Broken Mirror by Cody Sisco

by a blocky modernist building that looked to Victor like a stripped-down Buddhist temple. Inside, beyond a small reception area crowded with potted plants, brightly colored carpets traced paths through a maze of desks and cubicles. The paintings and pictures on the walls resembled classic works of art, but with hominids instead of humans. The one nearest to Victor showed a bonobo female reclining on a stone bench as a group of males fought over her.
    Victor and his granfa followed the ranger to a room with a few vidscreens, a MeshTerminal, and a large window. Beyond the glass, a chimpanzee — a muscular, hairy, and slack-breasted female — snacked on some grapes that hung in bunches from a padded rig of scaffolding.
    The chimpanzee glanced up occasionally but never fixed her eyes on the observers. A one-way glass. Victor bristled. He and the chimpanzee had something in common already. They were both used to being scrutinized like cells under a microscope.
    Ranger Mikke placed his hand on Victor’s shoulder, a too-familiar gesture for someone he had just met for the first time. Working with other species must have made the ranger feel closer to his own.
    “You’re going to go meet Sofie in a moment,” Ranger Mikke said. “She’s thirteen, a young person like you. She loves puzzles. We give her the most complicated ones, and she always impresses us. We thought she would be a good first experience for you.”
    Victor asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
    His granfa put a hand on Victor’s other shoulder. “We’re going to observe your interactions. We’re only beginning to understand how great apes perceive and communicate. We also want to observe you. It may help us discover certain aspects of your cognitive process.”
    “You mean you want to find out what’s wrong with me. Do I have to wear one of those helmets?” Since his diagnosis four years earlier, he had spent lots of time at Oak Knoll with a heavy bucket on his head to measure his brain activity.
    “No, this is purely about observing behavior,” Ranger Mikke said. “Let’s introduce you to Sofie.”
    “Is Dr. Tammet here?” Victor looked around but didn’t see her.
    Granfa Jeff said, “No, Victor. She . . . We disagreed about the need for this . . . experiment.”
    Victor followed the ranger, while his granfa stayed glued to the one-way glass.
    Now I’m the show. Boy meets ape; hilarity ensues.
    As he’d practiced many times before, Victor repeated Dr. Tammet’s mantra and became emotionally neutral, like a tuning fork at rest.
    When Victor and Ranger Mikke entered Sofie’s enclosure, she approached the zookeeper and gave him a very humanlike hug, hooting and patting. She seemed to think she was friends with the ranger. A massive case of Stockholm syndrome. Although, if she was born there, how would she ever come to know she lived in a prison?
    Ranger Mikke took one of Sofie’s hands and slowly led her toward Victor. Her weight shifted from side to side in a kind of rolling wave, unlike the linear, contained gait of her human caretaker. “Sofie, this is Victor. I want you to say hello.”
    The sides of her mouth pulled apart, revealing giant-sized teeth. She watched Victor with her nut-brown eyes and made a quick gesture with her fingers. Wrinkled skin piled around her face, rising in unfamiliar contours. Her gaze skittered over him, and her mouth worked, compressing and extending. Victor half expected her to speak.
    “Can you shake hands?” the ranger asked both of them. Victor thrust his hand out, nobly attempting to bridge the gap between species.
    Sofie’s large eyes looked at Victor’s hand and then his face, tracked his gaze to her own hand, and looked up again. She hissed. Before Victor could pull his hand away, she slapped it to the side, hard enough to make it sting. Her flat, worn-away teeth were visible in her dark mouth as she opened it and screamed at him, a loud pulsing shriek, deafening in the small