And yes, I was wondering how obvious it would be that I’ve been reading the Ender novels lately. Well-spotted.

As well as having never written anything close to this before (in song form or otherwise), this is also the first time I’ve written a story in full before coming up with a single lyric. Even more unique is that I wrote it twice. Here’s the original story:

The inhabitants of Mirrorworld once lived in peace; staring into one another was their greatest joy, as the resulting infinity tunnel made them feel close to God. However, they broke into factions over differing ideas about what lay at the tunnel’s end. One faction believed it was heaven, another believed it was another world like theirs, and yet another believed that it could logically be nothing other than their own world. Over time, these differences became irreconcilable, and the mirrors went to war. At the end, only one faction was left standing, but having shattered all opposition, they could no longer create the infinity tunnel, and realised that they had forever cut themselves off from God.

There was of course a huge plothole here, which was that there was no reason the victors couldn’t have just looked at each other. So I had the idea of making the three factions into separate races – flat, concave and convex. A concave mirror could only create the infinity tunnel by looking at a convex mirror, and vice versa. The flat mirrors could indeed look at one another, but this caused resentment from the other two races, so when war began, the curved mirrors tacitly worked together to wipe them out, before fighting each other.

But it turned out I was totally wrong about the interaction of the two mirror types, and there was physically no way that an infinity tunnel could be created like that. And even though we’re talking about a story featuring sentient mirrors, I couldn’t ignore physics, so I rewrote most of the story.

In hindsight, the original version would’ve been a nightmare to turn into lyrics.