Author: Tower Curator

 

 

Dyna shoved back from the tulpa, ripping her hands from its momentarily loosened grip just in time to duck underneath a tiger-sized paw that swept through the air her head had occupied only moments before. Bastet didn’t stop at her. The hefty paw tipped with razor-sharp claws ripped at the tulpa’s throat. Dyna wasn’t sure if the cat goddess was attacking both of them or if she had just been in the way.

Scrambling back, Bastet continued to focus on the tulpa, ripping and tearing at it. But the tulpa just didn’t seem to care. Much like the PP-2000 wielding tulpa that Dyna had tried shooting at while chasing Harold into the noosphere, the tulpa just blurred into a mass of light and shadow before returning fully formed and whole. Physical attacks didn’t work on tulpa. At least not in the noosphere.

Dyna bit her lip, mind racing as she watched the tulpa reach for its sunglasses once again. Bastet ripped its arm aside with enough force to snap the bones in its forearm. A shimmer of shadows and the damage vanished as if it never was.

Why wasn’t Bastet just integrating the tulpa? Was it too strong? It seemed absurd that any tulpa could be as strong as something called a goddess, but the continued physical battle stopped Dyna short. Her mind drifted back to the Hatman and November’s comments about that entity when she had first met the other tulpa. The Hatman didn’t integrate with other tulpa often. Rather, it turned them into servants. Or, judging by its… hunting of humans and Ruby’s current state, it turned humans into tulpa then turned those tulpa into servants.

Was Bastet similar? Not necessarily in that it turned humans into tulpa and made them into servants, but just that it had evolved beyond standard integration?

If so, this fight could last potentially forever, with neither able to meaningfully damage the other. Or it would last until the eye-tulpa managed to remove its sunglasses. With the way its gaze had both disrupted Dyna’s thinking and the world around them—not to mention how it instantly destroyed her clone—Dyna wasn’t sure that even an Egyptian goddess would survive for long.

Dyna had been moving as she considered the situation. Thinking about Ruby made her panic, realizing that the younger girl had been hit by that gaze as well. While Dyna felt fine now that the eye-tulpa’s eyes were off her, she didn’t have that shadowy film around her like Ruby had.

Rounding a containment tank with an ibis-headed man depicted on its plaque, Dyna found Ruby on the floor. Ruby had been diving to the side when the eye-tulpa turned to her and Dyna had rushed up shortly after, so she hadn’t been hit by that gaze for long. Even the world around them wasn’t nearly as melted and destroyed as the area around the sphinx unit.

Ruby’s shadowy aura was thin and transient. Large bits of it, especially around her legs, were missing entirely. Checking the angles, her legs would have been most visible to the eye-tulpa following her dive.

Kneeling down next to the unmoving girl, Dyna felt a pulse on her neck and air coming from her partially opened mouth. Physically, she was uninjured. Mentally?

“Ruby?” Dyna whispered, lightly rocking the girl’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?”

Aside from a faint groan, Ruby said nothing. Her eyes remained closed.

Swearing under her breath, Dyna reached a finger up to the earbud, only to find nothing in her ear? Had it fallen out? More likely, it had disintegrated into disjointed thoughts like the disruptor gun had. Nothing in this place seemed real.

Ruby’s earbud was still in, however, and her disruptor looked intact. They had both made it behind cover before the tulpa had fully turned. Fishing the earbud from Ruby’s ear, Dyna put it on just in time to wince at the noise Doctor Darq was making on the other end.

“—warnings going off everywhere in the Egyptian section now. Status report, please! Tartarus is failing to report on two contained entities. Dyna? Ruby? Anyone?”

“I’m here,” Dyna said. “Ruby’s… hurt? I don’t know.”

“I was under the impression that she couldn’t be hurt. At least not in the long-term.”

“Physically, she is fine. There is a tulpa down here, one of the intruders. Its gaze seems to disrupt thoughts far more thoroughly than your disruptors. It stared at me for several seconds and I can’t remember much of anything except nothing.”

“Dangerous. Don’t get seen.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Dyna said, injecting as much sarcasm as she could possibly muster into the sentence. “It saw Ruby but only for a few seconds. She seems unconscious. It deleted my clone in an instant,” she admitted, feeling a roil of nausea at the admission.

That clone could just as easily have been her. From the clone’s perspective, it had been her. It was just that the continuity of her consciousness had split.

She had sent herself to her own death.

“Did you deal with the tulpa?”

Clamping down on her feelings, Dyna peered around the tank. Bastet pounced on the eye-tulpa, pinning its arms down to the ground to keep it from removing its sunglasses. The goddess tried snapping at its throat, only for the eye-tulpa to shift into its shadowy state, righting itself. It started to remove its glasses, only for a mangy orange tabby cat to leap at its head. That bought enough time for Bastet to round on the eye-tulpa.

Interestingly, Bastet did not turn into a shadowy form to reposition. The cat-like humanoid turned on all fours before moving upright on hind legs upon facing the eye-tulpa.

“No. It’s fighting Bastet right now. I’m not sure it is winning, but I’m honestly disappointed in the supposed goddess.”

“As I said,” Darq quipped, “those interred here are not deities. They are ideas given form. Tulpa like any other, even if they are older and more defined.”

“Still…” Dyna shook her head. “There is more, unfortunately. Eye-tulpa here has the power to disrupt not just human thoughts, but everything made of thought. Just looking around the area has these containment tanks looking like they melted down—”

“Has anything else escaped containment? Tartarus itself is unsure of what is occurring in your area.”

“Not as far as I know. Just Bastet and a dozen cats.”

“Small relief. It’s destroying walls, floors, and the like?”

“Whatever it looks at. That includes the earbud you gave me and the disruptor gun. Ruby’s is still intact.”

“That might explain how it entered Tartarus. If it punched a hole from the noosphere into here… I’m not sure how it might have figured out how to do that, but it is the only thing that makes sense in the moment.”

“I’m a lot less interested in how it got here than how to get rid of it. It shrugged off a disruptor to its back… I might be able to overcharge it, but isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Me?” Darq asked, humor in his tone. “I am nowhere near you.”

“You control Tartarus—or direct it if it is some kind of living entity—right? Was it not designed to capture gods? Surely it can capture this tulpa.”

“Contain, not capture. Ideas, not gods. And that isn’t exactly how—”

“Don’t tell me how this place functions. I’ll make it capture him if you can’t.”

Darq didn’t respond for a long few moments, all of which Dyna spent thinking about the facility around her. Despite her words, Dyna was far from confident in her ability to manipulate an apparently sentient location. She tried to think about it as if a being like Beatrice were constantly watching and, perhaps, even doing using things built into the facility. Beatrice couldn’t do too much at the Carroll Institute. She was connected to all the cameras and could open doors and send messages over computers, but everything she was connected to had overrides and there wasn’t much machinery in the facility under her control.

Even though, if given remote operation of construction equipment, Beatrice could have worked night and day with high precision at clearing out somewhere like Phrenomorphics, the institute still hired contractors to build everything. That, Dyna assumed, was just because of the distrust the administrators had for her.

Dyna let out a small sigh as she thought about Beatrice. Ever since figuring out Alpha’s likely role in Ignotus, Dyna had been avoiding Beatrice as much as possible. It just didn’t seem safe when Beatrice herself had warned her that the actions of the administrative council could not be overruled at any operating level.

Alpha must have sent this tulpa as well. What had she done, waited for Walter to check in, thus confirming that everyone was on the premises? Ignotus had been quiet for the past few weeks, so there was no possible way this was just a coincidence.

It was another assassination attempt.

“Tartarus tentatively agrees to your proposition of improvements to its ability to capture and contain dangerous tulpa,” Darq eventually said, interrupting Dyna’s thoughts. “I’ve almost got the fires put out. As soon as I finish, I will head over to the Egyptian Containment Sector to see what assistance I can render.”

Dyna shrugged. “I’m leaving the earbud here,” she said. “Just in case that eye-tulpa hits me again.”

“Understood. Good luck! Darq out!”

Dyna set the earbud down on the ground, hidden behind the ibis-man containment unit. Then she did something she probably should have done the moment she moved around the container and saw Ruby on the floor. Carefully picking the younger girl up, Dyna moved her further around the containment unit, making sure that she wouldn’t be seen by the eye-tulpa until the entire cylinder had melted away.

Standing, Dyna looked over Ruby for a long moment, watching the shadowy aura around her. It was like a dark fire, burning against her skin. Bits of it were being drawn closer from nothingness in the air. Thin strands of dark thought that rejoined the mass in a manner not too dissimilar from when Dyna had seen Ruby pulling her physical body back together after a particularly gruesome injury.

Ruby’s consciousness was supposedly stored in her artifact, the ruby implanted in her neck. If the earbud and disruptor had survived, that would definitely have been out of the line of sight. Yet Ruby also had that shadowy aura, meaning not all of her was in the ruby—at least not since meeting the Hatman.

Removing her jacket, Dyna carefully wrapped it around Ruby’s neck. She wasn’t sure if the thin material would help Ruby at all should the eye-tulpa spot her, but it couldn’t hurt.

Convinced she had taken all the reasonable precautions she could without outright fleeing, Dyna turned her attentions back to the actual problem.

Only to find there was no actual problem. Peering around the side of the containment unit, Dyna couldn’t see either Bastet or the eye-tulpa. There was fresh damage to the room, however, meaning that tulpa must have managed to remove its sunglasses for a short amount of time. Had it obliterated Bastet then simply walked on, unaware of Dyna and Ruby behind the container?

Wary, with Ruby’s disruptor in hand just in case it bought her a few seconds to hide, Dyna stepped out from around the container and looked up and down the walkway.

All she saw was a cat. Gray, white, and black with long, shaggy fur. Bright blue eyes stared at her before it meowed once then turned and trotted off with its tail high in the air. Watching it go had her frowning. Was she supposed to follow? The cat goddess could have taken her head off with that initial strike. What was it planning now?

Rather than follow, Dyna followed her instincts and moved to the nearest intact control panel, a short distance down the hall. The triple-hexagon logo of Tartarus spun lazily on the screen. The moment she tapped it, it vanished and revealed a wall of text that she couldn’t read at all. The swimming words actually gave her a burgeoning headache. Shaking her head, Dyna tried to focus on the symbols displayed. Letters were meaningless, but symbols somehow made it through the odd effect of the noosphere.

Dyna found what she was looking for on the third pass. She wasn’t entirely sure that it had been there on the first two times around. Whether that was her ability or Tartarus didn’t matter, she supposed, as long as she could access video feeds from throughout the facility. A few button presses took her to what she wanted to see.

The eye-tulpa was still fighting Bastet, for however much it could be considered a fight at this point. Its sunglasses were off completely. Bastet dashed around more like a frightened rabbit than a tiger on the hunt. The goddess didn’t stay in one place for long, dashing from point to point, taking fresh cover before everything could melt completely. It wasn’t going to be sustainable. In fact, they were headed back the way Dyna had come, over one of the catwalks that crossed a bottomless gap in the facility. There wouldn’t be any cover to hide behind.

Dyna didn’t know what would happen if it caught Bastet in its gaze long enough to harm or kill—disperse?—the goddess. She did feel a bit bad about freeing Bastet, making Doctor Darq’s job harder, but she couldn’t say she was sorry. Especially not with Bastet occupying so much of the eye-tulpa’s attention. Of the two tulpa, only one had been sent to assassinate her.

Feeling like she could do at least a little to help out the cat goddess, Dyna flipped back to the control panel. A small pane on the larger screen let her watch the relentless march of the eye-tulpa while she studied the rest of the console.

Having no desire to get close to the tulpa again, she needed some other way of attacking it. Surely this facility had active security measures.

Dyna tapped around, half hoping to find something, half hoping to create something. She kept tapping until she tapped a bright red button.

A sharp red laser beam lanced out from somewhere behind the view of the video feed, striking the eye-tulpa in the side of the head. It stumbled to the side as if struck by a baseball bat, but didn’t go down. After a shake of its head, it turned.

The view of the camera cut out, but another one quickly replaced it.

Dyna hammered her finger on the red button several more times, each producing a visible beam of laser light aimed directly at the tulpa. It kept knocking the tulpa around, keeping it off balance, but it wasn’t enough.

She needed something to stop it. Something it couldn’t just destroy. Two things popped into Dyna’s mind. The first was psionically shielded glass. It stopped psionic-based energy waves in their tracks. Dyna wasn’t entirely sure that it stopped her ability, but everything else? The other idea was the gel-like substance that tulpa were contained in. Tartarus used it, she had seen them do so when capturing the Hatman. The Carroll Institute had taken samples from the Hatman and fashioned their own version. It was effectively the same thing as psionically shielded glass, just in a liquid form. It absorbed and dispersed any psionic activity.

Dyna focused, picturing what she wanted out of the situation. Idea clear in her mind, she pressed another button on the control panel.

The grate beneath the eye-tulpa split apart and fell inwards. Within, a containment tube of psionic glass and gel awaited the falling tulpa. A second button press slammed a piston down on top of the container, forcing the tulpa into the gel.

The perspective of the camera changed, showing a view directly in front of the now swimming tulpa. The fact that its glowing white eyes were locked directly on the camera and the view wasn’t being obliterated made Dyna sigh in relief. She hurried back over to the earpiece and put it on while walking to the console to keep an eye on her captive.

“Doctor Darq,” she started, only to stop and narrow her eyes at the video feed.

The gel directly in front of the tulpa’s eyes looked like it was boiling. Large bubbles of black thought drifted upward in the container, winding up stuck in the more viscous gel over the entity’s head. Once a few little bubbles started, the effect expanded exponentially. In short order, there was a cone of empty space in front of its eyes. It never blinked, continuing to stare dead ahead at the psionic glass.

The glass wasn’t maintaining integrity any better than the gel had. It held for a moment, then the video footage cut out.

Dyna had to grab hold of the console as a small earthquake rattled the Egyptian section of the facility.

“What did you do?”

“That thing…” Dyna hissed, finger to her ear. She grit her teeth as she tried to come up with another solution. That had almost worked. It should have worked.

The problem hit her like a freight train.

“That thing was created to fight me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It disrupts thought. Everything I do is just thought. Even in the real world, I just overcharge my thinking to the point where the noosphere leaks my will into reality. Isn’t that what you said?”

“We aren’t in proper reality to test such a hypothesis, but it seems likely, yes.”

“How do we get it out of here?”

“Excuse me? Get it out of here? Tartarus was made to contain entities, not release them.”

“It isn’t going to be contained. Not unless you have a section of this facility that is actually real. Even then…” Dyna bit her lip. “We need to get it into the real world. Bullets kill tulpa in the real world.” The Hatman and the mountain man had shrugged off firearms, but surely that just meant that they needed to use more bullets. “I bet real gel and glass would work too. But nothing down here. We have to get it out of here and find real gel, real glass, and real bullets.”

A wave of nausea hit Dyna even as she thought those words. What if just by thinking that, she generated gel and glass. She could open up a supply closet, thinking she was grabbing a riot shield made from psionic glass, only for it to vanish into wisps of thought the moment the tulpa spotted her. Even other people, if she expected them to have psionic glass, might wind up with generated glass instead because she thought about it.

She couldn’t think about it. But just trying to avoid thinking about it only made her think about it more. She couldn’t stop herself.

Dyna needed help.

“Darq. How do I stop my power?”

 

 

 

“They aren’t literal gods,” Darq explained as they ran through the noosphere-adjacent facility. “They’re more like the idea of gods.”

Dyna stopped abruptly as a catwalk ahead of them fell through a bottomless pit. “Is that any better?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“Yes.” Darq, seemingly unconcerned by the sorry state of the facility, simply turned and began walking in a different direction. He didn’t even pause in his strides. “If they were actual, original beings, the collective belief in them would likely not diminish their power or ability. Lucky for us, exceedingly few people worshiped titans even back in antiquity. Today, few people think of them outside historical academia and those people don’t think of them as gods but as folklore.”

“So it isn’t a big deal? You can put this titan back into containment without issue?”

“Maybe,” Darq said with a shrug. “I wasn’t the one to place the titans in containment in the first place, but I have read the reports written by my predecessors.”

“Alright,” Dyna said. “How do we help?”

“Ignore Helios and any other escaped entity. I will handle them. I need you to focus on what freed the titan.”

“Ignotus,” Dyna hissed.

“Perhaps. Whatever it was, it must be stopped before more can be freed. Even if all of them escape their individual confinements, they will not be able to return to the real world. Tartarus remains secure. However, we won’t be able to return either. Tartarus remains secure and will remain so until this security breach is dealt with.”

“We’re trapped here? No help from Id or Walter?”

“None.”

“Weapons?”

Darq motioned with his hand, squeezing between two containment tubes, before stopping outside another heavy door. “The armory,” he said, pressing his hand against a palm-reader. “All the latest gear and equipment for fighting tulpa. Chief Engineer Ado helped make changes to much of it, but some of it is older equipment. Tartarus has been around for quite a long time, after all.”

As the heavy doors slowly slid open, Dyna tapped her foot in impatience. “How long has Tartarus existed? How did you get gods and titans into containment before things like disruptors existed?”

“That, Dyna, is a trade secret,” he said with a smile.

The armory was, as expected, an armory. A relatively small room with racks of varying equipment. Most of which looked like the same disruptor guns that Dyna had seen Tartarus put to use against the Hatman. There were a few that looked newer, having sleeker bodies and the strange angled cylinder on top was smoother and had rounded edges, leaving it more egg-shaped.

Dyna frowned at the disruptors, wondering if she should go for the one she had used before or the fancier looking one. Ruby, standing at her side, just scowled at the whole array, clearly waiting for Dyna to take the lead. If this were a normal armory, they probably would have done the opposite. Even with all her training, Ruby still knew far more about conventional weaponry than Dyna did.

Not knowing all that much about disruptor technology either, Dyna watched Darq.

The doctor bypassed all the weaponry on display to head further into the back of the armory. There, he didn’t take anything that looked like a weapon, but a small remote control device. If Dyna had seen it sitting on a coffee table in front of a large television, she wouldn’t have blinked twice.

“While we aren’t in the noosphere, this place behaves somewhat similarly,” he said, pulling a small circlet off the wall. It was a thin white band covered in small copper connectors and thin clear tubes. “By that I mean to say that your ability is likely more malleable and potent here, not having to force your will through into the real world. However, Tartarus itself will fight against your power if it thinks you are compromising its security.”

“This place can think?”

Darq grinned wide, showing off all his teeth as he spread his arms. “We are in a world of thought. Is that so surprising?”

Dyna clamped her jaw shut. When he put it like that…

Shaking her head, Dyna cast her gaze around the armory. Eventually, she settled on the fancier disruptor weapon. She knew how to use the disruptors and, more importantly, it was fancy in appearance. High tech, obviously. In fact, probably more advanced than the models the Carroll Institute had most recently been using. She had managed to overcharge one of those enough to harm the mountain man. This would surely be able to give even a titan pause.

Holding tight to that particular thought, Dyna handed one of the disruptors to Ruby then took one for herself.

Darq nodded at her choice, then held out a hand. “Communicators,” he said, dropping earbuds into Dyna and Ruby’s hands. “I’ll handle Helios. The intruder was last spotted in the Egyptian section. Tartarus has locked down the area—they shouldn’t be able to free another entity—but I suggest you hurry nonetheless.” He motioned to the floor where a bright yellow line began glowing between the tiles. “Follow the yellow-lit road.”

Ignoring the reference, Dyna asked, “Who spotted them?”

“Tartarus, of course.”

“Of course,” Dyna said, tone flat. “Is it a tulpa? Advanced or a squad of the PP-2000 wielders?”

Lights on Darq’s circlet winked on and off as some violet fluid began flowing through the thin clear tubes. “Tulpa, yes. It appears to be a squad. I’m quite interested to know how they got here. It is harder to escape Tartarus than to enter it, but not much.” One of the tubes changed to a yellow liquid as Darq winced. “Helios has started burning down the control room. I need to handle this.”

He pressed a button on the remote control before Dyna could stop him. In the next instant, he was gone. Dyna wasn’t sure if he had a method of teleportation or if he had stopped time. Either way, both she and Ruby were used to people disappearing like that. Neither blinked.

Dyna did glance down to where Darq had grabbed the remote from, only to frown as the entire wall had gone blank. Teleportation or time-stopping would have been nice, but it seemed like it wasn’t meant to be. She had to wonder if Darq did that or if Tartarus itself decided she didn’t need teleportation. Although she considered trying to force a remote to appear with her ability, she decided against it. Now wasn’t the best time for experimentation.

“Guess we better handle this,” Dyna said, turning to follow the yellow light. A pulse ran through it, starting at her feet and headed out through the large armory doors.

“Why is it always us?”

Dyna shrugged as they hurried along the outlined route. “I would say luck, but at this point, I have to wonder if I’m doing it to myself. All these incidents popping up around me is just a bit too convenient, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t call it convenient,” Ruby grumbled. “Bleeping annoying, maybe.”

“That too.” Dyna pressed her lips together in a thin smile. “Still, can’t think of anyone else I’d rather save the world with.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?”

“Maybe not the other incidents we’ve gotten caught up in, but this?” The line on the floor winked out as a small tremor shook the facility. It lit back up again, pointing in a different direction. Wondering if another catwalk had collapsed, Dyna turned. “Gods or ideas of gods, it is probably a bad idea to let them out into the real world.”

Ruby opened her mouth but clamped it shut right away as they reached their destination.

Dyna half expected the Egyptian section to be themed like an Egyptian section of a museum. Lots of stone statues and obelisks with hieroglyphs covering everything. That wasn’t the case. It was just more slim containment tubes. While she still couldn’t read the text on any of the plaques or display panels, she could recognize some symbols. One tank bore the jackal-headed guise of Anubis, another the tattooed eye of Ra. The interiors of the tanks were, unlike Dyna’s initial trip through the facility, completely shielded behind thick metal slats, not unlike the chamber Darq had been using to test her ability.

That made her wonder if she could change the contents. Presumably, they all held various Egyptian deities—maybe even pure concepts given form—but with those shields in place, she couldn’t tell for sure. Stopping at a container bearing the image of a cat, Dyna frowned. If they all just disappeared, there wouldn’t be any threat beyond the intruders.

Not to brag, but Dyna had taken care of her fair share of the PP-2000 tulpa. They weren’t a threat. The tulpa they were freeing were.

In fact…

If this was the noosphere…

Dyna looked away from the empty cat container to find a shadowy clone of herself. Just one, not a whole horde like she had made to fight the mountain man. She could see her clone’s displeased posture as it gave her a half-hearted glare with its eyeless face. Dyna couldn’t say she was happy to see it either. Which was probably why it wasn’t happy to exist.

Dyna hadn’t been able to help herself, however. The moment she thought about a clone that could simply rip apart the low-tier tulpa, it had appeared.

With a nod, the clone phased into tendrils of shadowy thought that raced away from the cat container, further into the Egyptian section of the facility.

“You’re making more?” Ruby hissed as soon as it left.

“I didn’t mean to,” Dyna said. “But as I did, it should take care of the tulpa then return to me. I… We don’t want more of me running around. There’s enough of me out there already.”

Ruby shook her head. “I can’t believe I thought you were the normal one.”

“Excuse me? I am the normal one. It’s my power that isn’t.”

“Uh huh.”

Rolling her eyes, Dyna started walking, keeping low and using the various containers as cover. “Come on. We should catch up to myself.”

“Uh huh,” Ruby said again, shooting Dyna a pointed look.

Ruby didn’t try to conceal herself as she moved. Dyna didn’t argue. Bullet holes were easy enough for her to fix. If the tulpa were focused on her, Dyna would be free to move around. Assuming that her clone didn’t handle everything before they spotted any enemies.

“Hello everyone, Doctor Darq with a q here. Do you read me? Hello, hello.”

Dyna glanced to Ruby, who nodded, then pressed the button on her earbud. “Darq? Has the situation changed?”

“Slightly.” Darq paused, then it sounded like he put a microphone in his mouth before sighing. “Whatever you did, please never ever do that again.”

“Make clones of myself? Sorry. If it is any consolation, the clone is going to merge back with me once—”

“Excuse me, you what yourself?”

“Cloned.”

“That’s… not what I was talking about but probably never do that again either,” he said, tone hesitant yet cheerful.

“I don’t understand. I didn’t do anything else?” Not unless her clone had done something.

“Tartarus reports that Bastet has escaped containment. More specifically, Tartarus reports that you helped Bastet escape containment. If you ever wish to leave this place, please do not make Tartarus upset.”

“Bastet…” Dyna trailed off, glancing back to the empty cat container.

“Egyptian cat goddess,” Darq said. “Generally of a playful temperament but gets volatile if you hurt cats. Do not hurt any cats.”

“Do you actually have… cats… down here…” Dyna trailed off, watching as a hairless cat with a blue and gold collar scurried across the hallway. “Never mind.”

“I’ll take care of it later. Please don’t free any more entities.”

Dyna closed her eyes, glad she had only focused on one containment unit rather than all of them. That… could have been a disaster. She did wonder if she could try to reverse the effect by pure thought, but decided to not risk it after Darq’s warning.

Keeping her mind clear, Dyna pressed on while ignoring the look Ruby was sending her way.

It wasn’t long before they heard something. Sound in the noosphere was strange. There was no background hum and certain things didn’t sound the way Dyna generally expected them to. Gunfire, for instance, didn’t seem to carry as far.

She still heard it.

Locking eyes with Ruby, they gave each other a nod before splitting off. Dyna moved around a particularly large tank with a sphinx depicted on its plaque, readying the disruptor as she moved.

The remnants of a small squad of tulpa were being torn apart by her clone. A small black cat sat atop another containment chamber, watching with golden eyes as the clone dove straight into the chest of a tulpa. Gunfire went wild, both from the attacked tulpa and the two companions.

Out of ammo! Dyna thought in a panic as a line of bullets traced up the side of the metal slats of the containment unit. A small sigh escaped her lips as the instant the thought crossed her mind, the guns stopped firing. The cat still let out a squawk as it hopped away, but at least it hadn’t been shot. Dyna didn’t want to see a cat shot in the first place, even less so when a cat god might pop out of the shadows and blame her for it.

The tulpa her clone had attacked rearranged its features and clothing, returning to the shadowy form of the clone. Before that had finished, the clone was already ripping apart the next tulpa. With only one tulpa left, Dyna pressed her earbud, about to report a mission success to Doctor Darq.

As Dyna’s clone turned to the final tulpa, it reached up and lifted the dark glasses it wore over a balaclava. Bright white light shined forth from where its eyes should have been.

The clone dispersed into thin strips of rapidly shrinking shadow, burned away by the light. It wasn’t just her, either. The entire room shuddered and swayed as another earthquake rocked the facility. Bits of equipment and architecture fell apart, following Dyna’s clone into thin wisps of dissipating thought.

Dyna clutched her forehead, grimacing. The tulpa wasn’t even looking directly at her and she felt like she couldn’t quite think properly. This was clearly an advanced tulpa of some sort, but what was she supposed to do with advanced tulpa? It took an excruciatingly long moment of time before she even remembered the disruptor in her hands. It was fancy and sleek. Earlier, she had known without a doubt that it would have worked on anything she aimed it towards.

Remembering that, Dyna leaned around the melting protective slats around the sphinx containment chamber and raised the gun.

The tulpa turned to face her the moment she pulled the trigger.

The disruptor turned to shadowy mist in her fingertips. Dyna’s body stayed whole and complete, but her mind went entirely blank. She couldn’t do anything but watch as the tulpa took step after step, slowly approaching while keeping the sunglasses out of the way of its white, burning eyes.

A meow at her feet was enough to make Dyna look away. It didn’t help the blank spot in her mind, but she stared down at the little black cat with golden eyes, half hidden behind the sphinx chamber.

The sphinx chamber was rapidly melting, turning to shadow and displaced thoughts. The tulpa was about to free another entity, but Dyna couldn’t spare any thought for that. She just looked down at the cat, mind blank except for one small notion.

Dyna was supposed to keep the cats from being harmed. She couldn’t remember who said that to her, but…

Kneeling down, Dyna picked up the cat and held it close. It didn’t squirm or try to escape, but its claws dug into her shirt. Her body wasn’t disintegrating as the rest of the place was. She could act as a shield.

A moment of clarity hit Dyna. Her thoughts came rushing back as she heard a shout from Ruby.

Bits of the tulpa were blasted from the larger body as Ruby’s disruptor hit the tulpa in the back.

It didn’t stop the tulpa. It recovered from a stagger and slowly turned, bringing those white lights in its eyes around to Ruby.

Ruby dove for cover behind another of the containment units, but she wasn’t fast enough to escape unscathed. Her scream pierced Dyna’s mind.

Dyna jumped to her feet in an instant, startling the poor cat clinging to her chest. Ignoring the pain from the claws as the cat ripped her shirt on its way to the ground, Dyna turned back to the tulpa and started sprinting as her mind pieced together what was happening. Wherever it looked, thoughts were disrupted. In a world of thought like the noosphere, that was particularly dangerous. Her body was real, her clothes were real, but everything else?

Jumping at the tulpa, grabbing at its face from behind. She tried to go for the eyes, but the moment it started struggling and clamping its hands over her wrists, she knew she wasn’t going to be able gouge them out fast enough.

The only consolation was that, with its hands on her wrists, nothing held up its glasses anymore. They slid back down, over its eyes. Mostly. Enough that, when the tulpa turned its head, Dyna didn’t feel her mind blank again.

Dyna’s lips twisted into a grimace as its hands squeezed down. Whatever power was behind its eyes wasn’t its only strength.

Stuck in this familiar situation again, she was about to start pouring her clones into it, just as she had done for the mountain man, when a sharp hiss had them both looking to the side.

A human-sized cat, garbed in black and gold with linen bandages around the dark fur of its arms, perched atop one of the partially destroyed containment units. Its golden eyes glared down.

With another hiss, it pounced.

 

 

 

“Noosphere adjacent?” Dyna asked, looking around.

If she blocked out the impossibly large cavern they were standing in, the place—Tartarus, apparently—looked remarkably similar to the containment areas of both Phrenomorphics and Tartarus—the real-world section. There were large containment units stationed around, though far less organized than either of the real-world locations. Everything was lit in that odd, uniform, near-twilight look to it. That might have been enough to make her realize that they weren’t in proper reality, but still, she might not have noticed.

Obviously, Ruby’s odd shadow was the biggest giveaway.

“Noosphere adjacent, yes,” Darq said, smiling as he looked around the place. “Not quite the noosphere, but not quite the… hmm, if noosphere then biosphere? The realm where biological organisms live.”

While Darq started mumbling to himself about the definition of words—Dyna wasn’t sure if the Carroll Institute had a special term for the real world—Dyna found herself slowly walking behind him, staring at all the various containment tubes. Most were occupied, she noted, though none with anything remotely human in appearance. The entities contained within were swirling shadows of varying shapes and sizes. Somewhat like the mountain man had been while in the noosphere.

“These things aren’t going to escape, are they?”

“Certainly not,” Darq said, offense in his tone. “In my time as the Conservator of Tartarus, not one escape has been made.”

“The mountain man escaped from containment similar to these when we brought him into the noosphere,” Dyna said.

“Tartarus is not the Carroll Institute. Your precautions were clearly inadequate. In addition, as I said, this is not the noosphere but noosphere adjacent. Even should one of these containment cylinders fail, Tartarus is secure.”

Dyna glanced back to the elevator, not believing Darq. It had no guards at all when they stepped out. Now, however, Dyna found herself blinking several times. There was no elevator. The area where they had just been was just another large empty space in this unnatural cavern.

A chill ran down her spine, wondering if she had somehow been tricked into containing herself within Tartarus. Her head snapped back to find Darq. Luckily, he was still there, a few steps ahead of her. Dyna, using a few quick hand motions, pointed out the absence of the elevator to Ruby and then motioned to Darq. Ruby gave an affirmative nod of her head. She would keep a watch on him.

“Does Id know about Tartarus?” Dyna asked, looking back to Darq.

“Id is the acting director of Tartarus.”

“Does Id know about this part of Tartarus?” Dyna clarified. If Id did know about this place, then Dyna felt relatively confident that she wouldn’t let herself sit around in containment forever. Dyna still wasn’t sure that she trusted Id—what kind of person ran around invading people’s minds, even if they were the same person—but she at least trusted that Id didn’t want to cause undue harm.

If Id did not know about this place, then the only one who would know Dyna was down here was Darq.

Darq turned to her with a smile and reached up to remove his goggles. They left a red mark around his face, but he was otherwise a normal person with regular blue eyes underneath. Although he didn’t have a shadow around him like Ruby or a completely different form like November and the mountain man, Dyna had suspected that he was a tulpa of some sort and was using the goggles to hide some anomaly.

He was a normal human, as far as Dyna could tell.

“Miss Graves, if I wanted you in containment, you would be in containment,” he said, practically reading Dyna’s mind.

Perhaps literally reading Dyna’s mind. She could never be sure without knowing what, if any, psychic abilities Darq possessed.

“That’s a small comfort. Maybe.” Unless he suddenly changed his mind. “You said that nothing has escaped during your tenure here? How long has that been?”

“Fifty-three years,” Darq said, slight edge of nostalgia in his tone.

Dyna had to do a double-take. The man didn’t look older than twenty-five. Maybe thirty. Fifty-three years working here, assuming his started immediately following high school age, would make him seventy. At least. He had to be older than that, even, simply because Dyna didn’t believe some nineteen year-old would be made into Conservator of Tartarus straight away.

“That’s quite a bit older than I expected. Older than the advent by a great deal too. Did you have a predecessor?”

“Of course. Doctor Marq was the conservator for about twenty years before I took over,” he said with a small laugh. “I’m not nearly as old as this place.”

“Doctor Mark…”

“With a q.”

“Marq,” Dyna said, feeling like she should have expected that. “How did you capture tulpa before the advent? Or how did your predecessor?”

“Tulpa have always existed. The noosphere, though it hasn’t had that name until recently, has always existed. Psychics have always existed as well. All three are tightly bound together, all drawing their abilities from the power of thought swirling about in places like this.” Darq paused at one large cylindrical tank, frowning for a moment before walking over to a control panel.

Dyna couldn’t read the words on it, but Darq, after donning his goggles once more, started tapping away without hesitation. The containment tank didn’t have shadowy tulpa shapes in it, but rather bright light that flickered and pulsed like lightning. Or, maybe it was lightning.

As he worked, he continued talking. “Before the advent, access to the noosphere was next to nonexistent, tulpa were exceedingly rare, and psychic abilities manifested so sparingly and so inconsistently that any who claimed to possess such abilities were effectively frauds. Especially so when put up against the beliefs of skeptics. You are what you think, but you’re also what other people think.” Darq nodded to himself, pressing one final button on the control panel. “Good. Zeus always gives us a little trouble. My predecessor’s short tenure as conservator was because of this tulpa.”

“Zeus?” Dyna said. “Named after the mythological god?”

“No. Zeus is named after himself.”

“The god of thunder?”

“That is certainly what people thought.”

Dyna licked her lips, slowly glancing around. “How… How old is this place?”

“A few thousand years. Unfortunately, precise bookkeeping was not among many of my predecessors’ skills.”

“This is mythological Tartarus. Prison of the titans and primordial deity?”

“Deity?” Darq said with a laugh and a shake of his head. “It is a location of thought, adjacent to the noosphere, nothing more. We do have a few titans down in Sector T, however.”

“And… you’re saying that old mythological gods are tulpa?”

“Hard to believe? Consider what you know of the noosphere and of tulpa. Is it really that unlikely that so-called gods, worshiped by many, would come into some semblance of existence?”

The noosphere was a world of thought, reflected by the collective thinking of all of humanity. When something in the real world changed—a new building built or a car moved from one parking space to another—it took time to reflect that change in the noosphere. Time for people to think about it and disperse their thoughts into the noosphere.

Tulpa formed from individual thoughts shed into the noosphere merging together. According to November, most thoughts were transient and insubstantial, but some could be larger and more important. Especially if it was something someone thought about for a long period of time. Dyna had no idea what ancient religious ceremonies were regarding Zeus, but she could easily imagine large amounts of people spending plenty of time in worship, all of which would generate thoughts relating to the subject in close quarters, allowing them to merge together easier…

Considering it like that brought up a few implications that Dyna wasn’t sure she wanted to consider, most revolving around more modern deities. In many parts of the world, religion had been on the decline for decades. A feat that only accelerated following the advent… But still, if Zeus and titans were contained within Tartarus…

Dyna shook her head. It didn’t matter, she supposed. Whether extremely powerful tulpa were running around or were contained, they weren’t a concern. They weren’t after Dyna. A very human threat that was after her life, not manifestations of deities.

Though…

Looking around, Dyna thought back to what she had done to the mountain man and wondered just how many copies of herself it would take to subsume a tulpa like Zeus. With a name like that, Dyna presumed it was a powerful entity. Probably leagues more powerful than the mountain man. Then if she were to release Dyna-Zeus, it could probably handle Alpha and any other threats without even trying.

“That, Miss Graves, is the kind of thinking that results in you being inhumed.”

Dyna turned to Doctor Darq with narrowed eyes. “You are a mind reader.”

“Something like that,” Darq said with a casual shrug. “I would make an extreme recommendation against attempting to subvert the security and sanctity of Tartarus. Regardless of what you think, you would not survive.”

Dyna shuddered at the surety with which Darq spoke. He was absolutely confident, even in spite of her ability to alter reality. That was a bit unnerving.

Then again, she supposed they weren’t in reality at the moment. Although Dyna had affected change in the noosphere before, this wasn’t the noosphere.

It was noosphere adjacent.

“I wasn’t going to try anything,” Dyna said, not quite sure if she was telling the truth or not.

“Good. Come along.” Darq headed down a wide catwalk that took them over what Dyna could only describe as a bottomless pit. “Now, Dyna Graves, the primary reason I brought you down here was to test a little something, if you please.”

Heavy doors slid open in a small wall, revealing a proper room. The kind of room that wouldn’t be out of place anywhere within the upper levels for Tartarus or in the Carroll Institute. It was clearly designed with security in mind with its thick walls, making Dyna a little hesitant to step inside, but Darq walked right in without noticing. With a glance to Ruby, who just shrugged as she kept a harsh glare on Darq, Dyna decided to enter behind him.

“Your ability, as far as I can tell, affects the noosphere to such an extent that it forces your beliefs into reality. I barely understand the mathematics behind it all, quite the impressive feat all things considered, but the long and short is that you think with such intensity that the noosphere effectively overflows back into proper reality. I wish to observe this happening from here, as close to the noosphere as I am willing to venture.”

A control panel popped out of the ground right in front of Darq. In the very center of the room, a cylinder descended from the ceiling. It was much like the containment tubes, except not filled with any liquid or tulpa. Just an empty chamber.

“Picture something simple, if you will. Maybe a stone cube or wooden sphere. Whatever is easiest.”

Dyna frowned, looking at the cylinder that Darq was indicating. “My previous experiments show that my power works best if I am not consciously aware of what I’m trying to change. If you close a box and say you put a blue card in, I could pull out a blue card, but if I’m staring into an open box, no card will ever appear no matter how much I think about it.”

“Odd, given what I know,” Darq said, then pressed a button on his console. A slatted metal sheath lowered from the ceiling, blocking off the view of the tube. “I pressed a button which made a rubber bouncy ball appear within the containment chamber.”

Frowning, Dyna squinted her eyes in thought. When she was a child, she had visited an arcade once with a simple coin-operated vending machine filled with bouncy balls. There had been a wide variety in appearances, from solid colors to swirls, half red and half blue to soccer balls. She didn’t get a chance to think of one in specific before Darq pressed another button.

The slats around the chamber lifted up, revealing a large glass ball filled with bouncy balls, standing atop a zig-zagging dispenser that would make the ball bounce around before finally settling into the receptacle. The same vending machine that Dyna had been thinking of.

“Not quite what I asked for, but interesting nonetheless.” Darq pulled a small leaver.

The floor underneath the vending machine split apart, opening a trapdoor beneath the tube. The vending machine fell in. Dyna winced as she heard a loud crash of the metal vending machine, glass ball, and dozens of bouncy balls hit whatever was beneath their chamber.

Darq paid it little mind, closing the trapdoor. A second later, the slats covered the glass once again, obscuring the interior from view.

“Alright. This time, I put in something special. Tartarus has been working on the world’s most advanced cellular phone, complete with holographic displays, tactile feedback, and an x-ray camera safe for frequent human exposure. I just placed a prototype into the chamber.”

Dyna shot him a look. She had spent long enough around medical technology to know how most of it worked, even if only the most basic of terms. Regular cameras worked by picking up reflected light. Whether that was reflected off something from ambient light or reflected from the flash of the camera didn’t matter. X-rays, on the other hand, did not reflect. That was the whole point. They passed through the subject to the other side where they would be picked up by a sensor or other detector. An x-ray camera on a phone didn’t make sense unless there was a detector that had to be manually placed by the camera operator.

“Interesting,” Darq said, pulling the lever that had dropped the vending machine through the floor. He did not lift up the slats for Dyna to see whatever it was she might have created. “We’ll have to study that one later.”

“What was it?”

“I wonder. Don’t worry, it is in a continuity sheath. You won’t be able to affect it if you think about it more.” Switching the lever back to the closed position and pressing another button, Darq smiled. “This one might be tricky, but now there is a simple code designed to say ‘HELLO WORLD’ in the chamber.”

“Code?” Dyna said, frowning. “Programming code? Like a tablet or even a piece of paper with code on it?”

“No, nothing like that. Just code.”

“That’s…”

Dyna frowned, mind drawing a blank as she tried to think of what computer code, floating in the air with no… source, might possibly look like. First she thought of letters floating in the air on their own, like holograms or reflections on the glass, but that was obviously not what Darq wanted from this test. He wanted code. He hadn’t even specified a language for the code.

Maybe this wasn’t to see what she could come up with consciously, but something that her subconscious would have to handle on its own. Which, she felt, was dangerous. Dyna wasn’t quite sure to what extent her subconscious could come up with things, but without her conscious mind reining her ability in, she was a bit afraid at what it might produce. The possibilities—

A sharp, piercing high-note that rapidly descended into a low and vibrating bass startled Dyna out of her thoughts. It repeated again and again, with Dyna, Ruby, and even Doctor Darq looking around in alarm, before she realized just what it was.

An alarm.

“It wasn’t me,” Dyna said, almost on reflex as Ruby moved closer, drawing a knife that Dyna wasn’t surprised she had despite their recent flight.

“No. No it wasn’t,” Darq said with a frown, looking down at his control panel. He pressed a few buttons, none of which affected the cylinder in front of them. “Oh my.”

“What is it?”

“It appears as if Tartarus is under attack. A spatial anomaly ripped open in the main lobby.”

“Tulpa? Ignotus-33?”

Darq shrugged. “We’re safe down here. Nothing to worry about.” Another button silenced the alarm in the room. “Now, as for that code—”

“The place is under attack and you want to continue experimenting?”

Bright blue eyes looked to Dyna as if he couldn’t quite comprehend her complaint. “Yes.”

Dyna shook her head. “No. We need to get to Walter and Id.”

“I’m sure they’ll be fine. This has happened a few times. Your Ignotus group wants to steal the tulpa we have in containment. Luckily, none of the topside tulpa are, in any imaginable way, as remotely dangerous as those contained down here.”

“That doesn’t mean we can just leave the others to fend for themselves!” Dyna shouted. “We need to get back there. Your coworkers are there! What if they get down here?”

“Ado is quite capable—”

Darq didn’t get to finish before he was almost thrown off his feet. The ground underneath them rumbled, feeling like the worst earthquake that Dyna had ever been through. Something overhead hissed as a pipe broke and she heard the distinctive sound of glass cracking on the other side of the metal slats.

It stopped quickly, but now Darq’s eyes weren’t quite so calm. His head snapped around to the various corners of the room, though it looked more like he was looking through the walls than just at them.

“What was that?”

Darq slowly looked back to Dyna, lips pressed tightly together. “Perhaps we should call an early end to our experiment after all.”

“You think?”

Darq nodded slowly. “A titan has breached containment.”

 

 

It took a long few hours to fully explain what was, in effect, mostly conjecture analyzed by a few million instances of Dyna. All the information Dyna had on Alpha, how she got it, and the existence of Dyna-tulpa. Seeing that Id was also a tulpa of Dyna, somehow, didn’t exactly make her more trustworthy in Dyna’s eyes. While Dyna could understand Id’s motivations a bit more now, she had a hard time believing that she would do all that invasion of her mind and manipulation to herself.

Still, given her very existence, Dyna figured she was more trustworthy than most. Besides that, Dyna didn’t know when she would next find herself in a small, electronically-shielded space or with whom she would find herself in such a space. Ruby knew most of what Dyna had to say, though was obviously surprised that the escaped mountain man was actually Dyna-tulpa.

Walter absorbed most of the information in silence, only occasionally asking questions to clarify matters that Dyna skimmed over or failed to adequately explain.

“This… will take some time to process.”

“You are welcome to remain here as long as you need,” Id said, retrieving her mask from the slot in the wall. “The cogitator brain will not be able to penetrate our defenses. Probably. Even if Beatrice does, this room will remain secure for discussions.”

“That may be desirable,” Walter said. “I expect we’ll need some kind of a plan before returning and, after considering the matter, there may be more questions to answer. However, we must check in lest they send the other artificers after us.”

“Excellent idea. I have no desire to face down someone who can pause time for herself.” Securing the mask in place, a button press cleared the glass of their little isolation cube. Another button slid the door open. “Come along. I shall—”

“Oh my, tourists at this hour?”

Nothing obvious changed in Id’s stance or posture. With her face once again hidden behind her mask, Dyna couldn’t even see her expression. Even still, she knew without a doubt that Id was disturbed. Something in the way she froze for just a moment before raising a hand to gesture at the man who looked like he was just emerging from a side room with a bundle of rolled up papers barely contained under his arm.

The coincidence of him stepping out just as Id opened the door was not lost on Dyna. Especially given that he was the first other person she had seen here in Tartarus. Dyna figured that Id had everyone working here clear out of the sections she intended to show off.

“This is Doctor Darq. With a q,” Id said slowly, lowering her arm from gesturing at the man.

He was just as Dyna had seen back while hunting down the Hatman. An unassuming fellow with a blue laboratory coat and polka-dot bow tie. He had wavy brown hair and dark welder-style goggles that occluded his eyes even more thoroughly than Walter’s mirrored glasses.

“My, my, my, my, my. Dyna Graves is here?”

“I sent a facility-wide announcement while we were on the way of our guests,” Id said, slowly and carefully. “Did you fail to read it, Doctor?”

“Oh no, of course not. Reading of someone’s presence and actually seeing her is a different experience, Director.”

“Indeed,” Id said, tone utterly flat. “I’m surprised to see you outside the containment sector. I rather thought you would pop up there.”

“Alas, I had to rush up to Records to check through a few item in preparation for our guests,” Darq said, patting the rolls of papers.

“And what preparations are those?”

“Why, a vast array of experiments on the subject, of course. Did you fail to read the memo I left on your desk? I left quite detailed descriptions of all I intended to carry out during this fortunate time.”

Dyna didn’t need to look at Id to feel her displeasure with Darq’s words. With Id having been a guest in Psychodynamics for the past month, she obviously had not visited her desk. The tour had not stopped in any office that might have been Id’s either. From that, Dyna guessed that Darq was being intentionally malicious in his manner of informing his superior of his actions and intentions.

Darq had dealings with the Carroll Institute. Mostly dealings involving tulpa and advanced entities, which were his area of expertise. While Dyna hadn’t interacted with him since the Hatman incident, she was fairly certain that Darq’s interactions were generally well-received. In fact, Dyna didn’t remember Id and Darq having much animosity back during the Hatman incident. Then again, Id had foisted Darq off early on and basically vanished for the remainder of the incident.

“Those experiments,” Id said after a moment, making Dyna wonder if Darq hadn’t been intentionally malicious and was instead referring to something that had happened before Id’s visit to the Carroll Institute. “Consider your requests summarily denied.”

“Madam Director, I reall—”

“These are guests. Not test subjects for—”

“Wait,” Dyna said, stepping in front of Ruby who had moved between her and Darq at some point. “These experiments are for me? Are they harmful?”

Darq looked to her, then back to Id—who remained still and impassive behind her mask—before returning his attention to Dyna. “None are designed to cause psychic or bodily harm. Whether or not you find them harmful depends on your definition of the word, I presume. After all, losing time you would rather spend doing other tasks might be considered harmful.”

“I’m sure I can spend a few hours—”

“Dyna,” Id said, leaning down. She turned partially away to better whisper in Dyna’s ear despite the mask covering her face. “I do not know what Darq’s motivations are or what he intends to learn. I do not even know where he came from. He was simply here when we arrived and has expressed an interest in you from the very start.”

“Is he going to hurt me?”

“I do not know.”

“Will his experiments help me control my power better or otherwise learn more about what I can do?”

“Possibly for the latter, unknown for the former.”

“Can Ruby take him out if she plays bodyguard for me and he does have ill intentions?”

“I do not know.”

Dyna hesitated at that, ignoring an incensed Ruby who was standing close enough to hear. At the Carroll Institute, Ruby could probably have taken on an entire room of randomly selected scientists without breaking a sweat. To have Id uncertain about Ruby’s capabilities against Darq meant that either she didn’t know about Ruby’s fighting abilities and regeneration or she really didn’t know what Darq might be capable of.

“I’d like to see what experiments you have come up with, Doctor Darq,” Dyna said, louder as she turned away from Id.

Id let out a barely audible sigh, but didn’t protest again.

Walter scowled, but glanced toward Ruby and nodded his head toward Dyna. Fully facing Darq, Dyna couldn’t see Ruby’s response, but it wasn’t hard to guess.

For his part, Darq looked ecstatic. Dyna wasn’t sure why he was wearing such heavy welding goggles, but the slump in his shoulders that had come from Id denying his experiments vanished entirely. He actually bounced from foot to foot in a giddy excitement.

“Darq, we will be meeting at seven tonight to discuss… your results,” Id said. She then turned to Walter. “You wished to contact your superiors? Come.”

With that, Id stalked off, leaving Ruby, Dyna, and Doctor Darq. The doctor rushed up, scrolls falling from his arms as he reached out to shake Dyna’s hand.

“I have heard so much about you,” he said, yanking her up and down. “I know we spoke before over a video call, but as I said to Id, meetings in person simply cannot be substituted.”

“Yeah, sure,” Dyna said, trying to take her hand back. “So, what experiments have you got for me?”

“Oh a great many. Where to start? Where to start?” Darq questioned himself, turning down a different path than Id had taken with Walter. He did not stop to pick up the pile of papers he had dropped, all but confirming to Dyna that they had merely been an excuse to meet with her.

Ruby shot her a look. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“No.” But if she could learn more about her ability, and maybe how to control it, a few experiments couldn’t hurt. At least not so long as Darq hadn’t been lying about them not being designed to hurt her.

And if she failed to glean insight into her ability, there was still Theta’s operation to consider. It hadn’t worked out as they had been planning, but now she had direct access to Doctor Darq. Maybe it was foolish to worry about Theta’s plan now, with Tartarus and the Carroll Institute having been working together for the past while, but Darq was still an enigma as far as Dyna knew. Any information she could get would be appreciated.

Darq led them to another elevator, this one smaller than the large freight elevator. Humming a jaunty tune, he flipped open a panel that had been seamlessly hidden beneath the rows of floors and hit the button for basement level three.

“How big is this place, exactly?” Dyna asked with a frown, wondering if the other elevator had the hidden panel as well. “I know Id said that some of it really shouldn’t be able to fit in a building of this size, but…”

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that question.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

Darq flashed a grin. “Let me put it this way, sometimes, while wandering through the facility, I’ll come across a room I’ve never been to before. I’ll come back later, looking for the room, and be entirely unable to find it.” He shrugged his shoulders at the look Dyna was giving him. “It has been a whole lot more stable since Id, and more specifically Ado, came to reside here. They have a way of stabilizing psionic fluctuations of the type this building has suffered from since it was built.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Oh… I’ve been working here for a few decades now.”

“Before the advent?”

“Long before. It used to be much calmer.” He glanced over, goggles hiding his eyes. “Or, it was very busy, then it grew calmer as my colleagues began leaving, now it is busy once again with Id’s presence.”

“What was the purpose of Tartarus before tulpa and entities?”

“Tartarus is, has been, and always will be for the express purpose of containing existential threats to humanity’s continued existence.”

Dyna shifted, suddenly uncomfortable. “That doesn’t include me, does it?”

Doctor Darq stared, black lenses of his welding goggles reflecting no light. “Should it?” he asked after a long moment.

“You better not touch her,” Ruby snapped, stepping in front of Dyna with a blade out. Dyna quickly put her hands on Ruby’s shoulders, keeping her from jumping at the doctor.

Darq didn’t seem to notice her in the slightest, goggles still aimed directly toward Dyna.

“I acknowledge that I could probably do some frightening things if I really thought about it, but I think I can’t do anything truly… upsetting. Id’s experiment earlier proved it.”

“Oh? Id experimented on you?”

Dyna shrugged. “I don’t know if it was an intentional, planned test or simply something she wanted to do on the spur of the moment. She manipulated me into making alcohol appear out of nowhere. Specifically, high class alcohol.”

Darq hummed, ending with a small chuckle. “Id doesn’t drink.”

“Neither do I. I’ve never even been in a proper bar and know next to nothing about various alcohols. Which is kind of my point and the point of the experiment, I think. Id returned with some alcohol that had gold flakes floating in it. Something that looks fancy, but I have since been informed it is relatively cheap.”

“You don’t know what top-shelf alcohol is so you couldn’t create it,” Darq said, nodding his head. “Excellent experiment. I must give Id my compliments.”

“I’m not sure if it is that simple. I don’t know how a lightning gun works but I somehow made one of those,” Dyna said with a slight sigh. “I’ve been deliberately trying to blank my mind anytime my thoughts stray to anything that feels dangerous.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“I… probably shouldn’t try to think of those things. Right?”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

“It could,” Dyna said. “And I very much don’t want to blow up your facility with a nuclear explosion.”

Darq didn’t look even mildly alarmed. “That is certainly a dangerous thing, but nothing remotely close to an existential threat. At least not on the scale Tartarus is designed to handle… Unless, of course, you intend to bring about a full nuclear apocalypse. We might wish to detain you in that event.”

“No. No, absolutely not,” Dyna said, breath hitching as she tried to think about nothing. Thinking about exactly nothing, even including not thinking about nothing, wasn’t easy. Dyna tried anyway. Nothing. Not an empty room, but no room at all. Not even words or—

“Oh, please don’t go there,” Darq said, hands on Dyna’s shoulders. “That is an existential crisis I don’t want to try to resolve.”

Dyna opened her eyes, carefully picking her words as she tried to focus on not focusing about their previous topic. “Please don’t even mention things like that around me.”

Darq smiled, then shook his head. He held up a small black cube that he pulled from behind his back. “Antimatter.”

Both Dyna and Ruby jerked back, pressing themselves against the wall of the small elevator. Darq just laughed.

“Interesting response. You know at least vaguely what antimatter is. Of course, if this really was antimatter, backing up wouldn’t do much. Half the state would be gone.”

“Please stop talking,” Dyna said, utterly regretting not listening to Id and following Doctor Darq. The man was obviously insane. Not just a little weird like the artificers were, but legitimately insane.

“No.” Darq laughed. “But like I said, you don’t need to worry. It can’t hurt. Or, more specifically, it can’t hurt here.”

“Here?” Dyna tore her eyes off the black cube with effort, trying to not feel like it would explode the moment she took her eyes off it. They were still in the elevator, but now that her surroundings had been pointed out, Dyna couldn’t help but narrow her eyes. The elevator was near silent. The numbers on the control panel and the display showing what floor they were on just didn’t quite make sense anymore. Dyna squinted her eyes, trying to read the letters and numbers, but it was just gibberish. Gibberish that was made all the more unreadable by how it was shifting and moving, not the same symbols from one instant to the next.

The utter silence was almost deafening. She could hear her own breathing, her own heart hammering in her chest, but she couldn’t hear or feel the vibrations of the elevator’s descent. Ruby…

Ruby had a dark shadow overlaid on top of her.

The elevator doors slid open without a sound, revealing an impossibly large cavernous laboratory. It stretched so far that Dyna wasn’t sure she could see the other side. She couldn’t see the ceiling either. There was no possible way they had descended that far into the Earth and an equally impossible chance that this cavern could support itself.

“This is the noosphere.”

“Is that what the Carroll Institute is calling it?” Darq said, stepping out of the elevator.

Dyna slowly followed him out, Ruby sticking tight to her side. Looking back, there wasn’t a wall behind them. The laboratory stretched off into every direction without end. The elevator was just a small room sticking up above a white-tiled floor. There was no elevator shaft, cables, or rails of any kind.

“Well, this isn’t quite the noosphere anyway. We’re… noosphere adjacent, I would say.”

Darq turned, putting his back to a massive containment tube with opaque glass. He smiled wide, spreading his arms out to his sides.

“Welcome to Tartarus.”

 

 

Dyna wasn’t sure what she expected Tartarus to be like.

The Carroll Institute topside was a relatively modern school campus-like area. It had fairly standard dormitories, overly artistic administrative buildings, auditoriums for lectures, advanced medical facilities for testing and research, and a variety of meditation rooms.

Underground, Psychodynamics had an elegance to it. All the wood and brass fixtures made the entire facility feel like a high-class lounge from the early twentieth century. The psionically shielded glass had almost a strange violet tint to it, giving it an air of abnormal intrigue. About half the machinery and equipment had fancy casings and coverings to roughly match the aesthetic of the rest of the department while the rest of the machinery looked bare-bones.

Phrenomorphics, being a newer department, lacked much of the aesthetics of Psychodynamics. It was all in the same facility, so it was all probably going to be wood and brass in the end, but right now, the majority of those areas were hard cement walls. Dyna honestly had no idea how they were digging out new areas down there, but presumed they had fancy equipment to do the work.

A small part of Dyna wondered if she had any hand in either the design, architecture, layout, or aesthetics of any part of the Carroll Institute, Psychodynamics, and Phrenomorphics. Surely not much, right? If her power was constantly changing everything around her, it seemed like it would be impossible to get any work done. And her power was supposed to be a secret as well, even from people like Doctor Cross. Cross wasn’t a stupid or even unobservant man, he would have noticed and had questions.

Still, she did wonder.

Tartarus, on the other hand, had no topside component. Topside was the wrong word. It didn’t have a public facing component like the Carroll Institute campus. It was a large, windowless building positioned in the wilderness south of Dallas, Texas. It took a high speed train about twenty minutes to reach, crossing nothing but flat terrain the entire way.

The building itself was a monolithic obelisk jutting high above the otherwise flat landscape. It looked beyond conspicuous. It was the kind of place that should have more conspiracy theories about it than Area 51. Yet, watching Walter’s reaction as they approached in the train, Dyna would have bet money that he was surprised to see that Tartarus was so close to a major population center.

The hydraulics of the train hissed as it came to a stop.

“All ashore that’s going ashore,” Id said, standing.

“Ashore?”

She shrugged, glancing to Dyna. “I don’t know the train equivalent of the phrase.”

“Is the train the only way to reach the building?” Walter asked, looking outside with a frown.

“I mean, you can walk. There might be a road or there might not. I’m not here to tell all our secrets, you know.” Id stepped onto the platform as the train doors opened, then up a few steps to the only windows on the entire building, those surrounding the lobby doors. “Come along. Do you all have your golden tickets?”

Dyna rolled her eyes, but noted the confused look on Ruby’s face. “It’s a movie thing. We’ll watch it next movie night.”

The lobby was a fairly standard affair. Several monitors behind the front desk displayed spinning red hexagons and a pulsing Tartarus underneath. There was no one actually sitting at the reception desk, but Dyna didn’t find that particularly surprising. She doubted they got many visitors.

“Phones, watches, and any other electronic devices into the box, please,” Id said, reaching behind the counter to pull up a small box. “You’ll get them back at the end of the tour.”

Dyna placed her phone in the box without complaint, but kept her watch on her wrist. First of all, it was far too valuable to give up. She would rather sit out the tour than be without the ability to turn back time. Second of all, it wasn’t an electronic watch.

Ruby dropped her phone inside with a scowl, but didn’t say anything.

Walter, on the other hand, started putting item after item into the box. His phone, his watch, his tie clip, two cuff links, his wallet, a keyring with two fobs, and finally his belt. Id simply stared, radiating amusement. Once he finished, however, she brought up a finger and tapped the center of her mask. With a small frown, Walter reached up and removed his mirrored glasses.

“Do any of you have any pacemakers or other electronic life-assistance devices?”

All three guests shook their heads.

“Wonderful. Elevator is this way,” Id said, turning.

Large, multi-paneled doors slid open to reveal a wide freight elevator. The Carroll Institute’s elevator was a fancy thing designed for people to see it. This looked like something pulled from the back of an industrial factory. Dyna’s eyes moved to the buttons. A quick scan showed that the lobby button was all the way at the bottom, but…

“There is no way there are that many floors. The building isn’t that tall.”

“Yes, there are about ten more floors than there should be. We’re not quite sure how that works.” Id turned her head to face Dyna. “We’re pretty sure it has something to do with you.”

Dyna clamped her jaw shut. She was about to ask how that was possible, but decided that would be a futile question. How was it possible that Emerald could stop time or… anything, really.

As soon as the door slid shut, Id slammed her fist into a bright red button to the side of the floor controls. Dyna tensed, half expecting the floor to drop out from under them, as did Ruby. However, aside from a tingle and the hairs on her arms standing on end, nothing happened.

Nothing except for Walter sighing. Reaching into his vest, he pulled out a thumb-sized plastic box that was connected by wire to one of his buttons. “Can’t blame me for trying,” he said, dropping it on the floor.

“I could, but I know you well enough to have expected this.”

“How do you know him?” Ruby asked before Dyna could.

“I’m interested in discovering that as well,” Walter said, making Dyna’s eyebrows raise.

“You two aren’t old coworkers that fell out over some disagreement?”

Id laughed while Walter shook his head.

“I know everyone I see. It is as simple as that.”

“Are you a tulpa?” Dyna asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Your hair,” Dyna said, motioning toward the long black ponytail. “It doesn’t move like real people’s hair. Most tulpa, aside from the grunts Ignotus has been using, have some odd characteristics that are obviously inhuman.”

“Ah.” Id reached back and ran her fingers through her ponytail. “I’m pretty sure that’s your fault as well.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. “Is that what Tartarus does, blames everything on me?”

“Not everything,” Id said. “Just… say, eighty percent of things.”

Her tone made it sound like a joke.

Dyna just shook her head, not sure what to believe.

The elevator dinged, reaching the floor Id had pressed after the red button. It wasn’t the floor directly above the lobby, nor was it the next ten floors. She almost asked what was on those floors, even knowing that they weren’t going to get a full tour, but stopped herself as she stared out into the large open room they found themselves on.

It looked like a factory. Maybe the same one the elevator had been pulled from. Harsh and industrial with metal catwalks stretching over conveyor belts that ran through the room like a maze. Robotic arms picked up pieces from the belts, welding them, assembling them, or simply moving them from one belt to another. Dyna couldn’t see their end destination or form, but she could see where they were coming from.

Behind a large glass panel, concentric rings attached to robotic arms swept back and forth. The interior of the rings glowed a bright white light that hurt a bit to look at, even through the tinted glass. However, it provided enough light to see bits of machinery, circuit boards, and metal panels just appear as the rings swept back and forth. At a certain point, the rings finished and moved to one side, letting the completed product drop down onto a conveyor belt that took the item into the rest of the machine.

Most interesting of all was the feeling. While those rings were active, it was almost as if they were magnets drawing Dyna closer.

“The Prototyping Room,” Id said, voice filled with pride. “It is not something that Dyna magicked up, but instead came from the genius mind of our resident engineer, Ado. I believe you’ve encountered her.”

As the ring machine started up again, Dyna walked as close as she could before a railing kept her from reaching the conveyor belt leading out of it. “There is something about this…” she said, frowning as she stared at the light. “Is it teleporting things in from elsewhere in the facility?”

“You shouldn’t stare quite so much, the light is too intense,” Id said, placing a gentle hand on Dyna’s shoulder. “As for your question, no. That is the Psychofabber.”

“Psychofabber.” Dyna closed her eyes, still seeing those bright lights burned into the back of her eyes. Id guided her around, away from that side of the factory. “It feels familiar.”

“I’m surprised you can tell, but not that surprised. It is based off you, after all.”

Dyna snapped her eyes open and tried to turn back, only for Id to keep her hand on Dyna’s shoulder, stopping her from fully turning.

“It’s what?” Walter whispered, staring toward the machine with one hand held in front of his squinting eyes.

“It is forming objects from pure psionic energy, based off principles identified within Dyna’s use of her ability.”

“But how… We haven’t even…” Walter trailed off, not taking his eyes off the bright light.

Id just shrugged. “I truly cannot overstate just how much of a genius Ado is. It would not be incorrect to state that the Continuity Engine she designed is the only reason this place is not falling to pieces. If she had any interest in actually running an organization like Tartarus, I would abdicate in an instant. Lucky for me, she only wants to be left alone with her machines.

“As for the Psychofabber, Ado could explain it better, but basically it uses psionic energy to generate alterations in reality in the form of programmed items. Like a supercharged 3D printer. It isn’t just a magic solution to everything. Unfortunately, the complexity is limited, which is why we’re soldering chips to a circuit board rather than just printing an entire completed board. The items created are also unstable, dissipating back into psionics after a few hours. But, for those few hours, it is the perfect device to rapidly prototype whatever new inventions Ado comes up with. We can fabricate ‘real’ versions later without spending all the money of wasted parts.”

Dyna felt flabbergasted. A sentiment obviously shared by Walter—it was strange being able to see his brown eyes—though Ruby didn’t look quite as impressed. Maybe because the Carroll Institute could do a similar thing, if in a slightly different way.

Mel, Dyna thought, could act as a fabricator with the fog machine. Of course, she was human and would tire while these machines wouldn’t, but she had the added advantage in that her creations didn’t vanish. At the moment, the Carroll Institute wasn’t using her like that, but Dyna wouldn’t be surprised to find Walter suggesting it upon their return. Hopefully they paid her well because it sounded like the perfect way to turn a fantastical ability into boring, repetitive work.

“By showing this to us, might I take this as a sign that you would be willing to share the designs and blueprints?” Walter asked, almost timidly.

“Unfortunately no. The principles it relies on can only function within the area of effect of the Continuity Engine, a device which you will not be seeing or even allowed near for the duration of your stay. It is too integral to the continued functioning of Tartarus.” Id held up a hand before Walter could say anything. “However, in light of our current collaboration, I might be persuaded into prototyping some of your designs and returning the results.”

“Thus granting you access to our blueprints,” Walter said with a frown.

“Business comes at a cost,” Id said with a shrug. “Now, shall we move on? I’m afraid much of the rest of the facility isn’t anywhere near as fascinating as here, but I’m sure you would be interested in viewing our tulpa containment unit.”

From there, the tour continued. True to Id’s words, the rest of the tour was almost pedestrian in nature. They went through a few offices—most of which were either empty or had been emptied out in advance of their tour group arriving—a few other rooms with experimentation equipment that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Carroll Institute, and even the tulpa containment unit wasn’t that special. In fact, Dyna was quite surprised to find it nearly identical to that of Phrenomorphics. Lots of psionically shielded glass tubes filled with a gel-like liquid with floating entities inside them.

The entities themselves were of far more interest.

Much like some of those stored in Phrenomorphics, they came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Some weren’t even vaguely humanoid. One was a black spider with bright red eyes the size of a penny-farthing’s larger wheel, another was a woman with paws instead of hands and feet, a bushy black tail, and burning eyes. Literally burning eyes. They had flames jetting out the corners despite the entity being contained in liquid. Dyna wasn’t quite sure how that worked, but it was far from the strangest thing she had seen today, let alone ever.

All the containment tanks had metal placards, but the only identifying information was a serial number. Presumably one much like the Carroll Institute Internal Database’s identification strings. Id didn’t let them stop at any of the consoles and she didn’t explain what any of the tulpa were.

Eventually, after another trip in the elevator, Id brought them down a long hallway and to a room made entirely of glass. Id stepped inside first, followed shortly by Walter, Dyna, and Ruby. It wasn’t a very large room. Maybe the size of her dormitory bedroom. Four people standing around quickly became uncomfortable, especially once the glass door slid shut. Id, facing away from everyone else, carefully removed her mask and placed it in a small receptacle on the far wall of the small room.

As soon as the receptacle closed, the glass in the room dimmed, becoming opaque.

“No electronic devices, no cameras, no microphones, no way for anyone outside to see inside. What is said in this room won’t leave it,” Id said, speaking softly before slowly turning around.

Ruby started shouting something while Walter remained impassive.

Dyna just stared, narrowing her eyes. She didn’t speak for a long moment. When she did, it was barely more than a whisper. “You are a tulpa.”

“Hello, Dyna-Prime,” a copy of Dyna said, spreading her arms wide. “Nice to finally meet face-to-face.”

Dyna closed her eyes, breathing slowly. She honestly couldn’t decide if she was shocked or if she knew this had been coming. She tried to occupy her thoughts with thinking of when this tulpa, this stray thought of Dyna’s had branched off. “When we met in my mind and I told you to get out, was that when you started existing?”

“Good guess, but no. How would I have sent those men after you before I existed?”

“You’re Id. The subconscious. My subconscious sent them after me.”

“Specifically so that I could break away from you?” Id shook her head, hair drifting behind her. “What you want and what your subconscious wants aren’t always the same thing, but that is a bit much. Trust me. I know these things.”

Dyna narrowed her eyes, unconvinced, until she remembered discussing her ability in a similar situation following the most recent mountain man incident and her mountain man-self splitting off from her. Glancing to Walter, Dyna turned her attentions back to Id. “The first time I learned about my powers. I don’t remember it, but I bet you do?”

Id smiled. Dyna had to suppress a shudder. It was her smile. Like she was looking into a mirror, except not mirrored. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she let it back out.

“Do I want to know?”

“No,” Walter said, shaking his head.

Id nodded, agreeing. “Probably not.”

“Though,” Walter said with a slowly deepening frown. “This does answer some of our questions. But now I need to know, can you—”

“Only Prime here seems to have the ability to affect changes in reality,” Id said with another shake of her head. “But my knowledge of what happened and how was what allowed Ado to create the Continuity Engine and the Psychofabber, among other things.”

“Did you come up with Prime all on your own?” Dyna asked.

“Why? Has someone else been calling you that lately?”

“You could say that,” Dyna said, then paused and added. “Would it be arrogant to say that great minds think alike in this situation?”

Id just laughed. “You’re taking this quite well.”

“As you said, you aren’t the only one who has called me Dyna-Prime in recent weeks. I guess I got used to talking to myself.”

“Well, I’m not sure what my counterparts might have gotten up to, but I will not be making any attempt at rejoining you,” Id said. “A year and then some is far too much time. We’re different people. And,” she nodded to Walter before looking back to Dyna, “you having my memories might turn out the same way it did last time. Something all of us would like to avoid, I imagine.

“Instead, perhaps we can continue our conversation from the plane? You do have something to say, I know these things.”

Dyna pressed her lips together and nodded, then turned fully to Walter. “It’s Alpha.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Alpha is the one behind Ignotus-33,” Dyna said.

 

 

Dyna shuddered as she looked at the tarmac through the windows of the Idaho Falls Regional Airport. It was a bit of an overcast day. No dark, roiling storm clouds. Just a light gray canopy over the sky. There was a single jet, the small and private type with a long red stripe on its side, out in the boarding area at the moment, pulled up to the jetway. No one was actually boarding, however. This entire section of the airport had been cleared out.

Dyna wasn’t sure how the Carroll Institute did it. The Idaho Falls Regional Airport wasn’t a large airport by any stretch of the word, but it was still an airport. Shutting down the airports for a few hours for the safety of a single VIP really only happened when presidents arrived or departed on Air Force One.

The institute’s security teams patrolled the grounds and several blocks around. Emerald was on the roof of the air control tower with a precision rifle. Noosphere anomaly detectors had been setup around the airport, listening for any sign of spatial anomalies forming and other potential incursions by tulpa. Even knowing there had been assassination attempts in the past, it felt extreme.

All the while, the person all this trouble was for just sat on one of the benches, casually sipping at a latte using a straw under her mask.

Dyna stared at her for a long moment. Having worn one of those masks before, she knew they were comfortable. Not comfortable enough to wear constantly, however. Dyna wondered if Id had removed it even in the shower or for sleep. Did she wear the mask around the Tartarus facility as well? Or was it just the Carroll Institute? Then again, knowing what Dyna did about the administrators, Dyna couldn’t blame her for wanting to keep her identity hidden.

Shaking her head, Dyna turned her attention back to the airplane. She closed her eyes, trying to focus. No bombs. No malfunctions. No traps. No weapons. No bombs. No malfunctions. No traps. No weapons. No bombs. No malfunctions. No traps—

“You’re going to give yourself an aneurysm.”

Dyna jolted, glancing to Id with a frown. “I hate you for putting that possibility into my mind,” she whispered.

Walter was a short distance away, speaking on his phone. Several silver-suited guards were positioned around every entrance to the area. Ruby was the only one close enough to hear, having been appointed as Id’s most immediate guard for this operation, and she adopted a harsh glare.

Id just chuckled a light, tittering laugh. “Your power wouldn’t kill you. Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, well, right now I’m trying to keep it from killing you.” Dyna shook her head with a sigh. “They shouldn’t have even told me about this. Now I can’t stop thinking about all the things that might go wrong.”

“Nothing will go wrong,” Id said with complete confidence. “It is a brand new, fancy jet. Lots of leg room and comfortable seats. Nothing bad is going to happen to it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Look at all these people running around specifically to ensure nothing goes wrong.”

“They aren’t accounting for me,” Dyna said. “I don’t know if anyone can account for me. I don’t know that I can account for me.”

“You’re over thinking things. Take a nice deep breath and relax, Dyna.”

“I think I’m under thinking this. Even if I walked around the jet myself and inspected every bolt, eliminating all doubt that the jet had been sabotaged in some way, I could probably still think up ways it might wind up sabotaged. Maybe someone slipped in while I wasn’t looking or someone placed something in an engine just after I looked over it…”

“You’re not going to do anything. We’re friends, Dyna.”

Dyna shot the masked woman a glare.

“Alright. We got off on the wrong foot,” Id said with an irreverent shrug. “But surely you now realize why I went about things the way I did.”

“You could have just told me. Asked me for help rather than manipulated me.”

“And subjected you to this?” Id said, waving her hand between Dyna and the jet out the window. “You would not have thanked me any more for that then you are now.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. That was probably true. That didn’t mean she liked it. “I don’t know if I want to know now.”

“I’m sure the Carroll Institute would be happy to remove your memories—”

“No,” Dyna said instantly. At least one of the administrators wanted her dead. If she forgot that, she would probably just die, unable to defend herself.

Although she couldn’t see Id’s face, she could tell that Id put on a smile. The woman brushed a hand through her drifty hair and glanced out the window. “If you’re so worried, why not join me?”

“Dyna wouldn’t join you,” Ruby snapped, unable to keep silent any longer. “You manipulated her.”

“You think the Carroll Institute was doing any different? Is doing any different?” Id asked. She was probably raising an eyebrow behind her brushed nickel mask. “At least I’m being honest about it.”

“Now that you’ve been caught,” Ruby said with a sneer.

Id shrugged. “At least I’m not…” she trailed off and shot a pointed look upward.

Following her gaze, Dyna frowned at the camera overhead. She caught onto Id’s meaning immediately. At least Id wasn’t host to an omnipresent AI that couldn’t disobey the administrators that had it out for Dyna. As much as Dyna liked Beatrice, that was a fairly significant downside.

No matter how hard Dyna thought about it, it didn’t seem as if she could break Beatrice’s constraints through her power. Given the results of her various experiments, that could be because Dyna had it too ingrained in her mind and subconscious that Beatrice was subservient to the administrators. Alternatively, she figured that Beatrice’s name might contain a clue as to why she couldn’t affect the AI. Dyna couldn’t change people’s minds, according to both Id and Walter. The Biologically Enhanced Autonomous Task Resolution and Information Computing Environment was biologically enhanced. While Dyna wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, Dyna definitely felt like Beatrice had a mind of her own.

Still, she had to shake her head at the thought of joining up with Tartarus. Unintuitively, putting herself further away from Alpha was the last thing she wanted. Dyna hadn’t seen the administrator for weeks, but she was still around. Dyna had a much greater chance of figuring out exactly what her course of action should be from within the Carroll Institute than from without.

Dyna-tulpa was the one doing the more external studies, not that Dyna-prime had heard from her counterpart since their split.

A heavy shake of Id’s head broke Dyna out of her thoughts.

“You misunderstand,” Id said. “I don’t mean join Tartarus. Join me on the flight. It won’t blow up with you aboard. Escort me there, keep me safe, and I’ll even toss in a free tour of our facilities?” Dyna could hear the grin spread into Id’s words. “I’m sure half those administrators just started salivating at that thought. What do you say, Walter? Fancy a tour of Tartarus?”

Dyna looked up, finding the mirrored lenses of Walter’s glasses. His phone call had finished and he simply stood by, neutral expression on his face. Lost in thought, Dyna hadn’t noticed his approach and didn’t know how much he had heard.

“We’re ready,” he said, not acknowledging Id’s offer. “It’s time to board.”

Standing, arching her back in a long stretch, Id tossed her coffee cup into the recycling bin. “It is a genuine offer, you know. But I understand if the Carroll Institute is too terrified of Dyna escaping her gilded cage.”

“You’re being manipulative again,” Dyna said with a frown.

“Not trying to hide that,” Id said, holding up a finger. She held up a second finger and added, “Doesn’t make it any less true.”

“Id,” Walter said, motioning toward the jetway. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch.”

“Alright, alright. I’m on my way.”

Two silver-suited guards stepped aside, admitting her passage. The moved back in place as soon as she passed, but Dyna just stared after her, watching her wafting hair drift back and forth with each step.

“Should I go?” Dyna asked, not taking her eyes off Id.

“She’s manipulating you,” Ruby said with a growl. “She even admitted it. Bitch.”

“Ruby.” Walter sighed. “You aren’t in a gilded cage, Dyna. We’re not keeping you captive. That said, I doubt the institute would be pleased with you cavorting with a rival organization.”

“I thought we were allies now.”

“In this business, those who are allies today might be enemies tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason to try to foster positive relations?” Dyna frowned. “Or, if they are going to be enemies one day, getting information on their facilities. They were ahead of us on disruptor technology, what else might they have that we don’t? Do we even know where Tartarus is located?”

“Dyna—”

Walter didn’t get any further before three phones vibrated all at once. Dyna felt her phone in her pocket and heard the other two coming from Walter and Ruby. Glancing down at her screen, Dyna just raised one eyebrow. She wasn’t surprised, but a part of her wondered if she caused this in some way or another.

 

ATTENTION: New Priority Objectives. Please review and acknowledge.

PRIORITY 1: Identify geographical coordinates of Location: Tartarus.

PRIORITY 2: Ascertain status and numbers of personnel within Location: Tartarus.

PRIORITY 3: Ascertain nature of unknown device Codename: Continuity Engine.

PRIORITY 4: Ensure continued safety and cooperation of Principal Subject: Id.

PRIORITY 5: Safeguard interests of CI.

END OF LINE

 

“Keeping Id safe is pretty low on that list, isn’t it?” Dyna said, looking up. “Assuming you both got the same message?”

Ruby, wide grin on her face, nodded her head. “I’m to ensure your safety.”

Walter drew in a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “These orders were approved by Administrator Gamma,” he said with a frown.

“Makes sense. She’s the one in charge of keeping tulpa out of our business and Tartarus is supposedly a containment organization for tulpa.”

“It seems like our objective is to confirm that suspicion,” Walter said, head still looking down at his phone.

“You’re coming too?”

Sighing again, Walter nodded. “I don’t have anything packed,” he mumbled.

Dyna almost laughed at the surprisingly mundane cause for distress until she realized that she was in the same boat. “Me neither. Are they going to delay the flight?”

“Not according to this. The airport needs to reopen to the public by five. We’ll have to get things when we arrive.”

“Guess we better hurry aboard before they leave without us?”

“I call a window seat!”

The aircraft was a small private jet, but still had several round windows along its hull. With Id as its only passenger at the moment, Dyna imagined everyone could have two or three window seats and there would still be a few to spare. Thinking about Id made Dyna frown. “She’s going to be smug when she sees us,” she mumbled, heading toward the jetway.

The two guards did not get the notification as quickly as Dyna had, but a few words from Walter had them standing aside.

As Dyna expected, she could feel the air of superiority around Id as they boarded the craft. Even with her face hidden, she still had that look to her.

“Three escorts?” Id said, not sounding as surprised as she should have been. “All for little old me?”

“You offered a tour,” Walter said. “We’re here to take you up on it. Nothing more.”

“I didn’t think you got out of the Carroll Institute much these days, Walter. I admit, I wasn’t expecting you to join.”

“I don’t. The orders I received are… unusual with that respect. But this is an unusual circumstance.”

“I’m sure getting out in the sun will do you some good,” Id said with a smile. “Going to stand around all flight or will you take a seat?”

There were only eight seats in the plane, surprisingly enough. They were in groups of four with only one seat on either side of the aisle in each ‘row’. Two seats faced backwards in each group, letting occupants face each other. Quite a fancy space with high quality seats that almost looked like lounge recliners. There were tables that could fold out from the wall between the opposing chairs, but otherwise, nothing obstructed the legroom.

Walter looked around the interior with his eyebrows popping up. Even with his eyes hidden behind his mirrored glasses, Dyna could tell when he narrowed his eyes. He stalked past Id. For a moment, it looked like he was heading to the second pod of four chairs, away from the woman, but he paused and eventually took the seat diagonal to her. Dyna sat down opposite from Id while Ruby plopped down in the seat across the aisle. The young girl pressed her nose right up to the glass.

“Do they serve alcohol here?”

“Ruby,” Walter said, warning in his tone.

“What? It isn’t like I can get drunk. My body fixes the issue on its own.”

“And why do you know that?”

“Emerald,” Ruby said, utterly unashamed at selling out her friend.

“Emerald is in a lot of trouble.”

Id just started laughing at Walter’s glare. “There is a fully stocked refreshment area in the back,” she said, standing and heading toward the back. She stepped through a small door, but continued talking as she rummaged through cabinets and pantries. “Extremely fancy stuff. Top shelf alcohol of every variety, plus snacks, a plethora of hors d’oeuvre-type foods, and anything else Dyna can think of.”

Dyna’s eyes widened and she spun around in her seat, looking back. “Excuse me?”

Id was already walking back, carrying a bottle with a long and narrow neck but bulbous bottom. The liquid inside was clear, but it looked like a snow globe. If a snow globe had a bunch of flecks of gold rather than snow inside it. In her other hand, she had four narrow flutes dangling between each of her fingers.

“Always wanted to try this stuff,” she said with a laugh. “Would never actually pay for it.”

Dyna glared at her. “You just made that appear in the back?”

“Ridiculous. Impossible. Absolutely not,” Id said. She paused a moment, then her smile came through in her voice. “You made it appear.”

Dyna did not let up her glare.

“I thought you said top shelf,” Walter said, nose wrinkling at the bottle Id had in hand. “This is cheap garbage made to look fancy.”

“Yes, well, Dyna’s idea of top-shelf isn’t very refined,” Id said as the jet started moving. Apparently unconcerned with their impending takeoff, she twisted off the cap and started pouring the gold-flaked drink into the flutes. An odd cinnamon-alcohol scent filled the air. “Not an alcohol woman, Dyna?”

“You know I’m not,” Dyna said, glaring at the glass Id held out for her. “And I don’t think I should drink this. I’m nineteen—”

“Meh.”

“And… I’m not sure that I should ever get inebriated. It sounds like a bad idea.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Id dropped the glass into the drink holder before turning to Walter and Ruby.

Walter started to say something but didn’t finish before Ruby knocked back her entire glass. The young girl smacked her lips together for a few moments before sticking out her tongue with a disgusted exhale from the back of her throat. “Tastes like Atomic Fireballs.”

Walter curled a lip, glaring a the glass Id handed him. After a moment, however, he took a small drink. “People actually drink this?”

Id, much like Ruby, drank her whole glass all at once, pulling her mask forward just enough to tip the narrow glass back. As soon as she finished, she shuddered. “Had to try it once, I suppose. But… here is the real brain teaser for you:

“Dyna has obviously heard of this kind of drink and maybe even knew it was a cinnamon schnapps. But, is this what the drink would actually taste like if we were to go buy it from a store without her knowledge? Alternatively, does every instance of this drink across the world now taste like Atomic Fireballs thanks to Ruby’s comment?”

“You’re going to make me second guess everything I eat from now on,” Dyna said with a groan.

“Just make everything taste good and you don’t have to worry about it,” Id said with an obvious grin behind her mask. “In any case, now that we’re all gathered together in this isolated Faraday cage and have all turned off our electronic devices to prevent interference with the flight electronics… Anything you want to say, Dyna?”

Dyna’s eyes widened for a moment before she adopted her glare once again. “I would appreciate it if you would stop trying to manipulate me into using my ability.”

“Just a bit of harmless fun,” Id said, waving her hand. “But very well. Anything else you wish to say?”

“Yeah,” Dyna said, pulling out her phone and flipping it over to show a lit up screen. “I know I didn’t turn off my phone. One little quip isn’t enough to make me activate my power.” Sometimes, anyway. Maybe all the time. For all Dyna knew, that bottle of alcohol had been there all along.

“Well, I suppose we can wait to discuss sensitive matters until we reach Tartarus. Regardless of what you think, it is a secure facility.”

“How do you know? What if I just sit here thinking about how insecure it is for the next… how long is this flight?”

“Three hours. And I know because the facility is… outside your purview.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m sure the Carroll Institute would love to know. But that is why you all are here, isn’t it? To steal our secrets?”

Walter was the one to speak, frown on his face. “Steal is a harsh word. You offered a tour. If we glean information from your tour, is it really stealing?”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Id said, leaning back in her chair, crossing her hands over her lap. “I suppose we’ll find out.”

 

 

Routine, Dyna found, helped handle stress more than anything else in her life these days. Dyna woke up every morning at the same time, headed to exercise or training with Ruby and Emerald for the first half of the day—with the occasional guest appearance by Walter or Hematite—followed by experiments or study in both classical college courses or psionics in the afternoons. She tried to eat dinner with Mel, Matt, and November every evening, though their own responsibilities with Phrenomorphics occasionally interfered with that. Finally, she wound down her day by trying to affect things a bit more intentionally than usual. Usually in the form of more gadgets, but occasionally she simply preoccupied her time trying to change the color of a piece of paper.

It didn’t always work. In fact, oddly enough, it was easier to create a gadget than to change the color of a piece of paper.

Holding a red poster card in front of her face, Dyna glared. It felt like it should be easy to make the paper blue. After all, she had turned a complex piece of engineering from a coil gun into a lightning gun—one which had defied a few laws of physics according to a report Emerald had showed her. Flipping a few dyes from red to blue couldn’t possibly compare. After simply staring didn’t work, she had taken to reading. First, about dyes and how paper was made, hoping that knowing might help her change it. When that didn’t seem to work, Dyna had delved into books about light, colors, and how the various cones and rods in the eye were sensitive to specific wavelengths of light, which the brain then interpreted into the visualization of color.

The Carroll Institute, in dealing heavily with matters of the mind, had an entire library filled with such reading material. Dyna wouldn’t suggest to anyone that she had gone and read herself into being an expert on the subject by any stretch of the word, but she had spent the last two weeks figuring out how this specific part of the mind worked.

And it was all for naught. The red card, two weeks later, was still red.

Which was why, today, Dyna was trying something different.

“You want me to what?”

“Schrödinger’s box—”

“Cat,” Mel corrected.

“Yes, but I don’t want to kill a cat on accident, so we’re only using the box today,” Dyna said patting the old shoe box that sat on the table between them.

She didn’t often spend time in her old dormitory room these days. Her quarters down in Psychodynamics were far less personable than the homely dormitory, but it had two distinct advantages. First, it was underground. A bit depressing with no natural lighting or windows, but at least she didn’t have to worry about one of those tulpa snipers taking her out while she was walking around. Second, it was closer to everything else in her routine. The training areas, the scientists, they were all down below. Except, of course, for Mel, who continued to reside topside.

Which was why Dyna was here now, enjoying a glass of hot chocolate while explaining her latest experiment to Mel.

Technically, Walter said she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about her ability, not even Doctor Cross, but…

She needed help and Mel’s unique ability made her a bit more interesting as a helper.

“Pick one of the red or blue cards, slide them into the box when I’m not looking. Make sure I can’t see the one you didn’t pick. To further complicate matters, use your ability. Not the fog machine, I don’t want extra cards pulled from nowhere for this experiment, just your natural ability. But not every time—we’ll do this experiment a few times so mix it up a bit. Get it?”

“I suppose. Still not sure why we’re doing this.”

“Later,” Dyna said, twisting in her chair to face away from Mel. “Alright. Go ahead.”

Dyna heard a sigh but did not look until Mel said, “Ready, I guess.”

With that, Dyna turned back to the shoe box. The lid wasn’t pressed down as firmly as it had been, indicating that it had been opened while Dyna had her back turned. That meant a card was inside. Now, she just had to figure out what color it was.

At first, Dyna looked up to Mel, watching the woman’s face for any hint as to what she might have put into the box. But, as Mel stared back with a blank expression, Dyna remembered…

That wasn’t quite accurate. Figuring out what color it was would have been the job of any regular psychic. Dyna needed to decide what color it was. It sounded similar, but that key difference might have been what stopped her from ever successfully completing the standard psychic tests offered by the Carroll Institute. Either that or her own subconscious dictating that she would fail did her in. That, in retrospect, might have been what Id had been insinuating back during their first encounter.

Still, Dyna found herself frowning at the shoe box. While she knew what to do, she still wasn’t quite sure how to accomplish it. It had been just a bit under a year since Doctor Cross dragged her down to Psychodynamics to have her pick out an artifact. Just over a year since she had enrolled at the Carroll Institute. And yet, she had never once felt any kind of feedback from using her ability. Not once. From talking with Walter, Emerald, and November, she even knew when a few of those occasions had been. None had been intentional.

Making gadgets had been far more intentional, however she still hadn’t felt any kind of feedback upon making them.

Would she feel feedback now?

Well, that was what this test was for, she supposed.

“Red,” Dyna said. Opening the box, she pulled out a red card. “What color did you put in?”

“Red.”

“Did you use your power?”

“Nope.”

“Okay. Again,” Dyna said, sliding the card over to Mel before turning her back.

“Ready,” Mel said after a long moment.

Looking back to the shoe box, Dyna decided not to over think it this time. “Blue.” Opening the box, Dyna pulled out a blue card.

“Wrong. Red card that you think looks blue,” Mel said.

“It is blue,” Dyna said, forcing as much conviction into her tone as she could manage.

“Nope. It’s…” Mel trailed off, staring at the card. After a brief moment, her eyes widened. Looking down to her lap, she lifted up a red card. “That’s… I put in the red card…”

“You aren’t using your power?”

“I’m not now,” Mel said, confused frown on her face as she looked between the card in Dyna’s hand and the card in her hand.

“Again,” Dyna said once more, sliding the blue card across the table as she turned her back on Mel.

This time, it took a long few minutes for Mel to say anything. Dyna kept her back turned the whole time, wondering what Mel was up to. There wasn’t much sound of rustling, meaning Mel wasn’t trying to subvert the experiment. Maybe she just wanted to be doubly sure which card she was placing into the box.

Eventually, she said, “Ready.”

Dyna turned back and reached for the box right away. Like last time, she didn’t want to think too hard about it. But she did think a little. Just a tiny bit. An odd thought came to her as her fingers brushed against the box.

“Green,” Dyna said.

“That isn’t even one of the…”

Mel trailed off as Dyna opened the box and withdrew a green card. Dyna flashed her a grin.

“What.”

“Green,” Dyna said again, flipping the card over to show both sides were the same. “You aren’t using your power, right?”

“No… How did a green card get in? I put in a red card.” Looking down at her lap, Mel lifted up both a red and a green card, glaring at both. Her glare shifted, moving over the top edge of the cards to meet with Dyna’s eyes. “Alright. What’s going on? Another gadget of yours?”

“Nope. Just gold old fashioned psychic ability.” Holding the green card in her hands, Dyna stared at it. “I wonder if I was over thinking everything. All that studying I did on eyes and light and paper and dyes…” Placing the green card back in the box and closing the lid, Dyna said, “Purple.”

Reopening it, however, she frowned.

A green card sat in the shoe box, taunting her with its very existence.

“Why didn’t it work that time?” Mel asked.

Dyna shrugged. “I have a few theories,” she said, closing the box again. “Black.”

The card was still green when she opened it.

“One more try, just to check something,” Dyna said, sliding the green card across the table to Mel.

As soon as she turned away, Dyna heard the rustling of cards. Maybe Mel was shuffling them so that even she didn’t know what card she was putting in. If she was only putting in one card. And what a thought that was. After a few moments, though not as long as the previous test, Mel cleared her throat.

“Alright.”

Dyna opened the box immediately, not even calling out what she thought might be inside. The longer she had to think about it and consider the possibilities, the fewer possibilities there would be.

Mel gaped, staring at the completely full box of cards. Every one was a different color. The seven colors of the rainbow. Every color between. Even some colors that Dyna wasn’t sure were actually real colors. Some of the scientists around here would probably love to get their hands on those octarine cards for analysis, but Dyna was far more focused on the mere existence of the mass of cards.

“Alright. I think I know what is happening.”

“That makes one of us,” Mel said, looking at the three cards in her hand. “I didn’t put any inside.”

“First, let me explain this much: My power is kind of like yours with the fog machine. As far as I can tell, anyway. A bit of a different scale, in that I seem to be able to affect large changes, if what Walter tells me is true. I think it has one drastic downside compared to yours, however,” Dyna said with a mild frown.

“Oh?”

“I can’t seem to affect things when I know they’re already one way. Hence, the Schrödinger’s box.” Dyna pulled out a blue card and stared at it. “I see this is a blue card. Thus I can’t make it something else. It is a blue card, therefore, it is a blue card.” Tossing the blue card aside, Dyna buried her hand into the box of cards and closed her eyes. “This,” she said, pulling a card up with her eyes still closed, “is a red card.”

Dyna opened her eyes to find a red card pinched between her fingers.

“Now, a question for you,” Dyna said. “Was this a red card before I said it was a red card?”

Mel nodded slowly, making Dyna frown.

“Now we’re faced with the truly mind boggling question of whether this card was always red, or if my subconscious knew that I was going to say red before I revealed it, thus making it red.” Dyna closed her eyes, pulled out another card at random, and hesitated. Green? Black? Puce? Royal blue? “Daisy yellow,” she said.

“It was always a yellow card,” Mel said, but paused with a frown on her face. “I think. Maybe.”

“Walter says I can’t affect other people’s minds, so if you remember it being yellow, it probably always was yellow.”

“That’s one less thing to worry about, I suppose.”

Dyna shrugged, smiling. “I’m sure there are a million tests we could do with this. Lay them out in a pattern you know but I don’t, toss them up into the air and guess how they’ll land, a bunch of the standard psychic tests reworked for this particular way of using my power, basically. Maybe we’ll get to those eventually, but there is just one thing I don’t get,” she said, frowning once more.

“One thing?”

“Lots of things, really, but the biggest one is that it seems like I need a Schrödinger’s box to get my power to work, except that isn’t true. I make gadgets mostly intentionally. In addition, while in the noosphere, I made a standard disruptor gun into a far more powerful variant capable of harming the mountain man. So I can make some things happen on purpose. It’s like I can’t do them purposely on purpose, however.”

“Practice more?”

“Indeed,” Dyna said, standing. “Thanks for your help. I’m going to head back down to Psychodynamics for a while. Probably spend the night down there too.”

“I would question how much you work—and those scientists, haven’t they heard of a work-life balance?”

“The Carroll institute hires passionate people. For a lot of them, their research is their life.”

“But,” Mel continued as if she hadn’t heard. “I already turned your room into a bit of a storage room so probably best if you don’t try to spend the night there.”

Dyna blinked twice, taking a moment to register what she was hearing. “You what?”

“I make things,” Mel said, taking out her fog machine as she spoke. Flicking it on, she reached into the fog and pulled out a steaming mug of coffee. “But the things I make don’t just vanish into nothingness. I need somewhere to put them and you don’t use your room anymore.”

Dyna’s eyes flicked down to the cup of coffee, then back up to Mel. “Do you just magic up a fresh cup of coffee every time? Never reusing the cups?”

“Maybe,” Mel mumbled into her mug.

“And everything else you need too, I imagine.” Dyna’s glare fell as she thought to herself. “I wonder what the room would have looked like if I walked in before you told me that.”

“You think it would have been how you left it?”

“Maybe… Tell you what. Clean it up over the next week—or don’t—and I’ll check it. We’ll see what it looks like then.”

“Uh huh,” Mel said, rolling her eyes.

It wasn’t a very good experiment. Dyna knew Mel. She wasn’t about to clean it up. Dyna, expecting that, figured it would be difficult to make it clean because she already expected it to be a pile of junk.

Except…

Dyna’s gaze shifted down to the pile of cards in the shoe box. That many cards should have been impossible. It should have been impossible for there to have been a green card. The experiment wasn’t a true Schrödinger’s box, where there would only be two valid outcomes. Her power could affect it to a greater extent than was logical. Something she already knew from the various confirmed or suspected incidents Walter had mentioned where her power affected something.

Glancing down the hall to her door, Dyna considered opening it right now. In the end, she decided against it. Next week, she would try.

Crossing the campus and reaching Psychodynamics, she headed through the wood and brass-covered corridors, eying each red camera light as she moved.

There were a lot more experiments to do before she felt ready to purposefully try anything big.

 

 

 

Administrator Alpha scanned the report from the most recent experiment for the umpteenth time. Each reading had her scowl deepening further and further as things just didn’t quite add up. Pulling up the report from Harold’s capture, she compared Dyna’s debriefing there to the one here.

The first and most obvious change was the lack of freely offered information. The Harold incident was full of offered conjecture, full thought process of every decision, and ideas for how she could have handled any given aspect of the incident in a more efficient manner. This tulpa experiment, on the other hand, contained just a simple description of events as they happened with no extra details. Everything beyond the description had been pried out of her by the debriefing personnel. Even those felt incomplete.

Dyna had focused entirely on events that could have been observed by an outside element. In fact, her debriefing report matched almost perfectly with that of Colonel O’Neil. Someone at the center of events should have had drastically more information.

The next oddity concerned the entity known as the mountain man.

In truth, Alpha had been hoping the mountain man would escape confinement. That was the whole reason she had pushed for approving the inane experiment in the first place. If the mountain man escaped, she had presumed that it would attempt to follow its most recent orders: killing Dyna. Alpha wasn’t exactly sure why it had gone after November first, but theorized that the tulpa was just too attractive a target and had overridden her final order. She had thought she stamped out natural instincts like that, but the odd quirk of tulpa attempting to absorb their fellows wasn’t easily suppressed.

Irritating, but that was not what had Alpha scowling at her report.

The mountain man ran away. It fled. Tulpa did not have fear responses. Not in the same way that humans did, anyway. She could order them onto obvious suicide missions and they wouldn’t begin to complain. That wasn’t even a side effect of the Psychic Dominator, which instilled her orders into the tulpa, they simply lacked a significant self-preservation instinct.

November was a bit different in that regard, but Alpha was willing to attribute that to her extended existence outside the noosphere.

Could that have been why the mountain man fled? Its time in containment warped its instincts? Plausible. While Alpha received regular reports from Phrenomorphics on the subject of tulpa, she honestly knew very little about them. Machinery replicating psychic powers were the domain of Alpha’s talents and specialties.

Alpha’s eye twitched as an incoming message popped up on her tablet. A request for her to return to the Carroll Institute campus for the time being. Alpha wanted to be nowhere near the campus. Not while that abomination roamed the grounds. The few times she had been unable to avoid returning had been harrowing enough.

Placing her tablet on her desk, Alpha stood and moved to the large windows of her office. High in the mountains of Puerto Rico, south of the city of Arecibo, Alpha made her home in the sinkhole of an old radio telescope, long since collapsed. With the closure of the educational center some five years ago, she had identified it as the perfect location to expand the Carroll Institute’s psionic radar network. In the place of the old telescope, a massive mast stood tall. Several L-shaped beams of metal slowly rotated around the central shaft, looking like a massive orrery. Several triangular blades, attached in a line just beneath the array of L-shaped beams, spun in the opposite direction.

The Psychic Detector.

It was a simple device, relatively speaking, capable of identifying anomalous spikes in psionic activity over a wide swath of the world. Several were placed around various territories and overseas bases that the United States claimed as their own, forming a near-global network. Satellites with similar technology observed any blind spots and formed a redundancy over covered areas.

But this one was a little different. More recent and designed by Alpha, it served an additional purpose. One she had slipped into its design during construction, unnoticed by any except, perhaps, Beatrice. But with the administrative authority over the glorified chat-bot, Alpha had been able to install a void in its cognitive functions, preventing it from seeing anything she didn’t want it to.

Leaving her office, Alpha stepped into the gondola lift. Pulling a lever disengaged the safety brakes and a press of a button activated the cables, bringing her down from her office to the base of the sinkhole where the Detector sat. The gondola, attached to the cable, entered a small garage-like opening in the side of the machine’s base and locked into place.

Walking through maintenance corridors, Alpha approached an unassuming ladder. Not the most convenient method for descending further into the facility, but one that few would bother to look for. At the bottom, a lever disguised as a pipe opened a panel concealing a keypad. A few quick presses, leaving her thumb on the last number for an extended moment, opened a part of the wall.

Alpha stepped into a long, narrow chamber that looked like it belonged to a submarine rather than a building. Cramped corridors covered with metal pipes and several air-sealed doors. Eventually, however, Alpha found herself inside a small control room. There was only one other occupant at the moment. A man who looked like he was dressed for winter in thick clothes. Even his face had a thick, quilted covering that hid any skin. Dark, impenetrable goggles hid his eyes while half of a glass ball adorned his forehead, in front of the quilted mask.

“Progress?” Alpha asked as she approached the massive table of buttons, knobs, dials, toggle switches, ratcheting levers, valves, and other devices that the cowled man sat in front of.

He didn’t turn to face her, focused on slowly twisting one of the bright red valves while watching a gauge increase.

Alpha didn’t distract him with further questions. Instead, she looked down into the room beyond the control panel where a horizontal cylinder made from glass and metal, looking like an antique hyperbaric oxygen chamber, hummed with an unsettlingly low tone. Shadows and light twisted behind the glass as the valve continued to turn. Pipes connected to the Detector above—or perhaps she should say Beacon—rattled as more shadows siphoned down into the hyperbaric chamber.

The man at the control panel locked the valve in place, reached up, and flipped one of the large toggle switches. Alpha averted her eyes just in time. Even looking down with her eyes closed, the bright flash of light, brighter than a welding arc, still stung the back of her retinas.

“Do you ever feel like Frakenstein?” a highly distorted voice asked. “The doctor, not the monster.”

“I am familiar with the story. Your clarification is unnecessary.”

He twisted a knob then flipped another toggle switch. “I just feel like I should be maniacally laughing right now. ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ you know?”

Alpha didn’t dignify his question with a proper response. She simply kept her eyes averted for a few moments longer as the doctor worked. Though she did wonder if he was worth keeping around. At least he didn’t go about correcting people for spelling his name wrong even in the privacy of their own heads.

Quashing a flash of irritation, Alpha looked up as she heard the siphon pumps winding down.

He was hunched over a small screen built into the control panel, mask and goggles preventing any idea of what he might be thinking. “Oh. That looks good. Remarkably stable, this one.”

That was good news. A majority of their attempts at forcibly integrating tulpa into one mass had been less… integrated than was required to maintain a stable form. The results, when pulled from the noosphere, were messy to say the least.

“I believe this one will be suitable for your purposes,” he said. “My best creation yet.”

“It is done, then?”

“Are these things ever done?” His costume made it a bit difficult to turn his head, but he still managed to shake his entire body. “I could spend the next ten years perfecting the amalgamation process, but you wouldn’t wait for that, would you?”

“No,” Alpha said, taking the stairs beyond the control panel down toward the hyperbaric chamber. The shadows were no longer present, coalesced into solid form. Alpha couldn’t see many details on the form, unfortunately. A bright white light occluded everything. It wasn’t as bright as that flash had been earlier, but it was enough to wash out the entire interior of the chamber.

“I followed all your directions for the baseline,” he called down from above, “but added a number of improvements and one or two alterations to make it… hardier with regards to the subject. The method that dispatched the… ah, I believe we’re calling him ‘mountain man’ these days. Whatever its name, repeating that method of attack shouldn’t work again here. Probably.”

“Defenses to the disruptors?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard back up at the control panel.

“Preliminary tests show high degree of resistance to the technology you provided. I cannot account for the experimental disruptor technology, unfortunately. It may simply be too strong and will overwhelm this one.”

“I am working on sabotaging the project. Do not allow it to influence you.”

“Yes, ma’am. Owing to the lessons we learned from the ‘mountain man’, this subject should be quite hardy toward physical and psionic influences, however, it should be more intelligent as well, capable of proper reasoning and not just taking orders blindly.”

“I see,” Alpha said, lips curling into a frown. “Destroy it.”

The cowled man jolted to his feet, leaning over the railing that separated the upper level from the chamber floor. “You can’t be serious! After all the effort—”

“I have no need for a tulpa that will not follow orders. I could go to any human and get a soldier that won’t listen to me.”

“He will follow orders. Of that I assure you. It is merely that it will be able to understand what you want, rather than follow blindly the letter of your word,” he called down, voice frantic. “Give this one a chance. Please. You will not be disappointed.”

Alpha pressed her lips together. That was certainly a more appealing way to put it. “We’ll give it a test,” she said slowly. “Once it is finished, send it after our friends in Texas.”

“Ah!” The cowled man practically sagged in relief. “Of course. A worthy test. They are marginally more advanced with matters pertaining to tulpa than the Carroll Institute. I have full confidence it will succeed. And if it succeeds there, it will succeed at the institute.”

Alpha did not share his confidence. Too many of her plans had stalled, stopped, or simply vanished entirely. Or had been wrested from her control… That last point was a particular irritant. One that made her consider once again if that abomination really could alter thoughts as well as the rest of reality. That was the whole basis behind using tulpa rather than humans—beings of thought would be harder to alter than regular humans. Their willingness to throw themselves into danger, follow orders without question, and the occasional advanced individuals were purely side benefits.

“It is a shame about Tartarus,” the cowled man said as she ascended the stairs once again. “If their blundering hadn’t revealed the existence of tulpa to the institute, we could have marched over them by now. I wonder how they got so knowledgeable about tulpa. They came from nothing but your subject’s imagination, right? You think tulpa come from her too?”

“Tartarus did not emerge from nothing,” Alpha said through clenched teeth.

Tartarus had been hers. Darq had been hers. Waking up one morning to find all her passcodes failing, backdoors locked, and no way of even finding the facility had her livid. Even now, that anger hadn’t diminished. Even now, it took all her willpower to keep her sidearm in its holster and stop herself from shooting this man before he too could turn traitor.

Initially, she had thought the entire facility wiped from existence in an accidental usage of Dyna’s powers. Then Wyoming. A van bearing the name and emblem of Tartarus, driven by people she didn’t know, proclaiming that Id was their leader?

“Get everything in order for this test,” Alpha said. Not trusting herself to remain in close proximity to him any longer, she stalked back down the narrow corridor that had brought her here in the first place.

As soon as she made it up the ladder and back to the gondola she pulled out her phone and reinserted the battery. There were a few messages. Notifications, mostly, from the other administrators about their various projects. Alpha ignored all of them except for that of Gamma’s, the Phrenomorphics project. The Carroll Institute’s own attempt at cataloging, understanding, and experimenting on tulpa and the noosphere. She quickly skimmed through the banal portions of the report to focus on what really mattered.

Tracking the diminished mountain man through the noosphere. Not the easiest thing in the world, Alpha was well aware, but due to Id’s current presence within the Carroll Institute, they had been able to get into contact with Tartarus and were now using their research to augment their search. Alpha’s research.

She couldn’t even claim it without tipping her hand. All of it was being attributed to Darq.

That traitor.

Alpha sent off a council message, suggesting that perhaps it was time to put Id back where she belonged. The message hadn’t said so in such crude terms, of course. It was simply that, in the absence of any defined threat since the assassination attempt had failed, they couldn’t really justify keeping her around any longer. Not to mention, if they wished to foster a more collaborative environment with Tartarus, furthering the leader’s ire by keeping her imprisoned wouldn’t do them any favors.

And if Id just so happened to be back in her facility when Ignotus-33 chose to resurface and wipe them from the planet, then that would just be such a shame.

Such a shame indeed.

 

 

It took a few hours for the portal back to the real world to open. At first, Dyna and November had considered wandering off in search of a natural spatial anomaly or somewhere Dyna could use her stolen information from the mountain man to force open a gap in the noosphere—though she hadn’t said that part aloud—however, O’Neil stopped them. He was certain that the scientists would reopen the portal.

They did, though not right away. First, they opened up tiny pinhole portals for a good hour or two. Dyna assumed that the portal wasn’t failing and that the pinholes, even though they quickly collapsed, were intentional. Probably investigating the noosphere with various instruments to try to determine the best course of action in dealing with an escaped mountain man. Dyna used the time to drag November and Ruby away from O’Neil and the other guard that hadn’t made it back through.

She quickly explained what she had discovered. Or what her other self had discovered. Her collection of selves? Dyna wasn’t entirely sure that there was a distinction. She was herself, after all, as were the rest of herselfs. At least right now. Apart, she would grow separately from herself, developing along different paths, even if they were all the same at their core.

“Listen to yourself,” November said, tapered arms crossed over her chest. “You need to not do that again. You’re going to go insane. I can’t believe you were so reckless in the first place.”

“I’m fine,” Dyna said, shaking her head. “Disoriented a bit, but I’m pretty sure most of the other mes were ripped out when that thing ran off.”

Dyna had not mentioned that the fleeing mountain man was actually Dyna-tulpa. Just in case. Dyna didn’t believe either would go talk about it, but the less people who knew a secret, the more likely it was to stay safe. Besides, none of them could communicate with Dyna-tulpa, so it wasn’t like she was harming potential collaborative efforts.

“So, one of the administrators is behind Ignotus?” Ruby asked with a scowl.

“That’s what I gather from what I saw while merged with the mountain man.” Dyna paused, then decided not to mention Alpha’s name just yet. Not to keep this one a secret, necessarily, but just to not bias their responses. “I doubt it is Theta. I’ve spent a lot of time with him and… if he wants me dead, he is doing an amazing job of hiding it.”

“Not Gamma,” November said, “I can tell.”

“Can you?”

“Stray thoughts.” Shrugging, November added, “I’ve spent a decent amount of time around her as part of Phrenomorphics. Enough time that I doubt I wouldn’t have picked up on something like this.”

“Alright. So that’s two down,” Dyna said, looking to the other two expectantly.

Ruby crossed her arms. “Never met any other administrator.”

“They seem reclusive.” November sighed. The one light at the back of her eye-pit dimmed briefly. “I can actively attempt to pursue stray thoughts rather than just grabbing those that drift too close.”

“Are you alright, by the way?” Dyna asked. “You did eat a fairly large chunk of the mountain man.”

November shifted, looking away. “Larger integration than I would have liked, but I didn’t want it to rejoin after we finally managed to hurt it.” She paused, considering. “Although large, it isn’t as… jarring as I would have expected from integrating so much at once. I’m pretty sure I’m still myself, though I suppose the two of you might be better judges than I.”

“You seem normal,” Dyna said with a shrug. “While it was inside me, I… It wasn’t a contiguous being like you and I are. It was a smattering of thoughts shoved together and given purpose. Although it was a large chunk you ate, I imagine your strong personality was enough to overpower random and occasionally conflicting thoughts. In other words, it had no real sense of self. You do. Maybe. Does that sound right?”

November shrugged, but didn’t answer before another bright pinhole portal opened at the other end of the chamber. Unlike the previous few, this one slowly started to widen. It didn’t open fully, not right away, but it opened enough for Dyna to see through to the other side.

She had to force her jaw shut as she walked closer.

The Carroll Institute had pulled out all the stops. There were hundreds of soldiers in the room, positioned around the portal. Automated turrets had been set around the walls. Walter stood in the middle of the group with several artificers at his side, Alex, Emerald, and Hematite. The way Hematite held her cybernetic arm made Dyna wonder if she had weapons implanted in it. A hidden gun or maybe a disruptor. Then, Dyna wondered if she could force weapons into it by thinking about it hard enough, much as she did with the coil gun or even the disruptor gun she had used on the mountain man just a while ago. The noosphere might have helped with the latter weapon, but not with the former, so it should be possible. Probably.

Then, Dyna decided that she should probably not think about that at all lest Hematite injure herself because of a surprise weapon she didn’t know she had.

Sapphire was missing, but he probably wouldn’t be able to effectively attack the mountain man. Aquamarine wasn’t present. Dyna had never met him, and just assumed that he was off on some extended mission.

The massive array of satellite dishes that was the new disruptor technology had been moved into the room as well. Dyna could tell that it was powered up even from this side of the portal. The air around it just… looked far less stable than anything in reality had any right to be.

Dyna didn’t want to disparage the precautions or preparation they had taken. Not after they had only taken down the mountain man through a hastily constructed gadget the first time around. Yet, she did wonder what they would all think when they realized that the ‘mountain man’ was long gone.

It took another few hours to get everyone back through to the other side. There were procedures to follow and protocols that prevented Dyna and everyone else from simply walking through the portal. She didn’t want to walk around only to get shot on accident. Or on purpose, given what she now knew. Really, it would probably only take one financially burdened security guard to ‘panic’ and pull the trigger at an opportune moment and Ignotus will have accomplished their goal.

Except, Dyna doubted they would do that. She didn’t understand the motive behind using Ignotus and the tulpa, but it was clearly there for a reason. If Alpha had been able to simply walk into her room and smother her with a pillow, she surely would have done so by now. If it was just wanting to keep her hands clean, someone with the reach of the administrators could probably hire a hitman.

Why use tulpa at all? Cost? Resources? Was Ignotus all some giant experiment? With the way some of the scientists around the Carroll Institute acted, Dyna wouldn’t be surprised. The administrators were all just scientists with fancy titles anyway, weren’t they?

After finally being escorted through the portal, they put Dyna into a decontamination chamber. She was always going to have to go through it, even if the mountain man hadn’t escaped, so she knew what to expect. There were just too many unknowns with the noosphere. Nobody knew what might follow her out of there.

Of course, if nobody knew what might follow her, she wasn’t sure how they planned on getting rid of whatever it might be, but she could understand the sentiment behind not wanting to bring some brain virus through to reality.

If anyone was going to do that, she imagined it would be Ignotus, but protocol was protocol.

Decontamination took another hour. Then, Dyna was thrust straight into debriefing.

Dyna didn’t bother lying about anything that happened outside her own mind. O’Neil and that other guard had seen enough that lying would be pointless. Even what happened in her mind, she didn’t so much as lie regarding it as she simply omitted it, claiming to have passed out and awoken in time to watch the mountain man flee with a few scraps of memories remaining in her mind.

The man debriefing her, a Phrenomorphics scientist Dyna didn’t know, seemed particularly interested in how she generated stray thoughts at will to attack the mountain man. They spent… Dyna didn’t even know how long discussing the topic.

Dyna finally emerged to find both November and Ruby waiting for her. That was despite her having been taken from decontamination into debriefing first. November had less to talk about regarding the incident than she did? Dyna found that hard to believe.

Walter and Emerald were present as well. Dyna wanted to go up to them, to tell them at least everything she had told November and Ruby. One thing stalled her.

A bright red light set under an array of five lenses in the upper corner of the room.

Beatrice… had to be cut out. Completely. Dyna, Emerald, Ruby, and November had already taken steps to do that, driving out into the desert on their own to talk, but it wasn’t enough. As much as Dyna liked Beatrice, knowing that even one administrator had it out for her made it impossible to trust her with any amount of information. Not unless she could figure out how to cut Beatrice off from their control over her.

And wasn’t that a thought.

If Dyna could figure out how to free Beatrice, Beatrice would be able to tell her everything. Every last dirty secret that the administrators had. Exactly which ones were part of Ignotus and which weren’t. Beatrice probably to know that—or at least had evidence for one of them, likely Alpha—it was just that the administrators were in control of Beatrice. Alpha could easily have put some gag order in place, preventing Beatrice from speaking about it to anyone, potentially even the other administrators. The other administrators might have been able to remove the block, but only if they suspected it was there in the first place.

Dyna considered dropping some hints to Theta or Gamma. But then, Beatrice would just be trading one master for another. Maybe it would help her figure out who was part of Ignotus, but maybe not at the same time. If other administrators were using Alpha, they could have kept their noses clean even from Beatrice.

Maybe.

Honestly, Dyna had no idea exactly how far Beatrice could reach. Especially while operating at an elevated level.

“Your experiment failed,” Walter said, arms crossed. He stared a moment from behind his mirrored lenses, pressing his lips together, before he finally dropped his gaze. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

“Me too,” Dyna said, then shot Ruby a particularly pointed look. “I’m glad all of us are alright.”

Ruby, of course, put on a fiery glare. “You were in trouble.”

“Everything was under control.”

“Liar.”

“Maybe,” Dyna shrugged, then looked back to Walter. “And, as I explained to that debriefing guy, the experiment didn’t fail. I wanted to see the difference in power level between a naturally advanced tulpa like the Hatman and tulpa that Ignotus has been using. In that respect, it succeeded quite well,” Dyna said, nodding toward November. “Containment failed. And I’m going to say that is entirely the fault of Phrenomorphics.”

“Don’t let Gamma hear that,” Walter said. “She has been…”

When he trailed off, Emerald chipped in with a serene smile. “Ranting and raving like a madwoman.”

“Upset,” Walter finished. “I imagine she will be even more livid now that we have confirmed the mountain man did not merely break containment, but escaped completely. None of our noosphere scanning devices have been able to detect its presence for hours now.”

At least Dyna-tulpa got away, Dyna didn’t say. “She doesn’t blame me for that, does she?” It would be just her luck to have made another actual enemy.

“Doubtful. When you proposed your experiment, the scientists in charge believed that, because matter can pass into the noosphere unaffected, the containment device would function properly while over there. It is clear that was not the case… Unless…” Walter drew in a breath. Dyna could tell that he was locking eyes with her even with his glasses in the way. “Did you think the containment device would fail?”

Dyna’s eyes widened. “No. I didn’t try to make it fail. I didn’t think it would fail. I… I guess I didn’t really think it wouldn’t fail either. Until the glass started to crack, I don’t think I thought about it much at all. Once the glass did start to crack…” Trailing off, Dyna shrugged. “I guess it was a foregone conclusion at that point.”

Walter stared, and then slowly nodded his head.

Ruby looked back and forth between Dyna and Walter with a frown. “What?”

“She makes things happen with her mind,” Emerald said, crossing her arms.

November nodded her head.

“Since when did you know?” Dyna asked.

Emerald shrugged. “I do my investigations,” she said, looking at her green-painted fingernails. “The real question is: When did you figure it out?”

Dyna pressed her lips together. “Probably since I made a lightning gun on accident,” she said, glancing to Walter. “But it was more of a suspicion than knowing. It really clicked when I made alterations to the disruptor in the noosphere.”

“Was it easier over there?” November asked.

“How am I supposed to know? It isn’t like I’ve been doing it intentionally. I can’t control it. If I could, I doubt I’d have people trying to kill me right now. They’d just…” Dyna waved her hand, wiggling her finger. “Vanish, or something.” Frowning, Dyna looked around the room. “Everyone knew and nobody said anything?”

“I didn’t know,” Ruby snapped. “How come everyone else knew and didn’t tell me?”

Emerald just smiled at the younger girl, then looked up to Dyna. “I figured if you didn’t know, there was a reason you didn’t know.”

“I tried to tell you,” November said. The sparks of television snow in her eyes were far more intense now, Dyna noted. Probably because of the mountain man. “You didn’t listen.”

Walter, however, crossed his arms. “We told you once. It… caused issues.”

“I think I would remember that,” Dyna said, frown turning to a glare. Her eyes shifted to Ruby for just a moment before locking on Walter. “You did something to my memories?”

“No. The theory is that you did something to your memories. We are unsure what.” He paused while Dyna tapped her foot on the ground, annoyed, but continued talking in short order. “After that, it was decided that we would take a slower approach, test things cautiously. We brought you here. I don’t think you fail to remember anything that has happened since.”

Dyna stared a moment longer, but Walter didn’t so much as flinch. “So, what now?”

“Well, the Carroll Institute’s continued existence is a good sign. I have no authorization to tell you what happened last time you became aware of your ability, but… well…”

Dyna’s eyes widened slightly, putting the two statements together in context. “I did something to the entire Carroll Institute?”

“No.”

No elaboration.

“We’ll continue taking this slowly,” Walter said, “but the current state of things should, hopefully mollify the fears of some of the administration council.”

Dyna locked her jaw, keeping her face carefully neutral. Just as carefully, she did not look at either November or Ruby. Emerald and Walter needed to be warned about Alpha, but she couldn’t do that now. Just asking to go for a drive might be suspicious too. She would have to think up some excuse to get them away from here where they could talk.

“Right,” she said slowly. “Well, I don’t really want to die, so we just continue hunting down Ignotus-33, then? Make sure whoever is leading them pays?”

Maybe she shouldn’t taunt the administrator who was certainly watching them through Beatrice right now, but at the same time…

Well… she was going to make them pay.

 

 

Dyna awoke to a familiar location, though she was a bit surprised to wake alone, she focused on her surroundings.

It took a few moments to recognize it, but the wood and brass architecture matched with the aesthetic of just about any room in Psychodynamics. Except, this wasn’t a room in Psychodynamics. At least, not one she had ever visited. A long couch and a smaller chair, both fashioned in red leather, sat around a small pit of fire. One wall had a rack of weapons, various pistols, submachine guns, and even a scoped rifle. She recognized each and every one of them, quickly spotting her preferred APC9K.

A small station for brewing coffee had been shoved aside, making room for other things. First was a small training room, complete with weight sets and a punching bag. Beyond that were a series of shelves filled with random objects. These weren’t quite as familiar to Dyna. Her mirror was there, as was the laser pointer and the wristwatch. A jumble of other assorted items littered the counter, most which she didn’t recognize as gadgets or artifacts. She did spot the Ouija board and even the game of Operation that she had used against the mountain man on their first encounter.

It had been destroyed, but she supposed that probably didn’t matter here.

Walking across the room, around the red leather furniture, Dyna approached a massive window that dominated the entire wall.

A field of stars drifted beyond, wrapped in a massive nebula of swirling clouds in a rainbow of hues. A single sun-like ball of light dominated the vista, though ball was the wrong word to use. Light from the sun stretched out to either side of the horizon, continuing endlessly.

Dyna had been here before. But it wasn’t exactly a real place.

This was her sanctuary. A little corner of her mind just for her. Harold, using his hypnotism, had sent her here before. Now, she could only imagine she had wound up here because of the mass of her own clones. They clasped their hands together and then Dyna had blacked out. It was odd to have memories of blacking out, but there they were.

It… probably hadn’t been intentional. Dyna couldn’t imagine she would do something like this to herself.

Turning her back to the window, Dyna faced the rest of her sanctuary with a frown. Last time she had been here, there hadn’t been an array of weapons on one wall. It had looked like a coffee shop rather than an armory. And the other side…

Last time, there had been a bookshelf. Though Dyna hadn’t checked through all the books, it had been quite clear that they were her memories. Those books were where she first discovered—or perhaps remembered—the Hatman, sparking at least some of all this tulpa nonsense that she now had to deal with.

The shelves were gone. In their place were dozens if not hundreds of monitors. None were the same size, but they were all packed in together to make a full wall of screens with no gaps between them. A different event played out on each screen, most of which Dyna remembered. Little snippets of her life. Strangely enough, they weren’t all from a first-person view. Dyna watched herself run across some flat rooftops as if a camera man had been on a cherry picker crane, driving along the road. Another screen showed her watching a movie alongside Ruby, though seemingly from Ruby’s perspective.

Most of the screens were from her perspective, however. She watched herself seal the Hatman into the isolation chamber, fire a gun into darkness, and even jump off a low diving board. Dyna hadn’t been swimming since high school.

Dyna had to wonder about the change. The coffee shop changing into an armory made sense. Dyna hadn’t even thought about working in a coffee shop in months. Her current life was vastly more of who she was than anything else. And, for better or worse, her current life was somewhat violent.

But a bookshelf changing into monitors? Not just monitors. Positioned a short distance from the wall of screens was a small standing console. A terminal, much like any that could be found in or around the Carroll Institute.

Should she even bother trying to psychoanalyze herself based off this room? It was a product of her mind, true, but it was also some kind of abstraction designed to be understood at a more conscious level of thought. The next time she visited, whenever that might be, it would probably have changed again.

No. She wasn’t a psychiatrist. Even with the knowledge she had picked up through sheer osmosis from being around all the doctors and scientists of the Carroll Institute, she didn’t know where to begin in picking apart the appearance of her mind.

And she doubted she would mention this to Doctor West. He would probably spend their next ten sessions dissecting every little thing.

Instead of getting lost in her own mind, Dyna moved up to the terminal. She wasn’t quite sure how to leave this place—last time she had sort of startled herself out after spotting that handwritten note in her mind—but as long as she was here, she might as well make use of the ease of access she had to her memories.

Especially because she doubted all of them were her memories, given the final moments of consciousness that Dyna could remember.

Starting out, Dyna tapped the keys, typing out Ignotus.

The screens all flickered, snapping over to new images. Almost all of which were of Dyna or from Dyna’s perspective. None of it was new information that she had been hoping to glean from the mountain man’s memories.

It took a moment to realize her folly. Ignotus was the name the institute used for the unknown organization. The organization itself wouldn’t be aware of the name. Or, if they were through information leaks, they wouldn’t have been aware of it at the time of the mountain man’s capture because that name hadn’t existed at the time.

Trying again, this time Dyna put in a few generic words. Leader, boss, and superior. She didn’t know what they called their organization, so couldn’t easily search that. But if she could figure out who was in charge…

Again, the monitors changed. Several changed to faces she recognized. Walter’s face was prominent, as were Theta, Alpha, and Gamma’s faces. Even Emerald popped up on a few monitors near the edges of the wall. There were faces Dyna didn’t recognize scattered among the monitors. Some obviously had little to do with the current situation. Some kind of medieval warrior, a gas station manager, and a few others had likely come from random tulpa that the mountain man had integrated.

Dyna watched the monitors for a while longer than she had with her previous entry. There were too many unknown faces. She couldn’t decide which were relevant and which weren’t. Using the terminal, she figured she could start filtering them out so she could focus better on those that did matter. Obviously out-of-time faces vanished, leaving only modern era people. After that, Dyna filtered out Emerald and Walter. She watched Theta for a few moments before deciding that all the monitors displaying him came from her memories. Gamma went along with Theta. Just as she was about to filter out Alpha, however, she noticed something.

In a few of the screens, Alpha’s face flickered. It was enough to make Dyna pause.

Especially because she felt like there were a lot of screens showing Alpha for how few interactions Dyna had actually had with the woman.

One of the monitors in particular stood out to Dyna as being especially odd. It flickered more than most and when it did, it did so for long periods of time, changing into a simple jagged line. It took another moment of watching that monitor for Dyna to realize just what that line was.

An audio waveform.

Tapping on the terminal, Dyna figured out how to get the monitors to output sound. It probably didn’t matter what buttons she pushed given that this was her mind, but she figured it out nonetheless.

“Remain where you are,” the voice said in a garbled and distorted voice, waveform now bouncing around on the largest central monitor. “The target is now on a route that will reach your position in minutes. Kill her if you can. Delay her if you cannot.”

The message then repeated. Still garbled and distorted, sounding like it was coming over a small headset speaker. But this time, Alpha’s face appeared on the monitor, moving her mouth along with the spoken words. Did it fit? Dyna wasn’t quite sure. Dyna doubted Alpha would have been standing in front of the mountain man while giving the order, or even displaying her face on a screen that the mountain man could see. If Alpha really had given the tulpa an order, there was always the possibility that it would be intercepted. It would have been idiocy to put her face there, meaning the face couldn’t possibly be real.

When had that message gotten to the mountain man?

The order, kill her, was fairly telling. Assuming the order had come the same night the mountain man had been captured, it either referred to Dyna, Hematite, or Ruby. Assuming the mountain man had been operating under the orders of Ignotus, and assuming Id was correct in who Ignotus was targeting, Dyna figured the order was referring to her.

That was a lot of assumptions, but most of them had been all but verified.

If Dyna was going to be on the mountain man’s position within just a few minutes, the order must have been given just before Dyna and Hematite found the burned-out car. Just before he attacked them.

That all made sense. The part that didn’t was why Alpha’s face was on the screen with the recording. Some part of Dyna must have made the connection, but the conscious part—the main part that mattered, in the conscious Dyna’s opinion—wasn’t quite seeing it.

“Thinking about the content of the message helped us.”

Dyna jolted at the voice at her side. Whirling, she started.

An identical clone of herself stared back, smile on her face. The new Dyna wasn’t a shadowy tulpa or hulking, vaguely humanoid version of herself. She was just Dyna. White hair at the ends, black jacket, loose shirt, and a pendant dangling from her neck.

“You expected this, didn’t you?” She said, then paused. “We did.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. “You are… tulpa me?”

“We think tulpa are only tulpa when they’re outside a mind. Otherwise we’re just people.”

“We?” Dyna said, pressing her lips into a frown.

“You did make a lot of us to overwhelm the mountain man.” Dyna shrugged. “Besides, we think it makes us sound a little more mysterious.”

“So you’re doing it for fun.”

Dyna flashed Dyna a grin. “You would do it too if you were in our position.”

“But are there actually… lots of me?”

Dyna shrugged. “It is a bit strange. Not quite accurate. We’re one entity, but… we can think a lot?” Pausing, she shrugged. “Whatever it is, it helped us sift through the mountain man’s memories. We tried to give you only what we thought would be necessary. There was a lot to go through.”

Dyna blinked, frowning. “You… you aren’t just a figment of my imagination, me talking to myself. You’re an entirely separate entity?”

“We are,” Dyna said with a nod of her head. “We… decided fully merging with you would be a bad idea. We have no intention of killing ourself, after all.”

“Well, that’s… good, right? I guess. Except what now?” Dyna blinked, briefly jolting as the existential crisis sunk in. “I am the original, right?”

“We decided to call you Dyna-Prime.”

“Prime?”

“It sounds cooler. We’ll be Dyna-Tulpa, at least until we come up with some fancy epithet.”

Dyna nodded her head. That made complete sense. It did sound cooler. “So I’m just going to have a million copies of myself in my mind now? How is that going to work out?”

“Oh, it isn’t. We’re pretty sure we need to leave before too long. We doubt your mind can take this for very long.”

Slowly, Dyna nodded, realization settling in. “Not even Sapphire copies several minds at once. I’ve effectively copied my own mind a million times, plus however many minds that mountain man might have counted as.”

“The results probably won’t be as dramatic as Scanners, but we’re not interested in finding out.”

“Good idea. So, you’ll split off in a few minutes, I presume.”

“Not exactly.” Dyna pointed at the array of monitors, most of which were displaying Alpha’s face. “We’re pretty sure we’re right about that. We had a lot of us thinking about it. Because of that, letting the institute know about our existence would be… disadvantageous.”

Looking back to the monitors, Dyna scowled. “I’m not sure I understand how you came to the conclusion of Alpha. I assume that was you, putting her face along with the audio?”

Dyna nodded her head. “The context of that message. Specifically the line ‘The target is now on a route that will reach your position in minutes.’”

After thinking about the sentence for a minute, Dyna’s eyes started to widen. “We got our route from Beatrice.”

“Bingo. And who has access to Beatrice?”

“The administrators. It’s an administrator. And Beatrice was trying to warn us and Id about an administrator as well. I thought that was unrelated, but if an administrator is behind Ignotus…”

“Yep,” Dyna said, scowl forming on her face. “We’re not one hundred percent sure it is Alpha, but from the few words she said to us, the voice is maybe the same if you squint your ears a bit. We don’t know if Alpha is acting alone or if Alpha is just the one set up to take the fall and all or some of the other administrators are behind this.

“Which is why we can’t go back. We don’t know what they might do if there are two of us running around, one of which is a tulpa merged with the mountain man. They might suddenly become less interested in their current attempts at killing us and try something a little more direct.”

Dyna glanced at her clone, thinking. “Is Walter safe?”

“Don’t know,” Dyna said, shrugging. “Probably. He did save us from the mountain man.”

“So we can trust him. And the artificers work for him, not for the administrators, right?”

“Sapphire might be a problem if he goes to them rather than Walter,” Dyna said, looking morose. “Hopefully he isn’t trying to read our mind right now. It probably isn’t pleasant.”

Both Dynas shuddered. Her other self bringing up Scanners did not put pleasant images in mind.

“I’ll have to act normal. Can’t let on that I know until something can be done,” Dyna said. “If Sapphire really does read my mind, he’ll help. How could he not after hearing that the administrators themselves are after me?”

“Hopefully.”

“Are you going after Alpha?”

“As we said, we aren’t positive. We’d rather not tip our hand against the wrong target and alert the true culprit.” Dyna shrugged. “Paranoia, you understand.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll split off you. As far as we can tell, we’re still in the noosphere at the moment. It should be easy. Except, you won’t see Dyna split off from you. You’ll see the mountain man appear—” “Don’t be alarmed, but maybe try to act alarmed,” Dyna said, interrupting herself.

Dyna wasn’t sure what to make of that. She figured it was something for her other self to deal with. “You’ll escape through the noosphere,” she said, understanding their plan. “I’ll claim something like the mountain man was too much to integrate, but the near-integration must have frightened it off.”

“Exactly. We’ll run through the noosphere, maybe see if we can’t figure out how Ignotus is recruiting tulpa. Gather information. Get on the inside of their organization.”

“And if you discover anything…”

“You’ll be the first to know. We’ll figure out a way to contact you.”

“I’ll stay with the institute. See if I can’t figure out more about the administrators. Hopefully get Walter on my side…”

“It might be difficult to get information to us, but there are a lot of us here thinking—” “And we absorbed the mountain man.” “—So, we’ll probably be fine.”

Dyna nodded, lips pressed into a firm line. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Stay safe.”

“You as well, Prime.”

Dyna’s lips twitched down into a mild frown before she let out a small laugh. “Okay, maybe that is a little weird. This whole situation is weird.”

“You should see it from our perspective,” Dyna said, holding out a hand. “Well, don’t be a stranger.”

Dyna quirked her eyebrow. “Is that even possible?” she asked as she clasped her hand into her own outstretched hand.

Blinking bleary eyes open, Dyna’s vision swam. Nausea welled up inside her chest as she watched November and Ruby dive out of the way of a hulking monstrosity of shadowy tendrils. It rushed from her to the far end of the noosphere version of the experimentation chamber and barreled down the thick doors as if they had been made from little more than papier-mâché.

Unable to stare any longer, she turned to the side and vomited.