asked for the percentage? Ask it in what percentage of worlds humans existed at all.”
“Oh.” The abrupt shock in his voice meant my point had sobered him up a bit. I heard him repeat the question faintly; he must be using the phone in his office. He laughed happily. “Oh, you were right! I was such a fool. 0% for this as well; the set of worlds with parameters tuned to sustain life is a set of measure 0. I already had an inkling that it defaulted to statistics over the whole multiverse, but when I saw that terrible number I suppose I just lost all sense of perspective. I’m terribly sorry to have called you so late at night for something so silly.”
“Think nothing of it. If I pick up the phone, I’m available, and I’m glad you called. Go to bed, eh? Leave the Mirror alone for a bit.”
“That’s a good idea. Thanks again.” He hung up the phone, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I hoped he wouldn’t think of the followup question I had immediately thought of. The Mirror would let you condition on facts when you asked a question–he could have asked what fraction of worlds where humans existed at all, they survived for at least some amount of time. Or, like in the Doomsday Paradox, asked how far along the list of all humans to ever live sorted by birthdate he was.
I knew better than to ask a magical device questions like that. It was never a good idea to tempt fate with self-fulfilling prophecies, and who knows what the Mirror might do to make its job of calculation easier? And then a sense of grim purpose overtook me, and I booked a flight on my phone.
I’m about to land. That’s enough for now. Hopefully Elliot will forgive my lack of trust in him.
