“somewhere very exciting.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Marcus said, peering about. “I’m more concerned with how we walked through a door a few seconds ago, and entered an impossibly large room. The door’s gone, you know. That worries me a little bit.”
“Don’t panic,” the Master said, “it’s almost perfectly safe. We’re in a theoretical room, bound by dimensional energy. Look, watch this, I’ll make more sense afterwards.” With a whirl of her sleeves, she conjured from somewhere something that looked quite a bit like a remote control, pointed it at the sky, and pressed play.
Instantly, the pattern of the swirling of the clouds changed, rolling together into two distinct shapes that then swept themselves aside, revealing clear skies beyond. Adorning this blank canvas was the image of a very familiar looking planet.
“For hundreds of years,” came a sudden voice that sprung from nowhere, deep and bass, and left Marcus’s ears feeling like they’d had warm treacle poured into them, “Planet Earth has been wondering if it is alone in the night sky of the universe. As we know, it is not. In their gentle pursuit of the stars for answers, however, the people of Earth fail to realise exactly how close their closest neighbours are. Because, across space and time, connected by that most fragile of links, Earth has a twin.
At this point, two large mirrors materialised on either side of the floating planet. Hugely ornate affairs, they were formed by a sudden twist of cloud which suggested that they had in fact been there all along, just waiting for their cue. With the planet caught between them, it could be seen reflecting off into infinity through the mirrors as they began to rotate around it. Marcus’s mind began to boggle.
“Mirrors share a strange quality that is rarely remarked on; they lie. The truth that a mirror shows is never the truth as experienced by the observer. Wink your left eye to your reflection, and it winks its right eye back. In mirrors, we see what we expect to see, a reflection of ourselves and the world around us. But such is the truth; the world the mirror shows is not our own, and this lie that mirrors tell is no less real than that which it reflects.. not from the inside. Here, in that oft-forgotten space on the far side of your reflection, the individual moments of Earth are infinitely captured and recreated. Thus is another world born, one that recreates and yet distorts its benefactor. Thus exists the Mirrorworld.”
As the sky mirrors sketched a path around the planet, it began to change. Colours flowed out of their homely spots, beginning new journeys to unforeseen lands, where they came together anew. In that unearthly sky the Earth recreated itself, continental patterns shifting away and reforming into shapes that managed to be completely new yet vaguely familiar at the same time. Here lay a desert over what was once a rainforest. There , the ocean reclaimed long-lost land. Sea levels fell and ancient civilisations arose once more. Cities vanished into cracked maws as countless millennia of continental drift made up for lost time. Ancient jigsaws clicked back together, decided that that had been a mistake, and connected back up a different way instead. After a few moments, Marcus found himself staring amazedly at a planet that definitely wasn’t, but might once have been, Earth. At his side, the Master was humming faintly.
“Balance,” the treacle voice continued ominously, “is key. These worlds that we share differ many times over for every one thing that stays the same.” Above , the new planet moved over to the side slightly, to allow another vision of an unaltered Earth to fade gently back into existence next to it.From the sides, clouds began to leak back into the image, filling the space between the two planets with their whirling intensity as the voice picked up again. “Here, in the gulf between our two worlds, lies the space that is not space,