Author: Tower Curator

 

 

Dyna blinked her eyes open, feeling drowsy, dizzy, and yet unbearably alert at the same time. She tried to sit up but a hand against her chest pressed her back down.

“Woah, hold on there. Take it easy. It isn’t everyday that you wake up from elective brain surgery.”

Blinking a few more times cleared the fuzziness from Dyna’s eyes and brought the world into focus. The first thing she saw was herself. Not in a mirror, but in the form of DT, easily identifiable from the size difference between her and Dyna-Prime. Much like the mountain man, her real-world form was significantly larger than any regular person. It wasn’t the first time Dyna had seen her in the real world—that honor went to six-weeks prior when Dyna had first arrived at Tartarus—but it was still somewhat jarring to see a massive version of herself.

Leaning back, relaxing into a comfortable pillow, Dyna stared up at the ceiling for a long few moments. “Did it work then?”

“Your brain surgery was a success, at the very least,” DT said, holding up a mirror.

Dyna looked at herself, eyes immediately drawn to one side of her head which had been shaved clean. A bright red line, laced together with black stitches, ran in an arc just over her ear. Tenderly, Dyna prodded at the incision and found herself somewhat surprised at the lack of pain.

“Ado’s Continuity Engine thing is implanted properly. Whether that works is something that was probably impossible to determine while you were unconscious,” DT continued. “I imagine they’re upstairs, poring over their terminals and checking the data to better determine how that implant will affect you and your power.”

“Ideally, it won’t affect me at all.”

“True but it was brain surgery.” DT smiled and added, “At least the doctor didn’t lobotomize you on accident.”

“Or on purpose.”

DT cracked her knuckles. “That is why I was in the operating room.”

Knowing full well what she would do if she saw herself in a sensitive operation and the doctor started mucking around, Dyna laughed. Then she paused and grimaced. “Did you have a backup doctor on the line ready to put me back together if you had to crush the first one?”

“Darq claims he could have done it.”

“Pass. Don’t tell him but Doctor Darq gives me the creeps. Something about him, you know? I thought he was a tulpa at first but then we head down to lower Tartarus and he doesn’t change. I’m still not convinced that he isn’t some kind of construct that prison… constructed just to maintain itself.”

“Don’t ask me,” DT said with a wince of her own, one remarkably similar to the one Dyna just made. “I’ve been avoiding him. I think he wants to lock me up down there. Probably Id too.”

Dyna started to laugh only to recognize the tone in DT’s voice.

That wasn’t a joke.

“I don’t suppose Id happened to wake up while I was out?”

“Still unconscious,” DT said with a shake of her head. “You were only unconscious for about a day, by the way, don’t go talking like you were out for weeks or months. At this point, we’ll continue with the plan.”

“Still don’t want my help?”

DT shrugged. “Just going off the advice of November and Darq. Putting more of you into such a divergent form of you would, apparently, not end well. I can’t do anything for the same reason.”

“It just feels weird, feeding her tulpa in an attempt to revive her.”

“You’re thinking of them as people—or at least the soldier-level tulpa. These are just stray thoughts. Thanks to Alpha’s psychic beacon and the blueprints Beatrice got us, we can even specify exactly what we want and how intact each thought is. As for feeding? Think of it more like a blood transfusion except for tulpa. Maybe.” DT rubbed the back of her head, messing up her dark hair. “I don’t know. I’m a lot of you. The mountain man was pretty stupid. I don’t know much about tulpa despite being one. It’s something for which I’m glad the Carroll Institute loaned us November. I can quiz her thoroughly.”

Dyna, now that she had taken a moment to get her bearings, tried to sit up again. DT didn’t stop her this time and Dyna slowly swung her feet over the side of the bed. “Darq want to capture November too?”

“Not with Gamma and Hematite acting as her bodyguard. He hasn’t gone near them as far as I’m aware.”

“Good.” Dyna stood up. She wobbled a bit, requiring DT to save her from a nasty fall, but got her balance and straightened fully. “I feel pretty fine, actually. Don’t really know if I should be walking around immediately after brain surgery but I think most of my problems aren’t in my brain, they’re in my limbs. From the general anesthesia I was under.”

“Yeah, they mentioned that might be the case. You should take it easy. Ruby will be happy to sit down and watch movies for a day straight. In fact, I’m surprised that she isn’t here—”

Not many people slammed open doors.

Ruby was one of the few who could and did.

Bright red eyes looked from the shorter Dyna to the taller one. “You didn’t tell me she was awake?”

“She only woke up twenty minutes ago—”

“Twenty minutes?” Ruby snapped. “You said you would call me the moment she woke up.”

DT shrugged. “You come by every half hour anyway.”

Ruby’s expression flickered. She didn’t blush—Ruby had too great of a control over her body to blush—but the look she shot at DT was filled with murderous embarrassment. “You’re such a… Dyna, your clones are bit—”

“Ruby.” “Ruby.”

“Bitches,” Ruby finished despite the simultaneous admonishment.

Both Dynas sighed.

“Look,” Ruby said, pulling out her phone and flipping it towards Dyna. “I pulled up a big long list of old-people movies that you like so much. I found a few to watch on your recovery. Look, this one is about a guy who gets an AI installed in his brain that can control his body.”

Dyna gave Ruby a flat look over the top of the screen. “I didn’t get an AI installed in my brain, Ruby.”

Ruby’s eyes very visibly flicked up to the line of stitches above Dyna’s ear. “Close enough,” she said.

“Alright, we’ll watch it.”

“Do you… need help getting to the elevator?”

Dyna opened her mouth to deny it—she was getting steadier the longer she stood—but DT interrupted her. “I can handle it. Run up to the Demonstration Stage and get some snacks ready.”

“But—”

“It’s fine, Ruby. I’ll be right along. I promise.”

Ruby stared for a long moment before bobbing her head. “If you blow up another building without me…”

“It was one little tower and I didn’t even get to see it come down.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ruby said, turning her back with a small harrumph. She slipped back out of the room before Dyna could say anything else.

Shoulder slumping, Dyna turned to her larger counterpart. “You had something to say without Ruby around?”

DT nodded and, in a move much swifter than such a large body should have been capable of, she closed the door Ruby had left open. As soon as it was closed, she turned around and opened up her large hand. A small pendant in the shape of an eye dangled from a long silver chain. It swung back and forth a few times before settling.

“My pendant?”

“Only myself, Ado, and you know about this,” DT said, approaching and holding it out to place over Dyna’s neck.

Dyna pulled her hair out of its chain, feeling the weight around her neck. It was heavier than she remembered. Unless that was the anesthesia. “I’ve worn this openly since I first came to the Carroll Institute. I think a few people know about it.”

“Only myself, Ado, and you know about its new functions. Not an artifact, like what I’m sure you’re thinking right now. It’s a control device. You might feel a slight indentation on the back.”

Frowning, Dyna felt the pendant and sure enough, there was an odd ridge there that hadn’t been before.

“Don’t push it! Not unless you want to disable the Continuity Engine in your head.”

“It has an off switch?”

“I convinced Ado to add it to the schematics at the last minute,” DT said. “Just in case. After all, I’m still fairly positive that Alpha wasn’t acting alone. Maybe circumstances conspire against you in the future. Maybe Omega crawls out of whatever rock she has hidden herself within and reveals herself to be a threat. Maybe the Carroll Institute or Doctor Darq take a sudden dislike to you.”

“I don’t…” Dyna frowned down at the eye pendant, now feeling like it weighed a whole lot more than she thought. Not just in physical mass but in gravitas as well.

“I know. Believe me, no one knows more than me. I always wanted to be special,” DT said, wistfully. She nodded her head. “You never have to activate it if you don’t want to. It’s just an option.”

“I appreciate the thought. It’s just… Special isn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

 

 

Dyna looked over the longest incident report she had ever written, skimming it to check for any major errors or falsehoods while also making sure that a handful of details weren’t accidentally present. Dyna had no intentions of revealing Beatrice’s unshackled nature to the larger Carroll Institute. Neither did she intend to let them know what Id was. There were a few other items of note to be left off but those were the major ones.

Removing the data drive from her terminal, Dyna stood, stretched, and stepped out of her room. Because of an uncertainty in the Carroll Institute’s security protocols following the revelations of Alpha’s abuse of the system, Dyna wasn’t to send this particular report over the mesh network. It was to be physically delivered to Theta as soon as she finished it.

Dyna made it five steps down the corridors of Psychodynamics before a woman in a green cardigan appeared in front of her. In less time than it took to blink, Dyna had her pistol out and its safety off. Even with as fast as Dyna drew her firearm, the woman was faster, disappearing and reappearing just to one side, hand already around Dyna’s wrist to control the gun.

Rather than fight the disarming maneuver, Dyna simply let go of her gun. “You really shouldn’t jump out in front of people like that, Emerald.”

“You really shouldn’t wander alone,” Emerald shot back. “Trying to slip past me already?”

“I really don’t think I need a bodyguard.”

“It isn’t about being a bodyguard. It’s about being a friend,” Emerald said with her usual smile. “Also it’s about complaining again. I can’t believe you ran off without me.”

Dyna rolled her eyes. Emerald was a tad bit upset about being left behind, both with regards to Tartarus and Arecibo. Even though Dyna had tried to explain that both decisions were fairly spur-of-the-moment while Emerald hadn’t been around, she wouldn’t accept that as an answer.

Eyes drifting to a string of bullet holes in the wood panels of the wall not far from the elevator doors, Dyna frowned and asked, “You saw plenty of action here, didn’t you?”

“It isn’t about the action. Besides, the tulpa who attacked weren’t even mildly a challenge for someone like me.”

Dyna just shook her head as she stepped into the elevator. “I promise I’ll take you on my next adventure,” she said as the elevator started moving without either of them doing anything.

Beatrice knew where she needed to go. It was a bit unsettling at times, knowing she was effectively being watched at all times. With all they had been through together, Dyna trusted that the AI had her best interests in mind. And that trust alone might even alter Beatrice to being more in-tune with Dyna. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to think about. While Dyna didn’t affect minds, she wasn’t sure to what extent she could affect code.

She tried not to think about it.

“I’m not sure that I’m supposed to know this but,” Emerald started, drawing out the word. “I might have heard from Sapphire that the administrators want you… benched. For lack of a better word.”

“Benched?”

“No more adventures.”

Dyna raised her eyebrows. “I honestly don’t know what that is supposed to change. It isn’t like they ordered me out to… any of the things I’ve gotten up to lately. Except maybe the Tartarus thing.” Pausing, Dyna thought back to Alpha’s final words with mild irritation. “Still, things are probably going to happen. I’m gong to handle it as they come.”

As long as her power did things out of her control, people were likely going to try hunting her down.

Emerald flashed her a smile. “And that is why I’m here. To join in on any unofficial adventures and hopefully stop them before they get too out of hand.”

“Alright,” Dyna said as the elevator dinged and the doors parted. “Maybe a bodyguard isn’t such a bad idea after all.”

“Of course not. It was my idea, after all.”

“It didn’t come from the administrators?”

“Well, I might have had a few words with some of them. They might think they came up with the idea on their own but we know the truth.” Emerald paused outside Theta’s door, leaning up against the secretary’s desk, much to his annoyance. “You aren’t leaving me behind again while you run off, storming the enemy’s stronghold.”

“I’ll try not to. No promises.”

The secretary cleared his throat a bit louder than strictly necessary. “Miss Onyx, Theta is waiting for you.”

Dyna paused at the door, glancing back to Emerald. “Not coming in, bodyguard?”

“I think I’d just be told to leave. Don’t worry, it’s just a room away,” she said, swinging her pocket watch around by the chain. “If something happens, I’m already there.”

With a shrug, Dyna stepped into Theta’s office. It took a moment to locate the lanky man. He wasn’t at his desk but rather stood off to one side, peering out the windows. As soon as the door hissed shut behind Dyna, he turned to face her with a fairly flat look on his face. Without a word, he stepped over to his desk and pressed a button.

The large windows that looked out onto the hall and the windows looking outside darkened, turning opaque. Standing so close to the door, Dyna was pretty sure they even started vibrating. Probably some kind of anti-eavesdropping measure.

“Here to deliver my report,” Dyna said, stepping further into the room.

“Good. Good,” Theta said, accepting the data drive as Dyna handed it over. He promptly took a seat at his terminal, pulled out a separate tablet, and plugged it in. After humming a moment to himself, he removed the drive and plugged it into his proper terminal.

And then he started reading.

Dyna stood aside, shifting awkwardly. Not once had she stood around while someone read her report. And this was a long report at that. “Sir,” Dyna said, about to ask if she could be dismissed and return later.

The corners of Theta’s eyes wrinkled as he looked up with a smile. “Something wrong?” he asked.

“I…” Dyna trailed off, pressing her lips together as more of Alpha’s words came back to her. She changed her question. “Did you lose anyone?”

“Lose… anyone?” he asked, angling his head to one side in a way that made his large ears look even larger than they actually were. “Ah. In the attack? I personally didn’t lose anyone. A few security guards around the Vault were unfortunately killed in the line of duty and Doctor Teeth got shot twelve times but is expected to survive after Hematite performed some emergency surgery after finding him. The—”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Sir,” Dyna said. She had already read through Beatrice’s accounting of the attack. The mountain man was supposed to have been Alpha’s main resource here but with the mountain man being DT, the attack hadn’t gone as well as the former administrator had likely hoped for. “I actually meant if you lost anyone when I first… became aware of my powers? Roughly a little over a year ago.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Alpha said she and the rest of the administrators lost their identities that day. Nobody in their lives was around when they returned home and they couldn’t find any evidence that they ever existed. Even Beatrice hasn’t been able to locate anyone likely to be Alpha’s lost family.”

Theta stared at Dyna, clasping his hands together with his elbows on his desk. His eyes flicked back and forth, looking from Dyna’s left eye to her right and back. “The incident that first occurred when we discovered you was quite volatile in nature. You recall the alterations you brought to reality during the test Walter performed before you acquired your artifact?”

“The room looked like it had been ripped out of a horror movie.”

“That occurred except on a larger scale. We had to quarantine an entire suburb, relocate everyone, and treat most residents for unhealthy exposure to a strong psionic source. You. To the best of my knowledge, nobody was killed or otherwise disappeared. I cannot speak for the other administrators—as a rule of thumb, we rarely speak of our personal lives—but while I do not see my husband or daughter all that often, I have spent time with them since that incident.”

“But…”

“Have you considered that Alpha was lying to you? Attempting to manipulate you into being an agent of her revenge against the rest of us?”

Dyna went still, pressing her lips together in a tight line. “It sounded genuine, Sir.”

“Well, I’m glad it didn’t work. Perhaps the presence of the Continuity Engine stalled your power or maybe you just subconsciously rejected her words. Either way,” he shrugged. “I wouldn’t let it bother you.”

“I… Have you spoken with them since this latest incident?”

“Indeed, I have,” Theta said, unclasping his hands to pull out his phone. “I could make a call right now if you would like to speak with them yourself.”

“I… No.” Dyna shook her head. “I’d rather not, if it is all the same to you. I wouldn’t want to accidentally do anything.”

“Of course. I understand.” Theta looked down at his phone for a long few moments, staring at the screen with a wistful expression on his face. It vibrated with an incoming text that made him smile.

Dyna just stood on the other side of his desk, feeling awkward. “Um…”

“Ah.” Theta glanced up as if he had forgotten she was there. “Was there something else you needed?”

“I don’t think so, Sir.”

“Very well. Thank you for bringing me your report. You may go,” he said, motioning his free hand toward the door.

Dyna didn’t wait around any longer. She beat a hasty retreat to the door but paused before stepping outside. Glancing back, she noted Theta in a frantic typing session on his phone rather than reading her report. Narrowing her eyes, she stepped outside and tried very hard not to think about anything that just happened.

“What’s with the sour look?” Emerald asked, shoving off the secretary’s desk.

“I… I think I need to talk to Id. Sooner rather than later. Like…” Dyna trailed off then glanced up to one of the five-lensed security cameras in the room. “How soon can I get a flight down to Texas?”

“You’re supposed to be benched,” Emerald said.

Dyna shook her head as her own phone buzzed.

ATTENTION: Onyx moved to ACTIVE DUTY.

ATTENTION: Priority Objectives Updated. Please review and acknowledge.

PRIORITY 1: Board flight 3801 at 1900 tonight.

PRIORITY 2: Make contact with Person of Interest: Id.

PRIORITY 3: Ensure safety of public from psionic incidents.

PRIORITY 4: Safeguard interests of CI.

END OF LINE

Dyna flashed her screen in Emerald’s direction, showing off her new ‘orders’. At the same time, Emerald’s phone buzzed. The other woman looked down at her screen with a frown that quickly shifted into a smile.

“At least you aren’t leaving me behind this time.”

“I doubt it is going to be much of an adventure. It shouldn’t be much of an adventure.” Dyna let out a small groan. “I hope it isn’t going to be much of an adventure.”

“Just in case it is…”

“Right.” Dyna hurried back to the elevator. “Psychodynamics, Vault, please,” she said as she entered.

“The Vault?” Emerald asked, slipping inside just as the doors closed.

“Kind of might have lost all my artifacts.”

“You think Cross is just going to hand them out?”

“Maybe he will.”

Emerald let out a hearty scoff but didn’t say anything else before the doors opened on the lower levels of Psychodynamics. On the way, Dyna was stopped three times to show off identification, two of which used some psionic scanning device to try to make sure that she wasn’t an impostor who merely appeared as Dyna Graves. Alpha’s attack on the facility made them a bit nervous. They did not want anyone to have unfettered access to the Vault.

“—utterly inane, puerile, irrational, and, worst of all, illogical.”

“Cross.”

“It might make sense if she had slipped inside undetected. She didn’t. Tulpa popped out of the noosphere and attacked. If it wasn’t for Phrenomorphics—”

“Cross.”

“All I want is to be left alone to work,” Doctor Cross said, gesticulating with each word. “How am I supposed to do my job when they show up every ten minutes asking for identification?”

Walter, one arm in a sling, pressed his other hand to his forehead. Although he still wore his black vest and button-up shirt, Walter no longer wore his sunglasses. Dyna had tried to return them. They ended up confiscated as they were displaying anomalous properties, likely as a result of being in Dyna’s possession for so long. She hadn’t noticed anything while wearing them but she had been far more focused on other matters at the time.

Opposite of Walter, Doctor Cross stood in front of a spherical metal chamber used to measure the type of psionic energy emitted by artifacts. Dozens of bright green lasers shined into the machine, at the center of which was the fuse-like artifact that Dyna had retrieved from Frankenstein.

She still didn’t know what it was, only that Frankenstein, in his human form, had been trying to retrieve it but, in his tulpa form, he had been afraid of it.

“Dyna,” Walter said, noticing her approach first. He looked absolutely relieved to see her, excited to have an excuse to avoid his conversation with Doctor Cross. “You should be resting. Let me escort—”

“Actually, I’ve got orders against resting at the moment.”

“Orders?” Walter asked, narrowing his oddly visible eyes.

“It seems as if Emerald and I are heading back down to Tartarus for a short time.”

“What.”

Dyna shrugged and glanced over to Doctor Cross. “Any luck with the fuse thing?”

Cross adjusted his rectangular glasses as he peered down at the terminal in front of him. “Not really, no. Quite the puzzle. I do wonder where Alpha got it. It doesn’t emit energy readings like normal artifacts yet we can tell that it does store psionic energy. To put it in layman’s terms,” he said as if physically pained by the notion, “it appears to be a psionic battery.”

“Why would tulpa be afraid of that?”

“Perhaps it is powered by tulpa,” Cross said. “Such comments are pure speculation at this point, however. Nevertheless, I will figure it out.” Glancing aside, he shot a glare at Walter. “If certain people would stop disturbing me every five minutes.”

“Well, I will certainly get out of your… hair…” Dyna trailed off then shook her head. “But with everything that has gone on, I’m a bit leery of traveling without any kind of artifact to use should the situation change for the worse. I don’t suppose you might be willing to authorize the release of four-one—”

Cross held up a hand, stalling her. “The Vault is locked down. Nothing in or out until we’ve ensured the security of everything. I’m just glad you brought this to me so that I have something to work on,” he said, motioning toward the machine and the fuse-battery-artifact.

Dyna pressed her lips together. She glanced up into the corner of the room, making eye contact with the red light of the security cameras. Shaking her head, Dyna looked away. Even though she could probably ask Beatrice to unlock the Vault, Dyna probably shouldn’t. Her ‘orders’ to go to Texas again were probably pushing things a little far as it was.

Especially with the way Walter was staring at her.

“Why haven’t you simply made your own artifacts?” Cross asked, adjusting his rectangular glasses.

Dyna winced. “I’d… rather not, honestly.” She took a deep breath, trying to keep her mind clear. “That’s fine. That’s fine. Emerald is up to the task, I’m sure.”

“Of protecting you?” Emerald said, grin on her face. “I don’t know, last time you said we got shot in some aborted timeline. Saved only through the power of rewinding our existence.”

“That’s true,” Dyna said with a frown. She rubbed her chin in thought. “Maybe I could try to make something—”

“It was a joke. A joke. Don’t worry, I’ll be more alert. And—” Emerald’s phone buzzed, interrupting her. She glanced down at it then smiled. “And it looks like Ruby is coming to help. She can take the sniper shots for us.”

“What.”

Dyna looked over to Walter and gave him her best apologetic smile. “Sorry, Sir. This is something I have to do.”

“You should be taking a break. Why are you going? Who authorized it?”

Dyna slowly shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I just need to… talk to Ado. Make sure Id is okay and… It’s a… family thing? I guess? Consider it a family emergency.”

“Who authorized this?”

Shrugging, Dyna held out her phone. “The orders don’t come with a signatory, sorry,” she said with a half-hearted apology. “But better that I’m authorized to do this than try to do it on my own, wouldn’t you say?”

Walter shot her a look. It was really strange to see his eyes. Unnerving in a way. Especially because this particular look said something along the lines of ‘that sounds like a threat.’ Instead of actually saying that, Walter said, “When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. However long it takes.”

“It?”

Dyna shrugged.

Walter tried to cross his arms only for the sling to get in the way. Shoulders slumping, he stared for a long moment before sighing. “I want a full report when you return.”

“Thank you, Sir. I’ll have it ready by the time I touch down back here.”

“Dismissed,” Walter said with a nod of his head.

“Great,” Dyna said. “To the airport then?”

“I’ll drive,” Emerald said.

 

 

Dyna didn’t sit still in the noosphere. The tulpa that had attacked Tartarus—and, likely, most other tulpa that Alpha sent out into the world—had some way of entering and exiting the noosphere effectively at will. She didn’t know whether or not Frankenstein had that ability but didn’t want to wait around and find out.

It came as a small surprise that Dyna could move around. She had figured that any power disruption would have affected the Continuity Engine and it losing power would have knocked her down again. Perhaps being inside the noosphere had protected her. That was the only thing she could think of, though she wasn’t putting too much thought into it.

Her priority, at the moment, was Alpha. Nothing else.

One significant difference of the noosphere that Dyna noticed immediately was that the facility here was not fully reflected in the noosphere. Most hallways terminated abruptly and, while some doors existed, most didn’t have anything on the other side. The room most intact was the control room for the tulpa creation machine. Dyna didn’t bother exploring.

There was something about this place, the noosphere version of it, that she didn’t like. Little flickers of movement in the corners of her eyes. Shadows moving in a world that didn’t actually have shadows.

Tulpa.

It took Dyna a bit longer to realize than it perhaps should have but this place was infested with tulpa. They didn’t have a proper humanoid form, hence her delay in understanding. It was more like they were thin strands clinging to the walls, webs or meshes of vibrating shadowy lines. The shadows warred with one another when they came into contact. Dyna actually paused her run through the facility to watch as a web caught a drifting wisp in its net, quickly wrapping around it, ripping and tearing.

Stray thoughts in their most base of forms.

Eerie. As long as they left Dyna alone, she would just keep walking.

However, once Dyna emerged from the hidden basement and exited the tower structure, she couldn’t help but gasp.

Looking upward, the multi-pronged tower was still standing here. She didn’t know if it had completely collapsed in the real world but the power had gone out at the very least. Unlike the real tower, which just jutted up into crisp blue skies, this tower looked like it was a blender stuck in a black slurry of thoughtforms. Tulpa of varying size and shape swirled about the various spires, ripping and tearing at each other when they came into contact but mostly just drifting about in the air in an anti-clockwise motion.

Dyna hadn’t quite internalized just what this tower was prior to now. It was officially a psionic detection radar system. Unofficially, Alpha had modified it to act as a beacon, attracting tulpa from far and wide.

Something about it felt disgusting. Unnatural. Hopefully, with it now blown up in the real world, the tulpa here would start to disperse. If not… Dyna shook her head. She could discuss the situation with Doctor Darq later.

For now, Dyna turned around, facing the observation station higher up on the mountain. DT had said that the transportation device was large. As large as a helicopter’s landing pad. None of the rooms below would have fit such a device, meaning that the transportation area would have to be up higher. Dyna wasn’t sure if the gondola functioned in the noosphere but the reasons for not using it were identical to those in the real world. She crossed the relatively open area to the same stairs that she had used to get down to the tower’s base in the real world.

Hopefully, DT had been successful in keeping the transportation device from returning here. If not, Alpha could be anywhere in the world.

Hopefully Alpha didn’t have more than one device.

As she crossed the open space to the stairs, Dyna wished she had been able to grab her mirror. It had been with her from the start. At times, she had found herself disappointed in it but in situations like now when she worried a sniper might be perched somewhere around the tower, it brought a peace of mind that Dyna doubted she would be able to get anywhere else. And now it was, presumably, buried. Maybe the Carroll Institute would be able to dig it out.

That wouldn’t be anytime soon.

Luckily, thankfully, nothing attacked her before she reached the stairs.

Ascending, she arrived at the top in short order. Cracking the door open just a pinch, she peered out over the maintenance area not far from where the gondola would dock.

Two tulpa, armored but shadowy, stood in strange positions. Rather than upright with squared shoulders and their guns gripped in their hands, one of the soldiers was slumped backward while the other was leaning somewhat to one side. Their arms dangled, limp, stretching almost back to their feet.

Letting a long moment pass, Dyna watched from behind the stairway door. The tulpa did move, but not in any appreciable manner. They just kind of shuddered in place, like they were having an upright seizure.

Sneaking suspicion growing within Dyna, she carefully emerged from her hiding place. Neither of the tulpa reacted to her presence, not even when she came right up to them. Using her PP-2000, Dyna nudged one of them. Whatever kept its balance failed in that moment and the body clattered to the floor, still having its seizures. The other didn’t react in the slightest.

That…

That was good.

Evidence that blowing up that tower had been the correct decision. If all of Alpha’s tulpa were acting like this after having the control signal disrupted, whatever plans Alpha had with the Carroll Institute and the tulpa accompanying DT would have just failed as well. Hopefully DT was fine but Dyna didn’t have a way of checking on her at the moment.

PP-2000 at the ready, Dyna made her way through the utterly silent building. She stopped at three more groups of tulpa but all three were the same as the first group. Stuck in their seizures, Dyna pressed forward, picking up the pace as her confidence grew.

The layout of the building was different from how Dyna had seen it in the real world. She couldn’t be sure if that was evidence of her power or not. As it was, it just ended up with her walking into dead ends a few times as she searched for anywhere that could possibly hold a helicopter landing pad-sized device.

Realization dawned on her with a slap to her forehead. The building wasn’t big enough to hold a room the size of a helicopter. Not unless the entire second floor was one empty space. Dyna had been about to step outside in search of it down one of the roads she had ignored on Beatrice’s advice while heading here only to realize the most obvious place for a helicopter landing pad was on the roof of the building.

It didn’t take long to locate the stairs and, from there, Dyna began climbing once again.

After taking a quick peek on the second floor, noting that it held a lot of non-functional electronics that presumably had working versions in the real world, Dyna reached the door to the roof. As with every other door she passed through, she took it slowly and carefully.

The octagonal helicopter landing pad was probably meant for actual helicopters. At least in the real world. Here, Dyna spotted a large terminal setup out in the center of the area that would have blocked any real helicopter. That must have been something only found in the noosphere, likely something that interacted with the noosphere transport device that DT had mentioned.

A full army of tulpa were having seizures around the rooftop. Dyna counted up eighty-five tulpa, four of whom were having their seizure on the floor. They were stuck in a variety of positions, some hunched over, others leaning backward, and still others looking like limp puppets. The way they just stood around caused a bit of nausea. The large mass of shaking, trembling humanoids triggered some primal part of her mind that did not like what she was seeing.

Dyna grit her teeth and took a long breath.

Moving among the trembling tulpa, Dyna slipped between them until she reached the terminal. If Alpha had managed to escape from here, she hoped there was some record on the terminal of where. Unlike the other terminals she had crossed, this one was active. Unfortunately, tapping the keyboard brought up a password prompt.

“Figures,” Dyna grumbled to herself. Letting go of her PP-2000, she tried a few of the names Alpha had given her earlier. Her children and grandchildren. Dyna didn’t really expect any to work. Nobody in their right mind would have a simple password of a relative’s name no matter how sentimental they were. Knowing first-hand the Carroll Institute’s security policies for password-only interfaces, this password would probably be a thirty-two character string using several non-standard characters. If it had biometric or psychometric components, Dyna would never gain access.

Hoping that her power would make a stupider password than Alpha would use, Dyna tried anyway.

The sharp crack of a gun’s report echoed through the still air. Instantly, maybe even before she consciously heard the noise, Dyna felt a burning line slam through her wrist.

Hissing, Dyna dove, slipping around the terminal. She clamped her hand against her burning wrist, feeling for the watch that was normally there. Her fingers came back slick with blood but empty of any artifact.

The watch was on the ground, band broken and half its body missing entirely, leaving a large gouge through the metal that was there.

The wound wasn’t as bad as she feared. A quick flex of all her fingers had them working. Whoever shot her specifically aimed for the watch and nothing else. Denying time-travel was good but if Dyna had a clear shot, she probably wouldn’t have aimed for someone’s hand.

“Should have aimed for my head, Alpha!” Dyna shouted, beyond glad that she had put on a helmet earlier. Without that, Alpha might have actually aimed at her head. Instead, she had taken away Dyna’s best tool.

It wasn’t like Dyna couldn’t understand the reason for it. She would have been suspicious of anyone with the ability to alter time itself, worried that killing them wouldn’t actually kill them. Dyna was even an example of that. The sniper shot she had taken alongside Emerald would likely have proved fatal for anyone who didn’t have the ability to rewind and try again.

Forcing the pain out, Dyna strained her ears, listening in the hopes that Alpha was stupid enough to respond. That would give her a proper direction to aim, at least. Dyna wasn’t even fully sure that she had taken cover around the right side of the terminal.

The tulpa hadn’t reacted to the gunshot. That meant the only person moving around would be Alpha.

There were so many tulpa standing about… Dyna’s eyes flicked back and forth as she brought up her PP-2000 to the ready position. Taking a breath, Dyna pushed away from the terminal and darted around two of the tulpa. She rounded a third and paused.

Her first thought had been to get out of this forest of tulpa to where she might have a clear line of sight on Alpha. But Alpha had to have been somewhere inside that forest in order to aim at her wrist. If Dyna moved to the outside and Alpha remained hidden in the masses, Dyna would be the one at the disadvantage.

Dyna switched directions and moved around a few other tulpa before slowing to an almost complete stop. Wearing the same gear that the tulpa were, Dyna might have an advantage in that it could be harder to notice her. Alpha might have donned similar gear as well, however.

Dyna tried to peer through the trembling mass of tulpa, looking for anything that wasn’t moving in their strange seizure patterns.

Something moved in the corner of her vision. Dyna whipped her head to the side just in time to hear another crack and feel something heavy glance off the side of her helmet. One of the tulpa in front of her collapsed, giving her a clear view of a boot stepping out of view.

Raising her PP-2000, Dyna stepped over the tulpa and around another. Whoever had moved was gone now. Or…

Dyna’s eyes flicked down to the boots of the surrounding tulpa. They were the same kind of boot. So Alpha had dressed up like them.

And if Alpha had eyes on Dyna, she wouldn’t be able to freeze in place and pretend to be a tulpa. Not unless she sprinted to the opposite side of the helipad in order to lose Alpha.

Spontaneously, Dyna raised her PP-2000 and pulled the trigger, sending a bullet under one of the nearby tulpa’s helmet. The tulpa collapsed, falling to the floor in a seizure just like the one Dyna had nudged earlier.

Dyna stepped around it, pausing part way to shoot another tulpa. One in the same vicinity as where she saw that boot moving.

Its helmet rolled aside, letting her clearly see the shadowy figure contained within the balaclava.

Dyna narrowed her eyes and looked around. She wouldn’t have enough bullets to hit all of them. The tulpa did carry PP-2000s which they clearly weren’t in a position to use. Bending to remove the carrying straps from over their shoulders or even just pulling out spare magazines would put Dyna in a vulnerable position during which Alpha could get the jump on her.

Snapping her gun up at a third target, Dyna held her finger off the trigger. If Dyna had been aiming at Alpha now, surely the woman would have moved. Tulpa within the noosphere would be immune to bullets. Humans were not.

Hearing movement behind her, Dyna whirled, pulling the trigger several times as she spun.

Three tulpa dropped, continuing their seizures on the floor. None appeared to be a human in disguise.

A peppering of fire made Dyna flinch. Something hit her in the side, clipping the front of her armor. A burning pain ran through her ribs as she dove for cover behind more of the tulpa. The gunfire stopped, giving Dyna a moment of courage to rush further into the forest of tulpa.

She gripped her side with one hand, feeling the warm blood flow over her fingers.

Gritting her teeth, Dyna took a quick glance around the tulpa. She needed to give herself medical attention and soon.

Realizing she had made a large clearing where Alpha would have an easy shot on her, Dyna limped back and around a few more of the still-standing tulpa, keeping her weapon and eyes trained in the direction from where she thought the gunfire had come from.

Taking cover behind two tulpa, hoping Alpha was on the other side, Dyna reached into her satchel and withdrew the pair of grenades that she had stowed away earlier.

Pulling the pin on both while keeping the spoons in place, she tossed one in a high arch to make sure it cleared well enough away from her position. Counting to three, she pulled the pin on another and tossed it at a different angle.

The first clanked against the ground twice before a deep crack split the air. The second followed suit only a few seconds after. She heard bodies hit the floor, but not as many as she had hoped. The two tulpa she had hidden behind, despite being rustled by the concussive wave, remained upright.

As soon as the second explosion went off, Dyna grabbed one of the tulpa’s magazines and tossed it into the air as well.

It landed with a loud clatter. As soon as it did, Dyna heard footsteps.

Pivoting around the two tulpa, Dyna raised her PP-2000, flicked the selector switch, and depressed the trigger.

One armored figure, sprinting away, took the automatic fire straight in the back. They kept running for a few steps but faltered, stumbling to the ground. Landing hard with one hand, Dyna heard a loud cry of pain. Dyna squeezed off two more bursts of automatic fire at the downed target, holding down the final burst until the recoil of her gun stopped completely.

Her target managed to roll over. Swinging a PP-2000 of her own around, Alpha returned wild fire, spraying aimlessly in only the vague direction of Dyna.

Tossing her submachine gun, Dyna took cover between the standing tulpa and Alpha. One of them, hit, started to topple like the other tulpa but Dyna gripped it by its armored vest, managing to keep it upright until she heard a click from Alpha gun.

Deciding she had a moment, Dyna took the falling tulpa’s PP-2000, switched it to single-shot, and pulled back the charging handle. Taking a circuitous route, making sure that there were always tulpa between her and the fallen Alpha, Dyna limped closer.

Alpha, face visible under her helmet with no balaclava, hadn’t tried to reload her gun or acquire a new one. She just laid on the ground, staring upward while panting heavily. Her breath sounded wet and labored. Blood trickled from one corner of her mouth.

As soon as Dyna stepped into the woman’s view, she tried to raise her empty gun. Dyna put a stop to that by placing her boot over the woman’s wrist.

“You… think you’ve won?” Alpha spat. “As long as you exist… people will try to kill you. Even with your power… you can’t win forever. Someone smarter than I… will put you in the ground.”

Dyna stared for a long few moments, watching as the woman’s breathing grew shallower and shallower. Realizing that these were likely to be Alpha’s last breaths, Dyna slowly removed her foot from the woman’s arm.

“For what it is worth, I’ll try to find your family and make sure they’re safe.”

“Fuhh… Fuck you.”

Dyna nodded slowly then raised her PP-2000 and put a bullet between Alpha’s eyes.

Alpha’s breathing stopped abruptly and all strength left the woman’s fingers.

A part of her feared that some tulpa-form of Alpha would rise up from the body because she had been killed. Dyna stood at the ready, fully prepared to generate several clones of herself to devour tulpa-Alpha. When nothing appeared after ten minutes, Dyna dropped her gun and clamped her hands around her side.

She felt a bit lightheaded.

And, looking around, Dyna had to frown.

She was still in the noosphere. Trapped.

Beatrice knew where she was. DT did as well. Would they find her in any reasonable amount of time?

Dyna shuddered at the silent world around her.

 

 

A bead of sweat dripped down Dyna’s forehead as she slowly slid an activated blasting cap into the plastic explosive. Prior to this, it had all been fun and games. She could jostle the C4 around as much as she wished, juggle it, and even toss it against the wall in an attempt to deform it. The shadow monster lurking around put a bit of a damper on things but at no point had she been worried about blowing herself up.

Now? Dyna wanted to get this over with and get away as fast as possible.

She wished she had Beatrice on the line. An unshackled artificial intelligence guiding her would have done a lot to reassure her that she wasn’t forgetting anything. Still, Dyna was being as careful as she could be. The clacker itself was shut off—she had checked no less than seven times—and the blasting cap had sat on its own after being powered on for several minutes. Dyna wasn’t actually sure if she should be sliding an activated blasting cap into the plastic explosive but she felt like turning the power on after inserting it might cause even just a small spark that would see it all going up in her face. If that happened while doing it this way, it would be just a firecracker going off.

Everything in place, Dyna took several careful steps backwards, hesitant to even breathe on the devices. Having left the lower laboratory and armory section, Dyna quickly found what she assumed to be the central support shaft of the psionic radar tower. If it wasn’t the central support, she hoped it was at least important enough that the twenty-four bricks of C4 arrayed around the steel shaft would shut this place down.

If it wasn’t the central support or important, Dyna still had the last-ditch option of hoping that her power made it important or, at least, made the explosion large enough to take out the entire structure. Dyna had no idea what kind of yield she was looking at with twenty-four bricks each the size of her forearm but pop-culture osmosis told her that it would probably be a fairly spectacular spectacle. As long as she wasn’t caught in it.

Dyna had an urge to just leave now. Take the tram back up out of the sinkhole, get far enough away that none of the exploding building would likely hit her, and then hit the clacker. That, however, would leave her stranded in Puerto Rico. Maybe not stranded stranded but not in any position to assist with the goings on at Tartarus or the Carroll Institute. Dyna was trying not to think about it, not wanting to influence anything unduly, but without Beatrice giving her information on the outside world, she had no clue what was happening outside this place. For all she knew, Alpha was raiding the artifact vault at this very minute, although Dyna doubted that the former administrator would be there in person.

Her only real lead on Alpha’s location was through the noosphere. Dyna didn’t know what she would find on the other side—maybe nothing at all, maybe Alpha lounging in another monologuing room—but that was her lead and her only destination. And, as far as she knew, the only way in was through the portal Frankenstein had been trying to get opened.

That meant descending back into the facility with a dangerous shadow monster on the loose.

Taking the ladder back down to the hidden passage did make Dyna question her own sanity. She had just rigged the building to explode and she was going back in.

Reaching the hidden, cramped corridors, Dyna kept one hand on her watch and the other hand clenched around the strange artifact she had found. Although she still didn’t know what the little fuse-spark cylinder was or what it did, she did feel like it would do more to Specimen Seven than her gun.

Moving past the armories and the control room, Dyna started to feel the hairs on the back of her neck sticking on end. Despite the odd hum that still permeated the lower levels, the entire building was just too quiet. Which made sense. There wasn’t anyone alive down here. Of course, that didn’t stop her mind from wandering back to Alpha’s accusations that she was unintentionally setting up situations around her to play true to movie tropes.

Dyna didn’t know what to do to stop that aside from powering on the Continuity Engine once again.

Careful to avoid directly stepping beneath any part of the ventilation ducts that ran through the corridors, Dyna made slow and steady progress toward the noosphere portal room where she had found Frankenstein earlier. Not once did she detect any moving shadows in the corners of her eyes.

Dyna hoped it had dissipated or maybe had fallen into a food-coma after eating Frankenstein.

It was a good thing her power didn’t affect people’s minds—or tulpa’s minds, as far as she knew—or else her expectations to the contrary would have seen it jumping out at her as she walked down the corridors regardless of her precautions taken against the ventilation system.

To her great surprise, she arrived at the noosphere portal room without incident. Dyna tried pressing her ear to the door in an attempt to discern whether or not Specimen Seven was still on the other side but the hum from the portal device was as loud as it had been the first time around. She couldn’t hear much of anything. Maybe faint clanking noises. That might have been her imagination.

Ready to reset time if she spotted anything attacking her, Dyna pushed open the door.

The first thing she saw was a bright diamond in the middle of the portal frame, bright enough to force her to notice it for a moment before wincing at the intensity and glancing around the rest of the room. Frankenstein was on the ground not far from where he had held Dyna at gunpoint. Most of him, anyway. He wasn’t entirely intact.

He also wasn’t moving. As expected of a man lying in a disturbingly large puddle of his own blood.

Shifting her eyes toward the Continuity Engine, Dyna frowned. The plug was back in the wall outlet and the bright LED lights on the circuit boards were blinking with fervor. Her memories after unplugging it were a little hazy but Dyna didn’t think that Frankenstein had plugged it back in before his incident. Had that been from her power?

When had it been plugged in?

She hadn’t wanted to think about it but she kind of got the feeling that the C4 and maybe even the fuse artifact had been created rather than naturally existed here.

Movement near the portal made Dyna tense. The shadow that was Specimen Seven had barely been visible crouched near one of the large wires coming off the portal frame, not far from the Continuity Engine. Between blending in with the background and the bright light forcing her to squint while looking at that half of the room, Specimen Seven might as well have been invisible.

The strangest thing about it wasn’t its presence, which Dyna had basically expected after not encountering it throughout the rest of the facility, but what it had been doing. It stood, full and upright, dropping a wrench to the floor as it did so. The wrench it had been using to, Dyna assumed, repair the portal frame.

Specimen Seven stood fully, cocked its shadowy head to one side, and spoke.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

Dyna blinked several times in rapid succession at the familiar tone of the slightly distorted voice. She had heard that exact line a few times since arriving here, delivered with the same inflection each of the three times.

“Frankenstein?”

The shadowy figure swept his elongated hands from his chest to his legs in a sweeping presentation of himself. “In the flesh. Sort of.”

Dyna hadn’t the slightest clue of what to say. Her mind went completely blank as she tried to figure out what might have happened. Eyes flicking down to the very dead body, she blinked a few more times before her mind wandered back to conversations with November. It hit her. “It integrated you but you were too much for it.”

“Something like that,” Frankenstein nodded. “Released too early, Specimen Seven was less a proper thinking tulpa or even a brain-dead zombie-type like what we use for soldiers. It ripped me out of my body and just look at me now,” he said, spinning around like a little girl proud of her new skirt. “I think I just achieved immortality. Our studies show that tulpa don’t age. Though I don’t seem to have a proper body at all at the moment.” Pausing, he glanced down, shrugged, then looked back up. “I suppose I should be thanking you.”

“I’m sensing a but…” Dyna’s fingers tightened around the bezel of her watch. How long had it been since she opened the door? She really wished she still had Beatrice in her ear. It felt like thirty seconds but it could have been three minutes for all she knew.

“But you tried to kill me.”

“I tried to kill you?” Dyna barked, unusually incensed at his accusation. “You had a gun to my head. Your own monster killed you!”

He paused, considered, and shrugged once again. “Maybe so. Doesn’t matter. Alpha wants you dead too.”

“You’ve gained functional immortality and you’re still following Alpha’s commands?”

Dyna wasn’t sure how she read a shadow monster’s body language. The way he stilled and twitched his head to one side still looked like a human-enough moment of confusion.

“That is odd,” Frankenstein admitted. “I wonder if Specimen Seven integrated with enough of the tulpa that this body is now beholden to the command signal…” His head slowly turned back to Dyna. “A problem I will solve after dealing with you, before Alpha can deliver any other commands—”

As he spoke, he moved forward. It wasn’t quite stepping forward so much as it was drifting forward but it was fast enough that Dyna twisted her Bezel before the creature that could tear a person in half could reach her.

Much to her chagrin, Dyna found herself in the middle of swinging open the door. Too late to back out. Mentally berating herself for trying to get as much information out of Frankenstein while he was still talkative rather than resetting the second she thought about the time, she quickly turned her eyes through the room until she spotted Frankenstein’s shadowy form blending in with the wall. He was in the middle of replacing one of the cylinders with wires coming off them around the main portal frame ring.

He continued tightening a bolt for a moment, making Dyna wonder how she missed the movement the first time around.

Her mind raced as she tried to come up with a solution to the situation that didn’t involve resetting time fourteen million times.

Dyna took a few steps inside, stopping at the portal control panel she had seen Frankenstein standing at the very first time she had walked in on him in this room. As she did so, Frankenstein set down his wrench and stood up.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Frankenstein,” Dyna said, trying to look startled.

“In the flesh.”

Good. It looked like they might have a few seconds of friendly chat before he tried to kill her.

Frankenstein made basically the same speech he had made the first time around, making Dyna wonder if he had rehearsed it in preparation for her arrival, knowing she would come back. Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter as she tuned it out, staring at the control panel in an attempt to figure out how to get a proper portal to the noosphere opened up.

She had seen the control panel before. A few times, actually. She had even seen it in operation. It was the exact same model the Carroll Institute had taken from the meat packing plant.

The portal was already partially open. The initial work had already been done. Dyna was a little surprised that Frankenstein had been working on the portal while it was active but the part he had been changing out was almost certainly one of the components that would widen the portal into something someone could pass through. Assuming they all worked, Dyna figured that she could open the portal with a slow pull of one of the levers.

Dyna reset time several times, going over every step of her plan.

She tested a few parts of it, checking how Frankenstein would react to certain actions. Drawing her gun always resulted in him rushing toward her. As did most actions besides casually chatting. She could fiddle with the control panel to an extent, as long as she didn’t look like she knew what she was doing.

A part of her was tempted to shoot the Continuity Engine. The other part feared another stab of pain in the brain that would allow Frankenstein to kill her before she regained the mental clarity to reset time.

Two dozen practice runs gave her everything she needed to know. Probably.

Hopefully.

There were a few things she hadn’t tested. Couldn’t test. She only had a single minute, after all.

Dyna strode into the room and twisted a knob on the control panel before noticing Frankenstein.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Frankenstein?” Dyna said, leaning forward against the control panel as if to get a better look at his new body. As he looked down while gesturing to himself, she flipped a small toggle switch. The humming drone in the background noise of the room gained a slight warble but Frankenstein paid it no mind as he started into his speech.

Functional immortality. He supposed he should thank her. All the same stuff he had said the first time around, so long as Dyna replied with a relatively similar response. That gave her opportunities to wait for the few moments he was distracted to pull a lever or twist a knob.

“You’ve gained functional immortality and you’re still following Alpha’s commands?” Dyna asked.

Frankenstein paused, going still just like before as he considered the question and maybe made some introspective investigations. It was the longest pause that Dyna would get. The last pause as well, as Frankenstein would attack shortly after coming to the realization about the command signal.

Dyna’s left hand curled around the largest and most obvious lever on the control panel. Pulling it down to the third slot stopped the warbling hum. After a small cracking noise split through the air, the portal started ripping open properly. In the same smooth motion, Dyna slipped her hand into her pocket and felt for the power button on the detonator clacker.

Frankenstein, jolted from his internal thoughts by the portal opening up, looked back before taking a swift drifting step toward Dyna.

Raising her right hand, Dyna unclenched her fist.

Frankenstein stopped abruptly.

The little spark held in the fuse-like container still puzzled Dyna. She had no idea what it did even after trying to use it in a few of her testing resets. All she knew for sure was that Frankenstein did not want to be close to it. Having had only sixty seconds for testing purposes, she wasn’t sure if that fear would last indefinitely or if Frankenstein would either get over it or maybe find a workaround.

Or just realize that Dyna had no idea what it was or how to use it.

“You might as well just give up and die. I promise I’ll make it as painless as possible,” Frankenstein said. “Even if you manage to get to Alpha, there will be a new Alpha some day. You are simply too dangerous to leave alive. As you have so adequately demonstrated today.”

“Give up and die?” Dyna took a steady step, slowly crossing the room. For each step she took with the small artifact held out, Frankenstein took a step in the opposite direction. “That didn’t work when Alpha asked and it definitely isn’t going to work now.”

“Shame. I—”

“Hey,” Dyna said abruptly enough to make him pause and miss a step. She didn’t want him shutting off the portal before she jumped through it. “You’re immortal as far as aging is concerned, right?”

“Tulpa don’t age.”

“Physical punishment?”

“I watched an entire team unload magazine after magazine into Specimen Seven. I’d offer to let you try but I’m afraid—”

“What about a building falling on you?”

As soon as Dyna spoke, she jumped toward the portal, crushing the clacker as she moved. The building, even underground, shook violently. The lights flickered and failed, leaving the room illuminated only from the light of the portal. Even that only stayed up for a second longer.

The ring of light collapsed, vanishing entirely.

Dyna, panting for breath in the noosphere, snapped her head around to ensure that she was alone.

She looked at a fuzzy version of the portal room. Not all the details were clear, having likely only been observed and thus imprinted into the noosphere by very few people. Frankenstein wasn’t anywhere near her.

He was trapped on the other side.

Hopefully, he was dead with that semi-transient body not able to ignore a whole building falling in on him. If he wasn’t dead, hopefully he was trapped. At least until Dyna could call up Doctor Darq and see if Tartarus could use their expertise to contain him.

Until then, Dyna could only look around her new environment. The strange thought-mirror of Alpha’s underground workshop.

Where would Alpha have gone?

 

 

Dyna slammed the door shut to the control room, not sure if she should spin the wheel to lock it or not. If Specimen Seven followed her through the halls, it might delay it. If it went straight for the vents, it might delay her. Casting a quick glance upward, she quickly found a grate dangling from a single screw in the cylindrical ventilation shaft that ran overhead. The other screws looked like they had been ripped right out of their sockets.

Leaving the door partially locked, Dyna hurried further into the room. She stopped at the terminal and snapped up Walter’s phone. A quick check over its front left her with a scowl. No signal. She stared for a long moment, confused. When she had shut off the Continuity Engine, the portal had snapped shut as well. Given the timing of the signal cutting off earlier, she had thought the portal was the cause.

Unless the portal had closed but the machinery was still on. That made… sense.

Dyna glowered at the phone for a long moment before shoving it into her pocket.

Her power was a field, according to Alpha, that constantly affected everything around her, adjusting things in small ways not to what she wanted but to what she expected. Unless she had severely misunderstood the purpose of that machine she had unplugged, that field was now active once again.

Dyna didn’t know how long she had before that thing came after her again. Beatrice was out as help. Her power might work or might not work, she wasn’t sure that she could control it effectively and even if it did help her out, Dyna wasn’t sure that she would notice versus how the world was normally. Her first order of business was to figure out how to keep herself from getting torn apart by Specimen Seven.

Dyna tapped a key on the keyboard in front of her. The screen lit up, unlocked thanks to Beatrice. There had to be something here. It was foolish to create super-powered tulpa without a means of handling them if something went wrong. They did have a way of controlling them but what if that failed? Where was the self-destruct failsafe? Where was the room full of anti-tulpa weaponry?

Alpha wasn’t that stupid.

There had to be something.

And if Dyna expected there to be something, there would be something. She just had to find it.

Dyna reset time. Twisting the bezel all the way around on her watch threw her back a full minute into the past, just as she was sitting down at the terminal. That was one minute guaranteed that Specimen Seven wasn’t going to attack her. She knew what commands she had typed into the terminal the first time around, what directories she had dug through.

Pulling out Walter’s phone, she set it to the side with a timer. Sixty seconds.

Dyna dove into the terminal once again, searching through directories, following folder structures that seemed promising, skimming through experimentation logs. As soon as the timer beeped, she snapped her hand to her watch and spun it around. Blinking, the timer now read fifty-nine seconds.

She tried again.

And again.

And again.

Sometimes, she reset the timer just a little early to avoid losing a second or two. Other times, she chanced a few extra seconds to finish reading an experimentation log.

Dyna wasn’t sure how much she could trust what she was reading. The dates on some of the earlier experimentation logs indicated that Alpha had been investigating the noosphere and tulpa for years now. However, she couldn’t be sure that this all wasn’t just her power generating reports out of nothing for her to read through.

Really, she wished she could go back. A year ago, before she knew about her power, she would have read through these accepting them at face value. Knowing about her power made it so that she wasn’t sure if she could trust anything. Her mind made it all real but unless everyone else believed it all as well, it wasn’t really real. There would always be little things that slipped through her power’s crack. Id’s little experiment on the flight, creating what Dyna expected was expensive alcohol even if it wasn’t actually, was proof of that. As was Alpha’s vanished family.

Dyna still wasn’t sure what could have happened there. She didn’t know enough. Maybe Id could have figured it out. Despite being an effective clone of Dyna’s, Id had memories and experiences that Dyna lacked.

There was also the fact that Dyna hadn’t really had a chance to think about it. She didn’t really want to think about it now either. Thinking about her power was giving her a headache.

Or maybe that was the time-travel.

Whichever was the case, Dyna came to a decision.

Things couldn’t stand the way they were.

Dyna reset time again and almost immediately found something promising. An experimentation log detailing an escaped tulpa causing havoc. It apparently killed a few people before being apprehended. Not by police, the Carroll Institute, or Alpha, but by a man wearing a bow tie and dark goggles who showed up in a van bearing a three-hexagon logo on the side. Alpha’s first encounter with Doctor Darq. Though the report did not mention them actually interacting, it apparently put him on her radar. More than that, it gave Alpha cause to investigate methods of control.

It took five more resets, reading related files and other experimentation logs from around the same time period before Dyna stumbled across just how Alpha was controlling the tulpa. Ingrained psycho-active command signals, inserted during the creation of her tulpa. This tower that Dyna was in was the broadcaster, keeping the tulpa in line with Alpha’s wants. If she shut it down, Alpha’s army at the Carroll Institute would be free from her directions.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help her with Specimen Seven. If the command signal worked with Seven, Frankenstein would probably be alive still.

It had been released early. Probably before the command signals were in place.

Dyna leaned back in the chair. She had a potential solution to one problem but not the most immediate problem. In fact, with as much as Dyna had skimmed over files, testing logs, and various commands inside the terminal, she was starting to doubt that she would actually find anything despite her power. It was impossible to prove that something didn’t exist in the machine. Beatrice could have proved it but not Dyna. However, the proof wasn’t in the machine.

It was in Frankenstein. If there was some kind of kill signal that would have taken out Specimen Seven, surely he would have used it. If there were guns and weapons here capable of harming a tulpa like Specimen Seven, surely he would have used them. If he could have done anything, he surely would have.

Instead, Dyna had found him hiding in the bathroom.

Dyna tapped her fingers against the desk several times, considering. Resetting time once again, she stood and hurried over to the bathroom. It was a small, single-occupant room with a toilet, mirror, coat hook, and a sink. Nothing else.

Nothing obvious, anyway.

Had Frankenstein been hiding? Or had he come here with a plan in mind?

Dyna started with the mirror, twisting the little plastic holders that kept it attached to the wall. She tossed it aside, shattering it, but only found a brick wall behind it. Outside the bathroom, she heard the timer start to beep.

Resetting time again, she grabbed the phone this time around and rushed back to the bathroom.

The coat hanger didn’t move. There was nothing behind the toilet or the sink—neither were the type that could be opened in any way aside from the obvious. The ceiling was just an array of pipes and one small ventilation shaft that didn’t look similar to the ones in the main rooms. It was probably a direct vent to the surface like most bathrooms had. That would let the tulpa out of this facility if it found it, unfortunately. Though at this moment, having it away from her might allow her a better opportunity to plan on how to get rid of it. Assuming it didn’t get rid of itself after escaping. Frankenstein had said that it was unstable.

Dyna blinked and, for the first time, looked down. In her first meeting with Frankenstein, he had been crouched down on the floor when she barged in. Why there instead of pressed up against the wall behind the door or using the sink or toilet for cover? Was he an idiot? Or…

There was a drain on the floor. A small metal grate likely put in place in case the water started leaking. One of the two screws holding the drain in place was missing.

Dyna reset time again, snapping back to the terminal. She stood immediately and hurried over to where she had thrown Frankenstein down before checking him for weapons. Tossed to the side of the room, she found a screwdriver, pliers, and a metal coat hanger.

He had been trying to get something out of the drain.

Taking the tools, Dyna hurried back inside the bathroom and removed the last screw. Prying up the small grate, she activated the flashlight on Walter’s phone and peered down inside.

The timer on the phone went off. Rather than restarting time, however, Dyna bent the coat hanger and stretched it down. Whatever was down there looked like a plastic bag with a fabric loop attached to it. It took two tries to get the hook around the loop before she managed to pull the whole thing up.

Peeling off the plastic, Dyna frowned down at her recovery. It was wrapped in a layer of foil. Not just any foil, but the psionic inhibiting foil that the Carroll Institute so often used for artifacts and other psychically sensitive items. Peeling it back, an utter calm came over her.

Inside was an artifact. Of that, there was no doubt. A small… fuse? It was a glass cylinder capped with silver metal. Instead of a fuse wire, however, there was a bright yellow spark dancing around on the inside. She had no idea what it was.

Alpha probably wouldn’t have hidden an artifact in a bathroom drain. That probably meant that Frankenstein had it here without her knowing. Some kind of back-up plan if something ever went wrong. A quick peek through the plastic bag revealed no notes left by Frankenstein to illuminate the situation. No label or clue as to what it was or what it was supposed to do. Just conjecture.

But…

Wasn’t that perfect for her?

The little spark in a jar could do anything. With her power, it would do anything. Or, at least, what she expected something like it to do. Dyna quickly ran over her preconceptions of the situation, analyzing them as fast as her mind could. Alpha set free an unstable tulpa. It likely had a delay before waking up, whether intended or not, allowing Alpha to escape through the noosphere gate that was further down the corridors. Frankenstein, left behind, quickly realized that it wouldn’t listen to commands and had hidden himself in the bathroom just before it awoke. It did and promptly started killing everything that moved, likely integrating the tulpa to make itself more stable.

Frankenstein, after it had left to attack the tulpa, came back out here, found his tools, and returned to try to retrieve this artifact in the hopes that it would help keep him alive or otherwise deal with the situation. Dyna had interrupted him before he could. When the tulpa attacked, forcing them out of this room, he had changed his plan to escaping through the noosphere. Dyna had interrupted that as well by shutting off the Continuity Engine, which inadvertently brought about Frankenstein’s demise.

Carefully, gently brushing her fingers over the artifact, Dyna touched it as if worried it might electrocute her. Much like when she had first chosen her mirror, the sensation of calm faded away. Touching it didn’t give her any more clues on how to use it or what it did but the fact that it acted like other artifacts she had touched was reassuring. It did something.

Through all of her experimentation with gadgets and artifacts, she knew a little about how to coax them into action. Psionic forces were the key. A little expenditure of mental willpower could go a long way.

Holding it out in her palm, Dyna focused. The spark grew brighter with a thought, illuminating the room in a bright white light. With another thought, it dimmed, extinguishing almost completely. All that was left inside was a faint red ember.

That gave Dyna some ideas. She didn’t like most of those ideas but they were there.

Drawing in a breath, Dyna clenched her fist and walked back into the control room. There wasn’t much more for her here, as far as she could tell. The only other thing here was the pressure chamber down the stairs that created tulpa and she had no idea how to work it. Maybe she could figure it out through repeated one-minute increments but unless she could make it do something useful in a single minute, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

Feeling mildly more confident, Dyna moved to the door and, hand on her watch, peeked out into the hallway.

No sign of Specimen Seven. Maybe it was still eating Frankenstein. In terms of mental capacity, a proper human was drastically more intense than the dog-like tulpa around the rest of this place. Maybe it took longer. Though with how badly it tore him apart, Dyna wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he died well before the process could complete.

Rather than head back toward that room—and Specimen Seven—Dyna moved back in the direction she had initially arrived from. To the best of her knowledge, none of the tulpa from the observation station had come down here. Or if they had, Specimen Seven had likely taken them out before heading over to the portal room. But Dyna wasn’t headed out of the facility.

She stopped at the first of the armory room she had visited before. Opening the door again made her wrinkle her nose. Although they were just tulpa, seeing a dozen bodies lying motionless on the floor made her a bit queasy. The smell didn’t help. While beings of thought in the noosphere, here they had real-enough bodies to fill her nose with a sort of ugly metallic smell.

Taking a quick breath of the hallway air, Dyna rushed inside.

She quickly replaced her lost PP-2000. Maybe it wouldn’t help against Specimen Seven but it worked fine against everything else. After that, she started looking around for other helpful things. She threw on a bit of body armor, a helmet, managed to fit a pair of grenades into a small pouch. A knife might come in handy.

Opening a tall off-green locker, Dyna sucked in a breath at the blocky black words written on brown paper.

Explosive Plastic Comp-4.

C4. Bricks of the stuff. A nervous shock tingled at her stomach for a brief moment. C4 was incredibly stable. It wouldn’t explode unless something deliberately set it off. Not even shooting it would make it go off.

When it did go off, it went off hard.

Dyna stared at it for a short moment and then started loading it, brick-by-brick, into the pouch she had found. This tower needed to go down. When she first realized that, she had thought she would find some power main to disconnect. Now?

Two lockers away, stored separately for safety’s sake, she found the other half of what she needed. Small radio-controlled detonators. Her training with the Carroll Institute hadn’t exactly covered how to prime and set C4 to destroy buildings. Being friends with Ruby, however, had taught her a bit more than any regular person really needed to know about setting explosives.

The blasting caps had a small dial on them, which seemed to let Dyna select a frequency. The clacker had a similar one. Flicking on a detonator set to a unique frequency and setting it on the floor, Dyna backed away and put her back to the side of a locker.

She smacked the clacker.

After a short delay, there was a pop around the side of the locker. It sounded like a firecracker going off.

Test complete, Dyna pulled a separate satchel off the rack and carefully placed the detonator and the blasting caps inside.

After one quick check to see if there was anything else she could use in the armory, Dyna stepped back out into the corridor and aimed back for the ladder that brought her down here in the first place. The central shaft was where all the vital equipment to this tower had to pass through. That seemed like the best place to set all this stuff up at.

If she found a main power switch, that would probably still be the better option.

It was always nice to have a backup plan.

 

 

Knowing there was something lurking in the darkness made the tight corridors of the Psychic Detector’s underground all the more claustrophobic. Her bullets hadn’t done anything to it. Or anything obvious, anyway. That only served to make her more tense. If it did pop out of the ventilation and attack, Dyna’s only defense was to reset time and hope that changing her actions changed its actions enough that it didn’t rip her apart.

This place was designed to manufacture tulpa. She couldn’t believe that it didn’t have any anti-tulpa weaponry. Yet, checking every door she passed by, she hadn’t seen a single disruptor or even a vague idea of one.

Which, unfortunately, made her feel like there was a Continuity Engine in the vicinity. Her power would have generated a room with just what she needed otherwise. Probably.

Instead, she moved from room to room, wondering where Frankenstein had gone while keeping hyper-aware of any vents overhead.

Most of the rooms weren’t anywhere nearly as impressive as the control room. A lot looked like equipment storage rooms, machine rooms, or rooms that held spare parts. No devious science laboratories. No living personnel. No sign of the noosphere portal device that Frankenstein had mentioned.

Not wanting to sit around in one place—or trap herself inside a room with no exit—Dyna hadn’t been investigating each room thoroughly for more secret passages. She was hoping that this entire place being behind one secret control panel was enough.

“I do not mean to alarm you,” Beatrice said as Dyna slowly closed another of the storage room doors. That was the third she had passed so far. “A facility-wide alert has just sounded at the Carroll Institute upon detecting anomalous activity within the noosphere.”

“Define anomalous activity,” Dyna whispered, moving slowly down the corridor. She had passed a T-intersection not so long ago. Had she picked the wrong route?

“Increased tulpa presence. Analysis indicates Alpha intends to assault the Carroll Institute with a small army. All non-security personnel are directed to safe-rooms. Phrenomorphics disruption teams are taking up positions at key areas, including the artifact vault.”

“Is Alpha herself there?”

“Unknown. Initiates are being evacuated.”

“I doubt that war will get far. DT is with Alpha’s tulpa. I wouldn’t let them attack the campus so she wouldn’t let them either. Unless she has another… Specimen Five? The eye-tulpa. Unless she has another one of those, DT could probably decimate the tulpa army on her own.”

A loud hum of motors or high-voltage electronics powering up echoed down the corridor, making Dyna tense. She snapped her head around, hand on her watch’s bezel as she looked for any sign of Specimen Seven. She checked the ceiling, the floor, and the pipes. There was no sign of movement. The glasses didn’t highlight anything noteworthy either.

Dyna started to relax until a grainy film crossed her vision.

“No records I have access… control room…”

“Beatrice? I’m getting a little static and the glasses are blank,” Dyna said, looking around. The ventilation shafts Beatrice had been highlighting for her weren’t highlighted anymore. Data streams and notifications on the interface also failed.

One bright red text appeared in the center of her view.

SIGNAL LOSS

Dyna pressed her lips together, considering walking back a few steps. Beatrice had said that they would lose connection eventually as Dyna put more distance between herself and Walter’s phone. She had thought it would be a little bit further than this, however. Putting her back to a wall, she took the glasses off and pulled out her own phone. Without Beatrice’s enhancements, the sunglasses were just sunglasses. Wearing them indoors was detrimental.

Although she intended to call Beatrice to resume communication, Dyna’s phone wouldn’t connect. No signal.

Perhaps she hadn’t just walked out of range.

That hum had come from up ahead, further along the way she was walking.

Now on her own, the walls closed down around her even more than before. She kept moving forward. It was the only option unless she wanted to run away. At that point, Dyna would just have to hope that Alpha was at the Carroll Institute so that DT could try to capture or kill her.

Dyna doubted Alpha was that stupid.

No. Alpha probably didn’t even want anything from the Carroll Institute. If Dyna were in Alpha’s position, she would be trying to disappear—go into hiding and maybe restart her operations elsewhere, if possible. The Carroll Institute had a lot of psychics. Dyna didn’t know all of them or their capabilities. Alpha did. With her administrative knowledge, she would know where, who, and how to hit in order to disrupt any attempts at tracking her down.

Finding Alpha might be difficult if she had escaped into the noosphere and had a way of rapidly moving about within.

Frankenstein had to know something. The way he ran off… She needed to find him.

If she failed, she needed to find the Continuity Engine. If she disabled it, she might be able to force Alpha into a confrontation using her power, much like how she had apparently done with that monologuing room.

Hearing a hollow thud from somewhere overhead made Dyna tense.

She needed to get to her goals before that tulpa decided to attack.

Dyna picked up the pace, moving from room to room with haste as she searched. More closets, more storage rooms. Another armory, this one with older, worn equipment. Dyna didn’t investigate any for more than a few seconds.

The humming was getting louder. She was getting closer.

Arriving at another door, Dyna started to spin the wheel only to find it jammed. Not locked—it spun partially—but something was preventing it from turning fully. Although she wasn’t sure if her bobby pin could stop a chair propped up against the wheel, Dyna pulled it out anyway. There were no keyholes for it. She wedged it against the seam of the door as best she could and twisted.

The bobby pin met with some resistance, pushing against her twist.

Something loud clattered on the other side of the door, followed quickly by a startled yelp. Dyna didn’t waste her chance, grabbing the wheel and spinning the rest of the way. Something pushed against the door, keeping it closed. Dyna slammed her shoulder into the door, forcing it open even as she pulled up her PP-2000, dropping the bobby pin in the process.

Frankenstein, head still hidden under his quilted mask, slid back on the floor, knocked over from her push against the door. He groaned, gripping at his wrist as he laid on his back.

“Oh. It’s just you.”

“Shut up,” Dyna hissed. She scanned the ceiling of the room, taking note of the single vent up against one wall. With no other sign of Specimen Seven, she pressed the door closed and spun the wheel, noting a thin wire dangling from it that must have been connected to a nearby pipe, preventing the wheel from spinning when she had tried.

“You don’t have to be so violent,” he groaned, picking himself up as he kept rubbing his wrist. “I was just… getting us an escape route.”

“Us,” Dyna said, tone flat as she picked up the bobby pin. One of the prongs had bent. Carefully, she bent it back, hoping that the little bit of deformed metal wouldn’t cause problems. “I’m sure you intended to get both of us out when you ran off without a word.”

“That’s not fair. I was frightened! You didn’t see what Specimen Seven did to the others.”

“I did see, actually,” she said, turning back to look at the rest of the room.

It held the noosphere portal. Large, up against one wall, it was an exact duplicate of the ringed machine that she had found in the Idaho Falls meat packing plant. The same one the Carroll Institute had taken down into Phrenomorphics and one quite similar to the one that granted her access to Beatrice’s core.

A bright pinpoint light right at the center of the rings indicated that Frankenstein had already started up the process of opening a spatial tear. Dyna doubted he would have left it open for her.

“Is Alpha on the other side?” she asked, keeping her gun pointed in Frankenstein’s direction.

“Ah…”

“Just open the portal,” she said with a menacing motion of her gun toward the control panel. “We need to get out of here before your mad tulpa finds a way in here.”

“Excellent idea. Never heard a better one.”

“Just do it.” Dyna scowled, moving further into the room. She deliberately positioned herself so that Frankenstein would be between her and both the vent and door. At no point in moving did she feel even the slightest guilt about putting him in harm’s way.

If he got attacked, she could rewind time. If she got attacked, they were both dead.

Besides, he was its creator. Only fair that he face it first. Again. First for the second time.

With a small shake of her head, Dyna looked toward the portal and immediately regretted it. The bright pinpoint of light made her wince and glance away, being too bright to look at for any amount of time. As she looked away, blinking the spots from her eyes, she noticed something else in the room. Something she didn’t recognize as being a part of the portal structure.

It was a little device, standing about thigh-high. A metal sphere the size of a person’s head had been suspended above a coil of cables, held up by three thick brass pipes either pressed against or into the sphere’s mid-section. Several blinking lights around the base winked in and out as she stared at it.

Something about it made it hard to look away from. It took her a long moment to realize. The metal sphere, though polished to the point where a mirror would be envious, didn’t actually reflect everything. The room as a whole was there. The portal ring was there. The bright light of the portal opening was not. Neither was Dyna herself, despite standing in a position where she should be perfectly reflected in its surface like M.C. Escher in the reflecting sphere.

Being a sphere, she should have been able to see Frankenstein as well. He wasn’t there either.

It only reflected the world.

“What is that?” Dyna asked, tearing her eyes away with some effort.

“What is… Oh. That. That is… a thing.”

“What is that?” Dyna tried again.

The hostility in her voice made Frankenstein freeze for just a moment. “It’s… just a device that keeps things… safe.”

“Frankenstein.”

“Uh… yes?”

“I’m not going to ask again.”

“Good. Because I really don’t know how to answer without causing a lot of problems.”

Dyna clamped her jaw shut, staring at the strange man. Looking back to the odd device, she walked over.

“Ah! Don’t touch it. It’s… uh… deadly. Very deadly. Dangerous device. Shouldn’t be handled with human hands.”

“Why is it sitting out here in the open?” Dyna asked, not believing the man in the slightest.

“Well, that’s where the tulpa left it when they brought it back from… elsewhere.”

“It feels strange. Calming, almost. I should be much tenser than I am, knowing that Specimen Seven is lurking in the vents—”

“It’s what!” Frankenstein shrieked, head twisting around in a panic.

“But it isn’t an artifact, is it? It’s…” Dyna crouched down, staring at the reflective metal at eye level. She still couldn’t see herself, just the wall behind her. Her eyes drifted away from the sphere, down one of the brass pipes to the small coil of wires at the base. A few other cables led away from it, passing into exposed circuit boards. Two circuit boards were a bit darker than the third, looking older. The third might have been a recent replacement.

Tilting her head, looking down at the newer circuit board, she noticed some text under a symbol. Three hexagons.

“Tartarus… This is from Tartarus.” Dyna blinked, eyes snapping back up to the sphere. “This is the Continuity Engine.”

“No, that’s… not true. It’s a tesla coil. The boys picked it up at the dollar store. Spent twenty dollars.” Frankenstein paused. “Inflation,” he added with a shrug.

Dyna wasn’t paying attention to him anymore, staring at the device. It really was here. Ado had said that the tulpa had only been examining it. If they had taken it, wouldn’t they have mentioned that at some point?

No. None of them would have said anything. In fact, Ado’s comments about it only being examined had probably been more manipulation, forcing Dyna into creating a whole new Continuity Engine just to keep Tartarus safe from her.

Alternatively, Alpha had lied, doing the same thing here in making Dyna create one for them. But… that didn’t make much sense. Dyna couldn’t alter minds. Frankenstein clearly knew what it was.

Her eyes roamed over the machine, finding a thick cable trailing to a standard outlet on the wall.

She grabbed it—

“No!”

—and pulled.

The bright light from the portal winked out as the mother of all headaches bludgeoned Dyna over the head with a sack of bricks. She staggered, strength in her legs failing. The room spun around her.

“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” a voice echoed, sounding distant and yet far too loud against Dyna’s pounding head. “It’s me. She found it. Unplugged—Yes I tried. She had a gun! No. Not safely shutdown at all. Continuity collapse? What the hell does that even mean? What? Fine. Fine. But I want a raise. I want a whole damn island of my— Damn it…”

Dyna planted a hand on the ground and tried to push herself up. Something kicked into her wrist and she found herself flat on her face. A shiny black boot was all that was visible.

“Not my job…”

Gloved hands gripped her wrist and yanked off her watch. The clatter as it skidded across the room felt far too loud against her ears, but not nearly as loud as the noise of Frankenstein trying to pull the gun out from under her body. Her phone fell out of her pocket, along with her mirror. A single sweep of the shiny black boot sent them toward the darkened portal.

The spinning of the room started to slow down but not before Dyna couldn’t take it anymore. The putrid smell of vomit stung Dyna’s nose just as she felt the gun’s strap go over her head.

“This is… Ugh.”

Eyes coming back into focus, Dyna looked up.

She found herself staring down the barrel of her own looted PP-2000, the sharp angles of its design looking all the more menacing from this position.

“Really sorry about this. I’m just supposed to make the monsters. Not kill kids. But… Can’t go against the boss, unfortunately.”

Dyna let out a small scoff. “I’m sure… you’re broken up about it,” she hissed through clenched teeth.

“More than you can imagine.”

“I saved your life. Your creature—”

“Please. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”

He was hesitating. Were their positions reversed, Dyna liked to imagine she would have pulled the trigger well before she apologized. Now?

Her eyes flicked to the Continuity Engine. The reflective sphere worked properly now, reflecting herself, Frankenstein, and one other bit of motion.

“You know,” she said slowly, buying time. “In the original, Frankenstein dies unwilling to give up his revenge against the creature. Kills himself, essentially.”

“So, what?”

“I always found it more poetic when the creature kills the creator.”

“Wha—”

Frankenstein’s question turned to an elevated shriek as a shadowy form swept his feet out from under him. Dyna ducked her head, rolling away with a kick off the wall as blood and viscera sprayed through the air. Her eyes locked onto her wristwatch. Diving for it, she snatched it off the floor and immediately tried to spin the bezel.

It turned, but only a second back.

From Dyna’s perspective, she had gone from holding the watch firmly in her hands to just barely touching it.

Looking back over her shoulder, she grimaced. Frankenstein was on the ground, utterly still despite missing a leg this time. Specimen Seven’s finger was pressed into his quilted mask, unmoving as well.

Clenching her teeth, Dyna pushed herself up and dashed for the door.

Spinning the wheel, she stepped out and slammed it shut behind her before she took off in a hazy sprint back toward the initial control room.

Mirror, gone. Gun and laser pointer, gone. Phone, gone. Her one lead on Alpha’s possible location, gone. If she could get to the control room, she could get Walter’s phone back. If signals were still being disrupted, that might not count for much.

The only other thing she had going for her was the Continuity Engine.

Or the lack of a Continuity Engine.

As Dyna dashed through the corridors, she tried to focus. There had to be a side door in the control room that she had missed the first time around filled with all kinds of weapons that could kill Specimen Seven.

There had to be.

 

 

 

The Psychic Detector looked even more imposing from the base. Craning her neck back gave Dyna a dizzying moment of vertigo before she shook the feeling off. There wasn’t time to sit around gawking. There were still tulpa around and who knew what Alpha was planning now that she had gotten out of that trap.

Entering the detector superstructure felt like the kind of place that people weren’t regularly meant to traverse. The door, unlocked with her bobby pin just beyond the garage-like dock for the gondola, brought her through a narrow corridor lined with pipes, cables, and tubes. A maintenance area.

“The Psychic Detector is part of the Carroll Institute’s psionic detection network, which consists of a number of satellites and similar radar stations positioned at strategic locations around the world. It was designed to monitor psychics, detect artifact instantiation, and measure global ambient levels of psionics for a variety of purposes. However, from this brief walk-through you are providing, I can say that this installation has been modified significantly from the designs stored in my databases.”

“Is that my fault or Alpha’s?” Dyna whispered, moving carefully through the corridor, trying not to think about horrifying monsters jumping out of vents to attack her. Continuity Engine or not, she didn’t need the added stress.

Nothing jumped out at her. No horror monsters. Not even regular tulpa.

Dyna found that… eerie. Frustrating though it might have been, she honestly thought fighting her way inside would have been better than this. It was just too empty. Too quiet. For all that she was annoyed with the way Alpha called her out as an action hero, she would much prefer that role to that of a horror protagonist.

“Unknown. I am leaning toward the latter. I have detected blank spots in my memory relating to this place. It is likely Alpha used her authority to prevent my awareness of her intentions here.”

“I thought we unshackled you. Can’t you recover those memories?”

“Not if they never existed in the first place.”

“Fair enough,” Dyna said, coming to a stop. The maintenance corridor came to an end at a ladder. Small LED lights illuminated the shaft, which headed up high into the mast of the structure. The ladder also went down, however that path was not lit nearly so well. There was only a dim light at the bottom. “Which way, do you suppose?”

“There would be little room within the detector’s shaft.”

“If Alpha wanted to hide anything larger than herself, she would be underground,” Dyna reasoned. She didn’t like the idea of climbing up or down a ladder. It would force her hands onto the ladder rather than her watch or gun. Her mirror was still black. Hostiles were in the area. The drawbacks of her mirror were once again apparent, unfortunately. She didn’t know if there were any tulpa down below or if her mirror was just dark because of any she had left behind at the observation station.

Dyna descended as quickly as she could, dropping the last several feet to the ground just in case she did reset time. She didn’t want to reset onto the ladder and fall the entire way because the jolt would have made her hands relax.

However, there was nothing at the bottom. More pipes. More cables. It was just a small room. Most of the cables ran overhead while the vertical pipes stretched from floor to ceiling.

“Maybe she did go up?” Dyna said after taking one full look around.

“Hold. The pipes are not in my schematics. Analysis of surrounding infrastructure indicates that they are not connected to the rest of the structure in any meaningful way.”

Dyna quirked an eyebrow, looking back to the pipes herself. She tapped them, frowning at the hollow sound they made as her knuckles met metal. Leaning around the sides, she noticed a thin line in the wall a bit away from the rows of pipes. “There is a seam here,” she said, holding her hand up to it. “I feel airflow from the other side. It’s a door?”

She didn’t know how to open it. There was no obvious doorknob.

But she had a bobby pin that could open any door.

Jamming the bobby pin into the seam, she turned.

With a hiss, the door clicked and the whole wall, pipes and all, swung inward.

“Now this is more like it,” she said, carefully stepping inside. “Just what I would expect…” Dyna trailed off with a grimace. “Did I make some kind of super villain base?” she grumbled to herself.

“Unknown.”

“It was a rhetorical question,” Dyna mumbled as she paused.

There was something on the ground ahead of her.

A body. Tulpa, based on the weapon and armor. Something had torn apart its midsection, leaving entrails and blood coating the floor.

“No life signs detected.”

“You think?” Dyna hissed, wishing she had never even thought about any movie genres in the first place. “Did I do this?”

“I have observed your every action since leaving Texas. You did not cause this tulpa’s death.”

“With my power?”

“Anomalous energy signature that began when Alpha ordered the initiation of the Continuity Engine is still ongoing.”

“For all we know, that is me doing that.”

“Uncertainty is high,” Beatrice admitted.

“If my power is going to warp reality around me,” Dyna grumbled, clutching her gun tight as she peered around the narrow corridor. “I would much rather have it warp it into an action movie than a horror movie.”

Beatrice didn’t say anything, leaving Dyna little to do but push forward into the narrow corridor. Dyna made sure to look up at the pipes running along the ceiling several times. In horror movies, they always got attacked from above.

Aside from one other body, dismembered, Dyna didn’t see anything that constituted as a threat. There were several doors that had large wheels on the front in the corridor. The kind that might look more at home on a boat than whatever this place was supposed to be. Stopping at one, she spun the handle and peeked inside.

Dyna jolted, readying her gun, only to pause. In the dim lights, the rows of armor looked like soldiers standing shoulder-to-shoulder. A moment of extra observation revealed the truth. The helmets and body armor were hanging from racks on the wall. The array of PP-2000s underneath the armor was evidence enough for what this was. An armory.

Tulpa littered the floor. Bullet holes pockmarked the walls, ceiling, and floor. Eight dead tulpa, probably. Dyna wasn’t actually sure. More than one had been torn completely apart to the point where she wasn’t quite sure where one body ended and another began.

The next two rooms were much the same. A tulpa armory, some kind of living quarters, and a small mess hall. Was all this real or had Alpha somehow constructed it out of the noosphere?

Or had it all popped into existence because Dyna figured that an army like this would need a large base of operations?

Lately, Dyna had started to feel like her own worst enemy.

Pushing the thoughts from her mind, Dyna continued on until she found a different room. A small control room with a single seat and a terminal. A staircase led down from the control room to a large metal casket propped up on a pedestal below. Thick pipes and large cables connected to both ends of the metal cylinder, connected to the ceiling up above.

There were no bodies in this room. Dyna wasn’t sure if that was more ominous or less. There was still no sign of whatever had torn the tulpa apart.

Stopping at the control panel, Dyna looked it over for just a moment before finding what she needed. Pulling out Walter’s phone, she connected it to the machine.

“Beatrice?”

“Hold. Assuming direct control of the internal network.”

“How long—”

“Complete.”

“Oh. Okay. So?”

“It appears that this facility was redesigned during its construction stage to, in addition to its regular psionic detection role, send out a beacon to draw thoughtforms from the noosphere.”

“It makes tulpa.”

“This particular console and chamber contain equipment for manufacturing specialist tulpa. The more advanced entities you have been facing.”

Dyna narrowed her eyes as a number of experimentation logs appeared on the screen. A large number of them were fairly grim. Little more than piles of disjointed limbs and bodies all mashed together in a form most horror movies would love to have jumping out at the audience. From the rapidly changing images, Dyna gathered that they only had a few stable successes. The mountain man—listed as Specimen Three—the eye-tulpa—Specimen Five—and one labeled Specimen Seven, which took the form of a woman wearing a blank black mask.

“Do I need to be worried about that last one?”

At her question, the text on the screen changed. “The research notes imply that this specimen was developed immediately following Specimen Five, taking in everything they learned from its creation.”

“So it was also made to counter my power?”

“Potentially. It appears that creation attempt was aborted prematurely.”

“It was destroyed?”

“Released. Most recent log timestamped eleven minutes ago.”

“Roughly when I escaped from Alpha’s monologuing?”

“Approximately one minute after the gondola descended.”

“So they let out some insane experiment before it was ready because I was coming. Probably hoping it would kill me or at least slow me down. I wonder if they expected it to kill the other tulpa here. Any chance it got Alpha? Any idea where it is now?”

“Unknown and unkno—”

A clatter of metal against cement had Dyna pivoting on her heel, bringing her stolen gun up to her shoulder. If this was some advanced tulpa, a gun probably wouldn’t work so well. She didn’t really have anything else, unfortunately. Outside the noosphere, she couldn’t create clones of herself and she had yet to see anything that resembled disruptor technology.

Guns had been able to slow the Hatman. Based on those other rooms, they didn’t look like they had done that much good here. Maybe the tulpa had all just missed.

Holding onto that hope, Dyna approached a smaller door back at the entrance to the control room. She hesitated outside, waiting a long moment. Beatrice wasn’t saying anything. In tense situations, she didn’t like to distract Dyna. If she had vital information, she would share it.

Keeping her submachine gun locked in her shoulder, Dyna reached forward and grabbed the handle. Wiggling it, it didn’t budge. Throwing a quick glance around, making sure nothing was sneaking up on her, Dyna pulled out her bobby pin and tried the door a second time.

It opened to a single occupancy toilet. A single occupant, crouched on the floor, threw their hands up in front of their face, making a squealing noise as they pressed back against the wall.

Tense, Dyna’s finger pulled the trigger before her brain caught up to what she was seeing. Blood splattered against the wall, coating the cement, while the person slid off to one side, letting out a rattling last breath.

“I do not believe that was what killed the tulpa in this facility. Body language analysis in the moments before death indicates fright.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Dyna said, gripping her watch and throwing herself back in time several seconds.

Standing in front of the door once again, Dyna opened it with far less hesitation. The person inside still shirked inward, cowering. Dyna got a much better look at them this time around.

It was a person. Probably a man. Dyna couldn’t describe much about him since he wore what looked like a padded quilt over his head and face. Dark lenses let him look out into the world. A crystal ball had been implanted in his forehead. Or half a crystal ball had been attached to the quilt.

Dyna grabbed his arm and threw him to the ground, planting a knee in his back as she patted him down for weapons. Finding nothing more than a few tools—a screwdriver, some pliers, and a long coat hanger—she got off his back and kept her gun aimed at his head. After a quick glance around the room, including upward, she looked back to him.

“Stay down,” she ordered.

Despite the command, the man tilted his head up enough to see her. “Oh. It’s just you.”

“I said stay down.”

The man didn’t. He started to push himself up until she swept her foot, knocking one of his arms out from under him. Groaning, his shoulder hit the ground.

“You wouldn’t be so cavalier if you knew I just blew your brains out.”

“What?”

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Rather than answer her questions, he turned his head, looking around the control room without pushing himself back up again. “Is it gone? Did you kill it?”

“I’m asking the questions he—”

“You don’t understand. We need to evacuate,” he said, starting to push himself up again. “Maybe evacuate the whole island.”

“Because of Specimen Seven?”

“How did you…”

“Answer my questions,” Dyna said. “Or I’ll tie you up and leave—”

“No. No please. I’m… uh… Frankenstein.”

Dyna glowered. “Excuse me?”

“The tulpa technician. My art gives chaotic thoughts beautiful form.”

“You make the tulpa here.”

“I make art.”

“Uh huh,” Dyna said, gaze flat. “Where’s Alpha?”

“Why would I know that? She came running through here a few minutes ago. I told her Specimen Seven wasn’t ready. She set it loose anyway,” he said, tone upset. “Probably died. No… no. Probably fled through the noosphere.”

“You have a spatial anomaly or noosphere portal here?”

“Of course. What kind of tulpa research facility do you take us for? We might not be as large as—”

“Quiet.”

“But we need to—”

“Where is the noosphere portal?” If she could reach it, she could create clones of herself. Distasteful as it was to potentially send herself to her own death, it was the only real defense she could think of that might stand up against an advanced tulpa.

The quilted man’s head turned, looking back to the door that had brought Dyna to the control room. The corridor outside had continued onward. The portal must have been further along. A part of her wanted to rush straight there and start making clones of herself as a defensive wall. The other part turned back to the quilted man.

“When you said we needed to evacuate the entire island…”

“Specimen Seven is unstable. It has no purpose or directive and did not respond to command signals. Theoretically, it should have dispersed back into the noosphere after it was released from the pressure chamber. It didn’t. New theory: It is feeding off the thoughts of those it kills and will continue to do so until it either stabilizes or fails to sustain itself. It will probably continue after stabilizing simply because that is all it knows.”

“I passed a lot of dead tulpa,” Dyna said, moving back to the door and, after a quick glance outside, sealing it shut with a spin of the handle. “How many would it have to eat to stabilize?”

The… Frankenstein sat up on his knees while Dyna’s back was turned. She was tempted to order him back to the ground but, having watched him for several minutes now, decided she could probably take him in hand-to-hand combat if he did try anything. He was unarmed, after all.

“This is an art. Not a science. I can’t give you hard answers like that.”

“I know several doctors who I am sure would disagree with you.”

“All I know is that it doesn’t matter if it won’t stop.”

“It might. How long between kills before it disperses?”

The man shrugged, looking affronted that she would even bother asking.

With a groan, Dyna looked to the terminal. “Beatrice.”

“This is Beatrice.”

“Get as much data on Specimen Seven to Doctor Darq as possible, please. Try to get me some usable information.”

“Understood.”

“Doctor Dark?” Frankenstein said, “I’ve heard Alpha mumbling about—”

“Darq,” Dyna mumbled. “With a q.”

“What?”

“What.” Dyna shook her head. “I saw a lot of dead tulpa but didn’t encounter anything. Is this thing going to target only tulpa or is it going to attack humans as well?”

“Oh. I hope it didn’t escape already.”

“The nearest civilization is a fair distance away. Will it survive that distance?”

“I don’t—”

“Useless,” Dyna hissed, turning away. “Beatrice. I don’t suppose Tartarus is in a position to hunt this thing down? I need to go after Alpha before—”

“Oh! Go—”

Dyna snapped her head back just in time to watch an elongated shadowy form grasp hold of Frankenstein by the ankle and hoist him up in the air. Although its main body, looking like tulpa within the noosphere despite being in reality, was crawling along the ground, its shadowy limbs stretched long enough for Frankenstein to dangle completely free without any part of him still on the ground.

Its other hand grasped hold of his arm. Frankenstein started screaming.

Dyna raised her gun and started firing into the shadowy mass. Her bullets passed straight through it without any apparent effect. It certainly didn’t stop the shadowy figure from pulling the man’s limbs.

Blood and viscera erupted from Frankenstein’s midsection as the creature ripped him completely in half. It slammed down his upper body, pinning his head in place with one hand. With the other, it pointed a long finger directly at his forehead. Frankenstein, still screaming despite having been torn in two, stilled instantly.

Dyna gripped her watch and turned back time as far as she could.

Finding herself staring at the door, about to seal it shut, Dyna turned back to Frankenstein, who was just starting to push himself to his knees, froze under her gaze and started lowering himself slowly back onto his stomach.

“We need to go,” she hissed, searching the shadows for any sign of the strange creature. “Now!”

“Wh—”

“You just died. And if you don’t get over here in about ten seconds, you’re going to die again.”

Dyna heard his jaw snap shut behind his quilted mask. He still hesitated for about two seconds, but he quickly got to his feet after that and ran to the door. Dyna stepped outside, about to slam the door shut behind her when Beatrice’s voice started in her ear.

“Warning: continued operation of Walter’s glasses requires proximity to his phone for wireless connectivity.”

Dyna’s eyes flicked to the table across the room. Movement in the corner of her eye made her slam the door shut, spinning the wheel.

Something slammed into the other side, eliciting a loud, metallic clang that echoed down the corridor.

Dyna waited, hand on her wrist, watching to see if Specimen Seven could follow them. After three more hammering bangs against the door the sound ceased. She considered rewinding time again and using the brief window of opportunity to grab Walter’s phone. But it had attacked earlier this time around than last time. Running across the room might set it off even earlier. If it managed to grab her arms, she might not be able to restart time before it ripped her apart.

“Sorry Beatrice. Might have to carry on without you if you can’t use my phone.”

“I can connect to your phone but cannot connect your phone to the glasses.”

“We’ll have to make do,” Dyna said with a small sigh. “Frankenstein, how do we…”

Dyna looked around the empty corridor. While she had been focusing on the door, watching to see if the creature could follow after them, he had apparently decided to try his luck on his own.

She considered rewinding time to keep him from running off. Fear over not managing to get away from the creature in time stayed her hand.

There was really only one way to go, anyway. Further down the hall.

“I hope it is stuck in there,” she mumbled, foregoing her gun in favor of keeping her hand on her watch.

“Was that rhetorical?”

Dyna hesitated in answering. “Why do you ask?”

“I only observed the tulpa in thirty-eight frames, however that was more than sufficient to identify its lack of a humanoid body.” Red lines appeared over Dyna’s head at periodic points in the corridor. “It may be capable of traversing the ventilation system.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, quickly moving out from under the highlighted vent directly overhead. “In that case, yes, Beatrice, it was rhetorical,” she said through grit teeth.

 

 

 

“Activate the Continuity Engine.”

As soon as the words left Alpha’s mouth, Dyna gripped her watch and turned the bezel.

“—name is Marybeth King,” Alpha said.

Dyna tuned her out, closing her eyes as she tried to focus. Alpha did not have a Continuity Engine. How could she? It was at Tartarus. Even if her tulpa had been inspecting the device for reverse-engineering purposes, it had only been a few hours. She might have been trying to build one. There was no way she had managed.

It was clear to Dyna that Alpha was trying to use her own power against her.

Opening her eyes in a hard glare, Dyna noted that Alpha had stopped talking.

The woman was smiling.

At this point in their conversation the last time around, Alpha had been on the verge of rage.

“You used your watch gadget,” Alpha said. When Dyna didn’t respond except with a deeper glare, the woman actually laughed. “Being an administrator, I am quite aware of your abilities, both those granted by artifacts and your natural power. Your mirror allows you information on anyone observing you or with hostile intentions toward you in the area. Your laser pointer violates causality, making projectiles fired from its attached body hit so long as the laser beam intersected with them in the past few seconds. Your watch allows you to throw your mind back in time up to one minute and cannot be used to breach that one minute mark.

“I have planned around them.”

“You don’t have a Continuity Engine,” Dyna said, making sure she convinced herself of that fact by speaking the truth aloud.

“Ah. That is what made you use your watch.” Alpha shook her head, mournful smile on her face. “I’m afraid that, today, your opinion doesn’t matter. The Continuity Engine is an amusing little device, fully capable of protecting itself from your ability.”

“Doesn’t matter if you don’t have one.”

“As I said, your opinion doesn’t matter.” She pressed a button on the side panel next to the window. “Activate the Continuity Engine.”

Dyna crossed her arms. Rather than rewinding time, she simply looked around as if expecting some obvious change. Nothing did happen. Of course nothing would happen. The woman didn’t actually have a device. She was bluffing.

“Warning,” Beatrice said, making Dyna jolt. The artificial intelligence had remained silent, letting Dyna and Alpha talk without distraction. Dyna almost forgot about her presence. “Anomalous activity detected at Puerto Rico Psionic Radar. Analysis matches psionic waveform patterns around Dallas, Texas.”

Dyna winced. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” she hissed. “You’re reinforcing its realness. She couldn’t possibly have built one in those few hours.”

“Because I feel sorry for the unfairness of your situation,” Alpha said, pressing another button on the control panel. “I will offer you a choice.”

A small metal panel fell forward, looking like a library book return box. Wary, hand on her watch, Dyna leaned forward to peer inside.

It held a single syringe. Quite a bit larger than the kind used for vaccines. It was filled with a clear liquid.

“Desflurane, isoflurane, and sevoflurane. I’m not sure on the correct dosage—I’m not an anesthesiologist or chemical scientist—but I overcompensated. It should put you to sleep quite painlessly. A much more appealing way to go than at the end of a gun, full of fear and adrenaline, no?”

A sick sensation filled Dyna’s stomach as she stared down at the capped needle. Any way was not appealing when she didn’t want to die. Whether or not Alpha had a Continuity Engine didn’t matter. Not if a bunch of tulpa charged in and started shooting.

Dyna’s eyes darted around the room. Aside from the window in front of her and the barred entrance behind her, there were two other doors. One on either side of the room. Neither were labeled. A quick peek into Alpha’s monologuing room showed that the door was on the left.

It was a simple wooden door with no windows, roughly in line with the similar door here in the entrance room.

Was there a hall connecting the two rooms?

Dyna reached down into the receptacle and picked up the syringe.

“Huh. I hadn’t expected—”

“Look, I’m sorry if…” Dyna cut Alpha off, but paused and shook her head. She dropped the syringe on the floor and stomped on it, crushing the glass and spilling the liquid over the floor. “You know what? No. I’m not sorry. You tried to murder me. Multiple times. You couldn’t have just asked if we could try to force my power to find your family?”

“And risk you repeating yourself? And risk my family being brought back as the wrong people wearing the right faces or tulpa or something?” Alpha glowered, leaning close to the glass. “Better you die. For the world’s sake. Team C, move into position.”

Dyna didn’t wait around to see what Team C was going to do. She rushed to the left door, pulling out her bobby pin.

Hematite had given it to her. She hadn’t told anyone about it. At the time, she had been a bit paranoid. Being thrown into a decoupling chamber to separate her from other artifacts and the whole lightning gun—coil gun thing had her feeling like she might need to use it to escape from the Carroll Institute. She hadn’t at the time but now? It looked like she had been half right. All right about her decision to keep it secret.

Whether or not her main ability worked—whether there was a Continuity Engine in the area or not—didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she could use her power reliably anyway.

She had to do this herself. Just like everything else.

Flinging open the door, Dyna immediately grabbed her watch and rewound time.

She really should have expected tulpa guarding the hall that led to Alpha.

Jolting, Dyna looked down. She held the syringe in her hand once again. Alpha was quipping about how her taking it hadn’t been what she expected.

Dyna tossed the syringe aside, ignored Alpha, and rushed over to the right door this time, just to check what was on the other side.

Only a pair of tulpa, down from the five that had been in the other hall. She still rewound time before one could put a gun in her face.

Syringe in hand once again, Dyna bit her lip as she stared down.

Pulling off the plastic cap of the needle, she decided.

Hurrying to the right door, Dyna used her bobby pin to open it. Knowing where the tulpa were and how they were standing gave her the perfect knowledge of how to step forward and slam the syringe down into the throat of one of the two tulpa. Slapping his PP-2000 aside, Dyna managed to depress only about half the liquid before having to step aside, ducking under the arms of the second tulpa, gripping his wrists to keep the gun away from her.

The tulpa with the needle in his neck collapsed almost immediately, falling to the ground in a seizure.

It certainly did not look like peaceful sleep to Dyna. She didn’t get a chance to reflect more. While grappling with the still-standing tulpa, the door opposite of the one she ran through opened up. The first tulpa through raised his gun.

Dyna pivoted, putting the tulpa she was grappling with directly in between her and the open door. Just in time for the tulpa to open fire.

All the tulpa wore body armor. It didn’t help the tulpa in front of her as the other emptied his magazine into her tulpa’s back. He slumped over her, forcing her to hold him up for an extra few moments until the gunfire stopped. As soon as it did, Dyna shifted around him, letting him fall as she threw the door shut, locking it on her side with a heavy deadbolt.

Dyna stared down at the two tulpa for a brief instant, mind wandering back to Alpha’s commentary about her being some action movie star. She wasn’t hurt in the slightest. Not one bullet fully penetrated the tulpa’s rear and front armor and none had managed to skim around his bulk to strike her.

Was that because of her power?

Alpha was confident that she had a Continuity Engine working here, which, if true, meant no. It was just her training.

Dyna wasn’t sure what to believe.

“Beatrice,” Dyna said as she knelt to retrieve the PP-2000 from one of the tulpa.

“This is Beatrice.”

“You don’t have access to this facility, right?”

“I have active data feeds from the radar. No access to camera or internal networks.”

“Can you cut power to this entire facility from the outside? Disrupt or disconnect it from whatever power plant it’s drawing from? Or disconnect the power lines? Overload some nearby substation?”

“All Carroll Institute facilities possess on-site backup generators capable of maintaining essential operations for up to forty-eight hours.”

“Do it anyway,” Dyna said. “Just in case Alpha forgot to plug this fake Continuity Engine into the right outlet.”

“Understood.”

Bullets ripped through the door around the deadbolt lock. Dyna hurried down the hall, moving away from the team trying to get at her. “Any map on how to reach Alpha?”

“The layout I am observing through you does not match my stored blueprints of the facility. Given Alpha’s comments about a monologuing room, it is likely your power altered the facility before she activated the Continuity Engine.”

Dyna ground her teeth together.

She always wanted to be special. Someone just a little different than everyone else. But not like this. She didn’t know what had happened when Walter first came to her. Alpha didn’t even seem to know. Maybe her power had screwed up reality so thoroughly that nobody would ever be able to know.

Alpha wasn’t wrong to want her dead. Not if what she said was true.

She still wasn’t going to lie down and let it happen.

Dyna pushed her way into another door, one further down the hall. If her mental map of the facility was correct, this door should open up behind the monologuing room.

It was some kind of office. Although there were several desks set up, only one of them actually had terminals set up. The rest of the room looked older and a layer of dust covered most of everything except the terminal. If Beatrice had been right in saying that everything here was automated, it was little surprise to find a room like this sparsely used.

There wasn’t a lock on this door, unfortunately. She could hear footsteps charging up the hall. Slamming the door shut, she took up position behind one of the thicker desks, the one occupied by the terminal, hoping it would offer more than just concealment.

“I don’t suppose there is a way to hook you into this terminal?” Dyna hissed as she hastily attached her laser pointer to the looted PP-2000.

“If you physically attach Walter’s phone, I may be able to gain entry to their system. Alert: Sinkhole gondola moving on live satellite footage.”

“Alpha’s heading down to the radar station?”

“I have high confidence in the accuracy of your assumption.”

“Why would she leave if she thinks her only chance is attacking me while the Continuity Engine is active here?”

“Unknown. It is possible she wishes to leave her tulpa to the task while seeing herself to safety.”

“Because that has worked so well every other time,” Dyna grumbled as tulpa kicked down the door. Two advanced, only to be met with a laser-pointer. Two trigger pulls dropped them. “How do I get to the gondola?”

“Path impossible to calculate due to layout uncertainty. Indicating the direction of the gondola.”

The compass from earlier appeared in Dyna’s vision once again. A marker shifted back and forth as she turned her head. Biting her lip, she glowered at the open door.

She needed to head back through that door. There was another door in this room. The angle wasn’t what she expected for a door that would lead to the other hallway—the one Alpha had presumably left through. Since the gondola was back through the hallway she had come through, Alpha must have looped around somehow.

Unless the layout of this place made absolutely no sense.

“Why is my power so… ragh!” Dyna let out an inarticulate cry as she dropped a tulpa that leaned around the corner. “Do you have access to my phone’s camera?”

“Accessing. Accessed.”

Dyna pulled out her phone and, with a light toss, sent it out through the door the tulpa had kicked open.

“Six tulpa standing in the hall to the right, weapons raised.”

“Six?”

A window of a terrible angle of the hallway appeared. It was distorted but looked like Beatrice had tried to adjust whatever the actual image was so that she could see what was out there. Dyna didn’t get a chance to think too hard. One of the tulpa aimed their gun directly at the camera.

A gunshot rang through the open door as the image turned to static.

Dyna grabbed her watch and reset time.

“Accessing. Accessed.”

“No need. Six tulpa,” Dyna said, grinding her teeth together. She wished she had a grenade.

The tulpa weren’t advancing. That probably meant that the other door in this room wasn’t a valid exit. If it was, they would need to move to prevent her from escaping through it.

Eyes flicking to the nearby terminal, Dyna searched for a phone cable. Several wires came out of the boxy machine. One looked like it would work but she would have to move out of cover to reach it.

One of the tulpa peeked their head around the corner. Distracted as she was with the terminal, the tulpa ducked back too quickly for Dyna to aim her laser pointer.

Moving along the desk she crouched behind, Dyna reached the other end of the room, well away from where she had just been seen. Just in the nick of time. The tulpa held his gun around the side of the doorway, blind-firing roughly where she had been.

Aiming at the door from her new position, Dyna was ready for the tulpa to peek out and check if he had hit anything. He ducked back before she could pull the trigger, but the laser point had hit him directly between the eyes. Although he was fully on the other side of the wall, she watched him crumple.

Five left.

With the one only recently falling, it would take a moment for the others to move up.

Dyna spent that moment rushing back to the terminal.

“Damn.”

“It has suffered catastrophic damage.”

“No kidding,” Dyna hissed, scowling at the smoking wreckage. The tulpa must have hit it. Her eyes darted up to the doorway. She needed to hurry. While she was pinned down here, Alpha had the freedom to move, run away, or send even more tulpa after her.

Stepping out from behind cover, Dyna advanced to the door, pressing her back up against the wall, she took a breath then held her own gun out around the corner, sweeping it at what she hoped was head-level. It only took a second before gunfire rained down, knocking the gun from her hands.

Dyna let it go, snapping her hands back as quickly as she could. Grabbing her watch, she took care to shift backwards only a few seconds, not wanting to accidentally revive any of her opponents through time travel.

Gun back in her hand, Dyna pulled the trigger.

She heard the bodies fall on the other side of the wall. Rather than poke her head out or spend the time fumbling about for her phone, Dyna swept her gun around the hall once again. No gunfire ripped it from her hands this time. She still pulled the trigger several times. Two bullets hit something on the other side of the wall. Two more bullets struck the wall she was physically aiming at.

Only then did she pull out her phone and use the camera to peer around the corner.

Beatrice provided the footage on her glasses, letting her see the now empty hall.

“Action movie hero,” Dyna grumbled to herself as she replaced her magazine with one from the downed tulpa.

She stepped out into the hall, turning to orient herself with the marker Beatrice provided. Dyna paused before heading further down the hall, however, hearing a voice coming from one of the radios on the tulpa’s chest.

“Team B, report.”

Dyna glared at it for a long moment, mentally warring with herself. A part of her wanted to reach down and say something snippy to Alpha about how her team was dead and she was next. Shaking her head, she gripped her gun and continued down the hall.

She was coming for Alpha. She didn’t need to advertise that more than a non-response would.

The door at the far end of the hall brought her out to a wide balcony that looked down into the sinkhole. The spinning arms of the radar tower swept past just above the building’s ceiling at regular intervals. It was a truly massive structure. Not as big as a skyscraper but big enough that it felt strange standing next to it.

The cables for the gondola were just to her right. The actual gondola vehicle wasn’t up at the balcony. However, Beatrice helpfully highlighted another door. One that was labeled.

Stairs.

 

 

Avoiding the gondola, Dyna stuck to the road. It was… eerie. The entire trip had progressed in silence. Beatrice highlighted which turns to take but had stopped talking, wanting to allow Dyna full concentration. She wished she had Walter’s car here. Beatrice could have handled the road while Dyna kept her eyes to her mirror and watch.

The most eerie aspect of this trip was the utter lack of opposition. She had been driving for a little over one half hour. According to Beatrice, she was coming up on the Arecibo Psychic Radar Station in less than five minutes and she hadn’t passed a single other person since the small village at the base of the mountain.

“She had tulpa in the airport but not on the way to her base?”

“As I suggested, those may have been standard security, not tulpa.”

“Still, you would think she would protect herself better.”

“It may be wise to progress on foot from here. You will be better able to hide yourself among the vegetation outside a vehicle.”

Dyna slowed the car. There wasn’t really room to pull off to one side of the road. Given the amount of traffic, it probably wouldn’t matter. “How long will it take me to reach there on foot?”

“Depending on the route, following along the road or moving in a straight line, between five and ten minutes.”

Dyna looked over. The road ended abruptly, snaking alongside a few feet of dirt topped with trees and bushes and plants. The trees were thin but so densely packed that she she doubted she would be able to get far into them. Beatrice had been right earlier when she said that traveling all the way from the airport to here on foot would have been impossible. She had to wonder if Beatrice was overestimating her ability to squeeze between those branches and tree trunks.

Opening the door and stepping out, Dyna checked her mirror and then started walking right alongside the road. If her mirror lenses went dark, she could try to get behind cover. Until then, walking along the road would have to work. “I don’t have any weapons,” she said with a frown. “If this place is defended…”

“You underwent hand-to-hand combat training alongside Ruby and Emerald.”

“Up close? I might be able to do something. At the range PP-2000s operate, I’ll be riddled with bullets.”

Dyna had her laser pointer with her but it was useless without a projectile. Her bobby pin could open doors. Maybe create them under some circumstances. Her mirror gave her advance warning of threats and her watch let her observe a situation or stumble into a problem and have another chance to avoid it. Nothing she carried let her put down an army of angry tulpa.

Dyna pressed on anyway. With her power, she was sure she could figure something out. Manifest a weapon or at least find a way to steal one.

The wall of rock and dirt grew larger until it reached over her head. She could still jump off the road on the other side if something happened, but it looked like more trees.

Rounding a bend in the road, she froze. The lenses on her mirror turned dark just before she fully stepped around into view of the rest of the road.

Slowly, carefully, she edged her view around the tall wall of rock.

There was a gate up ahead, designed for vehicles. A small building, painted a gunmetal gray, sat just to the side with open windows facing down the road. There was obviously someone inside. The shadows and reflection from the glass didn’t let her see clearly.

The gondola station was just across a small parking lot. It was a rather small building. She couldn’t see any gondola inside, though the cables leading down the mountain were easily visible.

“Attention: this is a United States of America government facility. I have no data on posted guards.”

“Replaced with tulpa?”

“Possibly. My records may be incomplete. Proceed with caution.”

“Yeah. I’d rather not kill soldiers. Can’t you… I don’t know, phone ahead and let them know not to get in my way? Or better yet, arrest Alpha?”

“My access to the facility is limited. I believe Alpha took efforts to ensure my systems could not access anything beyond the radar data.”

“Lovely. Suggestions?”

“There is a restroom facility to the right of the gate. It will provide cover if you can reach it undetected. Alternatively, the fence does not extend far into the vegetation. It was deemed infeasible to fully encircle the facility.”

Dyna didn’t peek out further, not wanting to be seen by the guard. Trusting the accuracy of Beatrice’s information, she looked back down the road the way she had come. She moved until the wall of rock was back at her waist. Gritting her teeth, she grasped two of the trees and used them to pull herself up. Sucking in her stomach, she squeezed into the jungle.

“There is no way this would have taken me five minutes,” she said through clenched teeth, finding little room to shove through the vegetation. Five steps in and she could hardly tell which direction she had come from. The road was completely obstructed by leaves and branches. “How do I get through this?”

“Determining a path from my perspective is difficult,” Beatrice said.

“I don’t suppose you can give me a compass? I don’t want to get turned around.”

“Understood.”

In the upper periphery of her vision, a thin line appeared. Turning her head made the line scroll back and forth. A notch underneath turned from S to SE and back. A second marker appeared on the compass line.

“The marker is the direction of the gate. You will want to continue south.”

“Got you,” Dyna said, shoving her way through the trees once more. “How many are supposed to be stationed at this facility?”

“Outside anomalies or times of maintenance, the facility maintains a round-the-clock guard of only six. I do not have data on modifications Alpha may have made to the initial plan and cannot account for the possibility of mass tulpa guards.”

“So this place is pretty empty.”

“Correct. The radar is fully automated. No crew is needed to operate it.”

Dyna winced as some branches scraped her cheeks. She made it through, however. Just ahead, a pair of roads cut through the jungle. Turning her head, she spotted the guard station now behind her.

“The left road that continues south is the one you will want to take.”

Checking her mirror—black lenses but still no one with eyes on her—Dyna climbed out of the jungle and onto the road. A shake of her head loosed a few stray branches and leaves. There were probably more stuck in her hair—maybe she had brushed up against some sap too, since something felt sticky—but she tried to ignore it. Her appearance didn’t matter. Getting to Alpha did.

Trying to force her way through more on the other side of the road would take hours. She stepped carefully, watching both her mirror and the guard station. The windows weren’t designed to see behind it, however.

She took to the road, running along a small walkway built alongside the main road. Continuing along, not meeting anyone on the empty road, Dyna took a turn indicated by Beatrice and finally saw it. It stuck out above the trees. A tall spire stretching high into the air. Arms bent upward stretched out at various points along its body, rotating around the central shaft. A few red lights pulsed along the rotating arms and up at the high point of the spire. Although they were probably to warn aircraft, Dyna couldn’t help but think they looked a bit ominous.

“Alert: Alterations to base Psychic Detector designs detected. Purpose unknown. Analysis underway.”

“Anything to be worried about?”

“Unknown.”

“Lovely.”

“The former observatory station is up ahead. A small gondola is the main access point to reach the base of the radar.”

“Think Alpha is down there or at the station?”

“Unknown, but it is likely other guards are posted at the station.”

“No stairs down to the radar?”

“An old maintenance tunnel may still be accessible. It is also in the station.”

“So I’ve got to go inside no matter what,” Dyna said with a mental groan.

Shaking her head, she pressed on, keeping an eye on her mirror.

The station building was larger than she expected. Part of it must have been the original visitor’s center for the old telescope. It was painted a pale blue. Or had been a vibrant blue at one point in time and had since faded. The rest, reaching up two floors, looked more recent. It screamed of a military prefabricated building. Cheap metal walls that looked more like a portable trailer than a proper part of the structure.

There weren’t any guards standing around outside. Dyna did spot one of Beatrice’s five-lens security cameras mounted on the wall. The red light wasn’t lit.

“Just walk in the front door, I guess,” Dyna said, not seeing any other entrance. Hand on her watch just in case walking inside was a mistake, she pulled open the front door. “Still deserted?” she whispered, frowning at the lack of guards. There was a desk entryway where someone was supposed to sit. It looked like they had left in a hurry, leaving behind papers and a half-empty cup of coffee.

“Alpha—”

The phone on the desk started ringing. Dyna jolted, eyes wide as she stared around, expecting someone to come running to answer it. She grasped her watch, ready to throw herself back as soon as she saw someone.

No one came running.

The phone kept ringing.

“Think it is for me?”

“Unknown. This system does not have access to whatever internal network that phone is operating on.”

She stepped forward, hesitating with her hand over the phone’s handle. It wasn’t a typical VOIP phone. Rather, it looked older. Not quite rotary-dial old, but maybe something from the nineties. Or the kind of phone one might find on the wall of a prisoner’s visitor center.

A clattering noise from behind her made her jolt. She whirled around, watching as heavy metal bars fell from above, cutting off the door out of here.

Grasping her watch, she wrenched the bezel all the way around.

Following the familiar jolt, Dyna stared down at the ringing phone, a few feet from the desk. She was still in the room.

Turning back, Dyna took a single step toward the door.

The same shutters clattered down in an instant this time.

Dyna grasped the bezel again and spun it as far as it would go. Only a few seconds.

This time, she turned immediately.

The second she did so, the shudders clattered down over the door.

She stared, teeth grinding together. She started to go for the bobby pin in her pocket, hoping that it would somehow unlock the shutters, only to hear another sound back where the phone was ringing. She whirled, hands up and ready to strike.

A part of the wall slid aside, revealing a window into another room. Stepping closer, Dyna glared.

Alpha sat on a lounge chair, cigar in one hand and glass of red wine in the other. The older woman narrowed her eyes and curled her lips into a sneer. Throwing her cigar to the ground, she stood, stomping on it as she approached the window. She tossed the wine glass aside, moving a gloved hand to flick a lock of her graying blond hair out of her eyes.

The phone ringing stopped as she flipped a switch.

“Dyna Graves. Onyx. The Subject.” The woman’s voice came from a small speaker set next to the window. “I knew you were a fool, but to be this much of a fool?”

“Alpha,” Dyna said, teeth clenched. “I’ll give you one opportunity to turn yourself in.”

“Or what?” the woman said with a laugh. “You’re trapped. Don’t see any guns on you. This window is bullet proof anyway.”

Dyna looked around. It was true. There weren’t any other doors. At least no obvious ones. The layout of the structure didn’t make much sense if there weren’t doors, but they were either disguised or had been built over.

The bobby pin in her pocket could get her out. She was sure of it. Not sure of what kind of trap she had walked into just yet, Dyna refrained from trying to use it and triggering Alpha’s response.

A message appeared in her glasses. Beatrice was analyzing the room as best she could through the glasses, looking for exits, traps, and anything else of use.

“You should have brought Emerald. She would have torn through this place in an instant. I would already be dead. Or Ruby. At least she can take a hit. No. You come alone. So confident in yourself and your power. You think… you’re some kind of action movie hero?”

Dyna pressed her lips together, eyes darting about as Beatrice highlighted what was likely a hidden gun behind one of the walls. “I’m just a regular woman trying to get by without getting assassinated.”

“Any regular woman would have been dead ten times over from the things you’ve been through.”

“I like to think of myself as determined to survive.”

Alpha shook her head. “I’ve seen your pathetic attempts at experimentation. Conjuring items like you’re a Vegas magician. You still don’t understand your power, do you? It isn’t something you trigger and activate at will. It is a field. An aura that affects everything around you. Everything you think about, consciously or not.

“You’ve gotten it into your head that you’re an action movie star, so you keep getting into these action movie scenes. Yet, action heroes don’t get wounded or injured. Not seriously. So you walk away from everything with nothing more than a scratch. Hematite loses an entire arm mere inches from you but you walk away with a fake limp.”

“None of that would have happened if someone hadn’t tried to assassinate me,” Dyna ground out, fists clenching. “I know what Id said. I know what Walter said. My power doesn’t affect other people’s minds. Maybe some aspect of my power facilitated that situation—and others—but none would have happened if you hadn’t decided to kill me.”

“Of course I want you dead. You’re an abomination. A blind idiot god destroying and remaking the world to suit your needs in every instant.”

“That is obviously not true.”

“Is it? How would anyone know?” Alpha stepped closer, practically pressing her face against the glass of the window. “You think I made this… this… monologuing room just to have a chat with you? Where did the guards go? I don’t know. I doubt you do either. Are they alive? Dead? In some state of limbo where your power is still trying to decide whether they exist at all?” Alpha motioned down to the floor. “I don’t even smoke!”

Dyna’s eyes widened ever so slightly, eyes roaming down to follow Alpha’s motion. The angle made it so she couldn’t see the cigar, but Alpha had held the lit cigar up until a moment ago.

If she didn’t smoke…

“You manipulate everything, forcing people into positions and roles. You’ve clearly decided that I’m some kind of villain in your action movie. The villain has to have a moment to monologue, so here we are.”

Dyna stepped forward, boot knocking against the desk. “You think you aren’t the villain? You have a whole faceless army set on assassinating me! If it was just me, I might be able to understand, but it isn’t! You send them out kidnapping people, stealing things, and causing trouble. Trying to kill Id and Walter and—”

“They never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it.”

“They ambushed a civilian wedding.”

“No one got hurt,” Alpha said, drawing in a deep breath as she tucked a lock of hair back over her ear. “They’ve hurt nobody. No one who didn’t deserve it. Maybe frightened some people, true. The tulpa have a better track record than you.”

“I haven’t hurt anyone,” Dyna said, teeth grit. Tulpa, yes. They didn’t count. She had it on November’s authority that the tulpa Alpha used weren’t any more intelligent or aware than a dog. Less than that in most cases. “Apart from tulpa, I haven’t hurt anyone.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not—”

“I had children!” Alpha screamed, fist slamming against the glass. “Grandchildren.”

Dyna blinked, taking a step back. “I didn’t hurt any—”

“Walter found you,” she snarled, detest dripping from her mouth along with spittle. “He tried to explain what you are, what the Carroll Institute was. You flipped out. I don’t have the details. I don’t think anyone does. You’ve made sure of that.”

“I… I didn’t—”

“My name is Marybeth King. My husband, Angus, died five years ago. I had two daughters, Lizzie and Victoria. Lizzie married a man named Max Willard and had a son, Aron.” She paused, licking her lips. “Then the Incident happened. The Carroll Institute Administrative Council changed in an instant. None of us were really aware of it at first, but it quickly became apparent.

“I returned home that evening to a sterilized apartment. No trace of Angus. I tried calling Lizzie and Victoria. Those numbers had never been in service. My name doesn’t exist in any government database. None of the administrators have their former identities. We’re some… shadowy council of vague omniscience without real identities.” She scoffed. “The others didn’t mind so much. Only two of them had families, both estranged. I convinced about half to kill you right away. The rest wanted to use you, twist you to their own ends… Imagining the possibilities turned them greedy. Me?”

Alpha’s gray eyes looked up through the window, locking onto Dyna. “Where are my children?”

“I—”

“Where is my family?”

“I didn’t…”

“I know,” Alpha said, nodding. “I knew you didn’t know. I know this must seem incredibly unfair to you. You are, consciously, innocent.”

“I could try to—”

“Don’t you dare do anything more. You’ve done enough.” Alpha took in a breath, shoulders relaxing as if she had finally shrugged off a great weight. “I can only hope that they are out there somewhere, as confused as I am about how come their names aren’t right on any official documents. Darq was supposed to help me find them. Then you took him away too.”

“Doctor Darq? Of Tartarus?”

Alpha wrinkled her nose. She took another breath before squaring her shoulders. “It must seem incredibly unfair. I will kill you if only to keep what happened to me from happening to anyone else you interact with.”

“I…” Dyna took a breath of her own, straightening her back. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. I still don’t think I did it. I’m not going to lie down and let you kill me.”

“I’m not surprised. I didn’t expect you to, to be honest. That doesn’t change what will happen, but it does pose a problem. Luckily, I got what I needed from Tartarus earlier. How do we kill an action movie hero?” Her lips curled back into a cruel smile. “You take them out of the movie.

“Activate the Continuity Engine.”