Ep 8: Project 573

This episode of Mirror Falls contains references to poutine with more than 3 ingredients. Listener discretion is strongly advised.

Well, here we are. The time has come. We're at the end of the season. I've been teasing the big reveal for weeks now. And here— Mayor Hans drops the envelope. "Well, there it is," he says, bending to pick it up. "The single most celebrated event in Mirror Falls is about to begin." The town council meeting room is packed. Every folding chair is taken, including the extras dragged in from the seniors room. People even broke out the good jeans. Every 2 months nominations circulate. Hans calls these period seasons because of his thing about reality TV. As I was saying, he adjusts his reading glasses and opens the envelope slowly, savoring every second of it. With a record 100% of the vote, this year's Citizen of the Year is— Mohit Singh from the Gassen God! The room filled with applause, the butter tarts were broken out, the only thing missing in fact was the guest of honor himself. And that is because this year's Citizen of the Year does not actually live in Mirror Falls. In fact, he doesn't live in Canada at all. Mohit Singh grew up in a town in northern India that most people only ever saw from a bus window. He had a mother until he was 8. She worked herself into exhaustion, then into illness. His father left before that. He lived with his mother's older cousin Rupa, who did her best. But best has limits when you've already got 6 kids and a tailoring corner in your front room. She gave him a bed, and as much love as she could stretch. The only adult who ever looked at him like he was more than a logistics problem was Mr. Iqbal, his English teacher. He kept Mohit after class sometimes, not as punishment, but as refuge. He saw something in the boy, a curiosity about people, a warmth that worked on strangers like a charm. One afternoon, Mr. Iqbal showed Mohit a news clip on his phone A retail store in another country running without in-person staff, but fitted with cameras and sensors and a person on a screen who could talk to customers. It looked like science fiction. "This is the new world now," Mr. Iqbal told Mohit. At 16, Mohit moved to Mumbai. A city where nobody looked twice at a boy with a cheap backpack because, well, there were 10,000 more just like him. He slept his first night on the floor of a crowded room rented by the week, listening to strangers breathe and cough and whisper into phones. He found work at a remote operations center, a room full of screens, headsets, and young people who spoke to other countries in calm voices while Mumbai slept. They called it store support. He learned the software fast. He learned the etiquette faster. Smile in your voice. Apologize first. Never sound annoyed, even when you are. About 2 years later, a job listing came across Mohit's social media. It's a nice town, Mirror Falls, it read. Sits on the north end of Vancouver Island. 'About 400 people live here. It has what you expect: a coffee shop called Dark Side of the Moon, a gas station called the Gas 'n' God, and a faulty electrical system.' It sounded cute. Fictional, even. The town owned and ran the Gas 'n' God, but it had spent a year trying to find someone to take it on. Worked 12 hours a day. Nobody wanted to outsource it, but they couldn't find anyone reliable who'd stick with it. Why not give it a shot? He was hired right away. Mohit fit in right from day one. He shows up right after the beginning of the long dash every weekday, propped up on a computer screen, sitting on the Gas N' God counter. Beside the coffee machine and the handwritten sign that said, "Please clean up after yourself," which to Mohit felt like the most Canadian sentence imaginable. Every morning he'd key in the Gas N' God security code that Father Marcel created all those years ago, 573. Such a short code, Mohit always thought. Why would he pick that? But from his desk a million miles away, he could watch the pumps, Restart a stuck transaction. Monitor the tank levels. Alert the maintenance guy in town when a reading looked wrong. He could see the till totals, the cigarette cabinet sensor, the alarm status. He could call the RCMP non-emergency number if something felt off. Sometimes he found himself replaying the camera feeds even when he wasn't on shift, just to watch the town exist. He learned the rhythm of its rain, He learned which customers always brought in their own mug. Outside his workplace, he talked a street vendor into making poutine, even though the vendor slapped stewed vegetables on it. He loved getting to know the people in town. They were kind, decent people. Relentlessly decent. Where he lived, people were efficient with affection. Not devoid of it, but people saved it, rationed it. In Mirror Falls, affection is wasted freely, like extra napkins stuffed into a takeout bag. People thank the computer screen he appears on. They say goodnight to the camera. They tell him to stay warm, as if it isn't 34 degrees in Mumbai, and even hotter in the room he's in. He even held court the way Father Marcel did. People came in to pay for the gas and left having unburdened themselves of something they said to a friend in 1998 that stuck. That still bothered them. Some asked for advice, a few for absolution, which Mohit dispensed like candy. Doug Anderson wanted to know if God would forgive him for selling a snowmobile he didn't technically own. Mohit was not ordained, but it turns out some spiritual vacancies can be filled by a teenager with good eye contact. More than anything, Mohit started to feel something he hadn't allowed himself to feel in years. The sense that there were adults in the world who might, if he gave them a chance, care about what happened to you. He needed parents. Not the biological kind, just the steady kind. The kind who noticed if you were tired, who asked if you ate, who teased you lightly and meant, "You're one of us." Mohib's 20 now, so you'd think he'd be past that, but no. He desperately wanted to be in Canada. In BC. On Vancouver Island. In Mirror Falls. In the last year or so, he started to paint a picture of his life where he could walk through that door himself. Not as a voice in a speaker, but as a person whose name people said without a headset between them. Garrison Ulrich writes the town newspaper, which is actually just a badly designed webpage he updates daily. Garrison moved to Mirror Falls from the States, used to be a radio host in central Minnesota. A slow place. A place where, as Garrison used to say, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Garrison is also one of the Gas'n'God's most reliable customers. Comes in every morning, gets a coffee, tries out a dad joke on Mohit, who laughs. Every time. But this one morning Garrison arrived early. 6:14. Still dark. Still raining the way it always does on the north end of the island. He pushed through the door expecting the usual quiet. But the monitor was already on. Mohit was already connected. He just wasn't talking to Mirror Falls. "I don't understand what else they want," he was saying to someone on the phone. "I sent everything. I sent it twice." There was a long pause. The other voice, someone older, maybe a cousin or an uncle, said something that Garrison couldn't make out. "I know, I know it's not guaranteed, but—" Mohit switched to Hindi, but enough English words leaked through that told Garrison what this was about. Visa rejected again. It turns out Mohit had been trying secretly to get permission to come to Canada, to Mirror Falls. He had the whole thing in his head. He'd tell no one, show up early in the morning, and for once sit behind the counter in person. A huge surprise. There was only one thing that might keep Mohit from moving: Rupa. She was not well. Rupa was 71 now, which isn't particularly old, except when your knees have spent 30 years bent over a sewing machine, and you've raised 6 children and one borrowed one, and you've never once in your adult life slept past 5:30 in the morning, Then, 71 is old. She didn't complain. That was the problem. If she complained, Mohit could argue with her, could say, "You're fine. Stop being dramatic," the way she always said it to him. Instead, she just moved a little more carefully, set things down more slowly, held the railing now on the stairs, which she never used to do. He sent money home every month. Not a lot, but some, and called every Sunday without fail, which she accepted the way she accepted most of his gestures: with a short "thank you" and then a pivot to asking whether he was eating enough vegetables. The visa application had been his secret partly because he wanted to surprise Mira Falls, but also partly because he hadn't figured out the other part yet. The part where he left. He told himself he would sort it out when the time came. That Rupa had her daughter nearby. That the cousins checked in. What he knew, and didn't say, was that leaving India would mean leaving the last person on Earth who had chosen him when she didn't have to. Who'd made room when there was no room. Going to Canada felt like the truest thing he'd ever wanted. Leaving Rupa felt like the worst thing he'd ever considered doing. He held both of these facts at the same time, the way you hold a cup that's too hot. You don't put it down. You just wait to see if you can bear it. Garrison was holding his own hot cup, standing by the coffee machine. Not moving. He had that stillness of someone who knows he's hearing something he wasn't meant to hear. Then Mohit looked up, saw the camera feed, saw Garrison standing there in his raincoat with his reading glasses still on his forehead. "Oh, Mr. Ulrich! Good morning! I didn't realize you were, uh... How's the coffee today? It should be fresh, I set the machine last night to start at 6 like usual." Garrison poured his coffee, paid, and left. He sat in his truck for 11 minutes before he started the engine. Garrison is a town council member, which in Mirror Falls means he attends He attends town meetings, argues about drainage, and occasionally helps Hans carry folding chairs. He is not a man given to large gestures. He once described himself as a person who contributes to quorum. But he went to Maureen's house that afternoon. In addition to running the town's 4 Facebook groups and getting all of its grants, Maureen also handles most of the town's administrative work, which is a polite way of saying she handles most of the town's everything. Mohit's trying to come to Canada, Garrison said. His visa got rejected. Maureen took off her glasses. How do you know that? Garrison explained what he knew and said, I guess I'm asking if there's a way. Maureen found the program in 3 days, a federal pathway for international students with a community sponsorship stream that most towns had never heard of because the paperwork looked like it was designed to discourage applications. Maureen has never been discouraged by paperwork in her life. She called Garrison. "There's a way, but it's gonna take the town." It spread quietly. Garrison told Mayor Hans, who told Mrs. Chen, who told 3 people she trusted and 4 people she didn't, which meant the whole town knew within a day. Everyone kept the secret away from Mohit. The immigration consultants were expensive. Every store had a fishbowl labeled "Money for Mohit." The fishbowls filled fast at first. Then they didn't. The fees climbed past what anyone had expected. The grants Maureen found covered tuition but not travel. Not housing, not the legal costs of untangling Mohit's previous rejections. The gap was $12,000, which in a town of 400 people who'd already given once felt like it could have been $100,000. Hans stopped sleeping well. He'd lie awake doing math that never worked out, then get up and do it again at the kitchen table. Until he remembered about the account. Father Marcel had set it up years ago, just a week before he disappeared, a sort of hand-me-down from back when the church had a congregation big enough to pass a collection plate worth passing. A small fund, in an account at the credit union at Ashford Bay. Marcel had called it the town's conscience, money for when something mattered and nobody had any. The account was actually a secret, something passed down from mayor to mayor. Not a single one ever told the town, and none had dipped into the fund either. The only instructions Marcel left were, "You'll know when," which was annoyingly vague. Hans was a saver. Living in war taught him that. Was this the right way to spend it? It was. Hans drove to Ashford Bay on a Wednesday morning, didn't tell anyone where he was going. The balance was $14,000. When Maureen called him that evening to say the funds had cleared and she didn't understand where they came from, Hans said, "An old friend." And so, little surprise that the room erupted in applause when Hans announced that Mohit was Citizen of the Year. Mohit was there too, in a laptop perched atop a table. The whole award was a surprise, but he figured they'd only included him in the announcement to be polite. He was thrilled. "And there's more," Hans said. He called Maureen to the front. "So," she said, "it turns out there's a federal program that accepts international students. Mohit, you once mentioned you wanted to study the local ecology of Vancouver Island." We found some money. The paperwork is done. Hans, who could never contain himself, blurted out, "We can get you here next month!" The clapping started. Chairs scraped the floor. Suddenly the whole room was on its feet. When the noise settled, Hans started talking about next steps. Logistics, details. The kinds of things that needed figuring out before Mohit arrived. Mohit, of course, will have his own things to work out. For one, a phone call back home. A hard call. In the back row, as always, were Guy and Kim. They'd attended every town council meeting for years and never once spoken. Kim turned to Guy. He was already looking at her. There's a thing that happens in long marriages where an entire conversation takes place in the space between two people's faces. No words, just the accumulated weight of every hope. Kim gave the smallest nod. Gi raised his hand. A few people turned around because Gi raising his hand at a meeting was like the sun rising in the west. "He can stay with us," Guy said. "We'd like that." The room went quiet in a way that was louder than the applause had been. Everyone in town knew about the foster list, the years of waiting. Kim, who had stopped mentioning it, which was worse than talking about it. On the laptop screen, Mohit was asking what was happening. Kim reached over and took Guy's hand, and he let her, which, if you knew Guy, was the biggest thing of all. Garrison sat in the third row, the smallest Midwestern hint of a smile on his face. He'd spent 20 years in radio being paid to fill silence. He didn't feel like filling this one. And that is how the evening should have ended. Hugs all around, a few joyful tears, everyone eventually drifting home. But tonight would not be a normal night. Stephanie was first to spot her out the window to the west. The forest, a silhouette at first, a woman, tall woman Her hair was scraggly. Something was on her back. She made it to the door of Town Hall and walked in. On her back was a large backpack, military issue. She was dressed like a soldier or an army person or something. She plunks down in a chair, half the town surrounding her. "You're the mayor, right?" she says. Hans nods. She hands him a business card. On it, a phone number and four words. Funny thing about mirrors: in the right hands, a mirror can hide something you expect to see or reveal something you never knew existed. Sometimes those revelations are big. Entire nations moved. Elections, stock market crashes, war victories that light up the sky. Sometimes those revelations are small. A crack in the varnish of a town's reputation. A mysterious fault on the power grid. Security cameras that don't turn off. Sometimes it takes one person to gather decades of work walk 15 kilometers through the forest, and change the entire country with a business card. Hans grabs his phone. 613. That's Ottawa, he thinks. 912-1909. This is a secure line. Project 573. This call cannot proceed without a valid protocol code. Hans reads off the card: Protocol Z, Foxtrot Station. The lights flicker for just a second, then the whole town loses power. Off in the distance, west, deep in the forest— an air raid siren? The Zunigwa? Mary George looks at Hans and says, "What did I tell you people?" It's a nice town, Mirror Falls. Sits on the north end of Vancouver Island. Exactly 41 people live there. It has what you expect. A coffee shop called Coffee Shop 573 Foxtrot.— a gas station called Gas Station 573 Foxtrot, and an electricity grid that's never gone down. Coming up in Season 2 of Mirror Fools. For years, Canadians have known about the early warning radar stations. Remote posts built to watch the skies for danger. But some now believe the stations are watching more than the skies. Home to towns that do not appear on maps. Designed for what purpose? That may be the most carefully guarded secret of all.

Download the complete season 1 scripts for Mirror Falls and get a bonus map of the town at book.mirrorfalls.com. Mirror Falls is produced with gratitude on the territory of the Coast Salish people. Story and sound design by Tod Maffin. Join other Mirror Falls fans and chat about this episode at chat.mirrorfalls.com. Mirrorfalls.com. You can subscribe to Tod's free newsletter about Canada at farandwide.news.

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