Four months into writing Project Mirror and I’m ready to share another piece. After the response to my first excerpt, several people asked to see more of how this world actually functions.
This scene comes later in the book, when my protagonist starts noticing cracks in the system. A teenage client’s emotion package malfunctions, and for the first time, she questions whether debugging people’s feelings is as straightforward as she thought.
Chapter Twelve
The girl couldn’t stop laughing.
Maya, sixteen, Premium Confidence Plus subscriber, sat in my clinic chair whilst her Appropriate Joy algorithm got stuck in a feedback loop. Every time she tried to speak, another giggle burst out. Tears streamed down her cheeks, but her expression remained locked in artificial delight.
‘When did this start?’ I asked her mother, who hovered anxiously near the treatment bed.
‘Three hours ago. She was practicing for her university interview when the package updated automatically. Now she can’t turn it off.’
I ran a quick diagnostic. Maya’s Emotional Regulation Suite was trying to process genuine nervousness about her future whilst the Confidence Package insisted she should feel optimised happiness about everything. The conflict had created a processing error that manifested as uncontrollable laughter.
‘Can you fix it?’ the mother pressed. ‘The interview is tomorrow morning. She needs to be taken seriously.’
‘Mum, please,’ Maya managed between giggles, ‘I can handle—’ Another burst of laughter cut her off.
I pulled up the error logs. This wasn’t just a compatibility issue. Maya’s natural anxiety was fighting against the artificial confidence so aggressively that her neural pathways were essentially arguing with themselves.
‘We need to reset her Core Emotional Layer,’ I explained. ‘It’ll take about twenty minutes.’
‘Reset means what, exactly?’ the mother asked.
‘Temporary shutdown of all enhancement packages. She’ll feel whatever she naturally feels during the interview.’
The woman’s face went pale. ‘Unenhanced? But she’s never done anything important without the Confidence Package. What if she’s not naturally confident enough?’
I looked at Maya, still trapped in mechanical laughter, tears of frustration mixed with algorithmic joy. For the first time in my career, I wondered if the problem wasn’t the glitch.
Maybe the problem was that we’d forgotten what confidence actually felt like.
The deeper I get into this story, the more I realise how close we already are to this reality. Every day, another client asks me to fix something that isn’t actually broken.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
