The Mirror Player

The tournament was Devon's idea, which was why the rules were on index cards and half of them contradicted each other.

Each round, two players sat across the folding table. Each held two cards, one that said SHARE and one that said KEEP. On the count of three you laid one down, face up. If you both shared, you each got three points. If you both kept, you each got one. But if one of you shared while the other kept, the keeper got five and the sharer got zero.

"That's dumb," Maya said, first round. "Everybody just keeps."

"You play the same person ten times in a row," Devon said. "That's the whole thing. Ten times."

Maya kept. Her opponent kept. One point each, ten times over. Ten points. She felt clever and also bored, which was a bad combination she recognized from long division.

By the third pairing she noticed the scoreboard. She was not winning. A quiet kid named Priya was winning, and Priya wasn't doing anything, as far as Maya could tell. Priya just sat there sharing.

"She's sharing," Maya said to Devon. "How is she winning by sharing? You told me sharing gets you zero."

"Watch her play somebody twice," Devon said, and went to referee the corner.

Maya watched.

Priya's first card was always SHARE. Every game, every opponent, the opening move was the same. She laid it down like she'd already decided it before she sat down.

Then the second move was where it got strange. If the other kid had shared back, Priya shared again. If the other kid had kept, snatching the five points, Priya kept the next round. She did to you exactly what you had just done to her. One move behind, like a shadow.

Maya's stomach did the thing it did when a pattern showed up before she could explain it.

She pulled a chair across from Priya. "Play me."

Round one, Priya shared. Maya, testing, kept. Five points, zero. Maya felt the little spike of winning.

Round two, Priya kept. So did Maya. One and one.

Round three, Maya thought: she'll punish me forever now, I ruined it. She shared, to say sorry with a card. Priya, who had only been copying, saw the share and shared right back.

And then they were both sharing. Three points each. Again. Again. The numbers climbed together, side by side, faster than any keeping had ever climbed.

Maya sat back.

She did the arithmetic she hadn't wanted to do before. Ten rounds of both-keep was ten points. Ten rounds of both-share was thirty. The stealing move, the five, felt huge in the moment, but it broke the thing that made thirty possible. One greedy card and you were back down in the ones, both of you, grinding.

"You're not being nice," Maya said slowly. "You're not nice at all. You'd keep if I kept. You did."

"I copy you," Priya said. She had a very small voice. "That's all I do. I go first with share, and after that I'm just a mirror."

"But that means whether we both win big is up to me."

Priya almost smiled. "It's up to whoever stops mirroring first. That's usually not me."

Maya looked at the whole room now, the way you look at a chessboard after you finally see the fork. The kids who kept every time, protecting themselves, were all clustered at the bottom of Devon's scoreboard. Each one had never been cheated. Each one had also never gotten above ten. They had defended a small thing perfectly.

The kids climbing were the ones who opened with a hand out and then refused to be a sucker twice.

"Play again," Maya said. "From the start. I want to try something."

This time Maya opened with SHARE. So did Priya, of course. Maya shared the next round without even checking, because now she trusted the mirror, and the mirror shared back. All ten rounds. Thirty and thirty. The highest score anyone had put up all afternoon, and they'd made it together, and neither of them had beaten the other by a single point.

"That's the weird part," Maya said. "To win the tournament you don't beat the person in front of you. In every single game I ever tie Priya or lose to her. She never once beats anybody. She just never loses by much, and everybody who plays her nicely walks away rich."

Devon wandered back over, chewing a pencil. "My cousin's in college. She said grown-up scientists ran this exact game on computers. Big tournament. Every clever strategy anybody could invent, all playing each other thousands of times."

"Which one won?" Maya asked.

"The shortest one. Somebody sent in this tiny little program. Share first. Then copy your opponent. Four words, basically. It beat everything."

Maya stared at the two cards in her hand, SHARE and KEEP, worn soft at the corners now.

"It beat things that were trying to trick it," she said. "With four words."

"It never tricked anybody back," Devon said. "That's what my cousin said was the freaky part. The winner never once did better than the person it was playing. It just did great overall, because everybody it met ended up doing great too. The mean ones won their games and lost the tournament."

Maya thought about all the times an adult had told her the world only worked if you looked out for yourself, that nice was a thing you could afford or not afford. She thought about it as a math problem now. As a thing you could put on index cards and prove. Nobody at this table was being kind. Priya had told her that plainly. They were all just trying to win. And the arithmetic of trying to win, played over and over with the same faces, kept pushing them toward sharing anyway, like water finding the low place in a floor.

She understood why her stomach had jumped when she first watched Priya. It was the feeling of the world being built differently than she'd been told.

"Do it again," Maya said, and she meant everyone, the whole room, the whole tournament, maybe every repeated game that had ever been played by anything alive. "I want to go first this time."

She laid down SHARE and waited for the mirror.