ACT I

Frankie O'Brien stood at the edge of the parking lot and looked at the bus that was supposed to take him to the launch site. It was a grey bus. It had been a grey bus for as long as he could remember, maybe longer. The paint was peeling in places, revealing rust that looked like brown scabs. There was a number stencilled on the side in faded white letters: 47. Frankie didn't know what the number meant. He assumed it meant nothing.

He checked his pockets. Three dollars and forty-seven cents in cash, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and a folded piece of paper with an address on it—the address of the New Dawn Project's hiring office in Youngstown. He had arrived in Youngstown four days ago with nothing but the clothes on his back and a cousin named Ray who had promised to put him in touch with someone. Ray had given him the address and said, "They're looking for people. Show up, ask for Mr. Kowalski, and don't say anything you shouldn't."

Frankie didn't know who Mr. Kowalski was. He assumed it didn't matter.

The hiring office was a single room above a laundromat on West Federal Street. Mr. Kowalski was a thin man with a face like a dried apple and eyes that moved too fast, like he was always looking for an exit. He sat behind a desk that had a chip in the corner and a sticker that read WORLD'S OKAYEST BOSS. He looked at Frankie's paperwork, looked at Frankie's face, looked at the paperwork again.

"You're thirty-four," he said.

"Thirty-three," Frankie said. He was not sure which was true.

"You got dependents?"

"I got a daughter."

"Does she live with you?"

"No."

Mr. Kowalski made a note on a pad. "You got a criminal record?"

"Once. Possession. That was ten years ago."

"Drug or weapon?"

"Drug."

Mr. Kowalski nodded. "You got a family doctor?"

"No."

"Last time you saw a dentist?"

Frankie thought about it. "A long time."

Mr. Kowalski set down his pen. "Here's how it works, Mr. O'Brien. You sign a contract. You get ten thousand dollars upfront. You go to Columbus for training—three months, room and board provided. Then you go to orbit. You work six months, you come home, you get your remaining forty thousand dollars. Total compensation: fifty thousand dollars. You do this once. You're not eligible for rehire."

Frankie stared at him. "Orbit?"

"You ever been on an airplane?"

"Yeah."

"Ever look out the window and seen the curve of the Earth?"

"No."

"That's what you'll see. You'll clean windows. Up close. The pay is good because the work is hard and the people who do it are hard to find. You got a cousin who works for us. He says you're reliable."

Ray had said a lot of things. Frankie couldn't remember which ones were true.

"How hard hard?" Frankie asked.

"People quit," Mr. Kowalski said. "Not because it's dangerous. It's not that dangerous. Because it's boring. It's repetitive. It's the same motion, twelve hours a day, six days a week, for six months. You ever scrub a floor?"

"I ever scrub a floor."

"Then you know what I'm talking about."

Frankie thought about his daughter. She was seven. Her mother had a new boyfriend who didn't want her around on weekends. Frankie saw her every other Saturday and sometimes on Wednesdays if his shift allowed. She called him "Dad" and then she looked at him the way she looked at a TV that wasn't turned on, like she was waiting for something to happen.

"How much for the upfront?" Frankie asked.

"Ten thousand. Half now, half after training."

Frankie signed the paper.

ACT II

The training facility in Columbus was a windowless building that smelled of industrial cleaner and stale coffee. Frankie was given a room—a concrete box with a metal bunk, a metal desk, and a metal chair. The walls were painted a colour that was not quite grey and not quite white. It was the colour of a room that nobody wanted to be in.

There were twelve other recruits. Frankie learned their names over the first week: Marcus from Detroit, Tony from Cleveland, Earl from Pittsburgh, three guys from Youngstown, and four guys whose names he forgot within a day. They were all men. They were all in their thirties or forties. They were all, in one way or another, men who had failed at something.

The training consisted of simulations. They were strapped into harnesses and hung in front of large screens that displayed computer-generated images of a vast silver surface. They were given scraping tools and told to scrape the surface. The screen showed patches of film that appeared randomly, and the recruits had to find them and scrape them away before the simulation timed out.

Frankie was good at it. He didn't know why. Maybe it was the years of scrubbing floors in his uncle's bar. Maybe it was the years of washing dishes at the diner off Route 8. Maybe it was just that he had hands that knew how to hold a tool and a patience that came from doing the same thing over and over until it was done.

Dr. Chen watched the simulations from behind a one-way mirror. He was a young man, maybe early thirties, with dark hair and glasses and the tired look of someone who had been working too many hours for too many years. Frankie learned his name from a poster on the wall: DR. MARCUS CHEN, LEAD ENGINEER, NEW DAWN PROJECT. Dr. Chen had designed part of the mirror's support system, or so Frankie overheard the trainers saying. He was one of the smart people. The ones who sat in offices and drew lines on paper and made the things that other people cleaned.

The training ended after three months. Frankie passed with a score in the upper quartile. He was told to report to the launch site the following Monday. He was given a flight suit, a toothbrush, and a letter he was not allowed to open until he was in orbit.

The launch was in a rocket that was not pretty. It was a white cylinder with black stripes, and it smelled of fuel and sweat. Frankie sat in a seat that was too small for his frame and held onto the armrests and tried not to think about the fact that he was about to go higher than he had ever been in his life.

The ascent was loud and violent. Frankie pressed his face against the window and watched the ground fall away. Ohio became a flat brown and green sheet. Then it became nothing. The sky turned from blue to black, and for a moment Frankie saw the curve of the Earth and thought: that's it, that's all there is, and it looks smaller than I expected.

Then the rocket stopped shaking, and everything went quiet, and Frankie floated.

He floated out of his seat. He floated toward the window. He floated toward the thing that was waiting for him outside the window.

The Mirror was vast. It was the size of everything. It filled the view in every direction, a silver plane that stretched to the edges of visibility and then kept going. Frankie pressed his face against the window and stared at it and felt something in his chest that he could not name.

He didn't know what to call it. It wasn't awe. It wasn't wonder. It was something smaller and more uncomfortable than those things. It was the feeling of standing in front of something you do not understand and knowing, with absolute certainty, that you will never understand it.

ACT III

Frankie was assigned to the backside.

He learned what that meant on his first day, when the supervisor—a gruff man named O'Malley who had been on the Mirror for two rotations—pointed to one side of the structure and said, "That side. You work on that side. Always."

Frankie looked. The side O'Malley was pointing at was dark. Not black, not exactly. Dark grey, like the inside of an oven. It was the side of the Mirror that faced away from the sun, away from the Earth, away from everything. It was the side that received no light and reflected nothing.

"Can't I work on the front?" Frankie asked.

O'Malley looked at him like he had asked if he could work in the control room. "The front's staffed. You work the backside. That's your station. That's where you'll be for the next six months. You eat, you sleep, you work the backside. You don't need to see the front. Nobody does."

Frankie's station was a small platform attached to the Mirror's surface by a metal railing. It was about the size of a bathroom. He had his scraping tool, a container of solvent, a harness, and a chair. He sat in the chair. He stood up. He scraped the surface. The surface was dark and rough and covered in a film that came off slowly, leaving behind a slightly less dark, slightly less rough surface. He scraped for eight hours. He took a break. He scraped for four more.

He could not see the Earth. He could not see the sun. He could not see anything except the dark grey surface of the Mirror and the black void beyond it. The void was absolute. It was not the night sky he had seen from Earth, full of stars and colour and the faint smudge of the Milky Way. It was a void. A nothing. A darkness so complete that it made his eyes water, because his eyes were trying to find something to focus on and there was nothing to find.

Frankie started drinking the solvent.

It was clear and tasted like nothing at first, and then it tasted like everything—the sharp chemical bite of it, the way it burned his throat and made his eyes water and left a metallic taste in his mouth that lasted for hours. He drank it from the container they used to hold the solvent, and he drank it because it made the hours go faster, and because it made the darkness less sharp, and because it was something to do with his hands besides scrape.

O'Malley noticed. "You don't drink the solvent, O'Brien."

"It tastes fine."

"It's not for drinking. It's for cleaning. You drink it, you get sick. You get sick, you can't work. You can't work, you get sent home. You get sent home, you don't get the rest of your money."

Frankie nodded. He stopped drinking the solvent for three days. Then he started again.

He wrote letters to his daughter. He wrote three of them. In the first one, he told her he was okay, that the work was interesting, that he was thinking about her every day. In the second, he told her he loved her and that one day he was going to buy her a house with a yard and a tree and a swing. In the third, he wrote nothing. He sat in front of the paper for an hour, holding the pen, and then he set the pen down and folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

He never sent any of them.

The other workers on the backside were few—six men in total, including Frankie. They spoke little to each other. They ate in silence. They slept in a cramped bunk room that smelled of sweat and solvent and something else, something sour and persistent that Frankie could not identify. He assumed it was the smell of the Mirror itself, the odour of a machine that was not quite a machine, something between a tool and an organism, breathing slowly in the darkness.

Frankie stopped counting the days. Time on the backside was not measured in days or hours. It was measured in scrapes. Each scrape was a unit of time, and the scrapes accumulated into something that was not a week or a month but a duration—a stretch of nothing that had no beginning and no end.

He began to see things in the darkness. Not faces, not shapes. Just impressions—flickers at the edge of his vision, like the afterimage of a light bulb after you close your eyes. He would be scraping, and for a fraction of a second, he would see something—a colour, a shape, a movement—and then it would be gone.

He told O'Malley. O'Malley said, "It's the void. Your eyes are trying to find patterns in nothing. It's normal. You'll stop seeing them."

Frankie stopped seeing them for a while. Then they came back, more frequent, more vivid. He saw a woman in a yellow dress standing on the surface of the Mirror. He saw a child running across the darkness, laughing. He saw his father, who had been dead for fifteen years, sitting in his usual chair in the bar, smoking a cigarette and not looking at him.

He stopped telling O'Malley.

ACT IV

Six months passed. Or maybe six weeks. Frankie had stopped counting. The rotation change-over was announced over the intercom—a voice he couldn't identify, saying that a new team was inbound, that Frankie and the other backside workers were to pack their personal effects and report to the transfer pod.

Frankie packed nothing. He had no personal effects worth packing. His toothbrush was still in its wrapper. The three letters to his daughter were still in his pocket, unopened and unsent. His flight suit was the only thing he owned, and he would need it for the trip home.

The transfer pod was a small capsule that would carry them from the Mirror to Earth. Frankie sat inside it with the other five backside workers and stared at the wall. The wall was grey. It was the same grey as the room in Columbus, the same grey as the Mirror's surface, the same grey as everything in his life.

The pod detached from the Mirror. Frankie looked out the small window one last time. The backside of the Mirror stretched away beneath him, vast and dark and silent. It looked like a wound. It looked like a scar. It looked like the inside of a coffin.

The descent was violent. The pod shook and burned and Frankie pressed his face against the window and watched the Earth grow larger—a blue and white sphere that looked nothing like the brown and green sheet he had seen from the launch rocket. This was the Earth as he had never seen it before: whole, complete, indifferent.

The pod landed in a field in Ohio. Frankie stepped out into air that smelled of grass and dirt and something sweet he could not name. He stood in the field and breathed and felt the ground beneath his feet and thought: this is solid. This is real. This is the world.

A van was waiting for him. Two men in uniforms stood beside it. They told him to get in. He got in. The van drove him to a building in Youngstown, and the building was the same as every other building in Youngstown, and the men in uniforms told him to sign a paper, and he signed it, and they gave him his remaining twenty-five thousand dollars in a brown envelope, and he held the envelope in his hands and felt the weight of it and thought: this is what my daughter's life is worth. Twenty-five thousand dollars.

He took a bus back to Youngstown. He walked to the address on the piece of paper Mr. Kowalski had given him. It was a bar. He went inside. He ordered a beer. He drank it. He ordered another.

On the third day, a package arrived at the rooming house where he was staying. It was a postcard, postmarked from Cincinnati. Frankie held it in his hands and stared at it for a long time. It was addressed to him, in a handwriting he recognized—small, slanted, uncertain. His daughter's handwriting.

He held the postcard for ten minutes. Then he set it down on the desk. He went to the bar. He drank a beer. He drank another.

He never opened the postcard.

OTMES-v2 Code: OTMES-V-ONU-03 TI: 82.0 | θ: 180° | M = [1.0, 1.0, 3.0, 9.5, 7.0, 2.0, 4.0, 6.0, 1.0, 3.0] N = [0.20, 0.40] | K = [0.30, 0.50] | R: 0.00 | I: 0.60 Classification: Dirty Realism / Zero Redemption Theme: M4_SocialCritique + M8_SciFi Narrative: Third-person limited, minimalist prose, nihilistic ending