The mirrors connected alternate selves, and everyone had one, and no one had established a way to use them. People looked. Sometimes they looked for years. They developed theories based on what was visible in the background: the furniture, the light, whether there were children, whether the other self seemed to be doing well. But they did not communicate. There was no agreed method, no shared code, no language that worked across the reflective surface without sound.
This was the problem Solen had set himself at thirty-nine, when he had been looking at his thirty-one-year-old self for eight years and realized he had nothing to say to him. Not nothing worth saying. Just nothing that could be conveyed.
The vocabulary he had built was gestural: closest, he had argued in two conference papers, to a natural grammar for the medium. Forty-seven gestures with defined meanings, twelve more in provisional status. A notation system for teaching and recording. A dictionary in three drafts. Other researchers had contributed proposed additions. He had accepted eleven of them and declined four. He had a collaborator in the south who was working on a companion grammar for spatial arrangement.
His own mirror showed him at thirty-one. The thirty-one-year-old looked back with the particular expression of someone uncertain what he was looking at. Solen recognized the expression. He had worn it himself, once, though he no longer remembered exactly when he had stopped.
He reviewed the latest draft of the dictionary. He made three small corrections to the notation. He considered gesture thirty-one, which meant: I know something you do not yet. He considered gesture fourteen, which meant simply: I am here.
He closed his notebook.