Introduction

Parallel worlds, called Mirror Worlds, have been discovered, colonized and then abandoned by Earth over the course of several centuries. Earth has also virtually wiped out the malevolent Dark Triad personality traits via genetic manipulation. When it then finds that it needs Dark Triads to sustain its defense systems, it employs head-hunters to visit the Mirror Worlds and find appropriate candidates to bring back to Earth. Nick is one such head-hunter. It’s a dangerous job, as many of the Mirror Worlds are politically unstable, and most don’t know much, if anything, about Earth and its superior tech. Head-hunters have to blend in, sneak about, identify and make contact with their target, test them for the Dark Triad traits and, if the test confirms the target is suitable, convince (but not coerce) them into leaving their home planet for Earth. Essentially, head-hunters are James-Bond-style people of mystery.

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Excerpt

Earth

I woke up drenched in a cold sweat. It took a moment before my heart began to slow down, and the familiar sight of the navigation room pushed the nightmare from my head. I rolled out of the pilot chair and fought an irrational desire to turn on all the internal lights.

“Kir,” I asked, “did you wake me up?”

“Your level of adrenaline was nearing the threshold. Besides, we’re entering Earth’s orbit.”

Our psychologists advised against cultivating a personal relationship with an implanted chip life assistant, but it was very reassuring to hear Kir’s voice.

Earth guard systems requested identification, the usual procedure for everyone coming from the Mirror Spaces, and I initiated the arrival protocol.

“Nick,” said Kir almost immediately, “we can’t land. The Cyber Safety Department has turned on a Red Alert for all ships arriving from Earth3, citing cyber-implant contamination. We’re told to dock in the quarantine area,” he paused for a second and added, “Nick, I’m positive that my systems are clean.”

Of course, they were, I thought. I didn’t believe for a moment that this check was related to contamination. Cyber contamination protocol hadn’t been invoked for a very long time.

It would be too much of a coincidence, and I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore. It was an information leak that certain people were trying to stop, that much was certain. 

The border control cruiser escorted my ship to the quarantine hangar entrance – standard procedure in cases of suspected contamination, even if it felt somewhat menacing. Nothing personal … but I didn’t even try to pretend that it was true. The gates closed, and I surveyed the interior of a huge holding area, letting Kir deal with the landing.

All the other parking spaces were empty, and the only person inside was a woman in a Cyber Safety uniform. Kir opened the hatch. I stepped out and waved at her as I walked down the stairs.

She addressed me from several steps away, “Welcome to Earth. We apologize for the unfortunate delay and will send you on your way as soon as possible. Can you please grant us permission to run diagnostic software on your cyber-implant?”

Another standard procedure for cases of suspected contamination, I thought.

“No problem,” I said giving her my most charismatic smile. “How long will this take?”

She stopped and looked at me with the cold resolute eyes of an interrogator. How unusual for friendly Cyber Safety personnel, I noted. Except that she most likely wasn’t from Cyber Safety and didn’t care about appearing nice. She was testing me: citizens with nothing to hide wouldn’t pay attention; people trying to smuggle critical information might get nervous.

“We cannot provide an exact estimate at this moment, but we’ll make sure that you’re comfortable during your wait.” She gave a tight smile back.

I told Kir to allow all cyber safety access. She nodded in acknowledgment and gestured for me to follow her. We passed through the metal gate to an internal corridor and entered a room that was decorated pleasantly enough but lacked the certain touch of care with which Earth usually treated its citizens. They didn’t even bother to imitate natural light.

I sat down in the only chair and just waited. 

I wasn’t surprised when Kir turned on a widespread security breach warning. They went beyond running diagnostic software – so much for standard procedure. 

Let them look, I thought. They wouldn’t find anything. It would be a big overstatement to say that the situation was under control, but things were going as planned, at least for the time being. As for the delay – I still had several hours before the timing would become truly critical. 

According to quarantine rules, I had to use their proxy to contact Earth. Not that it mattered, since Kir’s communications were under surveillance anyway.

I took a deep breath, preparing for the conversation, which would determine if my plan had any chance to work.

“Kir, request a connection to Hilgor,” I said finally. Listening to the gentle sound of the outgoing ring I hoped Hilgor did not reject my call. The truth was that I would most definitely get killed in the very near future if he wouldn’t take my call now. 

***

 A young man, Hilgor, a recent transplant from a Mirror World, was standing at his window wall looking out onto a multileveled flow of traffic connecting skyscraping sectors of the great city of Berlin. He seemed to be deeply immersed in his thoughts when a sudden shift in the building brought the sunlight directly into his eyes. 

“Damn these narcissistic buildings,” he said stepping away from the window. “I get their desire to look their best, but what about me?”

A large dog in the middle of the room stretched, sighed, and turned onto his back, his shiny fur looking particularly black on the pristinely white surface of the floor.

Architects programmed skyscrapers to periodically change shape to achieve their best appearance under different light conditions. None of the modern windows had the ability to block the sun, however. Generations of Commonwealth’s people had received retinal filters and self-protecting skin as a part of their standard birth package, so the brightness regulators had been redundant for some centuries now. But he wasn’t born here. In fact, he arrived on Earth only three months ago, and, despite the best efforts of his hosts, minor issues like this kept popping up in his day-to-day experiences. The external walls of his apartment needed to be replaced with some transparent photochromic material, but he kept forgetting to order it.

Of course, he decided to refuse to have any hardware implanted upon arrival on Earth. Instead, he wore the assistant chip on his wristband, and his residence and his flyer had to be rigged with custom devices, but he preferred to deal with the corresponding inconveniences. 

He walked to the corner, which remained in the shade regardless of the building’s orientation, and sat down in a shabby-looking armchair, blatantly contrasting with the sleekness of the overall room design, and refocused on the conjecture he had been trying to prove.

“Hilgor,” said the chip through the surrounding audio speakers, “you have an emergency call from Orbit. Nick is online. Would you like to accept?”

“Fine,” he said finally, “two-way audio.” 

A soft chime signaled the beginning of the open connection, and then a familiar voice came from the room speakers.

“Good evening, Hilgor. How’s life?” Nick sounded perfectly casual as if they had parted just yesterday. “Listen, sorry for disappearing – I have been extremely busy recently. I had to leave Earth for a while.”

“Busy?” asked Hilgor. “What do you mean – busy? How is …”

“I’ll tell you everything,” said Nick quickly. “But can we talk face to face? It’s important.”

Hilgor had to admit that he was rather keen to find out how Nick’s extraordinary story ended. His pride briefly fought with his curiosity, and then he replied in a similarly casual tone.

“Sounds good, Nick.” 

“The sooner the better. I just need to go through a couple of things on Orbit before I can land, but it shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay. How about Location 5? I’ll head over there now and you join me when you can? Riph and I could use the walk.” 

“You still have the dog? See you both soon, Hilgor. And thank you.”

The chime announced the end of the connection. 

“Wake up, Riph, and let’s go. We’re meeting Nick tonight,” he said and headed to the door. The dog shook himself awake and followed.

In general, Hilgor preferred walking over taking a flyer unless he was in a hurry. After three months, Berlin still seemed infinite, still had the attraction of an unsolved mystery. Hilgor enjoyed exploring the puzzle on foot when he could. 

A sudden wave passed through the pedestrian flow, and he quickly scanned the surroundings. Someone had upset the rhythm created by the precision with which people walked past each other to avoid close proximity, an old habit formed during the pandemic times. A woman had looked in his direction for too long and, distracted stepped into someone’s buffer zone. This happened around Hilgor all the time. Nick had explained that since there were almost no dogs on Earth, Riph caused a stir in the pedestrian flow. The woman turned away, and the smoothness of the crowd’s movement was restored.

Hilgor kept walking on one of the highest street levels. Nothing here resembled his home planet, but the pathways that crossed at seemingly impossible angles above and below creating intriguing geometric patterns. He would have to work them out at some point, but he was thinking about Nick now. There were very few people in his life that he could refer to as friends, and Nick got as close as anyone else. 

Of course, in the very beginning of their relationship, Hilgor had been suspicious, if not paranoid. But that was understandable, given the circumstances of their first meeting. One day Nick had simply shown up at Hilgor’s life and introduced himself as a secret agent from Earth. 

According to Nick, Hilgor had something that Earth had lost and desperately needed back. Hilgor didn’t quite get what it was from Nick’s explanation, except that it possibly had something to do with his ability to do mathematics. He clearly understood, however, that at some point it was considered so undesirable on Earth that it had been almost bred out centuries before. However, the situation had changed. They needed people like him to help reignite Earth’s technological future. 

Hilgor remembered asking, “People like me?” That’s when Nick told him about Dark Triads. 

Dark Triad people were known for their selfish and asocial attitudes, but these same traits, viewed from a different perspective, turned out to be little more than an evolutionary mistake. In fact, it was rooted in a neutral quality of mental unrest, which, in turn, translated into a fierce lust for anarchy and a burning desire to change the status quo. They fought boredom by their inherited desire to explore new territories and the imagination to develop new things. They weren’t afraid of anything when they were engaged in an obsessive hunt for fresh experiences and extreme emotions – they broke boundaries and took high risks for things that most other people didn’t care about in the first place.

In other words, they had the madness to see something that didn’t exist and the obsession to chase it at all costs. But was this really a mental illness, as it was initially defined, or was it something else? Could it be a kind of violent creativity? Creative drive? Nobody knew, but without it, Earth was losing the race for survival. It became clear that the rate of human advancement was reversely correlated with the elimination of the Dark Triad from the population.

The solution came to everyone at the same time. The trait was still available on the closed Mirror Worlds, and Dark Triad personalities could be imported to restore the lost genetic balance and jump-start Earth’s dominance as the lead planet. Commonwealth didn’t have a choice and had to take the risk of inviting evil back. 

Psychologists dusted off the old Dark Triad test they had used to discover this unsavory genetic phenomenon and developed screening technology to find potential targets. They trained a cadre of people called Headhunters to go to the Mirror Worlds, to recruit Dark Triads quietly and covertly and convince them to move to Earth. 

Nick was a headhunter and offered him a new life, full of perks and new challenges his homeworld couldn’t offer. He aced the test. And here he was. 

Hilgor didn’t know how he felt about it, not even after he had spent several months on Earth and finally understood all of the layers of the issue. He learned that Earth’s Military Intelligence issued a warning that some cutoff Mirror Worlds would reach the technological level that would enable them to cross Mirror borders and potentially attack Earth. 

While it was still possible for Earth to invade the developing civilizations and throw them back technologically as had been done centuries before. But generations of people grew up ashamed of their ancestors for doing precisely that. It was beyond impossible to repeat such an inhumane deed. The only ethically acceptable solution was to build a solid defense system, and Earth invested its best resources into a space shield design. Groups of highly intelligent engineers and scientists came up with excellent ideas, but despite all of their efforts, the program development got stuck in the initial stages. The Mirror Worlds were catching up. Time was running out. 

The space shield program was a decent challenge, so he joined the project group with sincere enthusiasm. 

Everything had been good on the surface, but Hilgor still didn’t feel completely at ease. It was hard to blame him really. There was something unhealthy about the fascination with which Earth’s population viewed Dark Triad outliers.

Dark Triad. Dark Fire. Friendly Fire. He watched the super-alert eyes of local people during their interactions with him and imagined a similar wordplay in their minds. 

Hilgor turned into a small alley, and Riph confidently headed toward a familiar door in a white porcelain wall. The dog stopped to sniff at some protruding object in front of the building, and then, satisfied, lifted his leg. Hilgor looked in a different direction, pretending not to notice. This object was probably a work of art just like everything else on Earth. The government had collected a lot of art over the centuries, and displayed it in every public space, large and small. 

The plaque at the entrance announced that it was an architect’s rendering of a place without a character. The installation represented a small fast-food place with an automatic food dispenser from some period several centuries ago. The place felt perfectly and refreshingly ordinary. And, at this time of day, empty.

Hilgor dropped his jacket on the white bench and threw Riph’s leash on a plastic tabletop that flashed with ancient headline news and bright advertisement clips. Riph immediately stretched out on the floor, obliviously blocking the aisle. 

Hilgor had to step over the dog to get to the vending machine in the back corner. Unfortunately, coffee wasn’t on the list of options, so he toggled the stimulant level of some synthetic drink from the past to the highest setting and watched a tall glass fill with cold amber liquid. The running text on the display cheerfully wished him good morning in several modern and archaic languages.

“I wonder what our friend Nick wants to talk about?” he said to the dog. Riph responded with a slight movement of his tail. 

Hilgor sipped his drink. “I hope he doesn’t take too long to show up.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) Why did the author choose this book's epigraph (a quote from Bulgalov's Master and Margarita): "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light?"
2) Which of the novel’s philosophical quandaries — the source of human creativity, the conflict between egalitarian / enlightened society and an individual’s freedom of expression, various dilemmas in bioethics - spoke to you the most?
3) What is your favorite action scene and why?

Weblinks

»	Official website for the book
»	Goodreads page for the book
»	Interview with Authority Magazine
»	Writing and Reading Podcast with Jeff Rutherford
»	Interview with Linda Hobden

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