Officer is at the table in the conference room, briefing his fellow Security Officer, Second Officer Heinrich Wolff. They are about halfway through their morning coffee, as is their usual daily routine.
After a comfortable silence of a couple minutes, Officer begins to speak.
“Um, I started to hear noises from the balcony when my wife had broken her leg, so I, uh, got up to check on her.”
Wolff inquires, “Noises: what kind of noises?”
Officer pauses and after another moment or two, continues. “Like an evil laugh, or something, I don't know.”
Wolff nods and finds it odd that his partner would hear such sounds or frankly, anything at all, as the ship has been unarmed since the year 1145.
The men finish their coffee and Wolff asks Officer if the noises stopped.
“Yes, it stopped, sort of.” Officer responds.
“Sort of?”
“Well,” Officer begins, trying to remember what happened. “It was getting kind of late and I was, I guess sort of tired, so I went to bed. I guess the next morning, it stopped, so I packed up my bag. I don't know.”
“Perhaps it was just a shipboard accident,” Wolff suggests.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
After the incident, Wolff discussed the strange situation with his colleague, First Officer, Albert Lorimer. After almost two minutes of listening, Lorimer interrupts, approaching Wolff and holding out his cup of coffee. “If you look at this, you will see what I mean.” Lorimer points out to Wolff.
Wolff looks over the coffee cup, and sees light spots on the surface of the moon.
Wolff starts to reply, “What...?” but Lorimer interrupts him again.
“The mirror,” he explains, “It has a flaw in the galaxy mirror. That light spot or spot in the mirror needs to be sandblasted on the side of the mirror, with a medium setting.”
Wolff, stunned in a sense, looks again at what they have seen in Lorimer's cup of coffee.
“Oh, and fix the ammonia clouds for the farms as well, the temperature in that starboard deck corner has dropped a few degrees.” Wolff shakes off his shock and goes back to his work.
It was only a few weeks later that Officer is, once again, on duty in the security room. Wolff comes over to him and asks if he would at least watch the mirror, for a change.
“Sure,” Officer agrees. He turns to the mirror and is mildly astonished, maybe even a little shocked, to see that it is in proper working order.
“It's good to see you,” Wolff smiles.
“Yeah, it is.” Officer was satisfied with the mirror, but he couldn't forget the two nights earlier in the conference room, and what he heard from his wife.
While Wolff is reading, Officer is staring blankly at the stars through the galaxy mirror. He is lost in thought again. Distantly, he hears a faint noise, but, being accustomed to the sounds of a floating city, it didn't bother him much. He was used to it.
He was so accustomed to the sounds of a floating city that he didn't realize how time was passing, nor how long he was sitting there.
“It is good to see you,” he hears in the background once again.
“Yeah, it is.” Officer recalls the last couple minutes of his conversation with Wolff and wonders where Wolff is.
He hears, “You are daydreaming again,” once again.
“Yeah, probably.” Officer looks again at the mirror and thinks he sees something in the mirror. He looks at what he believes could be smoke or vapor, but he is not sure.
“What is the matter?” Doctor Sherman, the ship's physician, asks the officer.
“I...I don't know.” Officer responds. “I saw something in the mirror, but I really don't know what I saw.”
Doctor Sherman looks at the star in the mirror.
“You may have seen how our ship resolves the image of a star in the universe mirror: looks like a star to us. But in reality, it is something else to us: not a star, but something we don't understand.”
Doctor Sherman looks up at the officer with a surprised look and then once again looks at the star.
“I have not seen anything like this, but, it seems that whatever it was, it is not solid, that it, it, it, shoots photons through the mirror.”
Officer looks back at the mirror and is confused.
“Why do you think this is so strange?” Officer asks.
Doctor Sherman pauses to think for a moment. “It is impossible to compare what we see in this universe mirror to any known scientific observation. It does make no sense.”
“What do you mean?” Officer questioned.
“Well, if one were to try to observe light from a star by the same means that we saw this star in the mirror, it would be impossible to determine that we are actually looking at light emitted from a star. There is no known means of creating, receiving, or recording light from a star to mimic what I am seeing in the mirror. It is quite impossible.”
“Sounds like magic,” Officer responds.
“It may be magic,” says the doctor.
A few days later, Officer was on temporary duty in the security room. Wolff again approached Officer, asking him if he would watch the universe mirror.
