The first months with the object were dull enough that I now distrust my memory of them. I remember the boredom very clearly, which is already suspicious. There were meetings, bad coffee, duplicated tickets, files named FINAL that turned out to be older than files named OLD. Most of what I did involved looking at light that had crossed an absurd distance only to arrive in a form requiring administrative review.
The object had already acquired three unofficial names by the time I saw anything resembling an image.
Image is generous.
There were gradients. A few stubborn edges. Brightness where brightness probably belonged. Someone had circled one of the darker shapes and written ROOFLINE? in red.
I objected to the word roofline.
I objected more strongly than the matter deserved.
The email is probably still archived somewhere, along with several thousand messages documenting the discovery of one of the strangest objects ever observed and my contribution to that discovery, which included the phrase insufficient basis for architectural classification.
I remember being pleased with it.
This was before the public settled on the Mirror, a name nearly everyone on the project disliked and then began using because resistance required more energy than compliance. The distance estimates put it a little over a hundred light-years away. Light leaving Earth had reached the object, reflected, and returned to us. The arithmetic was simple enough for television.
Two hundred years.
People said this with the satisfaction of having solved something.
There was footage of presenters standing in front of animated beams traveling between Earth and a silver disc. There was frequently a clock.
Within a few weeks everyone seemed to know exactly what we had found.
They knew before we did.
The phrase that bothered me most was clean human signal.
I heard it first in a meeting with someone from partnerships. Later it appeared in an interview. By the end of the month it had become ordinary enough that correcting it made me sound difficult.
Clean compared with what?
Nobody ever answered this directly.
The nineteenth century acquired a kind of moral cleanliness simply by being dead.
This should have annoyed me more than it did. I was already spending evenings looking at one of the coastal reconstructions after I was supposed to have gone home.
Harbor was the team's preferred interpretation. I liked harbor too, though I avoided saying so because liking an interpretation seemed dangerously close to choosing it.
There were several large structures along the water. A dark vertical shape that could have been a chimney. Something resembling a crane. Between two buildings, or between two things we had decided were buildings, a pale line sagged slightly in the middle.
Someone called it laundry.
I laughed when I heard this.
Later I began calling it laundry.
There was a satisfaction in it I couldn't defend. Laundry meant inhabitants. It meant somebody had washed something and hung it up and expected, without thinking much about it, to come back later.
None of that was in the data.
The line might have been rigging.
It might have been an artifact introduced during reconstruction.
I enlarged it anyway.
Around then the commercial products began appearing.
The first ones were terrible in predictable ways. Nineteenth-century sleep environments. Historical-focus modes. A service promising access to "human attention before optimization," which sounded profound until you tried to work out what it meant.
A colleague sent me an ad for something called Pre-Algorithmic Weather.
I forwarded it to three people with a joke I no longer remember.
Then I subscribed.
For research, presumably.
There was a period when people spoke about the reflected imagery as though it had escaped history rather than merely arrived late to it. You heard words like untouched. Authentic. Original.
I had long conversations about why these words were meaningless.
Then I went home and watched the harbor.
There was a small movement near the left side of the frame.
I hadn't noticed it at first. Once I did, I couldn't stop noticing it.
A dark interruption, appearing in roughly the same place across several reconstructed frames. It moved enough to encourage interpretation and too little to reward it.
Some people thought it was a person.
Someone said child.
I don't remember who.
I hope it wasn't me.
The next reconstruction model removed it.
This happened quietly. There was no argument. The new build handled atmospheric scattering better and performed substantially better against the validation set. Several other unstable features disappeared with it.
The harbor looked improved.
Everyone said so.
I said so.
I signed the review.
That evening I found the previous build on my machine and played it again.
The movement returned.
There.
Then gone.
Then there again.
I watched it through several loops. By then I knew its timing well enough that I began anticipating the little disturbance before it appeared. I noticed this and felt embarrassed.
In the new reconstruction the space where it had been seemed strangely open. Nothing was missing in any defensible sense. The model had removed uncertainty. Still, I kept looking toward the place where the movement should have begun.
I tried enlarging the old frames. This made everything worse. Pixels became blocks. Edges broke apart. The figure, if there had ever been a figure, lost even the small coherence I had given it. For a few seconds I thought I could see an arm. Then a coat. Then someone turning toward the water.
None of those interpretations survived the next frame.
I stopped.
Ten minutes later I started again.
I wish I could say I was thinking about evidence, historical loss, or the ethics of reconstruction. Mostly I was trying to understand why the corrected image felt emptier.
That felt ridiculous. It still does.
A few days later someone showed me a promotional image built from the new reconstruction. The harbor had been sharpened, graded, corrected. The sky had acquired a plausible blue. Individual windows had appeared on buildings where our underlying resolution supported nothing of the sort.
The laundry was still there.
That surprised me.
Apparently somebody else had become attached to it too.