Illusion Report

Mai Mingle bent down and reached under the chair. On the underside of the seat, she felt a knife held in place with duct tape. The tape came off with a RIPPPPP, and Mai Mingle stood up, knife in hand.

Mai Mingle pulled a stun baton from a prop box.

Mai Mingle grabbed a bottle of liquor from the shelf behind the bar and smashed it against the corner of a table. The bottle shattered with a crisp crack. Clear liquid cascaded down from the jagged, razor-sharp shards of glass.

Mai Mingle turned and ran.

It might have seemed ridiculous, but after ducking to dodge half a brick thrown by a Mai Mingle, her first instinct as she ran was to fumble for the "Extracellular Telomeres" on her body.

When her hand pressed against her lower abdomen and felt the long, coiled serpent sleeping there, her heart, which had been in her throat, dropped back into place. The slightly raised, strip-like Illusion was still wrapped tightly around her body.

So, she was *the* Mai Mingle.

For a moment just now, Mai Mingle had almost suspected that she, too, was one of the "Mai Mingles" fabricated by the Nest, perhaps being tricked into killing the real one.

’But if I’m the real me, then where did all these other Mai Mingles come from?’

Behind her, a glass window was smashed with a loud CRASH. The glass blossomed into a fleeting ice flower in the air before shattering across the floor.

Mai Mingle twisted her body, dodging a Mai Mingle charging at her with a broken bottle, and abruptly changed direction, darting diagonally into the rows of seats.

In just a few seconds, every Mai Mingle in the silent warehouse had broken into a frenzied sprint. And from the looks of it, she was the target of every single one of them.

’What should I do?’

The stage seemed unguarded, and the supply bag and tag were just sitting on a chair, completely unprotected. ’Should I go for the supply bag, or try to escape through the exit first?’

’Can I even escape?’

That moment of hesitation gave another Mai Mingle an opening. She kicked a chair, sending it straight into the back of Mai Mingle’s knees. Caught off guard, she pitched forward. Before she could even gasp in pain or regain her balance, a shadow flew at her from the corner of her eye.

Mai Mingle dove and hit the ground. The dark shape narrowly missed her head as it flew past, crashing into the face of another Mai Mingle. The sickening thud of a fire extinguisher hitting human flesh and bone—no, the sickening thud of a fire extinguisher hitting her *own* flesh and bone—made Mai Mingle’s scalp tighten.

"If only... things were different."

A loud voice suddenly boomed from the theater’s sound system, making Mai Mingle jump. She immediately recognized the somewhat unfamiliar voice echoing under the roof as her own.

Beside the microphone in the corner of the stage, there was no one.

One Mai Mingle grabbed half a brick and hurled it at her. Even though she quickly rolled away, it still struck her on the shoulder, a pain so sharp it felt like being sliced open by a knife.

"I wish I’d been born into a family like Kelly’s," the voice of a twelve-year-old Mai Mingle murmured from the speakers.

Those were words she had never spoken aloud, though they had coiled in her heart countless times.

She remembered instantly—Kelly was the prettiest girl in her class, with curly golden hair like sunshine. During summer vacation, she would go with her parents back to Copenhagen to visit family. If not for a stroke of luck, Mai Mingle would never have had the chance to attend the same school as a child like Kelly.

The memory, long forgotten, had rushed into her mind from nowhere, leaving her dazed.

’Wait, am I dazed because of the memory, or because of that brick that just hit my temple?’

Mai Mingle pressed a hand to her temple, where blood was gushing, and stumbled past the figure in front of her, making her way toward the door.

Her childhood home had also been a ground-floor storefront facing the street.

The front of the shop displayed groceries, dried seafood, sodas, and cigarettes. During holidays, they would temporarily sell couplets and firecrackers, mistletoe wreaths, and small national flags. The back half of the shop was a bedroom shared by the family of three.

That day, Mai Mingle was lying on the bed in a short skirt, reading a book, when the bedroom door was suddenly pushed open. A strange man walked in.

She was startled, and the man looked just as surprised.

His gaze quickly swept over the room, the bed, and Mai Mingle’s legs. He apologized and backed out. After the door closed, she heard her mother’s voice from outside, "The back isn’t part of the shop, you can’t just go back there!"

Nothing had happened. It was just someone who had made a mistake.

But an indescribable sense of shame made it impossible for Mai Mingle to keep reading. She tugged her skirt down forcefully and locked the door.

’Why didn’t I know to lock it? Why did I forget to lock it? How could I be so careless?’

’Something like this would never happen to Kelly,’ she thought. ’Kelly’s bedroom must be exquisite and beautiful,’ but she couldn’t picture it.

"If I were a man, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen to me, right?"

Through the speakers, a young adult Mai Mingle was saying quietly to a friend.

’Ah, that’s right.’

Mai Mingle thought to herself as she dragged her injured foot along.

After graduating high school, she had saved up money to learn how to type, determined to leave the area where she grew up. She wanted to apply for a job as a typist—she even fantasized about becoming a secretary in a big company. It was before 1960, and there weren’t many jobs a woman could do.

But the male manager sitting in that smoke-filled office didn’t care how fast she could type.

"Her legs aren’t long enough, and her ass isn’t perky enough."

She lingered in the restroom for a while. When she came out, she heard the male employees inside discussing her through the closed door. "Most importantly, I just can’t appreciate a face like that. I still prefer blondes with blue eyes. They look good in the office."

How strange. She couldn’t remember how her leg had been injured, something that must have just happened, yet this memory from over sixty years ago was so clear.

"I shouldn’t have done that... If only I were different... There are so many things I don’t like about myself... I’ve been hurt, and I’ve hurt others... In this life, there are so many things I wish had never happened.

"No one gets through life unscathed. I have to try to look toward the light, to walk toward the light... That’s because I’ve never lived in the light. There’s only been chaos, and tiny miseries. Every day feels like a splinter growing from life itself."

’...Were all these really my innermost thoughts?’

From the speakers, Mai Mingle let out a slow breath. The voice still sounded like her own, just ageless.

"Aren’t you wondering what kind of place this is? What the purpose is in making you kill all of yourself?"

A Mai Mingle grabbed what looked like a spare coil of thick electrical wire from a corner and swung it like a whip at her. She couldn’t dodge in time. The wire cracked through the air and struck her heavily across the back.

The voice from the speakers paused, waiting patiently for her cry of pain to subside before continuing:

"The ’me’s here are all the weak, ordinary, hesitant, awkward, embarrassed, mistake-prone, indecisive, and unsatisfactory versions of me. Countless weaknesses, countless mistakes, all just wasting a life.

"So what if you have an Illusion? You experience a few new things, and then what? You know it best, don’t you? Dragging this self around, a self that has already been molded by eighty-six years of life... even if you can be happy for a few days with the novelty of it all, you still can’t step into a brand new life."

Mai Mingle miraculously dodged yet another Mai Mingle, desperately lunged for the main door, and pulled it inward.

Unexpectedly, the door actually opened.

"You can’t bring yourself to kill right now. You just cower and flee, crying out in self-pity. Do you know why? Because this is the you that the past has shaped. In other words, it’s all the fault of your past selves. Only by killing these selves can you stop being defined by the past. Otherwise, giving you an Illusion would be a waste.

"Every Mai Mingle should understand this principle."

Outside the door was the sidewalk. As it opened, a pale, bloated daylight fell onto the warehouse floor.

Mai Mingle stared blankly at the Mai Mingle who had been waiting outside the door.

She remembered this face.

There was a small scar on her chin, from when she was working as a nursery school teacher and got kicked by the heel of a crying child’s shoe. White hairs were starting to sprout here and there at her temples and on top of her head. Her husband had said, ’You’re already forty and only just getting white hair. That’s pretty good.’

He was a gentle, mild-mannered man. Back then, Mai Mingle knew she had to get married. She deliberately avoided macho men and chose him instead.

The marriage lasted for eleven uneventful years, and Mai Mingle had no complaints. He was less like a husband and more like a friend who wouldn’t leave just because they’d started a family.

She sometimes wondered if this was all life had to offer, but as the years passed, she thought about it less and less.

"Kill those selves, kill that past, only then can you truly be reborn."

’...Is that how it is?’

Mai Mingle lowered her head, thinking dazedly that she was too late. The other Mai Mingle had already beaten her to it.

The knife was plunged deep into her abdomen. The blade was completely buried, leaving only the black hilt visible.

The hand holding the hilt, Mai Mingle’s hand, was gaunt. Veins stood out on the back of it, and the knuckles were much rougher and wider than they had been when she was twenty.

"His test results came back. It’s throat cancer."

Gripping the knife tightly, this Mai Mingle looked blankly at the Mai Mingle inside the door and said, "...What am I supposed to do?"