Dyna stepped into darkness.
Stepped was probably the wrong word. There was a certain drifting feeling to everything around her. She wasn’t floating, but it felt like she might be able to float if she remembered that gravity didn’t exist in someone’s mindscape. Nothing she saw would be real. This world would be populated entirely by nonmaterial mental concepts. Much like the noosphere, in a way, except instead of a collective amalgamation of thought forming that world, this place was entirely shaped by only a single individual.
The darkness did bring up a mild curiosity.
When Id had invaded Dyna’s mind during their first encounter, it had been a world of black void as well. She had been able to manipulate it after becoming aware of where she was, forming that vault door that Id used to leave her mind, but it hadn’t been at all like the sanctuary she had visited later during hypnosis and when Dyna-Tulpa stepped into her mind.
It must have been something about the method used.
Right now, Dyna’s real body was hooked into a machine that, using a link from Grafton’s mind control ability, was directed into Walter’s mind. It wasn’t the deep subconscious sanctuary, but the very edge of surface thoughts. During Id’s invasion, Id had mentioned that the link was delving deep into her mind. If what Ado said was true, that was not the case. Id had employed a great deal of smoke and mirrors in an attempt to get Dyna thinking certain things for the sole purpose of triggering her power.
Except this time, unlike when Id had visited Dyna, there was no one here to greet the invader.
Dyna had been warned about that. Walter was unconscious. He didn’t have surface thoughts at the moment. Unless he woke up, nobody would come to greet her.
She needed to go deeper.
Easier said than done.
How much control did she have over this mindscape? It wasn’t her mind, but she was using a mind controller to facilitate the link. If she could piggyback off that to affect changes…
Dyna focused, staring at the emptiness in front of her as she tried to remember what it had been like when she met Id. She didn’t feel anything happening. However, as she stared, she spotted it.
A staircase, metal and grated, that led downwards. She was fairly certain nothing had changed around her. It was more like she could see it now that she was thinking about it.
Had something changed? Had it always been there?
Dyna supposed it didn’t really matter.
Now that she had a visual frame of reference, the feeling of drifting in the void came to an end. She stepped forward, reaching the stairs, and started descending. It wasn’t a long staircase. A dozen steps or so. When she reached the bottom, she found herself facing a door. A heavy industrial door that could probably survive a bomb going off next to it.
Dyna glanced at the handle. Rather than just invade, however, she raised her hand and lightly tapped her knuckles against the metal.
The first surprise was that the door wasn’t metal at all. It felt more like wood. A fake metal door?
The second surprise was that it actually opened. No one opened it for her. Walter wasn’t on the other side. It just wasn’t latched shut properly. Lacking a frame around the door, Dyna wasn’t sure that it could be latched shut. Maybe it was him being unconscious, maybe it was the invasive nature of her method of entering his head, but she would have thought Walter would have better mental defenses than a fake metal door that could be opened at a light touch.
“Hello?” she called out, stepping into a narrow hallway. “Walter?”
The hallway looked like something out of the Carroll Institute. Clean, stylish tiles with rich wooden walls and brass accents. At the far end, she spotted a camera mounted on the wall. The same five-lens camera that Dyna had come to associate with Beatrice. This one, however, lacked the bright red light.
The security system was off?
Maybe Walter being unconscious was the cause for the lack of security.
Pushing through, passing deactivated camera after deactivated camera, Dyna eventually reached a large server room. The racks of servers formed cramped, narrow walkways that were difficult to navigate with the number of wires criss-crossing back and forth. She had to duck, shimmy, and step her way forward.
Dyna wasn’t even sure that forward was the right way to go.
Would she be able to get back? Did that matter? What happened if a power surge took out the machine she was strapped to while her consciousness was in Walter’s head?
Trying to not think about potential complications—the Continuity Engine should prevent her power from acting up but that didn’t mean that she should stress it further—Dyna focused on finding anything around her that she could use. All these servers were likely the manifestation of Walter’s memories, much as the library and later terminal had facilitated for Dyna within her sanctuary. But she couldn’t access the servers directly.
It wasn’t like…
Dyna narrowed her eyes, following a thick green wire as it left one server only to loop right back into the same slot.
Did the wires not connecting anywhere else matter? Was it all symbolic? Or…
Reaching over to the server, Dyna pinched what should have been a hard drive. Pulling it out of the rack, she looked down and flipped the drive open like a book. It was fake. Page after page of text greeted her, not that she could read any of it. Like the noosphere, text swam and shifted. Pictures, however, came through clear as day. Bits of Walter’s life presented themselves in image format, showing off what looked like a meeting between him and Doctor Cross. Neither looked happy about the other being there.
Eyes scanning over the rest of the server racks, Dyna frowned as she pulled out another book-like hard drive. A security system based on deception?
“I really hope I’m not making fundamental changes to how you think, Walter,” she mumbled, pulling out a third book. None held any relevant information. Nothing on Beatrice and nothing on Alpha. Taking care to slot them back right where she got them, Dyna looked around.
She needed an index. Or a guide.
Turning around, half expecting something helpful to simply appear, Dyna found herself freezing at the sight of something else at the far end of the aisle.
“Walter?”
It looked like Walter. No glasses, but it had the facial hair and build of the man Dyna knew. His clothes, however, were a bit strange. A full bodysuit with bright red glowing lines like he had stepped out of the old Tron movie. His eyes locked onto Dyna without any familiarity or recognition.
“Intruder located,” he intoned, voice flat and monotone.
“Walter? It’s me, Dyna. I need—”
The version of Walter before her shifted his body, aiming directly toward her. He then started running. The cables and wires that Dyna had to navigate simply parted, allowing him passage.
Dyna turned to run only to find the opposite problem ahead of her. Wires and cables laced together to form a thick, impassible netting. She turned away, thinking to climb over the server racks in an attempt to escape. One of the cables looped around her foot as soon as she tried. She reached down to try to tug it off her only to find more wires snaking around her arms and legs.
The glowing red Walter reached her a moment later, reaching out a hand toward her face.
Dyna jerked back in her seat, metal colander over her head knocked askew by the force of her motion. Balling her hands into fists, she ground her knuckles into her forehead, shoving aside the helmet even as it tugged hair out of her head.
“Didn’t work?”
Opening her eyes despite her pounding headache, Dyna shot a glare at Grafton. The man with machinery grafted to the side of his head sat in a chair across from Dyna, wires hooked up near the rotating gears on the side of his head. He had a snide smile drawn across his face.
He didn’t like her. Which was fairly understandable. She had captured him. More than that, she had damaged that machinery on the side of his head during his capture. According to Ado, he was lucky to have avoided permanent brain damage.
Ado stood at a console just to the side of both of them. Several wires ran from the console to her goggles while other wires ran to the colander on Dyna’s head and Grafton’s machinery.
“What went wrong?” Ado asked, frowning at whatever she was seeing in her goggles.
“His mind attacked me.”
“While unconscious?”
“It wasn’t him. Or if it was, I have a lot to make fun of him with when he wakes up. I didn’t take him as one for cosplay.”
Ado quirked an eyebrow over her goggles. “Excuse me?”
Dyna just shook her head. “Can we try again?”
“You think you will have more success after setting his mind on alert?” Grafton asked, nose wrinkled in a sneer.
Dyna opened her mouth, but hesitated before her answer actually made it out. She hadn’t stood a chance in the slightest. As soon as his mind detected her as an intruder—likely triggered by her rifling through his memories—she had been as good as gone. She considered somehow brining in or fashioning a weapon, but immediately discarded that idea. She didn’t want to hurt Walter. Firing weapons in the depths of his mind sounded like an exceptionally poor idea.
Even if she could get in and was allowed infinite time, searching through that library of servers wouldn’t be easy without some kind of index or map. Without Walter being conscious, she had no idea how she would get that.
“Is there really no way to wake him up?”
Ado just shrugged. “I’m an engineer, not a doctor.”
“Why do you need him awake in the first place?”
“Well, I didn’t think we did,” Dyna said, motioning to the colander that was now on her lap. “But without him at least conscious if not speaking, I don’t know how I can possibly dig through his mind to find what I need.”
“That is a better question then,” Grafton said. “You’re doing this to find the location of that thinking machine? Why?”
“Well, to get Beatrice to stop sending information to Alpha. If Beatrice has information on any other administrators in on this conspiracy, then that is just a bonus.”
“I mean, why do you need to know the location of the machine?”
“That is where the override switch is.”
“Yes, but why? When Id first came to Ado, Maple, and myself, she promised that she had a way to get what we needed. That way was you. In that storage unit I took you to, Ado was actually there. We knocked down a few walls and dressed up some locals who answered an ad to make it seem like we were working in a larger facility. Then you did all this,” Grafton said, waving a hand around the hardware laboratory.
“That’s not how…” Dyna trailed off. That was how her power worked. She had evidence of it. If she could transport Id and that whole fake laboratory over here to Texas and then make that fake laboratory into a real laboratory, surely she could transport herself to Beatrice’s core regardless of whether or not she knew where it was.
The problem was the war between her conscious mind and her unconscious mind. If she observed something, that something was true. Unless, as Id had done, she could trick herself into thinking it wasn’t.
Maybe?
Thinking back to her experiment with the cards, she had obviously known that Mel wouldn’t have placed a hundred cards into the shoe box at the end. Yet the possibility that she could use her power to make a bunch of cards had been there, thus it was something that Dyna’s power had been able to affect.
“I need something I don’t know the outcome of that will let me change things.”
There was a fairly simple solution that popped into her mind.
She didn’t know where Beatrice’s core was. That had been the whole point of delving into Walter’s mind.
If she didn’t know where Beatrice’s core was, couldn’t it be anywhere?
She couldn’t make it appear in Tartarus. Not while the Continuity Engine was keeping her power from disrupting the world around her. Outside Tartarus? Who was to say that Beatrice’s core wasn’t coincidentally on the other end of the train tracks, hidden behind some vending machine that they had all passed on the way here.
“I need to get out of here. I can’t do anything here.”
“The lockdown—”
Grafton interrupted Ado. “The lockdown can be lifted long enough to boot her out to the streets. Good riddance,” he said with a smile.
Dyna didn’t rise to the quip. She did rise, however, setting the colander down on the seat. Looking to Ado, she put on her best smile. “I don’t suppose you have any other fancy gadgets to give me before I leave?”
“Nothing that would remain intact outside the presence of the Continuity Engine’s sphere of influence.”
“Shame. How do I get out?”
“The train is really the only way to get away from here,” Ado said before her goggles drifted over to the large circular machine in the hardware laboratory that looked like the Carroll Institute’s noosphere portal. Her head shook and looked back to Dyna. “The train is the best way.”
“Do we have camera footage of the exterior? I don’t really want to get sniped the moment I step outside,” Dyna said, rubbing her chest. “It isn’t a pleasant experience.”
“We can get it. The train is automated. As soon as you step aboard, we’ll send the command for it to depart. Anyone watching the building will likely notice,” she added, almost as an afterthought.
“Hopefully I can turn rocket launchers into duds just by thinking hard enough.”
“Once you are away from the Continuity Engine.”
Nodding, Dyna started away from the two. “Take care of Ruby and Walter,” she said, then added after a brief pause, “Id too.”
“Good luck,” Ado said, offering little more than a stiff nod of her head.
Hurrying down the hall, Dyna took the elevator back down to the ground floor. She stopped at the box of phones and took her own. After a moment of thought, she grabbed Walter’s glasses and phone as well. Ruby’s remained in place along with all the other bits and bobs that Walter had taken off.
One of the monitors beeped a light tone as it turned on, displaying a cycling exterior footage. Dyna stepped up to it and narrowed her eyes, searching for anything nearby that might be Alpha’s tulpa. The Tartarus building was out in the middle of nowhere. Any vehicles would be fairly obvious. With the noosphere at their disposal, however, they probably didn’t need any vehicles.
Not seeing anything alarming, Dyna turned away and headed for the doors. The heavy metal shutters were still lowered, blocking off both access and light. Dyna performed one more check on her submachine gun, pistol, and various gadgets. She left the gun dangling around her neck, figuring that if she failed to locate anyone on the cameras, the gun would be less useful than her mirror and watch. One hand on her watch and the other holding her mirror, she looked to the camera and said, “Alright. I’m ready.”
It took a moment, but the shutters rolled up into a small gap between the building’s facade and the interior windows. Not all the shutters lifted. Just those over the main door.
Her mirror turned dark as she left, but didn’t light up with anyone’s perspective. Figuring that meant she was safe enough for the moment, Dyna hurried across the platform. The train doors slid open just before she reached them, letting her board without stopping. She thought about ducking down and making sure she wasn’t visible from the outside. Mirror in hand, however, it felt like a small warning of someone observing her would be better than complete ignorance.
She didn’t take a seat. Dyna stood in full view of one of the windows. Her mirror remained black.
The doors slid shut behind her.
With a hiss, the brakes disengaged and the train started moving.