The Other Side of Me

He had been running a side project. An experimental AI rendering system that used real employee biometric data — faces, gaits, voice samples — to generate synthetic security footage for training purposes. He had used Nora’s data because she was the most frequently captured employee on the museum’s cameras. He had not asked permission. He had not told anyone.
The system had been accessed remotely three weeks ago by an unknown party. Someone had used it to generate footage of Nora entering the museum, timed to a real theft executed by a real person wearing a realistic prosthetic mask. A frame job built from her own digital ghost.
It was elegant and terrible and almost worked.
Nora sat with that for a moment. It explained the footage. It explained the card — cloned from digital records. It explained everything except the mirror.
She thanked Marcus and hung up. She walked back to the bathroom doorway. She turned the light on.
The mirror showed her standing in the doorway, arms at her sides, face pale and watchful. The reflection moved when she moved. It blinked when she blinked. Everything correct. Everything synchronized.
She exhaled.
Then she looked closer. At the scar above the reflection’s left eyebrow.
In a mirror, left becomes right. The scar should have appeared above the right eyebrow.
It was above the left.
The reflection smiled. Nora had not smiled.
She did not move. She did not scream. She simply stood at the threshold of the bathroom in her Portland apartment on a gray November morning, looking at the thing wearing her face, and understood for the first time that the theft at the museum, the detective, the call from Marcus — all of it had been a distraction. Something to pull her attention outward, toward the world, while something else moved in close.
The reflection pressed one hand flat against the inside of the glass.
Nora looked down at her own hand, hanging empty at her side.
She had no idea how long it had been there. She had no idea how many mornings she had stood at that mirror and looked without seeing. And the worst thought — the one that followed her out of the apartment and into the cold street and never quite let go — was this:
If it had been watching her all this time, learning her, copying her movements down to the scar and the tilt of her head — what, exactly, was it waiting for?

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About the Author

Rowan Vale — a student of occult symbolism, for whom every abandoned church is hiding something. Never leaves house without Daisy … his little doll.

— Rowan Vale

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July 18, 2026

10min-stories