“This is impossible,” he said. “It’s a counterfeit reality. A rip of something that hasn’t happened.”

Julia raised an eyebrow. “You’re becoming almost as eccentric as Pendrick.”

A clue emerged. The thief, a disgruntled former projectionist named Cyrus Flint, had left a note: “They ripped my life away. Now I’ll rip their stories.”

Intrigued, Murdoch borrowed the disc. That evening, he invited Dr. Julia Ogden to his boarding house. He’d rigged a curious machine to a small cathode-ray tube. “Pendrick’s latest,” he explained. “He calls it a ‘DVDRip’—a direct transfer of the visual information.”

Just then, Inspector Brackenreid burst through the door, his mustache bristling. “Murdoch! There’s been a theft at Pendrick’s lab! Someone’s made off with a box of those infernal discs. And I’ve reason to believe the culprit is using them to… to alter memories!”

But Murdoch had already swapped the discs. When Flint played his doctored version, the screen only showed a single, looping image: a mirror. In it, Flint saw only himself—a lonely, bitter man, unable to distinguish story from reality.

The case became a race. Murdoch deduced that Flint’s next target was the original master disc—Season 10—which he planned to “re-rip” with a final, devastating fiction: that Murdoch himself had committed a murder.