While my family was driving the 16 hour trip to Florida, I read an ebook called Broken Symmetry. It's a science fiction novel about a girl named Blaire Adams who learns that, through a genetic anomaly, she can pass through the surface of mirrors into the world beyond. It's based on the concept that when light photons hit a mirror, they have two choices: reflect, or pass through. Apparently, scientists have found that they do both, the photons make no choice, and two separate universes are created; one where the photon reflected, and another where it passed through. When people like Blaire pass through the mirror, they experience severe internal hemorrhaging. Eventually it kills them.
The world that Blaire passes into is a reflection of the one she came from, but reversed. Words are written backwards, and they drive on the left side of the road. If you had a cat with a black left paw and a white right paw, in the mirror world the cat's paws would be reversed. Breaking the symmetry of a mirror causes the source and the reflection worlds to diverge. Keep in mind that the source is the real world, the world that Blaire comes from.
Once you "break the symmetry" of a mirror (meaning pass through it), the only way back to the source is to pass back through the same exact mirror. If someone or something breaks that mirror, you are trapped, forever, in that mirror world. When you break the symmetry of a mirror, the version of you in that mirror gets deleted so you are the only you in that world. But, if you didn't break the symmetry (if you found a mirror with broken symmetry and passed into the mirror world), then you would have to make sure you don't bump into yourself.
But, Blaire learns all this in a "safe" environment. With the help of Charles, a man who once knew her missing father, Amy, his daughter, and Damian, his employee, she learns how to break symmetry "safely". There are four rules. 1) Never take anything alive back through the mirror with you, 2) Always destroy the mirror once you are finished in the world you created or things will escape, 3) Apply red tape to the mirror before breaking symmetry, this signals that it's a portal to a reflection. Apply blue tape to the other side of the mirror, the side on the reflection, to signal that it's a way back to the source, and 4) Never, ever, nest reflections. It gets confusing, and you can get lost in a maze of reflections, leading farther and farther away from the source.
Nesting reflections means you broke the symmetry of a mirror, passed into the reflected world, and then broke the symmetry of another, reflected mirror. For example, you have 2 mirrors. A and B. You pass into A, then while in A's world you go into B. Now, to get back to reality you have to backtrack through B, then A. It seems simple, but once you try to go three levels down it gets seriously confusing. Think about it slowly. It took me forever to understand. When you break the symmetry of a mirror, the two worlds begin to act separately of one another, right? But up to that point, the two worlds are identical. So when you broke through B, A was already broken, meaning that on the "shallower" side of B (the side closest to the source), A is a portal to the source. But on the deeper side, the reflected side, A is a portal to a deeper level of a world that reflects the source. If you followed directions, you put blue tape and red tape up on the corresponding sides of the mirror, but now there are two portals with blue tape and only one that goes to the source. There is only one source, and only one way back to it.
Long story short, it's hard to explain. It's explained more clearly in the book, and it's considerably creepier. Obviously the plot of the story dictates the destruction of all 4 rules, and Damian and Blaire end up 50+ levels below the source following a traitor and encountering a weird mirror creature. It's insanely scary, but it makes sense. When I finished the book, I understood everything perfectly. I couldn't stop thinking about it, and staring, terrified, into every mirror I could see. The way the author described the deeper levels of reflections gave me a cold feeling while I was reading it, and the implications of nesting, the government's involvement, and the weird mirror creature made it impossible to quit reading for more than 15 minutes. I read it the entire drive, no breaks. I definitely recommend the book to anyone looking for a good thriller without an ax murderer.
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