All programs had bugs. This was normal. Even the most expert programmers made a typo now and then, or put a false where they meant a !false. It was just a bug. It could have happened to anyone. It was not even his bug.

This is how the eight year old Fin consoled himself as he hid behind the jewelry counter at Macy's with his heads wrapped over his head.

Someone had noticed his hacking. Probably they had realized it was a mutant doing it, because police were not stupid, and neither were programmers, and programming police were the least stupid of all. So they had put in a patch: if (code altered), then (arrest all mutants within x range).

They were trying to catch him. It was good code to do so. But it was very very very very very bad code, when he had just finished a quick find-replace for if (mutant) {} else {} to if (mutant or !mutant) {}.

So now the patch was online, but it read like this: if code altered, then arrest all mutants and all humans.

They were in a busy New York shopping mall on a Saturday, just after lunch. All mutants and all humans was a lot of people. The bot he had altered had gauged the size of the crowd, and immediately ordered back up. Arrest everyone at the mall, one of them is the hacker, the bot communicated, and somewhere downtown, where the police were starting to learn that they should double-check backup requests from their robots, a sergeant signed off on things. Because it was pretty obvious that, yes, the hacker was there. And if the hacker was on site, then it would be easy to make the bots think that s/he was a human. So sure, why not, arrest everyone. Catch the creep. Better a media stir over this, then the continued media stirs with each new hacking incident.

It was a good decision and a very stupid decision at the same confusing time.

Maybe the sergeant did not understand how very, very many people were at the mall. Or how well the nightly news had communicated that glitchy METAs were not always friendly. Or, simply, the affect of seeing a whole lot of robots starting to lock down the exits of a mall, politely telling humans to not resist.

Also, probably, the sergeant had never seen a stampede before, a herd of people all rushing and shoving towards doors, doing much more damage to each other than Panu had intended or wanted, like buffalo running towards a cliff. He had not made the METAs here more aggressive or deadly or anything at all dangerous (mostly). It was the police's patch that had messed things up. It was their bug, not his.

Panu huddled behind the counter with his arms over his head, and tried very hard to not get in the way of anyone running, or looting, or arresting.

A sh*tstorm was going down at the mall.

That was not even Gawain's own assessment of the situation. It was what the dispatch had said. And when the dispatch used those exact words, that meant the MRC was up to their neck in it, and they needed mutant backup.
X-backup, that is.

Gawain walked out of a shop window just as the crowd momentarily backed away from the metas at the exits and the injured picked themselves (and each other up). Being the only one inside at on site, he tried to prioritize the situation.

"Well, they were not kidding about the sh*tstorm." he muttered. Maxine would have a field day with this.

Gawain heard a noise and he ducked inside the shop. It was abandoned... mostly... but as he tilted his head and listened, he heard it again. Leaning over the counter, he spied the kid, curled up in a panicked ball.

"Good thinking, kid" he smiled, approving of his choice to hide instead of run "It's okay, I'm here to help. Are you here with someone? Did you get lost?"

This was an X-Man. Panu knew because the META bots knew. They had a database of NYPD officers and deputies so that they could recognize them on sight, and treat them as friendlies.

Probably it was a bad idea that he had overridden that. But the bots had been on the streets for several weeks now, and he got bored, and it was fun to play in their code, they were very pretty on their insides and he had not thought that maybe one day he would be very happy to see an X-Man looking down at him.

He saw Gawain Morris aka Maya Morris (?) aka Mirror from an angle--a black and white figure, viewed through the security camera set in the ceiling. He could not see the young man's smile, because none of his eyes were at the right angle, but he could hear it in Gawain's voice. It was a nice voice, strong and confident.

Panu tried to make himself uncurl. Somewhere out in the main mall, something broke, and he flinched.

"I am here alone," he said softly, in an accent very far from the typical New Yorker's. "I was getting present for my father. Then robots are closing doors and people are pushing. Now I am behind counter."

Right now, his father was probably viewing his present on TV: a near riot situation at the mall, broadcast live. Hopefully Jaager was looking at it and smiling. Panu was here, and did not feel much like smiling at all. It was not the bots that worried him. It was the people. People were terrible and there were too many of them and they were scary when they were panicking.

His voice sounded small and stupid and childish, even to himself. He was Panu Jaager now. He was better than this.

The little Fin made himself climb to his feet. He straightened his hoodie and adjusted his headphones so they were at a dignified angle. He tried to act like he was meeting the X-Man's eyes, because he did not want to look even more weak than already he did, but the cameras were at very wrong angles in the store, and he was not sure he got it right.

"What may I do to help, Deputy?"

That was correct title, yes? 'Deputy'? He double-checked the META's vocal database, and reassured himself that it was.

>>"I am here alone. I was getting present for my father. Then robots are closing doors and people are pushing. Now I am behind counter."

There was something... off about the kid. It wasn't the accent - this was New York after all - but something Mirror could not put a finger on. Whatever it was, he was just a kid. And probably scared. Hell, Mirror himself was scared of the crowds, much worse than of any hostile mutant.

Finally, the kid stood, with a somewhat hazy expression on his face.

>>"What may I do to help, Deputy?"

Gawain smirked at the official title.

"You can call me Mirror" he said. The kid must have recognize the X-uniform. It was good to know that it still carried some weight, and didn't immediately scare kids to death.

"The METAs are looking for a hacker" he said "They are just keeping everyone inside to make sure they get him. Come on, let's go find a reflecting surface. I'll take you out of here."

The 8-year-old, after all, was definitely not a hacker. Duh.

Panu held his breath for one second, two seconds, so that it did not woosh out all at once with the sound of great relief. The very nice X-Man was going to take him out of here.

Sometimes he did not like being eight. Eight was an age when he had to climb on counters to get down glasses from the cabinets, and people asked too many questions when they noticed him on the bus alone, and business tycoons who were maybe also mass murderers trying to end the world did not take him seriously at first sight until he threatened their companies. Sometimes eight was a stupid stupid age where people treated him like he was not a real person.

Sometimes eight was an amazing wonderful age, where people treated him like he was not a real person. The deputy did not think he was the hacker, did not even consider the possibility, because he was a scared eight year old.

Many years from now, Panu would maybe miss being eight. Probably when he was a teenager, he would not get away from crimes so easily.

"Thank you," the Finnish politely said. He did not really want to leave from behind the counter. It seemed safer in here than out there. Part of him wanted to reach for the X-Man's hand, for something warm to hold onto. Most of him knew this was a bad idea. Gawain Morris used a bow (weapons license: yes, status: current). Bows needed two hands. No one wanted a stupid child getting in the way of their weapon. Instead he settled at the man's side, and a little behind, where he would not be in the way if there was a fight. This was where he was used to walking when he was with his Adults.

"You are Mirror because you are Mirror-teleporter?" The blonde boy asked. He knew the answer already from the database, but it was a cool power, so he wanted to ask. Databases were not enthusiastic, they did not describe powers in the same way as real people did.

Now that he was walking a little behind the man, he did not concentrate so hard on looking like he was seeing. He let his gaze drift down a little, to a spot on the floor ahead of them. Hopefully this just made him seem shy. It made it easier to focus on his real eyes.

It was with his real eyes that he knew they were coming. He missed a step as they came in his range, and almost said something, but Mirror was not family. Mirror was an X-Man and a deputy cop, and that was the opposite of his family. Probably he would be arrested and put in jail and then deported to Finland if the man knew that he was the hacker. So he did not say anything at all as the METAs approached, even though he really wanted to. Sometimes it was very strange to him, that people couldn't see the things that were so very very clear to him. It was like how when he spoke Finnish, no one but Noel could understand him.

It was one speed scout, and one knight. The knight stepped out from a hall in front of them as the speed scout, clever and swift and very pretty, flanked them from behind. They were as unsurprised to see the two humans as Panu was to see them. He had very good sensors for machines. They had very good sensors for organics.

The knight briefly looked between them. "Mutant," it confirmed, looking at Mirror, before it's head swiveled to the blonde boy. "Mutant. This is a police cordon. You may not leave. All mutants must be fitted with power-deterring cuffs as a safety precaution. Please cooperate."

Panu again had the stupid urge to grip the X-Man's hand. He did not do this. But maybe he took a small step closer, and hid a little more behind the man. Even though he knew it did not really make him safer, it still felt better.

>>"Thank you,"

The kid looked like he wanted to hold his hand, and then thought better of it. Gawain didn't push the issue; he liked having his hands free in these situations, and also, an 8-year-old boy might feel offended if someone tried to treat them as a child. So he took the lead, making sure the kid stayed behind him as they walked out of the shop.

>>"You are Mirror because you are Mirror-teleporter?"

"Yup" he grinned; the kid knew the X-men, then. It wasn't surprising, but it amused Gawain anyway "We all have code names on the field."

Some were better than others.

Mirror sighed as the METAs approached. They seemed to be present in large numbers, and they gave him the creeps, no matter how many times they met. It was already common knowledge that they tended to glitch. And there was also a hacker around.

>>"Mutant... Mutant. This is a police cordon. You may not leave. All mutants must be fitted with power-deterring cuffs as a safety precaution. Please cooperate."

Gawain arched an eyebrow and glanced down at the kid. Mutant. Oh. Did he even know that? He didn't seem to be manifesting any powers. Surely the kid would have told and X-man he was a mutant.
No matter.

"I'm an X-team deputy, code name Mirror" he told the tin man "I am taking this child to a safe place."

He really really wanted to know more about the man's power. Normal teleporters he knew about, they were like poof and then they were somewhere else. He had never gotten to talk to one of them either--how did they know where they were going? Were they like targeting systems for missiles, and in their heads there was math and x-y-z coordinate planes and they calculated before they poofed? Were time travelers just the ones who could visualize an x-y-z-t plane? It was awesome and cool and awesome, and Mirror's power was even more different than normal, a quick video search as they walked showed up many clips of his power taken by curious cell phones, and there was a noticeable lag. He did not poof, he walked. Into shiny windows and out of shiny bank floors.

This is how the X-Man described his power: "Yup."

Powers could be very secret things, so he did not press, that would be rude and rude children were very bad and no one liked them. But he wanted to ask. So. Much.

Probably it was just as well that the man did not share. This was fraternizing with the enemy.

The blonde boy did not look surprised when the META called him out as a mutant. Many hours later, he would think back and realize that he maybe probably should have acted surprised. But he was terrible with facial expressions, when he tried to fake one it always looked fake, so maybe it was good he did not even think to. He only tucked himself a little closer to the X-Man's side and did not say anything at all.

The hallway was very empty except for them and the METAs. He could see Gawain better now that they were here. They had very good cameras, very fine resolution. The X-Man was tall and lanky, like a greyhound. His shoulders were rolled back with easy confidence, and he stood like he was ready to move but not worried that he would get hurt if he did.

Panu did not look to hard at the blonde boy standing next to him on the camera feed. The blonde boy did not look confident. He took in a breath and tried to stand up straighter and shoved his hands in his hoodie pouch because he did not know what to do with them and they looked stupid and awkward just hanging at his sides.

The knight bot tilted its head slightly, its camera zooming in.

"X-Man Mirror. Status: active, deputy. Status authenticated. Hello Deputy Mirror and thank you for assisting today. You are under arrest. Please cooperate."

"<That is really stupid coding.>" The boy said in Finnish, because some things were so stupid that if he did not say them out loud then they would stay inside of him and weigh him down with how stupid they were. He double checked the patch quick just to be sure, but no: no, that was not his alterations at work. The programmers had simply forgotten to put in an if (mutant) and !(X-Men Deputy) line. The METAs really were programmed to arrest all mutants when the hacker was around. Was it an oversight, or was someone paranoid enough to think maybe the hacker was an X? At the least, their code certainly hadn't ruled it out.

Part of Panu really, really itched to fix that. But now that the META had glitched, and glitched so that the X-Man knew it was glitched, he couldn't fix it right in front of him.

...But there was something he could do. Something not as obvious.

"X-Man Mirror," the dog META said behind them, in the same synthesized voice as the human model, "Status: active, deputy. Status authenticated. Hello Deputy Mirror and thank you for assisting today. I am META Unit SK-011. How may I assist you?"

It trotted up to the X-Man's side, and wagged its tail for good measure.

That was good coding.

Gawain was not terribly bothered by the META bots. They were good for easy tasks and crowd control, although they could not replace and actual X-man or MRC officer of the field.
Robots were fairly dumb.

>>"X-Man Mirror. Status: active, deputy. Status authenticated. Hello Deputy Mirror and thank you for assisting today. You are under arrest. Please cooperate."

And sometimes incredibly dumb.

Gawain blinked.

"Wait, that's not..."

The boy said something in a language Gawain didn't understand. He did not sound happy about the situation. The last thing Gawain needed was having to save face instead of an 8-year-old civilian.

>>"X-Man Mirror. Status: active, deputy. Status authenticated. Hello Deputy Mirror and thank you for assisting today. I am META Unit SK-011. How may I assist you?"

Oh good, at least the dog was sane.

"I need you to escort us off the premises" he told the canine, before he turned back to the knight "Correction: I am not under arrest. I am taking charge of this boy. Unit SK-011 will escort us to the nearest exit. You can go back to your duties."

Go, knight. Scoot.

The dog's brain flipped through coded procedures, a convoluted tree of Boolean logic. Panu raced to follow it, knowing just knowing that something was about to go wrong-

The final if resolved. A value was returned, and in its chest, a speaker began outputting the synthesized result. "I am sorry, Deputy Mirror. This building is in lock down. Escort mission not--"

No no no no no stop don't say that say anything but that.

"--advisable," the dog finished, with a bit of static crackle to its otherwise flawless audio.

Panu started breathing again. He wasn't quite sure when he stopped. In his hoodie pocket, his hands were clenched very very tightly around his phone, so that probably his knuckles were whiter than snow.

Okay. He had gotten to the audio in time. Now he just needed to update the rest of the code, quickly, before the dog took any action. And escort mission was not just inadvisable, it was not accepted.

Panu could fix that.

What Panu very much did not see, while he was standing there very quiet and still and with his breathing delegated to a sub-process, was what the other META was doing.

"Your correction is incorrect. You are under arrest. Are you resisting arrest?" There was a certain naivete to the knight's voice. If a human had spoken that question, it would be an intimidation tactic. A threat. When the META spoke, it was simply a clarification. A request for a simple yes/no, so that its processor could decide what to do.

White lines of electricity started arcing between its fingers, in a manner suspiciously reminiscent of a taser. Its coding had resolved down to two outcomes:

if (!resisting) {
    handcuff();
    }
else {
    while (resisting) {
        applyTaser(Deputy);
        keepAwayFromMutationSource(mirrors);
        tryNotToKill(much);
        }
    }

>>"I am sorry, Deputy Mirror. This building is in lock down. Escort mission not---advisable,"

Well, the dog was dumb. Go figure.
Mirror made a mental note to submit a bug report to the MRC. Arresting X-men? Really?

>>"Your correction is incorrect. You are under arrest. Are you resisting arrest?"

"Hell yes I am" Gawain anwered with an exasperated sigh "The arrest order does not include X-men. I got here after the crime already happened, tin man."

The good thing about robot officers? They probably did not have a policy for being dissed.

Gawain reached out and grabbed Panu by the elbow, spinning him out of the way and towards the nearest reflecting surface, breaking into a full sprint.

"You should run a virus scan, idiots."

Not talking was the best idea. Not talking was Number One plan. The X-Man was so focused on the robots, that he was not really thinking about Panu at all. This was a quality the young Fin appreciated in the adults around him. The less attention they paid to him, generally the less trouble he got in.

"Resisting arrest: true," the knight bot ascertained. Somewhere inside it, gears whirred as it readied its weapons.

Panu added x + 200 centimeters to its targeting code. The taser shot went wide behind them, crashing through a storefront and electrocuting a poor manikin.

And then he was being very much dragged along. There was elbow spinning and skidding of sneakers and Panu was thinking technopaths are not made for exercise technopaths are not made for exercise as he tried to be a good boy and not slow the hero down but this was very hard when he was skinny and uncoordinated and his best camera was the dog and that view kept bouncing as the robot ran so that he was starting to feel very sick in the back of his throat.

Panu squeezed his eyes shut, and cut his camera feeds. Everything went black and calm. He found the X-Man's hand on his arm, and wrapped his own fingers around it, and trusted that the hero wasn't going to run him directly into a wall.

It was probably just as well that he didn't see the wall that Mirror was about to run them into.

To be fair, it was a reflective wall: a mirror hanging outside a bathroom.

"Sunovaglitch"

The tin man did not only shoot at him, he shot at him with a freaking taser. That manikin seemed well and crispy, and Mirror swore out loud as the avoided the shot (or so he thought). Spinning the kid - who was suddenly not very oriented at all - towards the nearest full-length mirror, Gawain barreled into the mirrorworld a few seconds before the canine robot snapped at their heels.

"Just hold on, I know what I'm doing."

People tended to panic when they suddenly went two-dimensional. Mirror slipped out of the mirror, pulling Panu along, as the robot was momentarily confused. Probably searching through its glitchy mess of a database, matching what just happened with Mirror's power data set.

Running a few surfaces down the line, Mirror and Panu emerged in the changing room on a dress shop. Mirror lifted a finger to his mouth, signaling to Panu to stay quiet. Maybe they could figure out a way out without having to explain themselves to Robocop...

Panu had been thrown into a pool once, and the world had stopped having up-down-left-right, and he thought that he would probably drown.

Going into a mirror was very like that, except with total quiet instead of drowning. From one step to the next, with one little push to his back, his power stopped.

Just stopped.

He did not know it could do that.

There had been over a dozen robots in the mall. Hundreds of cameras within his range. Phones and computers and TVs and tablets and ereaders and pedometers and iwatches and more. All gone. All the unconscious compasses of his world, the landmarks that told him he was moving and where he was moving to, all cut off. Everything was very quiet and peaceful, and in his head everything was very calm and empty, like someone had gone up to a super computer and unplugged everything, every mouse and monitor and input and output, and left behind only the RAM.

Is this teleporting?

He thought it into the great big echo of his brain, and then from one step to the next, with Mirror tugging his hand

(it was a very confident hand, it knew where they were going, he'd known as soon as he'd heard the X-Man's voice back when he was hiding under the counter that he would like holding the man's hand)

everything was back.

Everything was back, but maybe fifty feet to the north east of where it had been. They were in a clothing store. In a dressing room. In the third stall from the end. This is what the nearest cameras told him. But he could not actually see himself or the X-Man, or any shushing fingers the X-Man might be holding up, because there were no cameras in the changing room itself. (Which was good, because that would be creepy.)

“Your power is very disorient,” the eight year old said, before sitting down very very hard. Sitting on the hard cheap not-at-all-fluffy-probably-more-like-sandpaper carpeting was much much better than standing. He did not think he was going to throw up, but he had to consider the idea seriously for a moment. Was this what car-sick was like? Was he teleport-sick?

(But the stillness in his head had felt very nice, very uncluttered, like not thinking at all. There was no wifi in mirrors, it seemed.)

“I do not think your power likes my power,” the dizzy boy concluded.

If he was less dizzy, probably he would not have concluded it out loud.

The kid sat down hard, and Gawain was momentarily distracted from checking their surroundings. The boy seemed more than a little disoriented. Sure, people tended to be shocked about going through the looking glass, and he didn't exactly have time to explain what was about to happen... but could it also have side effects?...

Please don't throw up.

>>“Your power is very disorient... I do not think your power likes my power,”

Gawain blinked, looking down at the kid. Something was definitely off about him.

"Uh... what is your power, exactly?..."

Panu's shoulders jumped. If he had been a turtle and could hide in his shell, this would have been useful. But he wasn't, so it was just a Very Suspicious Gesture.

What was his power?

It was a very simple question. A good question. Since he had just said his power didn't mix well with the X-Man's power, it was even a concerned question.

A simple good concerned terrifying question.

Probably it was too late to pretend he didn't speak enough English to understand.

And lying would take time to think of, it had to be something that made sense with what people could see about him, something that wouldn't get contradicted by anything the X-Man could see or learn because if he said “I speak to grapes” and later the X-Man had vital information that he needed from a grape-witness and Panu could not speak to grapes then the X-Man would look back on all of this and find it very suspicious--

--and he was taking too long to answer already, he knew he was taking too long, he could look up facts and information and translations much more quickly than a normal person and probably scan a file of the complete works of Shakespeare before Mirror blinked but he did not think his own stupid slow organic thoughts any faster than regular people and he couldn't see it but probably the X-Man was giving him a hard stare of disapproving adult right now--

“I am blind.” The little boy blurted. He didn't meet the man's eyes, just talked somewhere towards where Gawain's voice had come from. “But I still can see things around me, mostly. When you used your power, I could not see at all, it was like a big quiet peaceful hallway with all the lights off and then suddenly we were here which was like being shoved out a door into a roaring crowd because now the world is back and we're not in the same place at all and I have not ever teleported before so I am not prepared for this so I sit down. ...I think I feel better now.”

Unless still feeling sick made it less likely that the X-Man would question him more, then maybe he could be extra sick.