A Gift for Cross

 

Doctor Phillip Cross stepped away from the terminal screen with a sad shake of his head. They were getting nowhere. The small fog-emitting machine demonstrated exactly one anomalous effect and it was nowhere near the level of proper artifacts. The only unusual property of the fog machine was that it didn’t need to be refilled or charged. It could run perpetually and indefinitely—or at least for seven days, the longest they had tried thus far—and would emit the same level of white clouds of fog, never diminishing or even thinning out.

According to their instruments, its psionic energy emissions were between one-tenth and one-fiftieth of a proper artifact. Higher than the average object, but barely worth noting. A random pencil taken from one of the Carroll Institute lecture halls would probably read the same.

And the girl…

Invariably, artifacts caused mental changes in those bound to them. The degree of the mental changes varied. Not everyone came out like Sapphire. But the girl Delta brought in showed no changes in electrochemical patterns. That could just mean that she wasn’t bound to the potential artifact…

But Phillip had a hypothesis that the potential artifact, despite its anomalous effects, was simply too weak to actually bind to anyone at all.

That didn’t mean he was disappointed. If anything, this vindicated him and his theories. If this did eventually become a proper artifact, it would prove that there could be in-between states. Periods where the ordinary item wasn’t so ordinary but not yet an artifact.

Phillip’s eyes flicked up through the shielded glass. The girl—Mel, he found on his terminal notes—was obviously frustrated and agitated. She had accomplished nothing during these tests. Despite having Dyna as a witness, she was starting to doubt her own claims of creating physical objects.

That was somewhat disappointing. Phillip would have liked to witness such an event with his own eyes. Perhaps later on, should it actually turn into an artifact proper.

But for that to happen, it needed a constant influx of psionic energy—at least according to Philip’s models. It wouldn’t get that outside this testing. And the administrators were stonewalling his request to release the object into the custody of either Mel—the hypothetical owner of the artifact—or Dyna—the literal owner. The administrators wanted it kept in Psychodynamics and under observation.

Until he could get it released, they had to keep psychics nearby. Preferably the two who were around it for the initial instantiation event.

“Continue the experiment,” Phillip said. He wasn’t quite sure who he was actually talking to. Whoever was the senior technician. There were five others, all performing various duties and monitoring for any problems. As long as one of them kept things going, he didn’t care who it was.

Command given, Phillip stepped outside the observation room.

He had other tasks. Other duties. Other experiments.

Not to mention reports to write and petitions to the administrators to finalize. Ever since Henry ran off, his workload had tripled. It was almost enough to have him put in a request with management for a new secretary or assistant. But not quite.

His demeanor was apparently so disagreeable that it drove someone to defection. Repeating that incident would reflect poorly on him. Worse than it already was.

A few months ago and he felt like the administrators would have released the fog machine upon his first request. Whatever status he had possessed had clearly tarnished.

“Beatrice,” Phillip called as he walked through the hallway toward his office. “Schedule a session in the Level 3 Test Laboratories for… one week from today. Purpose: High-level psionic infusion of PA-0083. Request the presence of all available artificers and Mel.”

“Understood,” Beatrice chimed, then immediately started talking again. “Schedule conflict with Doctor Teeth for use of L3 Laboratories. Next Friday is clear.”

“Very well.” With Beatrice, he wasn’t quite sure that he really needed a new secretary. There were some things she couldn’t do—namely anything physical—but plenty that she was more than happy to provide her assistance with. “Schedule my previous request for that Friday.”

“Schedule made. Notification requests to relevant personnel sending now.”

“Excell—”

A few chimes that didn’t come from Beatrice echoed down the hall from the direction of the upcoming intersection. Phillip flicked his eyes up to the mirrors set at hall intersections to prevent the collision of people moving equipment around blind corners.

He immediately grimaced at the monochrome figure checking her phone just around the corner.

Phillip turned on his heel, spotted the nearest door, and made toward it. He only managed two steps before a grating voice called out to him.

“Doctor!”

Phillip forced the grimace off his face as he turned to the girl with black and white striped stockings, black and white striped… arm-glove-sleeve things—he didn’t know what they were supposed to be—and matching makeup. She stepped right up to him while he just kept his back stiff and tried to avoid looking directly at her piercing white eyes.

“Hematite? Can I help you?”

“Sorry to bother you,” she said, sounding completely honest. Holding out her phone, she angled it for Phillip to see a message on the screen. The notification that Beatrice just made. “You sent this, right?”

“Is there a problem?”

“I just…” Hematite slumped her shoulders. “I can’t do anything. Whatever you want me for, I’ll just be dead weight, right?”

“It was a request,” Phillip said, extra emphasis the word. “I am not Walter. I don’t have the authority to order you people around. If you don’t want to, then don’t. In fact, please don’t.”

“No?” She winced as if he had shouted at her—which he most certainly had not—and then looked down at the message on her phone. “So it was a mistake?” she asked, eyes turning watery for some reason. “Of course it was. That makes sense. I can’t do anything.”

Phillip watched her as she turned and fled down the hall, running with her phone clutched to her chest.

No one in their right mind would suggest, even as a joke, that Phillip Cross was a ‘people person’. At the same time, he doubted anyone would blame him for his utter stupor in this moment. Did Hematite want to go or did she not want to go? He doubted the world’s greatest psychologists could explain the girl’s thought processes to him. Mostly because the Carroll Institute employed several of the best psychologists around and they had all given up on figuring out Hematite.

Phillip didn’t enjoy interacting with the artificers. They could be interesting case studies or useful for their interactions with artifacts, but every single one of them had personality flaws ranging from annoying to incomprehensible. Sapphire was the former. Harmless, but a step too strange for Phillip to deal with. Hematite was the opposite, impossible to comprehend and dangerous.

She was a precognitive, but a fairly weak one. She would be a threat to nobody were it not for her artifact. Despite his position as head of the Anomalous Materials Research Division—and thus artifacts—Phillip wasn’t sure what Hematite’s artifact was or what it did. He had been brought into the organization after Hematite had been settled in. Despite his best efforts, all her files had already been classified beyond his ability to access. All he knew was that her artifact did something and that something was enough to give her a flawless operational record. Not even Emerald had a perfect record of successful operations.

“Beatrice,” Phillip said, now that he was certain Hematite was gone. “Unless otherwise stated, please leave Hematite out of any future correspondences I may request.”

“Understood.”

Nodding, more to himself than anyone else, Phillip continued on his way back toward his office.

Arriving with no further interruptions, he took a seat at his desk and immediately began work on a fresh proposal draft for the administrators. He had no reason to believe that it would actually go through, but if nothing else, outlining the course of an experiment in detail helped him think. He could analyze and reiterate upon his ideas, refining them. Inevitably, the administrators would grant him authorization to pursue artifact creation through the medium of Onyx. When that happened, he wanted to be ready.

“Doctor Cross?”

Pulling his fingers away from the keyboard, he glanced up. First at the clock on the monitor—he had been typing for an hour at this point—then to his open door. Hadn’t he locked it? Phillip honestly couldn’t remember.

“Ah,” he said. “Delta.”

“Dyna.”

“Yes, yes. I’m a bit…” He trailed off.

Onyx stood in the doorway, looking like she wasn’t sure if she should come in or not. She was a bit of an odd one. All artificers were, but Onyx had this odd habit about projecting either confidence or insecurity—often flipping between the two at any change in the given external situation. At the moment, she was displaying more of the insecure side, standing with shoulders drawn together and a thick silver case held in both hands.

That case was what actually caught Phillip’s eye. He recognized it immediately, of course. One of the shielded cases to insulate psionic emissions. They were sometimes used to store sensitive equipment. Other times, they would hold unbound artifacts.

In Onyx’s hands, Phillip suspected the latter.

“I’m a bit busy,” Phillip said, restarting his sentence. “But I can spare a few moments.”

“Sorry. I was going to let you know that I wanted to talk later on, but then I sat around waiting for Hematite for twenty minutes and she never showed, so I figured why not come by now.”

Drama between the artificers? Phillip didn’t particularly care, so he didn’t ask. He gestured to one of the seats on the opposite side of his desk in an attempt to get her to talk about whatever she actually came here to talk about.

Luckily for him, she seemed to pick up on that. Rather than take a seat, however, she placed the silver case on his desk and turned it to face him. It had two simple latches with no locking mechanism. A low security case.

“We talked about this the other day—or week?—ago. Right after the fog machine incident. You probably don’t remember because it was a bit busy then and you were focused on all that stuff.”

“You’re right. I don’t recall.”

“It’s the other project I wanted to bring to you.”

“Potential artifact?”

“I… I don’t think so.” She pulled out a randi reader from her pocket and set it down next to the case. “It has anomalous properties, but barely hits fifty on this thing.”

Phillip picked up the cheap plastic device, made at one of the 3D printers down in engineering. They were supposedly early edition prototypes. More proof of concepts than anything else. Yet Phillip occasionally saw them around the institute in active use. “This is hardly a precise measuring device.”

“It’s close enough. I don’t need exact decimal points down to the thousandth place to tell that my mirror is an artifact and this isn’t.”

“Mhm…” Cross looked down to the case, partially itching to open it, partially wary of what he might find. He had extensive psionic resistance training, but some artifacts held properties that would completely bypass mental resistances. No matter how much he thought about it, the Gravity Stone physically nullified gravity in a small area around it. “Danger level?”

“Uh… None?”

That didn’t sound confident at all.

Standing, Phillip moved over to a closet in the room and withdrew a different prototype. A mask. One covered in hexagonal mirrored tiles. A psionic insulator based off the Tartarus design. It had a lower threshold than the standard suits, but it was also far easier to put on. Unfortunately, it required him to remove his regular glasses.

With it on, Phillip returned to his desk. “For the record, I knew nothing about this project prior to this moment. It was not sanctioned or endorsed in any way.”

Onyx rolled her eyes.

Phillip ignored her as he popped open the latches.

Inside was a set of safety glasses, tinted slightly blue with circuit board-like patterns etched near its edges. The sensors on Phillip’s mask registered a marginal increase in psionic energy now that it was out in the open, but Onyx had been right. It was nowhere near other artifacts. More testing might discover something else, but for now, he doubted this was anything more than the fog machine.

“I was trying to make a device that would let me see into the other side,” Onyx explained. “I don’t have an engineering degree, or anything else relevant, but I thought I could avoid that with my power. Just make something out of nothing that would do what I wanted it to do. I didn’t think it was working at all until November showed up and basically proved it. For all I know, it was working the very first night I tried and just couldn’t tell until November tried them on, but it represents about three weeks of thinking about it.

“What really made me want to bring it in is that… it worked for both of us. Artifacts only work for their owner, right? But she put this on and could see things. I put it on and could see things.”

“November is an anomaly,” Phillip said, carefully picking up the glasses. “Nothing that holds true for it is likely to apply to anyone else.”

“Yes. Maybe that’s true. Maybe not. That’s why I’m bringing them to you. I figure you’ll be able to figure out a whole lot more than I could. And maybe whatever you figure out will help me with some… uh… completely unrelated projects I’ve got going on.”

Phillip gave her a quick look. “Should we expect more incidents like that of the fog machine going forward?” he asked as he placed the glasses back in the case. There was a slight temptation to don them himself, but he wasn’t a psychic. Artifacts would never work for him. Some might be disappointed with that, but not Phillip. It took one look at the collective artificers to feel relief.

“I… took some precautions. Maybe though. Hopefully not.” Onyx paused. “Any progress with that, by the way?”

“Not at this time. You should have received a message regarding an upcoming experiment. Assuming the fog machine is like your mirror, a large influx of psionic energy brought about by multiple psychics may provide it the catalyst it needs to fully instantiate.”

“I did get that, yes,” Onyx said, nodding her head. “But is it necessary? Mel really did make a cup of coffee and it was only me with her at the time.”

“Nothing else has produced results. If you have ideas…”

Onyx frowned, pinching her chin. “There must be something we’re missing.”

Phillip tapped a few times on his terminal, pulling up the live feed from the ongoing experiment. He turned the screen to face Onyx, who leaned forward and stared.

“You don’t have her touching the machine or the smoke?”

“We’ve tried that.”

“She was miming with the smoke when it happened, playing with it and pretending it was real. I’m pretty sure that was in my report.”

“Yes, it was.” Phillip sighed. “Each experiment to replicate the incident varies slightly. Trying to change a single variable at a time so that we might eliminate that as a possibility.”

“Have you tried outside? You didn’t when I was trying to help with the experiment, but I don’t know what you’ve tried since.”

“The administrators would prefer if the object remain under the control of Psychodynamics.”

“Maybe just outside the shielded rooms? There is a lot more psionic energy outside, isn’t there? Maybe that…” Onyx trailed off, closing her eyes in clear thought.

“Something wrong?”

“I’m just trying to remember if other people were around. There probably were. Maybe observation would help?”

“There are always observers.”

“Inside the chamber? Exposed to Mel’s illusions?” Onyx waved a hand at the screen. “This doesn’t do anything at all. We can’t actually see what she is trying. Just me alone didn’t help, but maybe several people?” She nodded to herself twice before waving a hand at the blue-tinted glasses in the case. “Yes. Isn’t that how the other side is supposed to work too? People think which forms things over there. That’s why things don’t normally look all that different with the glasses on. Everyone has thought about the buildings enough that they’ve solidified over there. The trucks weren’t over there because not enough people had been thinking about them. What if the fog machine works in reverse? Using Mel’s powers to make people think that something is here enough to actually bring it here. I might not count because I made that fog machine. Or maybe because I was thinking her powers did something else…”

She stood abruptly. “Which room is that?” she asked, peering down at the screen. Before Phillip could answer, she noticed the text in the corner stating the camera feed name, nodded to herself, and rushed out of the room.

Phillip started to stop her—interrupting an ongoing experiment could invalidate all the results—but decided against it at the last moment. They could always repeat the experiment later. If Onyx thought she figured something out…

“Beatrice, ensure she has access to the test chamber.”

“Understood.”

Phillip, swinging the screen back around to his desk fully, sat down and picked up the glasses Onyx had left behind once again. Onyx appeared on the screen after a minute and, following a brief discussion with Mel, sat down on the edge of the table. Both started staring at the fog coming from the machine. Aside from the fog, nothing was visible. Mel’s abilities were mental illusions. With her shielded away as she was, no one could actually perceive them.

Perhaps Dyna had a point.

Unfortunately, nothing happened on screen immediately. Phillip found himself turning the glasses over in his hands. It wasn’t long before he found a small switch at the back of one of the ear pieces. Blue LED lights shined out from the earpieces, illuminating the lenses and, especially, the etchings. With the protective mask still in place, he couldn’t wear the glasses, but he could hold them up to peer through them.

Phillip just about dropped the glasses.

His room looked different through the cheap lenses. Not just blue as one might expect from blue-tinted glasses, but filled with rock and stone. Around the door and along a small path to his desk, it was mostly normal, but the walls looked unfinished. Like they were still part of the old mining tunnels that the Idaho National Laboratory had originally been built upon. The mining tunnels that later became Psychodynamics.

Onyx had tried to make a device that would let her see into the other side. From November, Onyx, and Ruby, they had some early guesses as to how the place worked. Onyx had just explained it. Thought. Psionic emissions colored in the other side like it was a painting.

Few people came into Phillip’s office. When he had to meet with someone, it was usually in a laboratory or meeting room. His office door and the path to the desk looked normal, but not the rest of the room.

Phillip’s mind quickly came up with a preliminary hypothesis. He was not psychic. His psionic emissions were near zero—not quite zero, but close enough to leave the canvas blank. Other people, people who walked past his door or entered his office, paid attention to their immediate path and the desk where he usually sat, thus moving brush strokes across the painting in those locations while leaving the walls and rest of the room mostly blank.

Sure enough, turning around, Phillip found the wall behind him looking normal when viewed through the glasses. At least, it was above the desk. Below the desk, it turned to rock once again. Where people couldn’t see.

Onyx had created something that worked.

Not just that, but something he, a psionic null, could use. And he could use it through the protective mask. That rather implied that the image he was viewing on the lenses was somehow real. Not a psionic phenomenon transmitted into his mind.

Anomalous, but acting on its own without any psychic input from him.

Not an artifact? Or, at least, a nascent artifact.

Before he could investigate further, two sharp announcement tones sounded through his office speakers. “Doctor Cross, report to Test Chamber 3 immediately.”

Flicking the switch on the back of the glasses to the off position, the rocky depiction of his office vanished, replaced by a simple blue tint through ordinary plastic lenses. Not only was it anomalous, but it could be turned off? He wanted to investigate more now. It was something he could investigate personally, rather than vicariously through test subjects. That alone was a novel.

But following that announcement from Beatrice, he glanced back at the camera feed on his terminal.

Mel looked drained and exhausted, yet had a wide smile as she held… something. Phillip couldn’t quite see what. The problem was Onyx. The girl was jumping up and down in front of the camera, waving her arms.

Something happened.

Onyx’s plan—whatever that had been—had worked?

Regretting not insisting on more details beforehand, Phillip placed the glasses into the case and sealed it, stood and calmly walked out of his office.

This time, he double checked the lock on the door, ensuring it was set.