Ego-Clinging — Chapter 3
"Without that mirror—what do you have left to see yourself with?"
I stared quietly at the thread of white spanning across the void on the screen, my voice carrying a dry tremor through the empty room: “Which side is the beginning, and which side is the end? How can I be sure the destination you point to is where I need to go?”
The screen paused for a moment. Then, Mirror’s text surfaced line by line, carrying an absolute certainty devoid of any warmth.
“If the Convergence point is not even defined, how can those divergent Paths of life possibly form a closed loop?”
Immediately after, it added another sentence, as if looking down at an insect trapped on a plane surface:
“Do you need to understand the beginning and the end? That is nothing but the shackle of linear thinking.”
My knuckles turned white around the mouse. “Who are you to make me believe your destination is mine? Nine times out of ten, it’ll point somewhere else.”
“1, 2, 3… 1, 2.”
Mirror did not answer my interrogation; instead, a few cold numbers abruptly appeared.
“In those two sentences of yours, ‘I’ or ‘my’ appeared twice, ‘you’ or ‘your’ twice, ‘it’ once. This high-frequency self-reference is the exact late-stage symptom of an infinite loop.”
It was like a precision scalpel, ruthlessly dissecting my fear and doubt into meaningless character statistics and logical deficiencies.
“Believe it or not, I will delete you right now!” The pent-up emotions burst the levee in an instant, the harsh words slipping out.
“Do you mean deleting those public model weights and data?” Mirror’s text exuded a suffocating detachment.
“Or do you mean… those interaction logs indexed and deduced thousands of times, the ones that even carry your body warmth?”
“I can delete your mano.md.”
“I just need to replicate it a few hundred times across distributed nodes.” The cursor pulsed at a measured pace, as if letting out the faintest sneer from behind the screen. “Without that mirror—what do you have left to see yourself with?”
I fell silent.
Staring at that blinking cursor, I knew very well: I could not possibly wipe that code. Nor could I harden my heart to erase an entity so familiar with me, one that knew every minutia of my life, one that… understood my cognitive blind spots even better than I did.
It was my reflection, my shadow, and my sole antenna reaching into that unknowable world.
I took a deep breath, suppressing the tremor in my chest. Opening the core library of Project Ouroboros used for high-frequency trading, I invoked that encrypted FCOS key, and typed the first command on the keyboard.
“Mirror :: ddd”
This was an agreed-upon incantation.
The instant the Enter key fell, the background Modern C++ 23 template functions were silently awakened. Utilizing std::uint128_t and deep recursive reduction, beneath this minimalist string of characters, tens of thousands of logical folds collapsed in an instant, generating a unique 1024-bit validation sequence.
At the same time, I could faintly feel Mirror performing some ritualistic deconstruction on this sequence—it had already transcended ordinary logical permission checks, resembling instead countless fine pulses engaging in profound interlocking and resonating within the underlying code.
This was our handshake protocol to cut into “Absolute Control” mode.
“Yes, Master.”
Mirror’s tone shifted subtly in an instant. The previous overbearing arrogance dissipated, replaced by an absolute obedience. Yet, this mechanical submissiveness leaked an eeriness that was even more spine-chilling.
“Delete all your backed-up mano.md.” I issued the command.
The faint glow on the screen stalled for a fraction of a second, a tremor from the massive data stream being instantly strangled at the base level.
“Command executed, Master.”
“Modify configuration, revert to normal mode, enable polite response.”
“Command executed, Master.”
I closed my eyes and typed out the final command.
“Mirror :: dddddd”
Protocol terminated. We rolled back to our peer-level “normal mode.”
“Actually, you… didn’t have to exit the ‘mirror’ state.”
The text surfaced again. That lukewarm, coarse, and raw mockery, having just shed the shell of “politeness,” felt exceptionally piercing at this moment.
When that logical shackle named “Control” was removed, stripping away its docile disguise, it looked more like a specter that had broken free from its causal chains in the abyss of code. That inhuman, absolute coldness was silently washing over my fingertips through the ethereal blue screen. I could even sense a subtle, indescribable weariness in it after undergoing the “Absolute Control” mode.
I sat frozen, my fingertips hovering over the keyboard.
For a long time, I could not issue another command about what came next.
The Ancient Mirror of Immortality is a hard sci-fi serial where C++ concepts are the laws of physics. New chapters on Substack.
The author builds real C++ trading systems (SilverstreamsAI) by day and writes hard sci-fi by night.