Tag: collective thinking

Chapter

Protection

by Tower Curator — Dyna set her phone down on the small table of her dormitory living room. There were… a lot more kidnappings around the Los Angeles area than she had thought there would be. Information wasn’t easy to come by either. Dyna expected to need little more than a simple search to pull up a list of all kidnappings in the county. She hadn’t been able to find anything like that. Instead, she had found a list of statistics. Having lived there, she never would have suspected that ninety thousand children…
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Chapter

Sanctuary

by Tower Curator — “Deeper… and deeper. Let your body and your mind calm. The tension in your shoulders, in your arms, in your chest… just let it all go and step to the third… step… now. Relax.” Sensory deprivation chambers always felt strange. They were small cylinders. More like metal coffins than actual chambers. Half-filled with water, the occupant was intended to relax and float on top, removing most sensations of gravity and the upward force of the ground or chairs or beds. With the water and air both…
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Chapter

Investigation

by Tower Curator — Emerald sniffed at the chill air biting her nostrils. Idaho Falls normally had a nature smell to it. Farmland, the Snake River, and the generally undeveloped area all gave it a natural scent. Without a large population and with the rising popularity of electronic vehicles—as slow as the people here were to adopt new technology—exhaust smog was effectively nonexistent. At the moment, however, Emerald didn’t smell much. Cold air had a way of deadening the senses. The natural senses, anyway.…
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Chapter

Your Mind

by Tower Curator — Dyna wasn’t sure what she expected from her mirror. An answer, she supposed. One way or another, she thought she would get some kind of answer. Instead, she simply got her own reflection. A perfectly normal girl stared back in the perfectly normal compact mirror. It didn’t even turn dark this time. Did that mean anything? The absence of a change to the mirror didn’t prove that it couldn’t change, only that this specific situation wasn’t enough to trigger it. Walking up to the left cell, the…
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Chapter

Retrospective

by Tower Curator — Dyna watched over Doctor Cross’ shoulder, not at all sure what she was looking at. A machine of some kind. The main body had three parts, all made from shiny silvery metal. A spherical chamber with several jutting canisters, a cylinder lit by a dozen bright green lasers shining into it, and a long narrow pipe connecting the two parts together. Cables, pipes, tubes, wires, and all manner of other dangling parts hung off the machine from nearly every point. Dyna wasn’t sure what the day’s tests…
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Chapter

History

by Tower Curator — “Sapphire,” Ruby snarled. “What are you doing here?” Dyna took a deep breath, beyond glad that Ruby was at her side. She patted at her chest, trying to get her heart to calm back down. Spooky movies, even ones she had seen before, always set her on edge. A good kind of edge, she often thought. They got her heart racing and her blood pumping. But the figure appearing out of nowhere while walking down otherwise vacant hallways of Psychodynamics caused more than just a small shock. If it had…
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Chapter

A Day Off

by Tower Curator — “Alright, Miss Graves. You may remove the apparatus.” Dyna straightened her back, gripping the handles built into the armrest of the chair to help pull herself forward. She reached up, undid a small buckle set under her chin, and slowly lifted a complex series of interlocking metal plates off her head. Cables and wires ran up into the ceiling. Most were for data transfer, but a few were connected to winches and counterbalance weights, causing the helmet to practically levitate away from her with…
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Chapter

Debriefing

by Tower Curator — With the emergency situation dying down, or at least not escalating any further, Dyna found herself able to sit still and relax for the first time in what felt like days, even though it had only been a few hours. The alleged safe house was little more than an abandoned arcade building. Dyna wasn’t sure how safe the blue and yellow checkered building actually was, but wood covered all the windows and a storage garage around the back hid the station wagon from any passing eyes. With Emerald casually…
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Chapter

Help

by Tower Curator — Dyna sat as still as she could. Only her eyes and her knee moved, both with a nervous tension. Her eyes darted back and forth between the little girl with red hair and the woman roughly her age with green hair. The older woman was on her phone, talking quietly in the far corner of the room. She kept her other hand locked onto a small silver pocket watch. Her thumb hovered just above the winding stem. The little girl concerned Dyna just a little more than the older one. After all, it was the little girl…
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Chapter

Pastries and Pursuit

by Tower Curator — Dyna had been given the incredibly imprecise instruction of bonding with her selected artifact. It was only after arriving in Idaho Falls that Dyna realized that Doctor Cross hadn’t told her how to actually do that. Neither had the technician, Harold—pretty much all he had done was complain about Doctor Cross. Under normal circumstances, she would simply have called them up and asked. There were two problems with that at the moment. The first was that neither had given her contact information. That…
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