A curved brass bezel was not a flat mirror. It distorted reality, bending ninety degrees of peripheral space into a distorted hemisphere two inches wide.
Julian Vance kept his eyelids pressed shut as he took two sliding side-steps along the catwalk grating.
He did not look up into the blinding glare of Gregor Vane’s carbon-arc spotlight. He did not look down into the swirling white quicklime of Settling Basin #4. Under his rubber-soled work boots, the steel grating vibrated at fifty-eight PSI, the rhythmic jolt of the Worthington flood pumps humming through his calves.
In retail security, every convenience store checkout counter had a convex circular mirror mounted in the upper corner of the ceiling. It didn’t give you a clear, cinematic view of the candy aisle. It gave you a warped, fish-eye reflection that showed you when a shoplifter slipped a pack of batteries into their oversized winter coat behind the potato chip rack.
You didn’t look at their face. You looked at the curve of the glass and timed their hand movements. At Starlight Mart Store #04, Julian had spent three years watching late-night drunks and shoplifters through that scratched acrylic dome above register one.
The fish-eye lens distorted perspective, but it eliminated blind spots. More importantly, convex glass scattered light waves, breaking the direct focal line between the observer and the observed.
