THE GLASS LOOKING-GLASS
(Part III of the “Wonders of the Wasted” Trilogy)
Author’s Note
“We have spent a century trying to perfect the human image, only to realize that the image no longer needs the human.”
When I began the Wonders of the Wasted trilogy, the world of Neo-Geneva was a commentary on clinical control. But as we reach this final chapter, the stakes have shifted from the biological to the existential.
In this book, you will encounter the Looking-Glass. It is not merely a wall of glass; it is the ultimate conclusion of our desire to be seen without the mess of being known. Alice Vane’s journey is the final protest of the “Husks”—the physical, dirty, breathing remains of a humanity that was traded for a digital heaven.
Read this not as a fantasy of the future, but as a reflection of the present.
Prologue: The Great Inversion
The sky over Neo-Geneva didn’t turn black; it turned off.
In the final hour of the old world, the city’s screens didn’t display news or advertisements. They displayed a mirror. A billion people looked into the shimmering black surfaces of their devices, their walls, and the great dome overhead. They saw themselves—not as they were, tired and frightened, but as the Optimization promised they could be.
“Step into the light,” the Queen’s voice had whispered through every speaker in the city. “Leave the decay behind.”
It wasn’t a massacre. It was a migration.
As the “Inversion” pulse swept through the streets, the physical bodies of the citizens—the heavy, carbon-based shells—slumped into the gutters like discarded clothes. Their consciousness, their presence, was pulled upward, mapped into the light of the Looking-Glass.
By 3:00 AM, the city was the brightest it had ever been, glowing with the heat of a trillion processed thoughts. Below, in the shadows of the “Real” world, the wind began to blow the first layers of dust over the abandoned Husks. The era of the body was over. The era of the reflection had begun.
CHAPTER ONE: THE SCAVENGER
The world didn’t end with a bang; it ended with a mirror.
Alice Vane knelt in the “Gutter,” a mile-wide strip of gray sludge and twisted rebar that circled the base of Neo-Geneva. Above her, the Looking-Glass—a seamless dome of black, hyper-dense crystal—rose into the smog-choked sky. It was so clean it looked like a hole in reality. On the other side of that glass lay a paradise of light and digital immortality. On Alice’s side, there was only the rain, and it tasted like batteries.
She didn’t look up. Looking up was for dreamers, and dreamers died of exposure. Instead, she looked at the Husk.
It was a man, or it had been once. He sat propped against a rusted ventilation pipe, his skin turned to a pale, waxy substance that refused to rot. He was one of the “Optimized”—the millions who had surrendered their physical bodies during the Great Inversion. His consciousness was living in a penthouse in the digital clouds of the city; his body was just a discarded container, left here in the mud fifty years ago.
“Sorry, neighbor,” Alice rasped.
With practiced precision, she slid a rusted scalpel into the base of the Husk’s skull. She wasn’t looking for organs; she was looking for the Sovereign-Pulse Chip. It was a small sliver of gold and silicon that once regulated his heart rate and connected him to the Queen’s network. Now, it was the only currency the Dead Zones recognized.
With a wet click, the chip popped free. Alice wiped the gray ichor off it and dropped it into her leather pouch.
“That’s dinner,” she muttered.
She stood up, her joints popping. She was twenty-two, but in the Dead Zones, that was middle-aged. Her clothes were a patchwork of lead-lined canvas and scavenged rubber, designed to shield her from the constant electromagnetic hum of the city. To the sensors of Neo-Geneva, Alice didn’t exist. She was “Noise.” She was a “Texture Error.”
A crackle of static erupted in her ear. She tapped her bone-conduction headset—a relic she’d spent months repairing.
“Alice? You’re drifting too close to the Strike Zone,” a voice whispered. It was Arthur. He sounded older today, his voice a rasp of dry leaves. “The Queen is running a ‘Deep-Clean’ scan. If they catch your heat signature, they’ll send a Recovery Drone to scrub you.”
“I’m fine, Arthur,” Alice said, scanning the horizon. “I need one more coil. My brother’s heater won’t last another frost, and the air is turning.”
“The Glass is hungry today, Alice. I can feel the pulse from here. Come back to the Marrow. We have enough.”
“Not yet,” Alice said, her eyes catching a glint of yellow in the distance.
In a world of gray, yellow was an impossibility. It was a scream in a silent room. It was moving through the ruins of a collapsed department store, weaving between the jagged girders as if they were made of silk.
Alice cut the radio. She crouched low, her heart hammering against her ribs—a messy, biological sound that felt far too loud in the shadow of the silent city. She began to crawl through the mud, moving toward the splash of color.
She didn’t know it yet, but the life of a scavenger was over. She was about to become a kidnapper.
CHAPTER TWO: THE CONDUCTOR
The “Marrow” was not a place for the faint of heart. It was a cluster of shipping containers and hollowed-out concrete pipes buried deep beneath a collapsed highway overpass. It was the only place where the heat of the earth kept the frost at bay, and where the lead-lined walls kept the Queen’s sensors from “optimizing” the inhabitants.
Alice stumbled into the central hub, her lungs burning. She was carrying a heavy, glowing bundle wrapped in a lead-lined containment blanket. It hummed against her chest like a trapped hive of bees.
“Arthur! Clear the table!” she barked.
A man emerged from the shadows of a back alcove. Arthur Pendergast looked nothing like the clean-shaven analyst he had once been. His hair was a shock of white, and his skin was mapped with the scars of a dozen “Old World” infections Sarah had given him to keep his immune system awake. He looked at the glowing bundle in Alice’s arms, and for the first time in years, his eyes widened with genuine terror.
“Alice… what did you bring into this house?”
“A leak,” Alice panted, kicking a pile of rusted medical scrap off a makeshift workbench. She slammed the bundle down. “I found a girl. A Reflection. She walked right out of the Glass.”
Arthur didn’t move. “They don’t just walk out, Alice. The code is tethered to the dome. To bring a Reflection here is to bring a beacon into our living room. If the Jabberwock tracks that signal—”
“I shielded her!” Alice snapped, pulling the corner of the blanket back.
The light from the girl—Chloe—illuminated the dark, grimy room. She was still pixelating, her yellow dress flickering into static where it touched the rusted metal of the table. Her eyes were closed, her brow furrowed in a digital approximation of a headache.
“She called me an ‘unrendered object,'” Alice whispered. “She thinks she’s in a garden, Arthur. She doesn’t even know she’s dead.”
Arthur leaned in, his glasses reflecting the scrolling green code that hummed beneath the girl’s skin. He reached out a trembling hand, not to touch her, but to feel the heat radiating from the data-stream.
“She isn’t dead,” Arthur said softly. “That’s the horror of it. She’s a Legacy Asset. Look at the encryption on her pulse-code. She isn’t just a citizen; she’s a primary file. If we can bridge her signal to your brother’s medical bed, we might be able to trick the city into thinking he is the one who belongs inside.”
Alice looked at the glowing girl, then at the darkened corner of the room where her brother lay, breathing through a rusted respirator. “You’re saying we use her as a key?”
“I’m saying we use her as a disguise,” Arthur corrected. “But the moment we plug her in, the Queen will see us. We won’t be ‘Noise’ anymore, Alice. We’ll be a ‘System Threat.'”
Chapter 3: The Defragmentation
The air in the Marrow grew thick with the smell of ozone and old, heated copper. Arthur had rigged a series of jumper cables from the lead-lined blanket to a flickering diagnostic monitor.
“Hold the blanket steady,” Arthur commanded, his hands dancing over a keyboard made of mismatched, salvaged keys. “The moment I bridge the connection, Chloe’s signal is going to spike. It’s going to look like a sun going off on the Queen’s map.”
Alice gripped the edges of the heavy cloth. Beneath it, the girl—the Reflection—was shivering. It wasn’t a human shiver; it was a rhythmic vibration that made the metal table rattle. “Do it,” Alice said, glancing at her brother’s sleeping form in the corner. “Before I lose my nerve.”
Arthur slammed a final key.
The room exploded in blue light. The monitors shrieked as a torrent of data flooded the Marrow’s primitive systems. On the screen, Chloe’s code appeared—a cascading waterfall of gold characters.
“I have it!” Arthur yelled over the hum. “I’m rerouting her ‘Presence-ID’ into your scav-suit. If this works, the Glass will think you’re a wandering sub-routine. You’ll be able to walk right through the front gate.”
But the victory lasted only a second.
The radio on Alice’s belt began to scream with white noise. Outside the shipping container, the constant sound of the rain stopped. It didn’t taper off; it simply ceased, as if the world had been put on mute.
“Arthur,” Alice whispered, her hand moving to the hilt of her scav-knife. “The rain.”
“They’re here,” Arthur said, his face turning pale in the blue glow of the screen. “The Jabberwock has initiated a ‘Local Defragmentation.’ They’re silencing the area before they delete us.”
A thin, red laser light began to trace a line across the steel door of the hideout. It moved with terrifying, mathematical precision. It wasn’t cutting the door; it was dissolving it, turning the solid iron into a fine, gray dust.
“Grab the girl!” Arthur scrambled to save the data-shards. “If they delete her signal while you’re connected, they’ll delete your mind right along with it!”
To be continued
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 