The Mirror-man grew up playing amusing little tricks. He reversed his sister’s face when she was ten years old; now, when she looked in the mirror, Abby saw her mole on her left cheek and not the right one where it had always appeared to be before. It was a bizarre family mystery that their parents never stopped talking about.
         Later he got an internship in a hospital. Once or twice he’d secretly reverse patients’ inner organs right before their surgeries, to the shock of the surgeon and the medical team. Mostly he contented himself with flipping tumors around, or switching a bum knee for a healthy one randomly throughout the week. He found confusion and pain to be great fun.
         On walks around town he caused accidents by reversing engine blocks, reversing axles. Detours pointed the wrong way. He swapped street signs and house numbers into illegibility.
         He might have gone on along his cruel but only semi-harmful way except that he read an article on chirality in Nature. Who knew that molecules could be right-handed or left-handed? It was news to him! Proteins are right-handed, DNA is left-handed. T-cells, amino acids, all of that. Their shapes allowed them to interact with other molecules—if they were the other way round, it would be like trying to put a right-handed glove on your left hand. It just won’t work.
         He bought some books on organic chemistry and decided to give it a whirl. He killed a few plants by reversing their carbohydrates, then executed a local politician by reversing his immune system. But he made a mistake when he reversed his landlady’s DNA—she boiled away with cancers within the week, but something had aroused suspicion, and he was arrested. Then he panicked and accidentally killed all the cops in the jailhouse.
         Now no one will go near him. The entire city block has been evacuated. He can reverse the cell door lock, he supposes, but one step out that door and he’ll probably get a sniper’s bullet in his head. He is contemplating drastic measures. He’d read that mirror bacteria would be able to slip around antibiotics and amoeboid predators, and infect all sorts of things: humans, animals…. It couldn’t be contained and it couldn’t be cured. It’s a possibility.
         He doesn’t want to die in this cell, but if he has to, he’ll kill the world while he’s at it.
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