Broken Mirror by Cody Sisco Page A

room.
    Victor stumbled backward into the wall, plugging his ears. The ranger was trying to calm Sofie, but she shrugged off his pats and hissed at him too. Her shrieks punctuated the zookeeper’s calm voice.
    Victor bolted from the room. His granfa came out of the adjoining room, and Victor slammed into him.
    Granfa Jeff grabbed Victor’s arm and kept him from falling. “Calm down. We’ll wait a few minutes and try again.”
    “I want to go. She doesn’t like me.” Humiliation churned in his stomach. Still, there was something comical about it. Rejected by a chimpanzee. He must be the least likable human on the planet.
    “You didn’t give her the chance. Hers was a natural reaction to your hostility.”
    “I wasn’t hostile. I didn’t do anything.”
    “Come here.”
    His granfa led him to a set of vidscreens and input slabs. Victor saw the zookeeper through the window petting Sofie and heard his murmured reassurances through the sonofeed. She seemed as agitated as he felt.
    Granfa Jeff pressed a cutoff switch for the sonofeed and activated a spectrum relay panel for the vidfeed recording devices in the chimp’s room. One of the vidcams had been trained on Victor. He watched as the image of his face expanded to fill the vidscreen.
    “Look here.” His granfa pointed to the vidscreen, tracing Victor’s brow, eyes, and lips. “I’ll advance the feed slowly so you can see from the time you entered the room until she slapped your hand. This expression is a blend of anger, contempt, and fear. Your lips are compressed, nose slightly scrunched, brow furrowed. When you offered your hand, she saw it in that context, arm thrusting out like so. She didn’t see an invitation; to her it was a challenge.”
    “So?” Victor looked away from the image of his face.
    “You were projecting negative emotions, and Sofie registered them.”
    “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Hey, chimp, let’s fight,’” Victor said.
    “It doesn’t matter. You may not have been thinking it consciously, but what you were feeling was written all over your face.”
    Victor looked away. His granfa’s explanation made sense. He was sure he’d been neutral, when in fact he’d been hostile and combative. To not be aware of his own emotions, and yet to succeed in broadcasting them to everyone in sight — it was like living in an inside-out body, wearing organs like clothes, and walking around oblivious to others’ screams of horror.
    Victor said, “A chimpanzee with empathetic super powers. What’s next? Cats in space? Or are you saying she’s a Broken Mirror too?”
    “I know you’re upset, but think for a moment. What does this experience tell us?”
    Victor bit back another remark about him being so monstrous he couldn’t make friends with animals. His granfa was giving him a chance to use and demonstrate his intellect. He shouldn’t waste it. Especially before his next dose of Personil returned his mind to dullsville.
    “I need to control my expressions,” he said, “so I don’t get into trouble.”
    His granfa shook his head. “That comes later, and it’s an imperfect skill. Even the most skilled confidence men struggle to keep their true feelings from peeking through their masks. The lesson is more fundamental than that.”
    Victor looked at the ceiling, replaying the encounter in his mind. He had walked in, following the zookeeper, observing Sofie. She had greeted the man, followed him by the hand, looked at Victor, at his face, at his hand —That’s it! She had examined him. “She read me; she read my emotions.”
    His granfa nodded. “Precisely. And what does that mean?”
    “It’s a process, a procedure. Like taking a measurement.”
    “Go on.”
    “It’s about observing the facts. Other people’s movements, gestures, and expressions, and then deducing what they mean. If she can read emotions like this, then I should be able to as well.”
    “You’ve almost got it, very good. But I need to explain the