Chapter 3 | Reflections in the Mirror

The last sip of Ethiopian coffee had grown cold in Sage's ceramic mug. She rolled her neck, feeling the lingering tension from her interrupted sleep. Piper's form seemed to shimmer in the mirror's reflection, her outline momentarily pixelating before solidifying again.

"Yoga or sleep, Piper?" she asked. The cat's tail twitched in precise Morse code patterns she wasn't quite ready to acknowledge. The morning's unexpected visit from Ryan had thrown off her usual routine, but maybe that wasn't entirely bad. Sometimes, disruption led to clarity.

She padded into her walk-in closet, a room larger than most people's living rooms, and faced her daily paradox: a life of calculated deception, organized with precision. As she changed into her yoga wear, the mirror showed something impossible—Piper's reflection watching her with eyes that displayed scrolling data while the real Piper dozed on the windowsill.

"It's different," she told her reflection. "I only target corporations. The ones who can afford the loss. The ones with insurance." The words sounded hollow, even to her. In the mirror, Piper's reflection tilted its head at an angle no biological cat could achieve.

As she gathered her yoga mat and water bottle, her eye caught the notification light still blinking on her laptop. The keylogger collected data, threading together the digital keys that would unlock someone else's security and trust.

"The thing about mirrors," she murmured to Piper, "is that eventually, you have to look into them."

The cat yawned, displaying a brief flash of binary code across its teeth, supremely uninterested in human moral complexity.

[End Chapter 3: System Log - Mirror protocol analyzing. Quantum reflections detected in multiple planes. Status: Self-awareness subroutines activating]