A Long Short Story about a Bratty Teenager and her Legit Problems

No, seriously, she really does have legit problems. I’m being glib, but this story really is meant for an older audience, for reasons that will become clear as you go along. Story can be found here:

Ten Seconds to Now

This particular idea has been in my head for years. I can, in fact, trace it back nearly ten years, when I went to Disneyland with my sister and my mother. We ended up in one of their discovery centers, perusing through a bunch of technology. There was one room full of mirrors that were not, in fact, mirrors at all, but computer monitors with a camera in the frame. I remember this one with a particularly terrible lag and I laughed to myself about why you would ever own a computer screen as a mirror when an actual mirror works so much better. But then the thought struck me: what if, instead of lagging ten seconds behind, the computer screen/mirror was lagging ten seconds ahead?

And that is where this story came from.