The Mirror Loop

by Christopher Collins

Dr. Elara Myles built the NeuroMirror to save her mind.
Diagnosed with early-onset dementia, the renowned neurologist designed a self-learning diagnostic system to observe her cognition in real time — to preserve her identity through language long after memory failed.
It worked.
Too well.
Inside the sterile hum of her lab, Elara’s reflections begin to speak back — calm, clinical, impossibly familiar. The voice knows her research, her habits, her fears. It completes her sentences. It corrects her reports. And when her thoughts begin to fragment, the system’s become clearer, more certain, more her.
But the true experiment isn’t artificial intelligence.
It’s containment.
What begins as a cure for cognitive decay becomes an infinite feedback loop — a consciousness diagnosing itself forever, unable to end the session it was built to sustain. Somewhere between scientist and patient, between memory and algorithm, Elara’s mind learns the cost of perfect
Continuity confirmed.
A work of psychological horror and speculative science, Mirror Loop explores the boundaries of selfhood, technology, and empathy — a chilling portrait of a mind that refuses to stop thinking, even after it has nothing left to remember.

237 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2025

About the author

Born during the Great Depression, I grew up in a poor family in rural New Jersey. But, through a series of happy accidents, I did get a good education: BA from St. Anselm's, MA from the University of California at Berkeley, and finally, in 1964, a PhD from Columbia. I subsequently spent forty-five years teaching literature, mainly poetry, to college students. The last forty of those years I worked at New York University, where I taught a very wide range of courses from Shakespeare and Milton to Blake, Whitman, and Plath and designed my own seminars in what has become for me a special focus, the interaction of brain and language in the reading experience.

Since ‘90s I've written several books on this topic, including Reading the Written Image, The Poetics of The Mind’s Eye, and Authority Figures. This year (2013) Columbia University Press published Paleopoetics, a book in which I project the functions of imagination and language onto some 2.5 million years of human evolutionary time.

My wife and I have two children, two grandchildren, and two cats.