Artifacts

 

Doctor Cross led Dyna back down into Psychodynamics. A different section of the underground research facility than she had visited last time, though the end destination was somewhat similar. Instead of a red leather chair in a room that looked like something out of the nineteen-twenties, there was a single large table. One with polished wood and smooth, sleek brass detail work.

Of course, Dyna wasn’t there for the table. The objects on the table interested her far more.

She watched through a mirrored glass as a pair of silver-suited individuals placed a simple glass vase on the table alongside a trio of other items. They held it with tongs, as if touching it through their gloves—which were even thicker than the ones Cross wore—would cause them to burst into flames.

“Artifacts,” Doctor Cross said as they set up the room. “Items, often mundane in appearance, that have gained anomalous properties through exposure to psionic energies. To most, they cause discomfort, paranoia, emotions that seem unnatural, or other feelings that can’t really be explained properly. To some, they may offer a sliver of their anomalous properties. Perhaps a gambler’s lucky chip offers them increased odds of being dealt a good hand. Or the fisherman’s tackle that always seems to catch the better fish.”

Crossing his arms, Cross looked to Dyna. “Mere slivers of their power. Those who can use the full extent of their abilities are called artificers. Not exactly an accurate usage of the word as the definition of artificer is a ‘skilled craftsman’ and not a user, but the administrators don’t see a need to change it despite my protests.”

“I… see?”

“I doubt that,” Cross said, looking back to the window. “Linguistic irritants aside, you display high probability of being an artificer. You passed the Bendall Test yet fail to display any traditional psychic abilities and your reaction to the resonant test almost confirm it. Now?”

He waited a moment, watching as the silver-suited men left the room. As soon as the far door hissed closed behind them, he motioned to the door in their room. The door, currently open, led to a small chamber through which there was another door that led into the room with the objects. More of an airlock, really.

In fact, it probably was an airlock.

“You will go in and select a single object. Whichever one feels the best to you. There is no wrong answer. As soon as you have it in hand, the door the men just left through will open. I will meet you in the following chamber.”

Dyna nodded her head. She already felt a mild tingling in her stomach. Excitement. Maybe a little apprehension. Those people who had been setting up the room had been wearing fully concealing suits and thick gloves. “Is it… safe?”

“That is a word with a muddled definition,” Cross said, fiddling with his rectangular glasses. “Every individual has their own concept of what safe is.”

“Dodging my question doesn’t instill confidence,” Dyna shot back.

“I am sure nothing irreversible will occur. We have teams on standby. Believe me when I say that we don’t want to lose such a valuable test subject so early in our experiments.”

Dyna narrowed her eyes, starting to wonder just what she had agreed to. “You mean at all.”

Cross blinked behind his glasses, slowly nodded his head, and then started to nod firmly. “Yes, of course. It would be a shame to lose you at all.”

The stiff way he spoke didn’t make Dyna any happier.

“If you would prefer to wait for Walter, I’m sure he’ll be with you some time this week. Next week at the latest.”

“No,” Dyna said, a little shocked at how quickly she responded. “No, I can do this. I just…”

“Nerves are not unexpected. I recommend taking a deep breath and letting it out nice and slow.”

Doing so, Dyna did feel a little better. Not great, but slightly less nervous. “Alright. So I just pick the one I like best?”

“Some artificers can tell exactly which artifact most aligns with them within seconds of entering the room. Others stand about and consider each, maybe even waving their hands over them to help decide. All you must not do is touch more than one. The first one you touch will be the one you must select. Failure to comply will result in the room being flooded with a sedative at which point you will be isolated and forcibly decoupled from the objects. I am told that it is not a pleasant experience.”

Dyna shuddered, picturing that glass chamber suspended over a pit. Waking up in that place didn’t sound fun. Adding ‘forcible decoupling’ sounded worse. “Glad you decided to mention that.”

“Whenever you are ready, step into the chamber,” Cross said, motioning toward the airlock.

Taking another breath, Dyna followed his instructions. The glass door hissed shut behind her. After a few audible beeps and the camera in the corner swiveling to watch her, the next door opened.

Instantly, Dyna felt a calming wave rush over her. All her anxiety and apprehension vanished, replaced with a certainty that everything would be fine. She couldn’t say where that feeling came from. Somewhere inside her.

At the Carroll Institute, it was impossible to go more than a few days without experiencing some psychic phenomenon. All initiates were given mandatory psychic resistance training to avoid complications with their peers. Because of that, Dyna knew well what it felt like to have her emotions manipulated. She could even stop it, to a degree, and fight back against the intrusive thoughts and feelings.

This felt nothing like that.

It was clearly unnatural. But Dyna wasn’t sure what to do. That uncertainty crept in, growing and growing until she realized that the permeating calm sensation wasn’t nearly strong enough to worry over. If she could upset herself just by thinking about it, Dyna could manage it.

Taking another breath, she stepped forward and into the room. Each of the four objects were set around the circular table at cardinal directions. None reached out to her instantly as Cross had suggested might happen, so she went with his other suggestion.

Stepping forward to the glass vase, Dyna held out her hand.

She held steady, several inches away from the glass to avoid accidentally bumping it, and just thought.

Nothing. No odd feelings. No strange sensations. No pull toward it.

Carefully stepping away—stumbling and falling onto the table would probably result in her being sedated—Dyna moved clockwise around the table.

The second item was a coin. A tarnished brass coin with a square hole in the middle. Lettering on the front had worn down and what text it had left had obviously originated from an East Asian country, though Dyna wasn’t sure which. She didn’t want to lean closer for a better look. Instead, she just held out her hand.

Dyna didn’t like the coin. The calm she felt upon entering the room disappeared when she put her hand over it. It was a feeling, but not a particularly good feeling. The calm returned when she pulled her hand away.

The next item, a sleek, modern pocket mirror with what almost looked like a camera lens on the cover, did the same thing as the coin. If anything, she felt even worse after holding her hand over it than she had with the coin.

Moving away once again calmed Dyna down.

The final artifact actually looked like what she might expect from the term. A… She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it was a conical piece of brown stone covered in carvings that might have been Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American or Mesoamerican writings, or even just the whittlings of a bored Boy Scout. She was not an expert in such things and couldn’t begin to recognize where the artifact might have come from.

Holding her hand over it, Dyna didn’t feel anything at all. Much like the vase, she just felt calm and neutral.

Two things that felt bad and two things that didn’t do anything. Doctor Cross had said to pick the one that felt the best, but… which felt the best? The vase and the stone obviously made her calmer, but was that what she should be looking for?

Looking up to the mirrored wall, Dyna frowned. She couldn’t see beyond the glass. Would Cross hear her if she talked?

Might as well try.

“None of them feel good. Some are just nothing, others make me feel uncomfortable. Is that what I’m looking for?”

Dyna waited a moment, but received no response. Scowling, her eyes flicked to one corner of the room where a spherical camera with five separate lenses hid behind a clear glass pane, watching her. They were surely listening. Was it part of the test to not speak to her?

Turning her back to the camera, Dyna started circling around the room once again. She didn’t want to pick up an object and have it be nothing at all. So then was the correct choice to pick from the objects that she had a stronger reaction to, even if that reaction was negative?

Then which one from there? The coin felt ‘better’ than the mirror, but only because the emotion was weaker.

Circling the table four more times, Dyna slowly came to a decision. One not exactly based around how she felt about the objects on the table in front of her, but a decision based on her memories of the compatibility test.

The end of the compatibility test, specifically. The moment where she finally displayed some kind of psionic abilities, even if that ability had destroyed the room as she had seen on Cross’ tablet.

She had felt bad. Uneasy, uncomfortable, paranoid, and all the things that Cross had said some people felt around these kind of objects.

Dyna’s hand reached out and hovered over the pocket mirror. If anything, it felt even worse than it had a few moments ago. The calm fled, replaced entirely with uncertainty and anxiety. What if the mirror was the wrong choice? Was there a wrong choice? Would she be invited back? Should she have waited for Walter? Was this unorthodox method that Cross wanted to use actually going to do anything at all for her?

Taking a breath and letting it out slowly, Dyna lowered her hand and picked up the pocket mirror.

It was small, circular, and folded shut to protect the glass on the inside. The exterior, some kind of silver metal, had a small lens that almost looked like a gemstone in the center of one side of the mirror, under the latch that would open the mirror back up. Maybe it was some kind of spy’s camera?

Belatedly, Dyna realized that she didn’t feel any of that anxiety or apprehension anymore. Not now that she had selected an item. The unnatural calming feeling did not return, but perhaps that had been nothing more than her own mind trying to relax as she told it to do so.

Before she could examine her feelings or the mirror any further, the door slid open. The two silver-suited men stood on the other side, one of which waved her through.

Walking through, she found herself in a simple room with another red leather chair, wood and brass paneling on the walls, and black and white marbled tile. As one of the silver men directed her toward the chair, Dyna couldn’t help but wonder how many of those rooms they had around the place.

This one didn’t have a front panel sitting on the other side of the chair. In its place, a clear pane of glass separated her from Doctor Cross and a small team of men with button-up shirts and striped ties. Researchers, probably.

“Well done,” Cross said, eyes locked onto the mirror in her hands.

“Did I pick correctly?”

“There was no correct or incorrect choice. I believe I mentioned that.”

Dyna honestly couldn’t remember if he had or not. Her hands trembled slightly and her nerves felt jittery. Like she had been nervous over something and now was feeling relief. In fact, that was exactly what had happened.

“If I might ask, what made you choose that object?”

Sinking into the red chair, she looked down at the mirror in her lap, flipping the latch to open it. There were two mirrors on the inside, one slightly curved to make her appear larger than normal. She flipped it over in her hands, noting a small dent in one side of the metal cover and again noting the lens. Faint markings etched the metal around the lens, like something had been there to help disguise it but had since been removed.

“It had the strongest feeling. The vase and the stone felt like nothing at all. The other thing made me feel bad, but not quite to the same degree as this.”

“You chose the ones that made you feel bad?”

Dyna shuddered. He had nothing but curiosity in his tone, but it still felt like he was accusing her. “Was that wrong?”

“Again, there were no incorrect answers.”

“Oh.” Looking down at the mirror, she closed then opened it a few times before looking up to the glass pane where Doctor Cross had his eyes firmly fixed on her. “What is it?”

“That, subject, is zero-three-one-seven. Also known as the Operative’s Looking Glass. It belonged to a Secret Intelligence Service operative whose name has been redacted from all records, but was supposedly quite the agent. It was manufactured in the United Kingdom as an espionage device, but little else is known about its origins.”

So it was a spy camera. “What does it do?”

“That, Dyna, is for you to figure out. Every artifact results in different effects dependent on the artificer. They do generally share a theme, the theme of this one is, of course, espionage.”

“So it spies on people? Assisted clairvoyance?” Dyna couldn’t help but get excited over that. Clairvoyants were some of the more common psychics at Carroll. Being able to see things from far away might not be as directly impactful as mind control or even mind reading, but it might be fun to go to Vegas for a weekend and win some poker hands.

Not that she would. Gambling violated the Carroll Institute’s code of conduct. If found out, she would be expelled instantly.

Unfortunately, Cross just shrugged his shoulders. “Normally, we would have you isolated here for a brief bonding period. That is impossible as of this moment. We don’t want you around other psychics with that item before it fully binds to you, so I have elected to purchase you a hotel room in the city. Spend the night there, return to Carroll tomorrow morning and report on anything you have noticed about the device.”

“I can’t just sit around in this room?” The chair might not be that comfortable as a chair, but give her a blanket and Dyna could sleep just about anywhere she could sit.

“Details are classified,” Cross said, face blank. “I’m afraid Psychodynamics has a great many secrets that you will likely never be privy to.”

“Alright. I guess. So check into a hotel and…”

“Just keep the artifact close at hand. No need to keep others from touching it, but do try to avoid losing it. Recovering artifacts is always a pain in the backside. Sometimes literally with how much paperwork there is to do.”

Closing the mirror and holding it close, Dyna said, “I won’t let it out of my sight.”

“Excellent. My assistant…” Cross trailed off while looking to one of the tie-wearing researchers in the room with him. He frowned a moment before shaking his head. “This young man will give you the details of your hotel. You may take the shuttle into the city, which should leave in twenty minutes,” he said after consulting his watch.

The indicated assistant frowned at his boss, said something that Dyna couldn’t hear through the speakers. Cross must have turned the microphone off completely, as they apparently had a brief argument. The argument resulted in the assistant sighing, rolling his eyes, and then looking toward her. He reached forward and pressed a button on the computer terminal next to him.

“My name is Harold,” he said, bushy mustache wiggling as he specifically stated the name that Cross had likely just forgotten. “Or Doctor Porter, if you wish. I’ll meet you in the hall. Jenkins, escort her out, please?”

One of the silver-suited men approached her and, without speaking, motioned toward a door behind the chair.

Keeping the mirror close to her chest, Dyna stood, eager to get moving.

Eager to find out just what the little mirror did.