It arrived as a rumor and a reflection.
First came the leaks—grainy photos of a black, borderless pane mounted on a tripod in an anonymous lab, surrounded by men and women who stood just outside their own silhouettes. Then the headlines, breathless without trying to be: A mirror that reads you back. Ethical optics. Intent imaging. The Commission did not confirm and did not deny. It scheduled a "research demonstration" instead and invited no one officially and everyone informally.
Aizawa handed Renya a printout he hadn't asked for. "They say it can infer intent from micro-choices—posture drift, blink cadence, thermal flux, language latency."
Renya looked at the photo. The glass was not quite black; it held the room like a lake holds sky. "Does it work?"
Aizawa's mouth went flat. "That isn't the question they'll ask."
The question would be: What will we do with whatever it says?
On the screen behind the printout, a crawl of comments marched by. Opinion writers rehearsed their outrage; futurists rehearsed their awe. The polite center rehearsed nothing; it waited, which was how the polite center stayed powerful.
"Name?" Renya asked.
"Public codename is MI," Aizawa said. "Mirror of Intent. Inside the building, they call it the conscience. Don't hold it against the engineers; marketing names itself."
"You think it's a weapon?"
"I think it wants to be a shortcut," Aizawa said. "And shortcuts rust souls."
He left the printout on the desk. It made a sound like a boundary putting itself down.
By noon, campus chatter had turned speculative. Kaminari tried to imitate an anchor's sincerity. "Breaking: the mirror shows you're a good person if you buy the premium subscription."
Mina grinned. "We're doomed."
Yaoyorozu, ever honest, asked the only technical question that mattered. "What does 'intent' mean to a camera?"
"Whatever the camera was trained to consider dangerous," Tokoyami murmured.
Uraraka traced a circle on her desk. "I hope it just tells people to drink water."
Renya kept his eyes on the window. The city reflected itself in the glass, imperfectly. That was better than any proof.
The Commission demonstration took place in a room designed to photograph well—neutral wood, matte black, small plants that pretended to have opinions. The mirror stood at the far end, nothing more than a rectangle of night leaning against its own idea of itself.
Imai adjusted the lights until they stopped being proud. Kurobane stood with hands in pockets, a refusal made posture. The director welcomed three observers from a consortium with acronyms for faces and three from a university that had learned to smile with funding.
"It doesn't read minds," Imai said, before anyone could lie on its behalf. "It reads surroundings. Pressure waveforms. Behavioral micro-latency. It produces a conjecture about whether an action is moving toward harm or toward help."
"'Toward'?" a man with immaculate eyeglasses asked.
"Vector, not verdict," Imai said.
"Actionable?" a woman with immaculate penmanship asked.
Kurobane answered. "Not unless you enjoy lawsuits."
They began with the obvious. A volunteer approached the mirror with a cup of coffee and the intention to set it down gently. The pane breathed once—no light, no sound; just a faint softening—and a caption appeared behind the glass like fog shaping itself into a sentence: Likely gentle placement. Low spill risk. The coffee arrived intact. This impressed the sort of person who had never worked a café shift.
Another volunteer walked up with a cardboard box and a cramped frown. The mirror showed Probable frustration. Consider pause. The volunteer paused, breathed, set the box down without converting displeasure into force. The observers nodded as if mercy had been coded.
Then came the temptation. "Aggressive scenario," the director said. He held a ceramic paperweight shaped like an animal. "Throw."
The volunteer hesitated, performed a half-smile to show the room they all understood this was theater, then drew the arm back. The mirror darkened—not warning, not siren, just a slight starving of light—and wrote: Harm vector increasing. Offer alternative. The volunteer blinked, remembered he was being watched, lowered the arm. The mirror cleared, an apology written in cleanliness.
"The device doesn't judge," Imai said. "It names inertia."
"And then people change," the director added, pleased, as if he had just pulled humanity from a hat.
Kurobane did not correct him. He let the observers narrate their own virtue. After, he whispered to Imai, "It works too well when you know it's watching."
"That's all devices," she said. "Also gods."
He marked the sentence in his mind to use later.
They needed a wild test. He looked toward the door, already knowing who would be standing there.
Renya had not been invited. He arrived as if intercepting a sentence that needed less grammar. The attendants glanced at badges they wishfully found; the badges refused to exist. Imai lifted a hand. "Let him through."
The room altered itself, the way rooms do when someone who will not be supervised enters.
"Mr. Kurotsuki," the director said with a composure he had paid for, one way or another. "Would you care to try?"
Renya stood before the mirror the way one stands before a river that might know your name. The Veil pressed against his ribs, curious and polite. He did not summon it. He did not test it. He breathed.
"Think of something," the man with the eyeglasses said, trying to sound neutral and achieving only interest.
"I'll decide something," Renya said. He let his weight shift half a step forward, the movement that begins action. He did not choose violence. He did not choose mercy. He chose attention—a grip on possibility strong enough to restrain itself.
The mirror did not darken. It did not brighten. It rendered a sentence with care: Unresolved vector. Intention withheld.
One observer frowned. "Meaning?"
"Meaning he has not deputized the moment," Kurobane said.
"Try again," the director urged. "Pick something you would do."
Renya thought of placing a hand on someone's shoulder who did not want to be touched and of stepping away without apology. He thought of a door; he thought of a lock. He allowed neither.
The mirror wrote: Boundary present. Seeking consent.
He almost laughed. "Clever."
Imai did not smile. "We trained it on your city."
"Then it will make our mistakes," he said.
The director, reckless with how good careful looks on camera, gestured to a table with a knife lying on it—blunt, symbolic, sharp enough to cause discussion. "Pick it up," he said, as if asking directions.
Renya held the knife. Not a blade, a memory. He adjusted his grip until it forgot heroics.
The mirror showed nothing for a long two seconds—its longest hesitation yet. Then words coalesced: Instrument acknowledged. Hunger absent.
He put the knife down and stepped back. The glass returned to simply being itself. Without an audience, it would have been furniture.
A university observer cleared his throat. "This could be invaluable for probationary heroes," he said. "Screening. Training. We could quantify intentions."
"Don't," Renya said without looking at him.
"Excuse me?"
"Don't trap people inside a probability," Renya said.
"It's ethics at speed," the observer argued. "A shortcut to better decisions."
Aizawa's warning earlier echoed through him: shortcuts rust souls.
Kurobane ran a hand along the edge of the mirror—never touching, never closing the circuit. "It's a mirror," he said. "Not a judge. Treat it like glass and it might make you honest. Treat it like law and it will make you lazy."
Imai added the only sentence that could keep the device from being adopted as dogma. "The caption is what you brought into the room," she said. "We're not measuring intent. We're measuring assumptions becoming sentences."
The director looked less pleased now. But he had sense. "We will not announce a deployment," he said carefully. "This remains in research."
Words that meant: We will see how the world uses you without us, and then pretend we started it.
Renya left before the room could invent a promise for him to refuse.
Outside, Musutafu held a weather made of intention and misinterpretation. A new pop-up on Riverside had set up a novelty attraction: "Intent Booth—Find Out What You Mean." For a coin and a minute you stood in a plywood stall with a consumer-grade camera and a chatty API and it told you you were "Seeking closure," or "Deflecting blame," or "Ready to change your hair." People laughed. A few cried. It felt like fortune-telling for an age too smart for tarot and not smart enough for humility.
Aki watched two teenagers take turns. The first came out grinning. The second came out quiet.
"What'd it say?" the first asked.
"That I'm… avoiding." The second scuffed a sneaker. "I'm literally avoiding telling my mom I dropped the club. But I already knew that."
"Then why are you sad?"
"I wanted it to be wrong."
Aki bought them taiyaki and didn't give advice. Advice is a corridor that assumes it's a destination.
By evening, Quiet Rooms was a hive. Threads multiplied with titles like Mirrors that Talk Back and Can code know kindness? Someone leaked a blurred clip from the Commission demo. The community slowed it frame by frame, not to expose a conspiracy, but to understand how hope behaves on a screen.
Aki wrote a post and pinned it:
The Mirror RuleIf a mirror tells you something true, take responsibility.If a mirror tells you something false, protect yourself.If a mirror tells you something useful but unkind, find a teacher.If a mirror asks to become a law, turn it to face the wall.
Natsume replied with a photo of the Intent Booth turned toward a lamppost. The comments were gracious and petty in equal measure. Community is a muscle that trembles when used.
Back on campus, 1-A ran a mixed drill in the gym—rescue, negotiation, and restraint under latency. The MI rumor made it into their warm-up chatter and refused to leave.
"Would you stand in front of it?" Mina asked Renya between sets.
"Every day," he said, surprising them both.
"Because it's right?" Yaoyorozu asked.
"Because it's wrong," he said. "Because I want to practice hearing a sentence and deciding who wrote it."
"Who?" Kaminari asked, sweating and sincere.
"The room," Renya said. "Me. You. The person we're trying to save. The person we're trying not to hurt. And the part of me that still enjoys being right."
Aizawa called time. "Again. But this round you narrate every decision to your partner before you make it."
Groans. Compliance. The gym filled with pairs of voices speaking quietly, choosing out loud. The air developed a new kind of patience—the sort where you trust your teammate enough to delay embarrassment.
When it was Renya's turn, he paired with Uraraka. "Left door," he said, then corrected himself. "Left door if the person inside is more afraid of me than of fire."
"Then we wait?" she asked.
"Then we knock," he said. "And we step back. And we ask permission to break the lock."
She looked at him sideways. "What if they say no?"
"Then we find a window," he said. "Or we ask a neighbor. Or we learn why no."
"And if the building falls?"
He didn't cheat with philosophy. "Then we carry them anyway," he said. "But we apologize at the hospital."
She smiled. "I like that mirror better."
Night pulled the lid over the city softly. Renya walked the dorm halls the way a person walks a museum at closing—gently, hands in pockets, eyes letting frames be frames. He paused by a vending machine. Its screen showed his reflection tinted with sodium light. For a brief, mischievous second he imagined the MI's caption: Hunger absent. Coins present. He bought nothing. He didn't need an algorithm to tell him that abstinence is only noble when it isn't performance.
On the roof, the city reflected its own constellations onto the river. The Veil settled along his shoulders like a shawl someone had warmed in the oven. He thought of how easy it would be to bring the mirror into his practice, to ask it to annotate his hesitations, to let it become instructor, absolver, judge. He rejected the ease. He accepted the tool. He made a door.
"Tomorrow," he said into the wind, "I'll visit it again. Alone. No observers."
Not alone, the Veil said, amused. You bring rooms with you.
He smiled. "Then we'll ask the room to be honest."
It always is, the Veil replied. It's people who learn politeness.
He sat, knees up, back against the concrete lip, watching clouds draft essays about weather and refrain from conclusions. A text buzzed: Aki—Your pinned Mirror Rule is turning into a poster. Kids printed it. Some taped it to their bathroom mirrors.He typed: If a poster asks to become a law—Aki:—turn it to face the wall. Already seeing photos.R:Of walls?Aki:Of rooms that learned to ignore instructions.R:Even better.
He pocketed the phone and let the world perform its uncoordinated grace. On a balcony five buildings over, a man practiced a speech into a plant. On a crosswalk three blocks south, a cyclist stopped without ranting. In a small kitchen two floors below, someone burned rice and decided not to cry about it. The mirror would have labeled none of it and everything. Sometimes truth was a caption. Sometimes it was the absence of one.
The next morning, Kurobane found Imai staring at the MI, both hands behind her back like a student standing in front of a painting she was not sure she deserved.
"Do you believe it?" he asked.
"I believe it's a recorder of context with an attitude," she said. "I believe it can help a trainee notice the moment before harm. I believe it will tempt chiefs to write policy in captions."
"And you?"
"I will try to name inertia and refuse to name souls," she said.
He nodded. "We're keeping it?"
"In a room with a lock and a sign that says 'Teachers Only,'" she said. "And we'll publish a paper that says we failed to build a conscience."
"And succeeded at building a mirror," he added.
They stood together in honest quiet—the kind that has nothing to sell and nothing to hide.
"I need to ask him to come back," she said finally.
"Ask him nothing," Kurobane said. "Invite him. He's teaching us how."
She half-smiled. "How to what?"
"To not be in charge of everything we understand," he said.
The mirror, having reflected enough for one morning, settled into being glass. A smudge near the bottom edge remained, human and incurable. Imai left it. Clean mirrors are for museums. Useful ones carry fingerprints.
When Renya returned that afternoon, there were no observers and no script. Only the pane, the room, and his shadow choosing manners.
He stood in front of the mirror and said, "I'm going to think something unprintable."
Nothing appeared.
He said, "I'm going to forgive someone who doesn't want it."
The mirror wrote, Check consent.
He said, "I'm going to wait when waiting is an excuse."
The mirror wrote, Name the excuse.
He said nothing for a long time. He pictured Aki's table and the square underfoot and the sticky notes that had become commandments not because they were right but because they were reachable. He pictured Aizawa's scarf holding a line around a class that deserved to learn slowness. He pictured the city's posters, the pop-up booth turned toward a lamppost, the river reflecting light that never learned to be straight.
He finally said, "I'm going to trust the part of me that is tired of control."
The mirror did not write. It softened. It became ordinary.
"Good," he whispered. "Stay that way."
He turned it to face the wall. Not punishment. Hygiene.
On his way out he passed a closet. Inside, he knew without opening, was a folded sign that read In Research. It would be honest there. He left it on the shelf in his mind.
Outside, the afternoon was performing its usual miracle: people negotiating without scripts. He stepped into the flow and let it carry him one block farther than he'd planned, then turned back without worrying about symbolism.
At the corner someone had chalked a new sentence under the old spiral of quotes.If a mirror can read me, let it learn to blush.
He grinned. Exactly.
The world would build mirrors. The world would stare. The world would forget that glass is a surface and pretend it's a well. And he—boy from another world, shadow turned room—would keep showing up and saying the unfashionable things: that captions are not commandments, that ethics hates speed, that power without pause still becomes hunger and that pause without purpose still becomes rot, and that the most accurate instrument in any city remains a person who chooses to wait.
He walked until the river decided to appear and sat where benches go to become metaphors. A message arrived from Aki: Dinner? I made a soup that admits mistakes.He wrote back: Teaching it to apologize?Aki:Teaching it to let us eat anyway.
He put the phone away. The wind rehearsed a future that refused to be an agenda. Somewhere in an office, a mirror faced a wall and served an important function: reminding a room that it was responsible for itself.
The city breathed. He let it. He breathed, too, and chose no caption at all.