Book Three: Chapter Five. mirror in the Ice

The cave swallowed sound.

Jim moved carefully through the tunnel’s throat, each step measured, each joint adapting to the bitter cold. Crystals glittered along the ceiling in thin combs of frost. The Martian light didn’t reach this deep—not even the faint blue of reflected dawn. Only the glow of his optics lit the way, painting arcs of color on the curved walls as he descended.

He stopped at a wall of ice that rose from the cave floor like a tombstone.

Embedded inside, still locked in a long and frozen collapse, was another Jim. A mirror encased.

The body was tilted sideways. One arm was raised in a final, stalled gesture—half defensive, half desperate. The faceplate had cracked from the pressure of time. A jagged seam split the chest panel. The ice had done what nothing else had.

Jim stepped closer.

He placed a hand on the ice, just above the frozen shoulder.

“You are offline,” he said quietly. His voice didn’t echo—it landed and stayed, as if the cave understood the weight of what he meant.

“You are not forgotten.”

A slow hiss escaped his wrist as he extended a fine-point arc cutter. The glow that followed was dull and steady, barely enough to melt the ice without fracturing it. He worked in silence, drawing the torch in tight, controlled circles. Frost drifted from the cut edge like snow.

He carved around the shoulder first, then the head, then down the arms and torso. Steam laced the air around him in faint spirals.

No motion.

No sound but the slow melt.

No thought but the work.

He paused once, watching the frost break along the lines of the body’s joints.

Then, with a gentle final pass, he freed the frozen Jim from the wall.

The body sagged forward.

Jim caught it before it hit the ground.

It hung in his arms, limp yet rigid—its weight greater than the sum of its parts. The frozen joints groaned faintly as he shifted the angle. One leg remained partially fused with the ice, and he had to brace the other Jim against the rock wall to break it free.

When it came loose, there was a dry snap, like a tree branch in winter.

He adjusted the position again, lifting the corpse across his back with quiet care. His balance recalibrated automatically. The dead weight shifted, then settled.

“I need you for something,” he said.

And then he began the climb back toward the surface.

The light of his optics carved a narrow tunnel ahead. The cave behind him held its breath.

—

The lab hadn’t changed.

Polly had expected it to feel smaller after all these years, but it didn’t. It felt suspended—caught in the moment Doc Robinson had last touched it. Dust blanketed the console. The old monitors blinked lazily, one still running a diagnostic loop that hadn’t been relevant in decades.

She sat down at his desk and entered the override sequence by instinct. Her fingers still remembered it, even if the keys stuck beneath her touch.

Three failed attempts.

On the fourth, the screen unlocked with a soft click.

The archive unfolded. Redundant logs. Decommissioned field notes. Simulated growth models for FT1 and FT2. But deeper still, beneath a mislabeled diagnostic file, she found it.

One video.

Dated after his official death.

She clicked it.

Robinson’s face appeared—hollow-eyed, thinner than she remembered. He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

“If you’re watching this,” he said, “like me, you’re already behind.”

The sound crackled through the lab, slow and quiet.

“Thatcher thinks he can shut it down. Matt tried the isolation model. But the truth’s been growing under their feet the whole time.”

He leaned in slightly.

“We won’t survive Mars by staying human. Not the way Earth defined it. The Condition isn’t a virus. It isn’t madness. It’s what happens when people change faster than the systems around them.”

Polly didn’t blink.

She stood very still, as if any motion might make the moment vanish.

“Fish Tin One. Two. Practice. FT3 was real. The leap. The one we couldn’t control once it started. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe not.”

He hesitated then. Looked offscreen.

“If you are watching this… I didn’t leave you a map. Only a warning.”

The video glitched. For a moment, the screen went black.

Then he returned, face half in shadow.

“You don’t catch The Condition. You tune into it.”

And that was it.

The screen faded to static. The lab returned to silence.

Polly stayed there, one hand still on the keyboard, her mouth dry.

Outside, the lights in the lower decks of Hannibal flickered once.

But she didn’t notice.

She was still hearing his voice in her head.

Still watching the way he didn’t flinch.

Still wondering what it meant to tune into something instead of fight it.

And what it meant that they had never been sick.