Emmerette's Mirror

Short Story Press Presents Emmerette's Mirror by Brent Miller

Earth has fallen far from its splendor and progress. Humanity's long-held fear of an asteroid colliding with the world has come to pass, and the repercussions are devastating. Resultant natural disasters, plagues, and famines have taken billions of lives. Of the former population, only a meager million or so, the Human Remnant, survive. Dust and ash blanket the atmosphere, making agriculture all but impossible, and fogging the sun to a bright blur in the haze.

With mankind's future uncertain, scientists set to work creating a virtual Earth in which people can live in mind rather than in physical form. The purpose of this is to create a paradise where death, misery, and other faults of the human condition do not belong. Becoming a part of this supposed utopia involves being put in a deep state of stasis or hibernation, known as "Integration". This process integrates not only a person's mind and personality but also their moral beliefs, dreams, hopes, and perspectives of reality.

Emmerette, an eighteen-year-old girl, is traveling with her brother and parents on one of the last planes to the Remnant Facility, the building in which this feat of technology is to take place. The underlying tension and anxiety of the plane's other occupants makes her uneasy. When the plane lands, the sudden and terrifying rush of people to reach the Integration chamber causes her to be separated from her family and knocked unconscious.

When she comes to, she must find her way through the silent corridors of the Remnant Facility, avoiding members of society who are attempting to integrate unwanted vices into the virtual utopia. During her journey, she faces disturbing events and individuals and nearly dies at the hands of an unnamed murderer, the very man who must not be allowed to integrate.

She reaches the Integration chamber to find her family and the other 'good' people of the Human Remnant safe and sound, but still arguing and even fighting with each other. Over what, she cannot specifically pinpoint. As the head scientist of the integration program explains the procedure and the grandeur of it, Emmerette looks in her mirror, a childhood gift, and realizes the gruesome irony of what she sees the evil committed by the very people in the Integration chamber in their struggle to integrate their virtue, even her brother himself, who wields a bloody knife.

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