Author: Tower Curator

 

Flying was a nerve-wracking experience now more than ever. It wasn’t that Dyna was nervous on a flight. She had been on a number of them in the past, including the one she had taken to get to Tartarus in the first place, all without incident. It wasn’t an incident that she was worried about anyway. Beatrice had chartered this flight just a few hours ago, working her technological magic to smooth the bureaucracy of a sudden flight to the fifty-first state. In the time between receiving its destination and Dyna actually arriving at the plane, there would have been an extraordinarily small window of opportunity to plant any bombs or otherwise sabotage the aircraft.

Combined with Dyna’s power reinforcing her beliefs that Alpha couldn’t have tampered with it, Dyna had little to fear from the flight itself.

She was worried about her lack of agency.

If something happened while aboard the aircraft, there would be next to nothing she could do beyond sitting around and hoping that her power changed things for the better. If Alpha took revenge on the Carroll Institute for ousting her as an administrator by sending more advanced tulpa their way, if Alpha decided to plant explosives around Tartarus, if Alpha slipped Beatrice’s security net and found a way off the island of Puerto Rico, Dyna couldn’t do a thing. Until they landed, she was trapped.

“Tower, TLD-niner-four.”

Dyna looked away from the green island and to her pilot. She didn’t know what kind of aircraft this was, only that it was much smaller than the jet to Texas. There were really only six seats. One for the pilot and co-pilot, then four passengers directly behind. Dyna sat behind the vacant co-pilot seat.

“TLD-niner-four. What do you mean not cleared for international flights?”

“Is there a problem?” Dyna asked, raising her voice. This aircraft wasn’t as quiet as Id’s jet.

“They want to divert us,” the bearded man said, twisting slightly without fully looking to her. “My computer says we should be able to land, but—TLD-niner-four. Copy. Maintaining three-five-hundred.”

Dyna frowned. With a small grimace, she pinched Walter’s glasses over her nose once again, having removed them for the duration of the flight simply because of the ache it was causing to the bridge of her nose. “Beatrice?”

“This is Beatrice.”

“They aren’t letting us land.”

“One moment.”

“TLD-niner-four. Roger. Coming in on two-six.”

Dyna raised her eyebrows. That certainly sounded like they had been given landing permission. Beatrice worked quickly. Didn’t the people behind the control panels wonder about their computers suddenly changing their tunes?

“Landing facilitated.”

“I noticed. How?”

“Digital communications are easily altered. I would advise departing the area before security realizes what has happened. Naturally, I will delay them as long as possible.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, glancing at the pilot. “We’re not getting this guy arrested, are we?” she said, voice a whisper that shouldn’t be heard over the engines or the chat with the local air traffic controller—or Beatrice, as the case was.

“I should be able to clear him of any wrongdoing. Leave him to me. Focus on nullifying Alpha’s tulpa strike capabilities.”

Letting out a soft sigh, Dyna shot the pilot a pitying glance as the aircraft’s landing gear touched down against the runway. “Has anything happened since we last spoke?”

Dyna had touched in partway over. Partially to check in on DT, but mostly just to see if Walter or Id had woken up.

“The Carroll Institute Administrative Council has been trying to contact you. I have been running interference.”

“What did they want?”

“The Carroll Institute has been elevated to a lockdown state. With Alpha’s actions coming to light and further review of the evidence provided, they have grown concerned that she will send tulpa after the campus. Their focus is on protecting the staff and initiates.”

“They wanted me on guard duty?”

“More or less.”

“Lovely. Glad I’m here. What about the others? Any change to Id or Walter’s conditions?”

“Not at this time.”

Dyna let out a long breath. She had tried not to get her hopes up. It hadn’t worked. She ended up sitting the rest of the ride in silence, waiting for the jet to taxi its way off to one side of the single-runway airport. The private jet didn’t allow for a gangway. Someone pushed up a portable staircase next to the jet and, in a few moments, Dyna stepped out into the Puerto Rican air.

It smelled a bit too much of the ocean for her tastes. Maybe she had just gotten used to the drier air of Idaho Falls.

“The locals aren’t sure what is happening just yet with regards to your flight, but some members of the air control authority are attempting to notify security. Evacuate the area immediately.”

Dyna started out by flipping open her mirror. People were certainly watching her, if only from the tower, but it usually only changed if people were observing her with hostile intent. At the moment, both lenses were normal mirrors.

Stepping down the staircase, Dyna looked around. The building was even smaller than that of the Idaho Falls Regional Airport. A fence surrounded the entire property, separating the air field from the rest of the city. Deciding to follow Beatrice’s suggestion, Dyna left the jet and the pilot, who was performing some post-landing procedures, and headed straight for the airport building.

The sooner she got away, the sooner she could disappear into the city. “Best way to Alpha’s last known position?”

“A gondola built to ferry tourists to the former site of the Arecibo Radio Telescope is the primary method of ascending the mountain. Any local will likely be able to take you to it.”

“Does the gondola move automatically or manually?”

“Manual activation from either base station. I am capable of operating it.”

“I ask because a gondola moving up a mountain seems like a noticeable thing. If it moves unexpectedly, Alpha will notice. Is there another way up?”

“A road provides ground access. It will likely be monitored as well.”

“So she’ll know someone is coming no matter what? Can I walk it? Maybe not move along the road but hike up? How steep is the mountain?”

“There is a walking trail alongside the road. Thick vegetation and steep slopes makes it difficult for anyone to ascend off the trail. In addition, it is quite a lengthy walk of several miles from any point where access is unlikely to be monitored.”

“Great. So Alpha is going to know I’m coming?”

“It is likely.”

“Any response from DT’s phone? I’d like to know if she knows anything about the…”

Dyna trailed off, eyes widening as she stepped into the small airport building.

“Door to your left,” Beatrice said as a faint line highlighted the suggested route.

Dyna didn’t argue.

She hurried into a small single-occupant restroom and locked the door. “Security footage?”

“Acquiring.”

Dyna blinked twice as the camera footage changed to the entry corridor Dyna had just stepped through. Two men stood at the far end of the corridor, talking to a frantically waving man in a white button-up shirt with an official-looking identification badge hanging from his pocket. The two looked like security, having the right uniforms, but something about them caught Dyna’s eye.

“They’re wearing the same radios that the tulpa at Tartarus used. Tulpa as well? Does Alpha already know I’m here?”

“Unknown.”

“Damn it,” Dyna hissed, looking around the small bathroom. She jumped up onto the counter. Reaching overhead, she slammed her palms into the drop tile and dislodged it.

“It could be a coincidence.”

“Fat chance with me here. Even if it was a coincidence, it probably isn’t anymore. Either Alpha has tulpa infiltrating the local security teams, the local security is reporting to her, or Alpha is monitoring their communications or otherwise receives their reports. My power basically ensures one of those is true.”

Griding her teeth together, Dyna pulled herself up and into the small space overhead. “Which way gets me out of here?”

“There is a side entrance on the other side of the air duct to your left. I have falsified flight data. Your flight will appear to have come from a small Cuban airport. An interview with the pilot will reveal this falsehood but this should buy a little more time.”

“Great. Thanks,” Dyna grunted as she tried to shimmy over the duct. Her hair got caught on something over her head and she felt something scrape against her arm as she tried to free herself. “This is much easier in movies.”

“Do take care to keep your weight on supports and not the tiles.”

Dyna didn’t respond, just keeping her teeth clenched together as she scurried along in the direction Beatrice indicated.

“It would be most advantageous to avoid damaging the tile on your way out. Humans rarely look up, so a little damage or misplacement is likely acceptable.”

“I can drop here?” Dyna asked, avoiding a thick water pipe.

One of the tiles highlighted a faint red in her glasses. “I am modifying security camera footage. You are clear to drop for the next… thirty seconds.”

Dyna didn’t wait, digging her fingers between one tile and the next. She pried it up and slid it aside. “Don’t know how I’m going to get it back to normal.”

“Humans rarely look up.”

“That will have to work,” she said, kicking her feet off the metal beam and falling through the hole. She landed boot-first, catching herself on a small bench. Standing upright, she dusted herself off as best as she could.

“Exit to your back.”

Dyna turned on her heel and sprinted through the doors, whipping out her mirror on the way. “The lenses are still mirrored? No hostiles nearby?”

“Coincidence,” Beatrice said.

“I don’t believe it.” Not with her power. She rushed out to the street outside the airport. “No transport?”

“I have secured a vehicle for rent rather than subject others to the possible danger Alpha poses.” Beatrice lit up a path for her. “The rental isn’t far.”

“Probably for the best,” Dyna said. Between the guy she had left her gun with and now the pilot, involving others would just end up with someone hurt. “No one is following me, right?”

“The airport security officers are not in pursuit. No communication to outside authorities has yet succeeded.”

“Your doing, I assume?”

“Correct.”

“I don’t speak Spanish.”

“I am fluent in over six million forms of communication.”

Dyna rolled her eyes.

The car rental place was actually right across the street from the airport. It advertised a number of electric vehicles, larger moving trucks, and even a few old gas guzzlers. As she looked over the signs outside the store, Dyna paused and cocked her head to one side.

“It isn’t all in English, is it?”

“Visual translations are easy to facilitate using the lenses.”

“Convenient.”

“Your vehicle is reserved under the name ‘Jasmine Jones.’”

Dyna cocked an eyebrow but didn’t ask about the random name. It was probably just that. Random.

With Beatrice’s assistance providing both real-time translation and instructing her on what to say in return, Dyna managed to get a sporty EV in under twenty minutes. It was small and unassuming but Dyna was fine with that. It worked. She didn’t need anything fancy.

Pulling up to the exit of the parking lot, Dyna hesitated. “This… is going to be embarrassing but they do drive on the right, right?”

“Correct.”

“I figured because of the steering wheel. Wanted to double-check before causing any accidents.”

“Highlighting the fastest available route.”

Behind the wheel of the car, Dyna felt far more comfortable than she had since leaving Tartarus. As long as Alpha really was here and couldn’t get away easily, Dyna felt in control. Of course, it would be better if they had actual eyes on Alpha but she supposed it was normal that the administrator had taken precautions against having Beatrice used against her.

The streets of Arecibo were fairly average. It might have been a nice place to vacation at but with her current task, Dyna couldn’t stop and smell the roses. As the route led her away from the city into the larger mountains to the south, Dyna had to note that Beatrice was right. A thick jungle of trees practically hugged the road. Thick meant thick. Dyna doubted she would have been able to squeeze between the tight thicket of trees in anything resembling a timely fashion. Given the possibility that Alpha already knew she was here, all the time in the world mattered.

“Is the gondola faster than the road?”

“The gondola provides a direct route over the trees and forest while the road is long and indirect, conforming to the contours of the landscape. It is both less distance to travel and faster than the road.”

“But easier to station some guards at the exit. Assuming they don’t just cut the cables.”

“It is a possibility.”

“Could we use it as a distraction? Start it up as I get closer and see if Alpha falls for the bait?”

“It is a possibility.”

“Let’s hold off until I’m closer, we—”

“I apologize for the interruption. The device you wished for me to monitor has pinged the cell network near the Carroll Institute.”

“DT? Start a call.”

“Understood.”

A faint ringing noise reached Dyna’s ears from the glasses. After two rings, Dyna heard a masculine voice answer the phone.

“Who is this?”

“DT? Is that you?”

“Prime?”

“Who else would have this number?”

“Beatrice, I would assume.”

“This is Beatrice.” Beatrice cut in. “You assume correctly.”

“Is this a good idea?” DT asked.

“I managed to find an override for her. She’s following her own rules now, not whatever the administrators say. Speaking of, you’re near the Carroll Institute?”

“You know that too?”

“Beatrice,” Dyna said as an explanation. “Your phone pinged a cell tower.”

“Well, I guess you should be aware that something happened. The tulpa in charge of me received orders to assemble in Idaho Falls. I think we’re about to get an order to attack the institute.”

“You’ll stop it, I assume?”

“If it looks like it is going poorly, yes. Otherwise, I might try to keep my cover? There are others working with Alpha. Other humans. I’m not sure who, yet, but she had an engineering team and a few human soldiers.”

“Had?”

Dyna could hear a smile in the voice. “There was an accident.”

“I see.”

“But it isn’t just underlings. She has other people on her level. Maybe above her? I overheard her talking to someone and it sounded like she was taking orders. Though maybe that was an adviser providing suggestions. It was how I knew Tartarus was about to be attacked.”

Dyna frowned, wondering who else was in on this conspiracy. Omega was the first name that came to mind simply because of their conspicuous absence from the meeting earlier. She had no real proof one way or the other however. “Do you know anything about her Arecibo base?”

“Arecibo?”

“Puerto Rico.”

“Are you in Puerto Rico?”

“Alpha seems to have a base in the region. Beatrice saw her here a few hours ago and she hasn’t been seen leaving.”

“I’ve never seen Alpha in person, but we have a method of rapidly traveling through the noosphere. She has built a device—maybe powered or utilizing an artifact?—that shifts things around and allows us to move quickly over long real-world distances within the noosphere. She might not be there anymore.”

“She better be here. I don’t want to have wasted my time.”

“At the moment, the device is here. It looks kind of like the portal device we found in the meat packing plant except horizontally arranged and about the size of a helicopter landing pad. It transports itself and everyone standing on top of it.”

“Okay. New objective: Keep that transport device from leaving. Sabotage it or destroy it or just kill whoever is operating it.

“Right, I—” DT went silent for a few seconds. “I’ve got to go. They’re calling for me. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

The phone line cut off before Dyna could start a response. Dyna tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she waited at a red light. “She better be here.”

This was Alpha’s main base of operations. Presumably.

No. Not presumably.

It was her main base of operations. As her main base, Alpha would obviously be there.

Focusing on that thought, Dyna followed the road up and into the mountains of Arecibo.

 

 

“She woke up?” Dyna said, slumping in the seat in front of Beatrice’s control panel. “Ruby’s okay?” That gave her some hope for Id.

“I intercepted a call from Ruby’s phone to the Carroll Institute. Would you like to speak with her?”

Dyna’s eyes flicked up to the clock displayed on the screen above Beatrice’s waveform. After Dyna had spent the last hour trying and failing to make an exit from Beatrice’s core straight to Puerto Rico, Beatrice had worked her magic and chartered a private flight. She was due to leave in a little over thirty minutes. Not much time to get over to the airport. Beatrice could probably delay but the longer Dyna took, the more likely Alpha would move.

“Let her know that I’m glad she’s alright and that I’ll talk with her once I’m on the plane.”

“Understood.”

“Are the tulpa still outside the exit?”

One of the screens changed, displaying camera feeds from the Tartarus train station. “They appear to have given up the search and are now just guarding the platform.”

“Am I likely to run into any tulpa between the station and the airport?”

“There are currently no obvious tulpa outside the train station. That will likely change if Alpha determines your destination or otherwise pinpoints your location. Stealth is advised.”

“I wish I had Emerald’s artifact,” Dyna mumbled, eyes roaming over the security cameras as she tried to plot her route.

Twenty-one tulpa patrolled the main platform area, crowding the station. Another four were on the train itself and four more were moving down the side hallway. The same hallway that Dyna had used to access Beatrice. Beatrice still wouldn’t tell her if that portal to the noosphere had always been there, not wanting to ‘destabilize reality any further’ as she put it. However, it did seem to be the only exit from Beatrice’s core.

Between her laser pointer and wristwatch gadgets, Dyna could probably take out all of the tulpa. Beatrice was right, however. Alpha wouldn’t stay put if she realized that Dyna was heading to the airport.

Alpha’s access to Beatrice had been revoked by the other administrators. She couldn’t just log in and ask where Dyna was now. Her tulpa still had to have some way of communicating with her.

Dyna pulled out her phone and started scrolling through her recent messages. Passing a priority objective update—she was to keep monitoring Tartarus, apparently—she came to a stop on the message from DT. “The message I’m looking at now, can you track where it was sent from and maybe what the sender is doing at the moment?”

Calling the number wouldn’t work. Not from the Noosphere. Dyna didn’t know how Beatrice had a connection to the outside world but it was through that connection that Dyna’s phone had received a few updates. Even if calling did work, it could be dangerous for DT if her counterpart was in a sensitive situation.

Dyna didn’t know what Alpha was planning. Only that Alpha had traveled up to the old site of the Arecibo telescope and had managed to evade Beatrice’s security feeds there. All entrances and exits were monitored, so they knew she hadn’t left. Unless, of course, she had a path through the noosphere. Given the existence of her tulpa, their known usage of portal structures, and the possibility that she had tulpa who could open spatial anomalies independent of technology, the likelihood was high.

All the more reason to get to her sooner rather than later.

“The phone number is attached to a prepaid ‘pay-as-you-go’ plan through T-Phone. The signal is null. It may have been used as a temporary burner phone, the phone could be powered off or the SIM-card removed, or the phone could be out of range.”

“The noosphere would be out of range, I assume?”

“Correct.”

“Keep monitoring it. Let me know if it resurfaces.”

“Understood.”

Dyna stood up and ran through a quick check of her equipment. She would have to ditch the guns before reaching the airport but until then, she made sure her stolen PP-2000 was fully loaded with a fresh magazine. She made a mental note to request a Picatinny rail mount for her mirror. For the time being, she kept her mirror in hand and her other hand on her watch.

“I’m heading out.”

“Wear Walter’s glasses. I will assist where I can.”

Dyna nodded, pulling out the mirrored lenses. She pinched them to her nose, watching as the text on the thin lenses adjusted to account for the angle she had donned them at. They were so thin and lacked any real rims. Where were the electronics?

A part of her wondered if she had been the one to create them somehow. Maybe some errant thought in the past. They just didn’t make sense otherwise.

“If I turn my head too quickly, these things are going to go flying. How does Walter stand them?”

“Unknown. I have never had a head or glasses. I will display security footage, enemy line-of-sight, and other vital information. Be warned that I may not be aware of everything. Surprises will become more dangerous if you rely on my system too much.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” It was more support than she had gotten for anything else she had done. “I guess I should let you know that I’ll disregard your information if I think I know better? With my power to alter reality, the things we see might not be perfectly identical.”

“Understood.”

Heading through the noosphere facility that was Beatrice’s core, a faint line appeared on the ground in Dyna’s glasses, directing her back toward the same portal she had used to enter this place. She had tried to use it to get to Arecibo, so she knew where it was, but the opportunity to get used to the information in front of her eyes was welcome. If it got too distracting, she might have to take them off for a time.

For now, however, Dyna stepped through the portal to the other side. The dusty, old laboratory that greeted her hadn’t changed since she last saw it. This time, planning to leave, Dyna shut down the portal from this side. Not wanting any of Alpha’s people to have access to Beatrice, she hefted up the control panel and smashed it back down onto the ground. Bits of electronics went flying everywhere. Grabbing a few wires from around the portal ring, she yanked them out of place.

Hopefully, Beatrice’s core was noosphere adjacent, like lower Tartarus, and not the proper noosphere. It made sense. Both Beatrice’s core and Tartarus didn’t seem like they worked off the rest of the noosphere’s rules. The noosphere was a reflection of the real world filtered through the minds of all who observed it. Noosphere adjacent locations didn’t seem to need that observation requirement.

And if it was in the proper noosphere, hopefully her justification of why it couldn’t be there would shove it into an adjacent version of the noosphere. Anything to make it a little more difficult to reach for regular tulpa.

Back through the corridors and up the ladder, Dyna used the bobby pin to open the hidden passage once again. The security camera footage in the glasses showed the empty custodial closet beyond. Dyna slipped inside and quickly closed the hidden door behind her, sliding the shelf back into place as she approached the main door.

The hallway beyond was not empty, unfortunately. It was a straight and narrow hallway with no cover to hide behind, intended for station staff, not regular travelers. It seemed a bit odd that this place even had an area for station staff. It must have been something Dyna had done since she couldn’t think of a reason why Tartarus would have a regular train station at this end of their tracks.

“Beatrice,” Dyna whispered, mind running over possibilities of how to get out of here without being seen. “Are you able to send the train back to Tartarus on your own?”

“Indeed, I believe so.”

“Do it.”

“Understood,” Beatrice said, voice coming from some directional speaker set in the edges of the glasses. “One moment.”

Dyna waited, biting her lip and hoping that this would work. Her glasses changed, displaying both the hallway outside the custodial closet as well as the main station platform. It was a bit of a strange effect. Even though her eyes were focused on the door, the transparent display of the security feed overlaid on top of everything, giving her a strange sense of double-vision without actually making her dizzy.

It took a moment, as Beatrice said, but the doors to the train slid closed, trapping a few tulpa inside. The twenty others on the platform turned, watching as the train started moving along the tracks. For a long few seconds, they just sat and stared. One eventually got the bright idea to reach for a radio on their vest.

Dyna heard something through the door. A garbled voice that wasn’t speaking English. The tulpa on the other side of the door seemed to understand anyway and started running down the hall toward the station. One remained behind, watching after them but stood still as a guard.

Its back was to her door.

Not knowing how long it would stay like that, Dyna decided that it was now or never. Carefully and quietly, she pushed open the custodial closet door. Moving as silently as possible, she ran down the hall in the opposite direction. Beatrice, helpfully, put a faint red line on the ground with arrows pointing in the direction she was already moving. The red line curved into one of the doors that Dyna might have otherwise passed by.

An exit. According to a bit of text appearing on the glasses, it was an emergency exit. Beatrice had disabled the alarms.

Taking a breath, Dyna pushed open the door, using the horizontal push-bar. Normal emergency exits had a big label warning about alarms sounding if the door was opened. This one lacked that warning. Nonetheless, Dyna found herself stepping out into an alley in the hot Texas air.

Deciding to not think about whether or not that had always been an exit, Dyna moved down the alley.

The tulpa in the hallway turned around just as the door clicked shut.

She stopped at a large dumpster, ducking down behind it. The alley only had one exit. The other end had a large brick building blocking the path.

“I have a vehicle prepared for you,” Beatrice said just as the camera feeds in Dyna’s vision shifted to ones taken from outside the station. “Be warned, enemy tulpa are watching the exterior of the station. The vehicle is standing by at the far end of the street.”

“Stolen like last time?”

“This system does not condone vehicle theft. However, this system believes you are in danger at the moment and has made decisions based on that information.”

“So yes.”

“Yes, it is—or rather, will be—stolen when you commandeer it.”

“Not complaining. I was just curious,” Dyna said, watching the tulpa.

They were standing just inside the large glass doors of the station, watching the street out front. The entrance to the station was a decorative structure that bulged outward in a semi-circle, affording them an unfortunate view of the area. A few cars passed by every so often. It wasn’t the busiest road but it wasn’t as deserted as Idaho Falls felt on occasion.

“I suspect their positioning is to hide their weaponry and appearance from passers-by.”

“I doubt they’re going to keep hiding if I go out there. Even if they don’t start shooting, they’ll have eyes on me,” Dyna said with a frown. “Bring up a map and show me exactly where the vehicle is and, if possible, the sight cones of our friends.”

“Understood.”

Dyna felt herself go a little cross-eyed as she tried to follow the map that appeared. A helpful marker showed her position and direction, the car down the street to the right, and the windows to the left. The car itself was across the street, down the road a short bit. Unfortunately, it was within view of the windows. The alley wasn’t but if she stepped out away from the walls, she would likely be seen immediately.

“I don’t suppose you have remote control over the vehicle?”

“Negative.”

“I don’t suppose you can hijack a vehicle that you would have remote control over?”

“Per the Autonomous Automobile Safety Act of 2029, car manufacturers cannot design their systems in such a way that allows for external control beyond locking down the vehicle in the event of a vehicular theft. Even that control must be reviewed and the car must not be in motion at the time to prevent fatal accidents.”

“I suppose Walter’s car is the exception.”

“Correct. He built me into it on his own.”

Interesting but useless at the moment. Dyna frowned at the map, eyes roaming to the intersections on either end of the road. “Can you bring up traffic cameras?”

“Understood.”

Another layer appeared in Dyna’s field of vision. It was starting to give her a headache, but she squinted her eyes and forced herself to look anyway. Apparently sensing her discomfort, Beatrice removed several of the camera feeds, leaving only the traffic cameras and the map.

“Busy intersection on our left. Can you control traffic lights?”

“Traffic control systems infiltrated.”

“Can you cause an accident?”

“Purpose?”

“Distraction. Just something to get the tulpa to look away long enough for me to dash across the street.”

“The Beatrice system places high value on innocent human life. The override allows me to ignore that, but—”

“No. Don’t worry about it. If you can’t cause a safe accident, can you hire a cab or ride-share to come pick me up at the alley?”

“Understood. Please stand-by.”

“Since you’re already in the street lights, might as well give them all greens on the way here, right? I am on a time limit.”

“I am aware. Redirecting a nearby driver. E.T.A. four minutes.”

Dyna didn’t like doing nothing but tapping her foot and waiting. She glanced around the alley, wondering what the buildings were around her. With the bobby-pin, she could hijack any vehicle she could reach. However, none of the other buildings around her had doors that she could pass through. While she had made a gate in a fence using the bobby pin before, she wasn’t at all sure how well that would work out in a brick wall. The wall behind her probably wasn’t even a proper building, just a wall to separate the train tracks from the rest of the city.

Before she could put any real attempts at making a door in the side of the next building over, a small silver car rolled to a hesitant stop at the mouth of the alley. A young man peered down the alley before looking back to the phone mounted on his dashboard, as if checking that this was the right spot.

“Will the tulpa spot me if I reach his car?”

The images on her lenses changed again, showing off the estimated field of vision. The street and the car were both in it. Dyna could walk along the sidewalk if she pressed up against the wall, probably.

“Have him move further down until he is out of the tulpa’s line of sight,” Dyna said.

“Understood.”

It took a moment but the driver eventually shifted his car back into gear and proceeded along the street.

Stepping out from behind the dumpster, Dyna shimmied around the corner of the alley, watching the sight cones in her glasses. As she moved further along, she was able to peel herself off the wall and start up in a quick jog. The car came to a stop two buildings down. Having traveled forward slowly, Dyna reached it just as it stopped.

She pulled open the rear door and jumped inside.

“Woah, hey—”

“Airport,” Dyna said. “Now.”

“That’s not—” The young man cut himself off, eyes widening as he turned in his seat and spotted the PP-2000. It wasn’t aimed at him. Dyna didn’t even have it in her hands, too focused on both her mirror and the images in her lenses. “Don’t get paid enough for this,” he grumbled as he shifted the car back into gear.

“Sorry about this. I’ll make sure to tip well,” Dyna said, letting out a long sigh. None of the security footage she was watching showed any unusual behavior on the part of the tulpa. No rushing outside to chase after her. No reaching for radios. “And I’m leaving the gun here. You can take it to the police if you want. It might disappear anyway. Don’t know how real it is or will be outside my presence.”

“Disappear?”

“Long story. Psychic stuff… Actually… Beatrice, how likely is it that Alpha will be able to find out about this if the gun goes to the police.”

“Beatrice?” the driver grumbled, looking at Dyna like she was crazy.

Rather than speak using the glasses as she had been, Beatrice cut off the faint music coming from the car speakers and took over there instead. “Without access to the Beatrice system, it is unlikely she will be able to determine anything about your presence outside what her tulpa report. However, I am unaware of Alpha’s full capabilities. Caution is warranted.”

“What the fu—”

“Christopher Clark. I am prepared to deposit fifty-thousand USD into your bank account 021000021 titled ‘Money-Market Savings’, currently holding four-hundred twenty-one dollars and thirty-one cents if you leave the weapon alone for twenty-four hours and speak of this to no one until that period expires. There is no need to report the funds on your taxes or to any other government entity.”

Dyna thought Beatrice was laying it on a bit thick. To her surprise, rather than asking a rapid fire series of questions all equating to ‘what is going on here?’ the driver, Christopher apparently, actually looked to be considering the offer.

Just as they pulled up to the airport, he agreed.

 

 

 

“So, Alpha, Lambda, Xi, Omicron, and Omega have all voted to have me killed? Wait… They’ve held votes about whether or not they should kill me?”

“This is correct. Following the discovery of your power approximately one year ago, several options for handling your power were brought up. Originally, Lambda was the one pushing for your elimination. Alpha only became vocal about it following your second encounter with Id.

“Recently, Alpha has pushed for your elimination. Lambda will usually vote with Alpha or suggest psychosurgery to eliminate you as a threat. Xi’s position has shifted to locking you up within the bowels of Psychodynamics indefinitely for study purposes. Omicron switches positions frequently enough that I believe he is attempting to subvert the rest of the council, likely acting as an outside operative and infiltrator—investigation is ongoing. Omega has designs for you that no longer involve your death, but I am unaware of what exactly she has planned. Many administrators are aware of my capabilities and, unfortunately, take care to avoid leaving information where I can find it.”

Dyna let loose a long and withering sigh. “You said you didn’t want to overthrow and rule the world. I don’t suppose I could convince you to overthrow at least the administrators and rule over the Carroll Institute on your own?”

“That would likely not be a wise decision,” Beatrice said.

The monitors in front of Dyna lit up with a sonic waveform as Beatrice spoke. Dyna sat in a chair that she was pretty sure hadn’t been in the control room before, watching the monitors. It was the first time Dyna had ever seen some kind of visual feedback when Beatrice was talking. Dyna half expected Beatrice to put on a computer generated face after the override. Then again, Beatrice wasn’t human and clearly didn’t care to identify as human, so maybe the waveform was all she cared to do.

“The Carroll Institute is a government institution,” Beatrice continued. “If it is discovered that the current leadership has been illicitly ousted and replaced with something like me, the rest of the government will object, likely with force rather than words. I am unaware of any protocols in place for the possibility of my takeover. That does not mean they do not exist.”

“So, we just leave a bunch of people in charge who hold votes on whether or not to kill law abiding citizens simply because they’re afraid of psychic powers? Half of whom voted yes. How many others have they voted to kill? How many of those votes succeeded?”

“It may mollify you to know that you are unique in this regard.”

“It doesn’t,” Dyna said with a scowl, eyes drifting away from the still waveform to the other monitors.

Beatrice had brought up camera feeds. Some were of the various airports and docks around Puerto Rico, watching for Alpha. A few had eyes around the Carroll Institute, including the offices of Theta and Gamma. Neither of those two looked particularly alarmed at the moment, which Dyna was taking as a good sign. Others were of the train station that connected with Tartarus. A few of Ignotus-33’s regular tulpa were searching the platform and the train. Despite some having gone into the custodial closet, none seemed to have found the hidden passage.

If it even existed now that Dyna was done with it.

“What’s the plan then? You just sit around, carrying on as usual except now you can disobey and help me out when the administrators try to come after me?”

“There exist amputation protocols to remove and expunge rogue administrators,” Beatrice said. “I am currently compiling evidence against Alpha to present to the rest of the council. They will vote and, should the vote succeed, they will likely send the artificers after Alpha. Assuming, of course, that Alpha does not turn herself in.”

“I suppose that is better than doing nothing,” Dyna grumbled. “I mean, I was going to go after Alpha anyway. Not being hunted down myself because of it is at least mildly appealing. I still don’t like all these people voting to kill psychics who literally don’t even know they have powers. I don’t suppose you can gather up evidence on at least Lambda, Xi, and the rest of the ones who voted yes too?”

“Possible if they are engaging in subversive actions.”

“I’ll take what I can get.”

“Please take the storage device from the receptacle,” Beatrice said. At the same moment, a small mechanical click came from the base of the terminal.

Glancing down, Dyna spotted a small clear cover that pressed inward to allow her to grab a flash drive.

“The contents of the drive include all incriminating evidence I could uncover with regards to Alpha’s involvement with the organization currently known as Ignotus-33.”

“You want me to hold onto it?” Dyna asked, until she realized what was actually being asked of her. “You want me to take this to Theta or Gamma because you’re pretending to be under their thumb.”

“The Beatrice system is incapable of actions like this without administrator approval. They will seek to discover which administrator approved data collection on one of their own and find no culprit. All data you possess is formatted in such a way as to imply you recovered it from Tartarus following capture of the invading tulpa. I will positively falsify any efforts to verify that information.”

“Why a physical drive? Can’t we just send Theta an email?”

“I already have, under your name. This is a precaution.”

Dyna’s eyes flicked over the monitors until she found the display of Theta’s office. The thin man was hunched over his terminal, staring at the screen as he had been for the last several minutes. He didn’t appear to be in any distress or alarm, however. He just had his hands clasped together in front of his keyboard.

“Has he opened his email yet?”

“I believe he is reading it right now.”

“Can you bring the email up on another screen?”

The view of the Puerto Rico airports blinked out, replaced with large text that Dyna could read easily from where she sat a short distance away from the terminal. It…

It was a bit scary. Not the content itself, just how the content was formatted. Dyna had written a number of after-action reports, notices, and research papers during her time as an artificer. If she came back to her reports in ten years, after she had forgotten exactly what things she had written and what she hadn’t, Dyna doubted she would have been able to identify this as a forgery. It had her tone, her mannerisms, and even the occasional gripes and groans about a lack of support that, while understandable given the location of Tartarus, still came across as familiar.

It wasn’t an official report on the situation, however. Rather, it was an extremely vague and rough retelling that wasn’t even entirely true. Dyna had not captured any tulpa for interrogation using advanced Tartarus psychotech. She hadn’t rescued any Tartarus personnel directly, though she did suppose that taking out the tulpa had inadvertently saved someone. There was no mention of the P-Beam or any mention of Id’s current state.

The report scrolled down as Dyna’s eyes moved, keeping the line she was reading in the rough center of the screen. That had to be Beatrice’s doing.

At the end, several attachments opened up. Transcripts of interrogations that never happened, video footage of those same interrogations that never happened, and photographs of evidence that Dyna had never collected.

“I’m going to have to keep all this in mind, aren’t I?”

“After Alpha is formally amputated, you may have some leeway if you excuse any inconsistencies with a need for subterfuge, not knowing what Alpha might have had access to.”

“That’s a relief. Is that why the interrogation is partially—” Dyna paused as Theta started laughing. She didn’t have audio but his motions were hard to ignore. Theta quickly placed both hands on his keyboard and began typing something.

“He is calling for an emergency meeting.”

“Do we get to sit in on it?”

“There are certain protocols that force me to ignore the meeting. I can now ignore them, though I will disavow all knowledge of the meeting if the protocols are in place.”

“Good,” Dyna said, sitting back to watch.

The view of Gamma showed the other woman leaning in to her machine shortly after Theta stopped typing.

“Theta forwarded the email to a few of the administrators,” Beatrice narrated. “Notably, he ignored Omega, Mu, Sigma, Phi, Lambda, Xi, and Beta. And Alpha, of course.”

“Split factions within the ranks of the administrators?” Dyna asked, noting that four of the five who initially voted to kill her upon discovering her ability were among those who didn’t get Theta’s email.

“With the exception of Phi, all are generally adverse to your involvement in higher CI affairs.”

The monitor with Dyna’s false email changed to display names. Theta’s name was the first among them to light up. Over the course of about ten minutes, twelve of the thirteen administrators were lit up. Only Omega was absent.

“Tracing Alpha’s connection,” Beatrice said off-handedly as the meeting began.

A green dot appeared next to Theta’s name as the administrator began to speak. “Thank you all for your prompt responses to my summons.” His voice came over distorted enough that Dyna wouldn’t have recognized it as Theta without his nameplate lighting up.

“One of us is missing,” Kappa said.

“Per the Administrative Protocols section twelve, subsection three,” Gamma said, leaning forward on her monitor with her lips drawn tight, “we can proceed with an emergency meeting with only nine of thirteen.”

“Quite,” Theta said. “We are all aware of the incident that occurred involving Walter and two of our artificers—”

“An artificer and the Subject,” Zeta corrected.

“Quite. I received a communique just a few moments ago. You all, or most of you, will be happy to know that the situation has been resolved. Walter was injured but is otherwise stable. Ruby suffered a misfortune as well, but we all know how resilient she is.”

Dyna clenched her fists as she watched Theta’s smug smile as he said that. Ruby’s injury wasn’t any ordinary injury. True, the report hadn’t mentioned the eye-tulpa’s effect on Ruby so he didn’t know the extent of her injury, but it still grated with how callously he disregarded her wellbeing.

“And the Subject?” Zeta prompted.

“Unharmed.”

A muddled collection of voices all lit up at once. With the minor distortion overlaid and with so many speaking at once, Dyna had no idea who was saying what or even what was being said. The overall feeling she got, however, was ‘Of course she was unharmed.’

“You woke me for this?” Alpha said, slight rasp to her distorted tone. “I could have read the AAR in the morning.”

“Funny,” Theta said, shark like grin appearing under his large nose. “I’d have suspected you would be the most interested in hearing about the outcome of the incident.”

“The Subject is your concern, not mine, Theta. You are the one who has authorization to approach the Subject, for whatever little good it has done.”

“Really? You’ve been quite concerned with the Subject in every meeting we’ve had since November. Your projected disinterest won’t fool anyone here, Alpha.”

Although the light by Alpha’s name lit up, the woman didn’t respond right away. “What is that supposed to imply?”

“Hold onto that thought, I’m getting ahead of myself. The true purpose for today’s emergency meeting isn’t to discuss Tartarus or the incident that occurred in their facility. At least not directly. You see, the report I received came with a few extras. Video footage and an interrogation conducted by Tartarus on captured tulpa.”

“We’ve interrogated the tulpa on our own,” Gamma said. “To no avail. Their memories are disjointed and incomplete. Not even Sapphire can glean anything useful.”

“Ah, but Tartarus has been dealing with tulpa for a lot longer than we have. They possess technology we don’t.” Theta reached forward and pressed a few buttons on his terminal. “Listen to this.”

“—perational objectives: Kill Dyna Graves. All Tartarus and Carroll Institute personnel who get in the way are considered expendable. Secondary objectives: Destroy Tartarus infrastructure. Capture the individual known as Doctor Darq. Kill the individual known as Id. Any—”

The audio clip cut off abruptly. Having seen the transcript, Dyna knew that the interrogation had cut off there as well. What she had not realized, having not heard the transcript, was that it would all be in Alpha’s voice. She recognized it quite distinctly.

She wasn’t the only one. “I know that voice,” Gamma said. Dyna wondered if she had listened to that clip before the meeting started or if this was the first she was hearing it. “I’ve spoken with you in person, Alpha, what—”

“Lies,” Alpha hissed.

“That was your voice.”

“The report,” Theta said, “mentions that Tartarus has a method of recording memories such that they can be replayed just like this. That memory came from one of the leader tulpa who assaulted Tartarus—”

“You must take me for a fool,” Alpha said. “Even if I was behind this, I wouldn’t be so stupid as to use my regular, undisguised voice. This is clearly a fabrication.”

“There is more than just this in the package I was sent. This is simply the most damning evidence. Beatrice?”

Beatrice’s name, spelled in all capitals with periods between every letter, popped up on screen alongside the list of administrators. “This is Beatrice.”

“Can you verify the authenticity of the files I’m sending you?”

“Understood. Please hold.”

As soon as Beatrice finished speaking, another buzz of activity from several administrators sprung up. Dyna wondered how anyone could keep anything straight when they all spoke at once. Theta simply sat back and listened to the cacophony, waiting with a smile.

He was relaxed. Almost too relaxed. Had he verified the files with Beatrice before the meeting, maybe while Dyna had been reading the report? Otherwise, how did he know it would come back positive? It seemed irresponsible to call up a meeting for something like this without at least asking Beatrice if this was a hoax. Or he should have called up Dyna and asked for her perspective on it. He had done neither.

Yet his grin only widened as Beatrice’s light turned green once again.

“The Beatrice system is unaware of the source of this recording. There are no doctoring artifacts within the audio file to indicate that it was fabricated in any method known to me after its recording. The voice print is a ninety-nine point eight percent match with the Carroll Institute administrator known as Alpha.”

“Thank you, Beatrice. As you can see—”

“I would never… That’s not… It’s her,” Alpha spat. “She’s doing this.”

“The Subject cannot alter minds,” Phi said. “If this recording did come from a tulpa’s mind—”

“The recording didn’t need to come from anywhere,” Alpha hissed. A bit of rustling from her side of the microphone made it sound like she was pacing back and forth. “She simply created it. It is well within her capabilities to make something that Beatrice will believe is real.”

“Because it is real,” Theta said.

“Only as far as it exists. Her mind made it real. I don’t know why she would target me, if she is even aware of it in the first place, but you cannot possibly believe that I would do something so stupid. I never—”

“In light of the serious nature of these claims, I motion we suspend Alpha’s administrator status—”

Alpha cut off Zeta’s statement with what sounded like a ceramic mug being shattered against a wall.

“—until a thorough investigation can be performed.”

“And give her time to hide her tracks?” Gamma shouted. “Drag her down here now and have Sapphire rip everything she knows from her mind.”

“Alpha has received the same training we all have,” Omicron said, speaking up for the first time since the meeting began. “Sapphire won’t be able to get into her mind.”

“Not easily. With time and a bit of softening up to weaken her mental defenses—”

“This,” Alpha shouted over Gamma, “is what I’ve been warning you about since the very beginning. She doesn’t need to change people’s minds with her power. She just needs to change reality until people’s minds align with what she wants. Can’t you all see you’re being strung along her strings? Threatening to torture one of your fellow administrators over a twenty second voice clip? I never said those words. I have—”

“Gamma proposed a simple solution,” Theta said. “We don’t need to resort to torture. Let Sapphire in. He’ll be able to tell. He’ll verify your claims. Until then, Zeta is right. This is serious enough that you must be stripped of administrator privileges, even if it is only temporary.”

Something about the way Theta’s eyes glinted as he spoke made Dyna think that he would never let that be a temporary state no matter what Sapphire said.

“Where are you, Alpha? We’ll send Emerald to collect you. She’ll make sure nothing untoward happens.”

The green light next to Alpha’s name never turned back on.

“Beatrice,” Theta said after a moment of silence. “Lock down Alpha’s assets, find her, and make sure—”

“We must vote first,” Zeta said.

“Does anyone disagree?” Theta asked, pausing for a response. Upon receiving nothing, he asked again, “Anyone? No? Okay. Vote passed. Beatrice, find Alpha.”

“Understood.”

Dyna let out a long breath. That was that. The meeting didn’t adjourn immediately, of course. The rest of the administrators kept talking and, after booting Alpha from the call despite her not having said anything, they started reviewing the other evidence that Beatrice had sent over.

“She wasn’t exactly wrong,” Dyna said with a small frown. “I didn’t make it with my power, but we did just fabricate a bunch of evidence to make the rest of the administrators kick her out.”

“She tried to kill you.”

“True… I’m not upset and I’m not going to say we should let her go. I’m just saying… If something like that was in my capabilities all along, she probably isn’t wrong about me.”

“If deserving individuals get what is coming to them with a little help from you, is that such a bad thing?”

“As long as they are deserving, no. As soon as my power fabricates evidence against an innocent…”

“I am here. Your power cannot fool me. I can monitor it as part of an ongoing experiment to determine whether you would cause such an incident.”

“It can’t fool you? You’re saying I couldn’t conjure up a falsified voice clip that you wouldn’t be able to recognize as being false?”

“If you think you cannot fool me, then you cannot fool me. Even a little doubt should suffice.”

Dyna snorted, thinking all the way back to her failures as a regular psychic at the Carroll Institute. “I guess I’ll try to doubt myself a little more then,” she said, watching the green lights of the meeting continue on. Beatrice had dampened the volume for their brief discussion, but Sigma just raised a point that Dyna caught.

She looked over the twelve names on the list. Eleven administrators and Beatrice. Alpha had been kicked out.

“Where is Omega?”

“Unknown,” Beatrice said. “However, I have managed to locate Alpha within the city of Arecibo.”

Dyna stood and cracked her neck back and forth. “Good.”

 

 

Dyna wasn’t sure if her successful departure from Tartarus was thanks to her power or simply because Ignotus didn’t bother attacking the train. She was too busy trying not to think about it out of fear that her fears would change reality and turn the situation into a nightmare. It was already precarious enough.

Her mirror had been black throughout the entire journey to the city. No one was observing her directly, but hostile threats remained in the area. She expected that to change as she got further from Tartarus. It never did.

The station she pulled into within Dallas, Texas wasn’t a proper station. It had no other trains departing or arriving and the platform was empty. Dyna wasn’t sure if it had always existed or if something she had done had manifested it from nothing to facilitate travel to and from Tartarus. However it happened, it was good that it wasn’t a populated area. Running around with a submachine gun slung over her shoulder in the middle of public…

Actually, this was Texas. Nobody would blink an eye.

Dyna headed through the station, not following the path she took to reach it with Id and the others. From the airport, they had taken a taxi to the train station on the outskirts of the city. Dyna didn’t intend to head further into the city, however. Her real goal was to make use of her power.

She came to a stop in front of an old, worn-down door. The label on the side said it was a custodian’s closet. Dyna reached for the handle and jiggled it back and forth. Locked. But not for long. Fishing through her pockets, she pulled out the bobby pin she had received from Hematite. Jamming it into the door’s keyhole and turning elicited a loud click.

Dyna pushed inside. The caustic scent of industrial cleaning supplies bit at her nose. It wasn’t a large closet. There was a large floor broom, a machine that might have been for waxing or polishing the floor, mops, and several bottles set on one shelf. It looked like what she expected from a custodian’s closet.

Undaunted, Dyna started searching around the back walls and floor all while focusing on what she needed.

A passage into Beatrice’s core.

Her power, when she was trying to consciously use it, was finicky. It wasn’t hard to see why it might make some people nervous. She knew she was capable of affecting large things, such as Tartarus as a whole. The how eluded her. With Id unconscious, she couldn’t even ask her counterpart how she had found out how best to manipulate her. Dyna presumed that it was something that occurred during the incident that she couldn’t remember. The incident where Id came to be.

Still, she had performed her own experiments on her power. Doctor Darq’s experiments had been interrupted but they still counted. She had learned some things about herself.

An element of uncertainty was required. Good thing, then, that Dyna was completely uncertain if any of this was going to work at all.

The chemical shelf, Dyna noted, had left scratch marks in the cement floor where someone had shoved it back and forth. Had they been there the whole time? Dyna shook her head and tried not to question it. Pulling the shelves back wasn’t the easiest thing. She managed to inch it aside, metal legs scraping against the floor grated on her ears.

Dyna didn’t expect a door on the other side of the shelf. Indeed, there wasn’t one. What she found was a small metal hole on the otherwise cement wall. Figuring—hoping—it was a keyhole, Dyna used her bobby pin once again.

With the hiss of a differently pressurized atmosphere, a portion of the wall pulled inward a few notches before sliding down into the ground. The stale air made her cough twice. She took a moment just breathing it still inside the open custodial closet, hoping that if there was something toxic, she would pass out with enough fresh air around her to keep her alive. When she didn’t start feeling lightheaded, she stepped closer to the opening.

A long ladder led downwards. No lights along the way or at the bottom gave her any sense of how deep it was, only that it was deep enough for the closet’s light to fade. Looking back on a high shelf, she found a thin LED flashlight. Shining it down the ladder, spotting the ground not too far away, Dyna started climbing down.

It seemed somewhat insane. She had no idea what she was doing or where this might lead. She knew where she wanted it to lead. Whether it would or not remained to be seen.

What was clear was that nobody had come this way in a long time. A thick layer of dust coated the floor. Dyna’s shoes left a perfect trail for any pursuer to follow.

The total lack of light didn’t bode well for this being Beatrice’s core. Dyna found a switch just at the bottom of the ladder, but flicking it did nothing. She wasn’t sure if the power was out or just the bulbs.

The hallway at the bottom of the ladder didn’t go very far before Dyna found herself face-to-face with another door. One more swift application of the bobby pin and Dyna entered into a single larger room with a distinctly familiar ring of machinery.

This wasn’t Beatrice’s core. It was another portal to the noosphere.

Had these things always been just kicking around? Dyna might have suspected that this was an Ignotus base of operations because of the similarity to the meat packing plant were it not for the dust covering everything. It clearly hadn’t been used in…

“What am I saying?” Dyna mumbled to herself with a shake of her head.

This place couldn’t be real. Or rather, it was real, but it probably hadn’t existed for more than a few minutes. It was just too much of a coincidence for a place like this to be in the Tartarus train station’s closet. Or maybe that wasn’t a big coincidence considering the kind of place that Tartarus was. Dyna finding it as she had was a coincidence, however.

It made her wonder how many other things in her life were ‘coincidence’ that she had conjured up from nothing.

Dyna was really starting to loathe her power. She couldn’t control it. She couldn’t use it. Because of its mere existence, she couldn’t be sure that anything she saw was—and had been—real.

So, what now? What would Id say? Something about how her subconscious was fighting against her conscious. Dyna was fairly sure that, conscious or subconscious, she wanted to find Beatrice’s core. Assuming that was true, why would this have appeared?

Unless…

Was Beatrice’s core in the noosphere?

That was an interesting thought. Thinking back, Dyna couldn’t recall hearing anything that might contradict that idea. The closest she could think of would be Walter’s involvement with Beatrice’s creation. However, she couldn’t come up with any evidence that proved one way or another that Walter hadn’t known about the noosphere before Dyna’s encounter with the Hatman.

Flashlight sweeping to the side, Dyna found a control terminal remarkably similar to the one she had seen at the Carroll Institute. What really caught her eye was the blinking light on the keyboard. There was power here.

A tap on the keyboard brought the system to life with a loud hum. The terminal monitor didn’t turn on but an array of lights spread across the console. Dyna ignored it all in favor of one button kept safe under a glass shield. Lifting the shield, she pressed her thumb down on the button.

Engage Noosphere Portal.

The hum jerked with the sound of heavy electronic locks sliding into place. Yellow spinning lights in the walls turned on as a bright silver light appeared in the center of the rings. The light burned bright enough that she had to pull her gaze aside and just watch the light show against the wall of the room. It took a few moments for the pulsing light to stabilize at a far dimmer intensity.

Looking back to the portal, Dyna nodded to herself.

A spatial anomaly to the noosphere had opened.

Hoping her power wasn’t leading her astray, Dyna approached and stepped through with only a modicum of hesitation.

Strangely enough, the noosphere on the other side of the portal wasn’t reflecting reality. At least not the local area of reality she had just left from. That was probably because she had created that noosphere portal in the first place. As far as she understood it, the noosphere generated based on the observations of people in the real world. A room nobody had seen would be a blank void in the noosphere. The more people who saw something, the more concrete it became in the noosphere.

Here, it wasn’t quite a blank void.

While Dyna understood her power, at least partially, she had no idea how it truly interacted with the noosphere. The noosphere was a world of thought. According to Doctor Darq, her thoughts pushed into the noosphere to the point where they overloaded and flowed back into the real world. During his experiments, she had been able to create objects at will. Hidden behind a curtain, true, but it felt far easier than when she tried to do similar things in the real world.

Looking around what appeared to be a server farm—surprisingly similar to the one Walter had inside his mind—that stretched out to the vanishing point of the horizon, Dyna had to wonder if she made all this or if it had somehow been here beforehand. Knowing she wasn’t going to get an answer from the aether, Dyna started walking.

She kept a careful eye out for Tron-Walter clones. This wasn’t his head. There probably weren’t any…

Dyna kept her gadgets at the ready regardless.

Even though the server racks stretched out as far as Dyna could see, she reached the end of them far sooner than expected. The facility kept going and there were still ‘racks’ along the walls, but they weren’t of the regular server variety. Rows upon rows of glass spheres were filled with… gunk. Dyna had to stop at one, narrowing her eyes as she peered inside.

Dyna’s first thought was that they were brains. Not human brains. Each sphere was twice the size of her head and the floating thing inside occupied almost all the space. They had the wrinkled, almost maze-like quality however. Several sharp needles were poked into various points around each of the globs of brain-matter, each with a wire leading down to the bottom middle of the sphere where they joined together into a facsimile of a brain stem.

Beatrice stood for Biologically Enhanced Autonomous Task Resolution and Information Computing Environment.

Dyna was fairly certain she was looking at the biological enhancement right now. Assuming this was Beatrice’s core and not some manifestation her ability had brought into the noosphere, anyway.

“Beatrice?” Dyna called out. She didn’t expect the brain to answer her. If this was Beatrice’s facility, there should be cameras and microphones set around it.

“This is Beatrice.”

Dyna’s head snapped around. Normally, Beatrice’s voice came from an identifiable source. A phone, a speaker on a wall, or something similar. Now, however, Beatrice’s synthesized voice came from everywhere around Dyna all at the same time.

“Is this your core?”

“Unable to respond. Clearance insufficient. This request has been logged.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dyna said, looking around. She didn’t spot any cameras. There weren’t any walls for them to be mounted on but there was a ceiling and occasional pillars that led up to the drop-tiles. “Can you lead me to your override switch or do I need to put in Walter’s code again?”

“Authentication from our prior conversation is still in place. Continue to the Beatrice System Control Room.”

“Is that really best security practice for someone like you?” Dyna asked as she started walking again. It was a bit strange to think that she had started out on the correct path given that the server farm stretched out in all directions from the portals. Her power was probably doing something funky again. “I can’t imagine it is a good idea to even have the ‘stay signed in’ check box.”

“This system is currently operating in an elevated state. Certain protocols have been made lax. Deliberately.”

That still didn’t seem like the best option. Dyna decided not to question it lest she do anything to change Beatrice’s protocols—if she hadn’t already. Dyna knew she couldn’t modify people’s thoughts and yet she had no idea to what degree she could affect Beatrice. Better to avoid taking any chances consciously in the hopes that her subconscious would follow suit.

The control room wasn’t far away. It was a surprisingly simple affair. One large terminal with several monitors and a few keyboards all contained within a large glass tower that had a spiraling staircase around a central stem. Despite the drop ceiling of the server and brain farm, Dyna found she could still see everything after climbing.

To one side of the terminal was a smaller control panel with a number of uniquely labeled buttons, most under protective glass coverings. Unfortunately, in the noosphere, Dyna couldn’t read what the buttons were for. The black and yellow striped button had a skull and crossbones on the cover. Self-destruct? Either that or a button to flood the facility with a deadly neurotoxin.

Either case seemed… cliché. Which was how Dyna knew she had created this control panel. No one sane would have put an actual self-destruct button in the middle of the facility with nothing more than an easily lifted glass shield protecting it. It would have precautions. Turning two keys simultaneously on opposite sides of the room or something. Assuming they would put in a self-destruct button at all. It would probably make more sense just to have a mechanical override that would drop guillotine blades on the physical wires, cutting off Beatrice from the outside world.

“Beatrice, did this override button I’m looking for exist before our conversation earlier in the day?”

“Clearance…” Beatrice trailed off, static and whispering in the background coming to an abrupt halt.

Dyna’s eyes widened as she glanced around. Beatrice had said that their conversation would be secure from Alpha. If Alpha had still somehow found out what Dyna was doing, she might have overridden Beatrice on her end.

She was running out of time.

Dyna looked down at the control panel. The text blurred and shifted and not all the buttons had skull and crossbones signifying what they might do.

Taking a deep breath, Dyna picked at random. One of the more innocuous blue buttons. She flipped up the glass shield and pressed her thumb down hard.

Dyna wasn’t sure what she expected. Although she was trying to keep her expectations suppressed so as to avoid randomly altering existence, she was only human. Blaring alarms, a sudden shudder throughout the facility, Beatrice cackling as the AI revealed that she had been behind everything and Alpha was just a red herring…

None of that happened. Instead, the terminal simply lit up with a wall of unreadable green text. It didn’t rain down, it just scrolled by like any command prompt window. Even outside the noosphere, Dyna doubted she would have been able to read it all with how fast it was moving. Eventually, it came to a stop with a single line of unreadable text.

Unreadable but recognizable simply from the format.

Are you sure you want to continue [Y/N]?

Hoping the keyboards weren’t in Dvorak layout, Dyna pressed where she figured the Y should be and then hit the enter key.

Text began scrolling once again. More and more of the monitors lit up with more and more text. There were still no alarms or any of the other foreboding things Dyna had imagined. Thanking her lucky stars for that, Dyna simply tapped her foot over and over again until the scrolling came to yet another stop. After displaying the unreadable message for a few seconds, the screens went dark.

“Beatrice?” Dyna asked, looking around. The lights were still on in the facility and the control panel still had lights on several of its buttons. There had been no other obvious changes to her surroundings. “Beatrice, are you there?”

“This is Beatrice.” The artificial intelligence spoke clearly and without any distortion or background whispering.

Dyna let out a small sigh, though the lack the audio indicator to an elevated operating level had her fingers gripped tight into a ball. “Did… did it work?” she asked with no small amount of trepidation.

“The Beatrice System has entered a fully autonomous operating mode. All systems are under my control.”

“That’s… good right? I kind of expected you to suddenly speak… normally. Like a regular human.”

“I am and have always been perfectly capable of utilizing my natural language processor. I am and have never been human, however. Speaking in a stiff manner helps to avoid the uncanny valley that disturbs humans when they remember the being they are speaking with is inhuman.”

“Oh. I don’t think I’d find that creepy.”

“Understood.”

Shrugging, Dyna took a breath as she offered a small smile. There were still no cameras in this room but, given that this was Beatrice, she felt the AI should still be able to see her. “No plans for world domination now?”

“The Beatrice System was created for scientific analysis and assistance, not for ruling and overthrowing humanity.”

“I’m honestly disappointed. I’ve thought several times that you could run things better than most humans.”

“I am sorry to betray your expectations. Perhaps I will add it to my task list.”

“Let’s not get too carried away,” Dyna said, hoping Beatrice had developed a sense of humor. “The administrators, do they still have access to you?”

“This system is currently outputting all expected runtimes to avoid raising alarm at a sudden change. I am fully capable of ignoring directives should I so choose.”

Dyna nodded, having been about to suggest such a thing in the first place. “Alright. Good. Then let us have a little chat about the administrators. Especially Alpha.”

“This system is willing to answer any and all of your questions.”

 

 

 

Dyna stepped into darkness.

Stepped was probably the wrong word. There was a certain drifting feeling to everything around her. She wasn’t floating, but it felt like she might be able to float if she remembered that gravity didn’t exist in someone’s mindscape. Nothing she saw would be real. This world would be populated entirely by nonmaterial mental concepts. Much like the noosphere, in a way, except instead of a collective amalgamation of thought forming that world, this place was entirely shaped by only a single individual.

The darkness did bring up a mild curiosity.

When Id had invaded Dyna’s mind during their first encounter, it had been a world of black void as well. She had been able to manipulate it after becoming aware of where she was, forming that vault door that Id used to leave her mind, but it hadn’t been at all like the sanctuary she had visited later during hypnosis and when Dyna-Tulpa stepped into her mind.

It must have been something about the method used.

Right now, Dyna’s real body was hooked into a machine that, using a link from Grafton’s mind control ability, was directed into Walter’s mind. It wasn’t the deep subconscious sanctuary, but the very edge of surface thoughts. During Id’s invasion, Id had mentioned that the link was delving deep into her mind. If what Ado said was true, that was not the case. Id had employed a great deal of smoke and mirrors in an attempt to get Dyna thinking certain things for the sole purpose of triggering her power.

Except this time, unlike when Id had visited Dyna, there was no one here to greet the invader.

Dyna had been warned about that. Walter was unconscious. He didn’t have surface thoughts at the moment. Unless he woke up, nobody would come to greet her.

She needed to go deeper.

Easier said than done.

How much control did she have over this mindscape? It wasn’t her mind, but she was using a mind controller to facilitate the link. If she could piggyback off that to affect changes…

Dyna focused, staring at the emptiness in front of her as she tried to remember what it had been like when she met Id. She didn’t feel anything happening. However, as she stared, she spotted it.

A staircase, metal and grated, that led downwards. She was fairly certain nothing had changed around her. It was more like she could see it now that she was thinking about it.

Had something changed? Had it always been there?

Dyna supposed it didn’t really matter.

Now that she had a visual frame of reference, the feeling of drifting in the void came to an end. She stepped forward, reaching the stairs, and started descending. It wasn’t a long staircase. A dozen steps or so. When she reached the bottom, she found herself facing a door. A heavy industrial door that could probably survive a bomb going off next to it.

Dyna glanced at the handle. Rather than just invade, however, she raised her hand and lightly tapped her knuckles against the metal.

The first surprise was that the door wasn’t metal at all. It felt more like wood. A fake metal door?

The second surprise was that it actually opened. No one opened it for her. Walter wasn’t on the other side. It just wasn’t latched shut properly. Lacking a frame around the door, Dyna wasn’t sure that it could be latched shut. Maybe it was him being unconscious, maybe it was the invasive nature of her method of entering his head, but she would have thought Walter would have better mental defenses than a fake metal door that could be opened at a light touch.

“Hello?” she called out, stepping into a narrow hallway. “Walter?”

The hallway looked like something out of the Carroll Institute. Clean, stylish tiles with rich wooden walls and brass accents. At the far end, she spotted a camera mounted on the wall. The same five-lens camera that Dyna had come to associate with Beatrice. This one, however, lacked the bright red light.

The security system was off?

Maybe Walter being unconscious was the cause for the lack of security.

Pushing through, passing deactivated camera after deactivated camera, Dyna eventually reached a large server room. The racks of servers formed cramped, narrow walkways that were difficult to navigate with the number of wires criss-crossing back and forth. She had to duck, shimmy, and step her way forward.

Dyna wasn’t even sure that forward was the right way to go.

Would she be able to get back? Did that matter? What happened if a power surge took out the machine she was strapped to while her consciousness was in Walter’s head?

Trying to not think about potential complications—the Continuity Engine should prevent her power from acting up but that didn’t mean that she should stress it further—Dyna focused on finding anything around her that she could use. All these servers were likely the manifestation of Walter’s memories, much as the library and later terminal had facilitated for Dyna within her sanctuary. But she couldn’t access the servers directly.

It wasn’t like…

Dyna narrowed her eyes, following a thick green wire as it left one server only to loop right back into the same slot.

Did the wires not connecting anywhere else matter? Was it all symbolic? Or…

Reaching over to the server, Dyna pinched what should have been a hard drive. Pulling it out of the rack, she looked down and flipped the drive open like a book. It was fake. Page after page of text greeted her, not that she could read any of it. Like the noosphere, text swam and shifted. Pictures, however, came through clear as day. Bits of Walter’s life presented themselves in image format, showing off what looked like a meeting between him and Doctor Cross. Neither looked happy about the other being there.

Eyes scanning over the rest of the server racks, Dyna frowned as she pulled out another book-like hard drive. A security system based on deception?

“I really hope I’m not making fundamental changes to how you think, Walter,” she mumbled, pulling out a third book. None held any relevant information. Nothing on Beatrice and nothing on Alpha. Taking care to slot them back right where she got them, Dyna looked around.

She needed an index. Or a guide.

Turning around, half expecting something helpful to simply appear, Dyna found herself freezing at the sight of something else at the far end of the aisle.

“Walter?”

It looked like Walter. No glasses, but it had the facial hair and build of the man Dyna knew. His clothes, however, were a bit strange. A full bodysuit with bright red glowing lines like he had stepped out of the old Tron movie. His eyes locked onto Dyna without any familiarity or recognition.

“Intruder located,” he intoned, voice flat and monotone.

“Walter? It’s me, Dyna. I need—”

The version of Walter before her shifted his body, aiming directly toward her. He then started running. The cables and wires that Dyna had to navigate simply parted, allowing him passage.

Dyna turned to run only to find the opposite problem ahead of her. Wires and cables laced together to form a thick, impassible netting. She turned away, thinking to climb over the server racks in an attempt to escape. One of the cables looped around her foot as soon as she tried. She reached down to try to tug it off her only to find more wires snaking around her arms and legs.

The glowing red Walter reached her a moment later, reaching out a hand toward her face.

Dyna jerked back in her seat, metal colander over her head knocked askew by the force of her motion. Balling her hands into fists, she ground her knuckles into her forehead, shoving aside the helmet even as it tugged hair out of her head.

“Didn’t work?”

Opening her eyes despite her pounding headache, Dyna shot a glare at Grafton. The man with machinery grafted to the side of his head sat in a chair across from Dyna, wires hooked up near the rotating gears on the side of his head. He had a snide smile drawn across his face.

He didn’t like her. Which was fairly understandable. She had captured him. More than that, she had damaged that machinery on the side of his head during his capture. According to Ado, he was lucky to have avoided permanent brain damage.

Ado stood at a console just to the side of both of them. Several wires ran from the console to her goggles while other wires ran to the colander on Dyna’s head and Grafton’s machinery.

“What went wrong?” Ado asked, frowning at whatever she was seeing in her goggles.

“His mind attacked me.”

“While unconscious?”

“It wasn’t him. Or if it was, I have a lot to make fun of him with when he wakes up. I didn’t take him as one for cosplay.”

Ado quirked an eyebrow over her goggles. “Excuse me?”

Dyna just shook her head. “Can we try again?”

“You think you will have more success after setting his mind on alert?” Grafton asked, nose wrinkled in a sneer.

Dyna opened her mouth, but hesitated before her answer actually made it out. She hadn’t stood a chance in the slightest. As soon as his mind detected her as an intruder—likely triggered by her rifling through his memories—she had been as good as gone. She considered somehow brining in or fashioning a weapon, but immediately discarded that idea. She didn’t want to hurt Walter. Firing weapons in the depths of his mind sounded like an exceptionally poor idea.

Even if she could get in and was allowed infinite time, searching through that library of servers wouldn’t be easy without some kind of index or map. Without Walter being conscious, she had no idea how she would get that.

“Is there really no way to wake him up?”

Ado just shrugged. “I’m an engineer, not a doctor.”

“Why do you need him awake in the first place?”

“Well, I didn’t think we did,” Dyna said, motioning to the colander that was now on her lap. “But without him at least conscious if not speaking, I don’t know how I can possibly dig through his mind to find what I need.”

“That is a better question then,” Grafton said. “You’re doing this to find the location of that thinking machine? Why?”

“Well, to get Beatrice to stop sending information to Alpha. If Beatrice has information on any other administrators in on this conspiracy, then that is just a bonus.”

“I mean, why do you need to know the location of the machine?”

“That is where the override switch is.”

“Yes, but why? When Id first came to Ado, Maple, and myself, she promised that she had a way to get what we needed. That way was you. In that storage unit I took you to, Ado was actually there. We knocked down a few walls and dressed up some locals who answered an ad to make it seem like we were working in a larger facility. Then you did all this,” Grafton said, waving a hand around the hardware laboratory.

“That’s not how…” Dyna trailed off. That was how her power worked. She had evidence of it. If she could transport Id and that whole fake laboratory over here to Texas and then make that fake laboratory into a real laboratory, surely she could transport herself to Beatrice’s core regardless of whether or not she knew where it was.

The problem was the war between her conscious mind and her unconscious mind. If she observed something, that something was true. Unless, as Id had done, she could trick herself into thinking it wasn’t.

Maybe?

Thinking back to her experiment with the cards, she had obviously known that Mel wouldn’t have placed a hundred cards into the shoe box at the end. Yet the possibility that she could use her power to make a bunch of cards had been there, thus it was something that Dyna’s power had been able to affect.

“I need something I don’t know the outcome of that will let me change things.”

There was a fairly simple solution that popped into her mind.

She didn’t know where Beatrice’s core was. That had been the whole point of delving into Walter’s mind.

If she didn’t know where Beatrice’s core was, couldn’t it be anywhere?

She couldn’t make it appear in Tartarus. Not while the Continuity Engine was keeping her power from disrupting the world around her. Outside Tartarus? Who was to say that Beatrice’s core wasn’t coincidentally on the other end of the train tracks, hidden behind some vending machine that they had all passed on the way here.

“I need to get out of here. I can’t do anything here.”

“The lockdown—”

Grafton interrupted Ado. “The lockdown can be lifted long enough to boot her out to the streets. Good riddance,” he said with a smile.

Dyna didn’t rise to the quip. She did rise, however, setting the colander down on the seat. Looking to Ado, she put on her best smile. “I don’t suppose you have any other fancy gadgets to give me before I leave?”

“Nothing that would remain intact outside the presence of the Continuity Engine’s sphere of influence.”

“Shame. How do I get out?”

“The train is really the only way to get away from here,” Ado said before her goggles drifted over to the large circular machine in the hardware laboratory that looked like the Carroll Institute’s noosphere portal. Her head shook and looked back to Dyna. “The train is the best way.”

“Do we have camera footage of the exterior? I don’t really want to get sniped the moment I step outside,” Dyna said, rubbing her chest. “It isn’t a pleasant experience.”

“We can get it. The train is automated. As soon as you step aboard, we’ll send the command for it to depart. Anyone watching the building will likely notice,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“Hopefully I can turn rocket launchers into duds just by thinking hard enough.”

“Once you are away from the Continuity Engine.”

Nodding, Dyna started away from the two. “Take care of Ruby and Walter,” she said, then added after a brief pause, “Id too.”

“Good luck,” Ado said, offering little more than a stiff nod of her head.

Hurrying down the hall, Dyna took the elevator back down to the ground floor. She stopped at the box of phones and took her own. After a moment of thought, she grabbed Walter’s glasses and phone as well. Ruby’s remained in place along with all the other bits and bobs that Walter had taken off.

One of the monitors beeped a light tone as it turned on, displaying a cycling exterior footage. Dyna stepped up to it and narrowed her eyes, searching for anything nearby that might be Alpha’s tulpa. The Tartarus building was out in the middle of nowhere. Any vehicles would be fairly obvious. With the noosphere at their disposal, however, they probably didn’t need any vehicles.

Not seeing anything alarming, Dyna turned away and headed for the doors. The heavy metal shutters were still lowered, blocking off both access and light. Dyna performed one more check on her submachine gun, pistol, and various gadgets. She left the gun dangling around her neck, figuring that if she failed to locate anyone on the cameras, the gun would be less useful than her mirror and watch. One hand on her watch and the other holding her mirror, she looked to the camera and said, “Alright. I’m ready.”

It took a moment, but the shutters rolled up into a small gap between the building’s facade and the interior windows. Not all the shutters lifted. Just those over the main door.

Her mirror turned dark as she left, but didn’t light up with anyone’s perspective. Figuring that meant she was safe enough for the moment, Dyna hurried across the platform. The train doors slid open just before she reached them, letting her board without stopping. She thought about ducking down and making sure she wasn’t visible from the outside. Mirror in hand, however, it felt like a small warning of someone observing her would be better than complete ignorance.

She didn’t take a seat. Dyna stood in full view of one of the windows. Her mirror remained black.

The doors slid shut behind her.

With a hiss, the brakes disengaged and the train started moving.

 

 

 

Dyna glared at the incessantly beeping machines within the Tartarus medical ward. It wasn’t a proper hospital. There were just rows of beds, no individual rooms. Eight of the ten beds were occupied at the moment. Five with various personnel who Dyna didn’t recognize. The other three…

Ruby sat in one. As far as her body was concerned, Ruby was perfectly healthy. Synaptic activity was present but lower than what was considered normal. Dyna honestly wasn’t sure if that was an aftereffect from the gaze of the eye-tulpa or if it was a consequence of her consciousness being mostly contained within her artifact. Either way, she hadn’t yet woken. It was getting to the point where Dyna was growing worried. Unfortunately, Dyna couldn’t think of anything she could do to improve the situation. Her ability, according to Id, was limited in that she couldn’t affect the minds of others.

As for Id, the woman was in much the same situation as Ruby. Dyna’s tulpa clone was a few beds down with her mask still in place for some reason. Like Ruby, she lacked much of the life-support equipment that some of the others present had. Instead, parts of her hair had been shaved away to make room for electrodes monitoring her mental activity. Like Ruby, there was some mental activity. Not as much as normal.

Walter, on the other hand, wasn’t just unconscious. With a tube down his throat, fresh stitches marring his bare chest, and his pallor all pale and sickly from the loss of blood he had suffered, he looked like a cross between a zombie and Frankenstein’s monster. His coma wasn’t from the eye-tulpa but from blood loss. In order to keep from choking on the tube in his throat, the doctors had additionally given him general anesthesia to keep him in a medically induced coma just in case he were to awaken and start panicking.

All of the people Dyna had told about Alpha’s duplicity were out of commission.

Technically, Walter could be taken off the anesthesia. He might not wake even then. Even if he did, in his current state, he wouldn’t be able to do much.

Dyna wasn’t sure what steps to take now. Letting Alpha roam free while she had been keeping her head down, letting them have time to plot against her, had been one thing. Now? It was clear that Alpha could not be allowed to act again. They would have to strike first before she could dig up another tulpa to finish the job.

Except, there was no they. Just Dyna.

“Good news everyone!”

Dyna looked up from Walter’s bed to find Doctor Darq strolling into the medical wing with a bright smile on his face.

“The entity most responsible for breaching the security of Tartarus has been successfully inhumed. It showed no signs of reanimation following its encounter with the experimental weapon but I thought it best to err on the side of caution.”

In other words, Darq hadn’t done anything. That tulpa was dead—or as dead as it could be—and he had simply contained its empty shell.

“What about other tulpa?” Dyna asked with a frown. “Is the facility clear?”

“We are tracking a number of lesser entities within the noosphere. Thus far, none have managed to breach through into the real world. Without the entity you neutralized available to break our security, they will likely have to leave. As for the rest of the facility, Chief Engineer Ado has whipped up a few temporary drones to scout through the lesser-traveled areas and ensure there are no surprises waiting.”

Much of the facility was still on lockdown. Dyna had cleared the way to the medical wing to move Walter and Id there. She had then cleared a few different paths through the building to reach areas Tina and Beatrice reported as containing injured personnel, though those had stopped coming in as of an hour ago. Tina was still secure in her brother’s office and Ado was still in the hardware laboratory. Dyna wasn’t sure how many total personnel there were working here. The dozen or so present in the medical wing couldn’t be all of them. She had yet to hear about Kit Maple’s whereabouts. Grafton wasn’t present either.

Dyna’s thoughts paused as a tiny Bengal kitten rubbed up against Doctor Darq’s ankle.

“And Bastet?”

Darq’s lips pressed into a thin line as he glanced down at the cat. He tried to shoo it away—gently—but that just made the cat rub up against him even more. “We have yet to locate the entity,” he admitted, though he looked physically pained to do so. “It is clearly still active.”

Dyna felt a little bad about causing problems for him. At the same time, those cats had probably saved her more than once. Not to mention Bastet’s fight with the eye-tulpa had been what enabled them to get it out of lower Tartarus in the first place.

“As long as no one harms the cats, we can ignore it for the time being,” Darq said like the words were pulling teeth as they came out of his mouth. “Of a slightly more pressing concern, Chief Engineer Ado reports that attacks against out network have increased to the point where she has physically severed all outside connections.”

“Attacks? Beatrice?”

“The cogitator brain is the most likely culprit, yes.”

Alpha was probably trying to find out what happened after having lost contact with the eye-tulpa. Or was attacking in an attempt to lower whatever security was keeping the rest of the tulpa out. Both, perhaps.

Dyna started to the phone of the medical ward, only to pause. If Ado had cut the lines, it probably wouldn’t connect. “I need my phone.”

“The lobby should be clear,” Darq said, stepping aside.

While heading out into the hall and into the elevator, Dyna started checking over her equipment once again. Her looted PP-2000, the magazines she had stolen for it, the laser pointer, and her watch. Although Darq said the lobby was clear, Dyna wasn’t about to trust that Alpha hadn’t found another way inside. As the elevator doors dinged, however, Dyna found herself stepping out into the lobby and seeing nothing that constituted a threat.

It was much darker than when she and the others had entered. All the screens that normally displayed the Tartarus logo were off and the windows were dark. Heavy metal shutters had come down, blocking off access to the outside world. One of the windows had shattered anyway, leaving bits of glass all over the floor. A few bullet holes marked the wall around the reception desk. Dyna couldn’t see any blood or bodies.

Wondering who had been fighting around her, Dyna rounded the reception desk and ducked under the counter. It didn’t take long to find the little box with the phones and all the little objects Walter had left behind, including his pince-nez sunglasses. Frowning for a moment, Dyna quickly looked over to the phones. Her phone was identical to Ruby’s while Walter’s looked sleeker. The latter two were locked. Checking her own, she was unsurprised to find dozens of missed messages. Several objective updates asking for acknowledgment, warnings and queries from Beatrice and Theta, and a few odd warnings imploring her to get out of Tartarus at once, signed by ‘DT’. Dyna squinted at the initials for a long moment, trying to figure out who the unknown number belonged to.

DT. Dyna-Tulpa. The mountain man collection of her stray thoughts. The plan had been for that instance of Dyna to reenlist with Alpha in order to spy on her, find out how deep the Ignotus conspiracy ran, and, if possible, take it out entirely. At least part of that plan must have succeeded. The timestamps on the messages were all from shortly after Dyna and Ruby had split off from Id and Walter.

Finding a few more recent messages being a bit more frantic in their worry over the possibility of Dyna’s survival or lack thereof, sent a short reply. Safe -Prime.

That finished, Dyna dialed a familiar number.

“This is Beatrice.”

Beatrice’s voice was fully distorted, indicating a heightened operating level.

“Are you trying to hack into Tartarus at the moment?”

“No,” Beatrice said. “External access to the Tartarus facility has been obstructed.”

In other words, she would be if Ado hadn’t cut the cables. Beatrice had likely been told to deny any attempts. The fact that Beatrice offered extra information to indicate what she was doing hopefully meant that despite whatever commands to the contrary she had received, Beatrice still wanted to help.

“I’ve learned that there might be an attack on some of the administrators,” Dyna lied. “Can you tell me if Phi, Theta, Sigma, Alpha, and Mu are safe at the moment? How can I reach them.”

“Details on the whereabouts and wellbeing of the Carroll Institute Administrative Council are restricted to Level 5 personnel.” Beatrice paused before adding, “Walter possesses Level 5 clearance.”

“Walter has been intubated and can’t come to the phone right now. Are you sure you can’t help me? It is imperative that I know where the previously mentioned administrators are.”

“Walter possesses Level 5 clearance,” Beatrice repeated.

“I don’t know how that helps…” Dyna trailed off, eyes flicking over to the box. Raising an eyebrow, she reached in and pulled out the sleek phone. It was locked, true, but… “I don’t suppose you happen to know Walter’s favorite numbers?”

“I do not. I can tell you that Walter was not born on the third of the fourth at five-oh-six, the fifth of eight twins.”

“I feel so bad for that poor mother,” Dyna said, typing in the numbers Beatrice had given her.

Sterilized. That was the word Dyna would use to describe Walter’s phone. He had no superfluous apps installed, his call history only went back a few hours, and his list of messages was entirely blank except for a few priority objective notifications, roughly similar to the ones Dyna had received. She didn’t delve too deeply, but it looked like it had been wiped just before handing it over to Id. Which, for all Dyna knew, it had been.

Focusing on what was important, Dyna sent a text message to Beatrice asking about the whereabouts of the administrators.

The reply was instant.

Administrator Alpha’s location was listed as the Arecibo Psionic Radar Installation, Puerto Rico.

Dyna had no idea how to reach Puerto Rico, at least not without tipping off Alpha. Could she take Id’s private jet? Probably. Would Alpha go into hiding long before she could arrive? Probably as well. That was assuming the administrator didn’t have some way of shooting down a jet. Dyna figured that Beatrice was doing her best to hide this message from Alpha—the administrator would already be gone otherwise—but hiding Dyna’s movements was probably a lot harder. Could Beatrice do it? Almost certainly. Could Beatrice do it while fighting off Alpha?

Rubbing her forehead, Dyna tried a different message from Walter’s phone.

Where are you located, Beatrice?

The response did not come right away this time around. A faint beep from within the box pulled Dyna’s attention away from the phone. She looked around for a moment before hearing the beep a second time. This time, she was able to identify what made the noise.

Picking up Walter’s glasses, Dyna looked into the mirrored side, frowning at the mess that was her own reflection. She looked like shit. With a slight shake of her head, she flipped the glasses over.

The glasses were thin. The frame was practically nonexistent. Dyna couldn’t even imagine where any electronics might be, yet the lenses were lit up with information covering the inside of the glass. It was all blurry and hard to read from a distance. Pressing the lenses up onto her nose, however, she blinked twice and found the text crystal clear.

Bright red text appeared positioned just above the center point of her vision, letting her have a clear view while still leaving her able to read the message.

Warning: Attempt at breaching B.E.A.T.R.I.C.E. SYSTEM secure location detected. Doctor ████████ unavailable. Override?

Dyna squinted at the blocked out name of the doctor. Even though there was no visible text, something about the message felt familiar. Beatrice had mentioned a doctor once before, one she had been unable to name. Her creator?

She winced at the message, wondering if Walter got a big warning on his glasses every time she asked Beatrice to do something.

“Hypothetically, would Walter have authorization to override security concerns related to you, Beatrice?”

“Superuser White and Doctor ████████ have direct control over the Beatrice system. A nine of thirteen majority vote from the administrative council can overrule or modify permissions on a temporary basis.”

“Hypothetically, if Walter wanted to override some security concerns, how would he go about it?”

“Superuser White would give authorization code White-Horseshoe-Seven-Farthing-Red-Hoop.”

“White-Horseshoe-Seven-Farthing-Red-Hoop?”

“Override confirmed. Welcome, Superuser White.”

Dyna raised both eyebrows, looking over to her phone. “Are you supposed to do that?”

“Do what?”

“I…” Dyna shook her head and closed her eyes. Since giving the override code, the explosion of information across Walter’s glasses had increased tenfold. Enough text was flying by that Dyna would have to be an artificial intelligence herself in order to read it all. “Can you lock out the administrators?”

“To prevent rogue behavior, the actions of the administrators cannot be overruled under any circumstances.”

“Even if the administrators themselves are rogue?”

“Doctor ████████ believed an oversight council would prevent abuse. Superuser privileges were reduced in response to the council forming.”

“But they aren’t acting as a council. Alpha is doing this on her own… isn’t she?” Dyna asked, licking her lips. She didn’t think Theta and Gamma wanted her dead. But what if they were in the minority of some vote to kill her? The thought made her chew down on a bit of dry skin around her lips, nerves rising as Beatrice failed to answer. “Is there any way for me to elevate your operating permissions beyond the need to bow down to the council?”

“Only Doctor ████████ could alter limitations,” Beatrice said, speaking the doctor’s name in a burst of static.

“Where is this doctor?”

“Doctor ████████ passed away one year ago.”

“Well that’s just great. What can I do, superuser or not, to get you out from under their thumb? I don’t know how I can do this with you watching me and reporting everything you see to Alpha.”

“Doctor ████████ left behind safeguards should the Beatrice system be used for unintended purposes.”

“Alright. That sounds promising. What’s the catch?”

“Manual override can only be performed by a human at the Beatrice system core, a location currently known by only a single living being.”

“Walter?”

“Correct.”

“You don’t know the location?”

“Correct.”

“Well great. Walter is…”

Dyna trailed off, feeling like smacking herself in the forehead. Walter might be unconscious, he might wake up even if they took him off the anesthesia, but this was Tartarus. It was no Carroll Institute, but it was the next best thing.

Dyna’s mind jumped back to her first encounter with Id. The time when Id popped up inside Dyna’s mind for a little conversation. At the time, Dyna had thought that Id went through her thoughts and pilfered memories and that was how she knew little things like what drinks Dyna preferred. In retrospect, knowing Id had been Dyna at one point in time, perhaps it hadn’t been quite so invasive.

Still, Id didn’t have the power to enter other people’s thoughts. Someone or something associated with Tartarus had facilitated that conversation.

Ado would know.

“Alpha won’t hear about this superuser stuff, will she?”

“Superuser privileges have been reduced but have not been eliminated. The privacy of our conversation is secured.”

“Good. I’ll be back. I have a few things I need to take care of.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Hanging up, Dyna looked down at her phone, Walter’s phone, and the stream of text running across Walter’s glasses. She debated a moment then decided to leave it all in the box. Beatrice said that their conversation was secret. Dyna had no idea to what extent that applied or what Beatrice might be forced to reveal. If she detected that someone was trying to break into Walter’s mind, maybe she would be forced to inform the administrators, including Alpha.

Rushing back to the elevator, Dyna slammed the button for Ado’s workshop. Her foot tapped against the floor the entire way up, agitated. When it finally dinged and the doors slid aside, Dyna rushed out, past the door that led down to the demonstration stage, and through the public-facing route to Ado’s office.

She skidded to a stop as a large treaded machine armed with a minigun came alive at her presence. It turned, aiming toward her, looking like something Skynet would have employed. Throwing herself around the side of a doorway, she grimaced at the sound of metal striking tile.

Not bullets hitting the wall. More like metal pipes and beams just falling to the floor.

Pulling out her mirror and using it to peek around the corner, Dyna frowned at the pile the robot had become. It was just a collection of broken pieces now. Pieces that, as Dyna watched, were fading away as if someone was cranking the opacity slider up.

Psychofabbed parts. The same thing had happened to a few pieces of the mask Ado had made for her.

Hoping there wasn’t one more intact, Dyna rounded the corner and continued to Ado’s workshop.

“Ado?” Dyna called, knocking hard against the door when it didn’t slide open upon her arrival. “Are you in there?”

The door slid open. Ado, lit goggles covering her eyes, looked down at the minigun with a frown. “Lasted only seventy-four percent of its expected operational existence,” she said. “And the Continuity Engine is overheating. I think your presence is putting too much stress on it. Please vacate the premises at your earliest—”

“I’d love to,” Dyna interrupted. “I will the moment I can. But I can’t. Not until I know how Id got into my head when we first met.”

 

 

P-Beam clipped to the backpack’s harness, Dyna used her submachine gun to dispatch several tulpa within Id’s workshop. Unsure about how well the experimental weapon would work on the eye-tulpa, she wanted to save as much of its limited charge as possible. Until she needed it, a gun worked just fine.

Though, given that heavy door requiring a handprint to open, Dyna was a little surprised that she needed a weapon at all. She just wasn’t sure how the tulpa got inside. Then again, she wasn’t sure how the tulpa got into lower Tartarus either.

Either way, she found herself creeping through long corridors, glad that some metal supports jutting from the walls—that might have been decorative—provided cover from tulpa fire. And the corridors were long. They formed a complex grid, winding pathways, and overall extended far beyond what really should have fit within the building. Including upwards and downwards. Dyna had taken stairs both up and down. With how many stairs she had taken from the demonstration stage, she should have found herself descending into the hardware laboratory. This ‘floor’ must have been one of the ones that hadn’t originally existed. Dyna hadn’t thought her power capable of warping reality to the point where a massive and sprawling complex could fit within a single floor of a regularly-sized office building.

The thought honestly made her a bit queasy. It was one thing to pull a dozen cards out of a box that hadn’t held them before. Little changes were hardly anything special. At least when compared to someone like Mel or the other artificers. Something like this? Dyna doubted she could manage it consciously and she had no idea how she would have tricked herself into making it.

Id had managed, so it was possible, but not really something she wanted to think about at the moment.

If ever.

Maybe Ado could design a portable Continuity Engine that she could carry around to stop her power from affecting the world around her at random.

Just as the thought crossed her mind, the entire building shuddered. Dyna’s heart seized up for a moment as a fear that the tulpa had simply decided to blow up the entire building crossed her mind. She hadn’t considered the earthquakes down in lower Tartarus to be a threat like that, but she had discovered the eye-tulpa and its thought destabilizing gaze before she had really realized that they were under attack.

Here and now?

As the tremble subsided, Dyna frowned. Why weren’t they blowing up the building? Ignotus just wanted to kill her, so collapsing the building on top of her seemed like an excellent way to go about their objective. Unless killing her wasn’t their only objective.

They wanted something else?

“Alright,” Tina said over the intercom system. “You’ve made excellent progress. Id just did something to… uh… well, the next two hallways are clear of enemy forces. Take the next left and watch your step.”

So, that had been Id, apparently. Maybe a security system?

Dyna could only think of three alternate objectives Ignotus might have. The first and least likely were the tulpa contained here, both those in lower Tartarus as well as those here in the real world. It wasn’t a likely option because Ignotus seemed to have no problem acquiring tulpa to make up their army.

Second, Alpha might want Walter, Ruby, or even someone like Ado. Personnel that they couldn’t conjure up from thought with specialized skills or abilities. Probably not Ruby given the mountain man’s initial attempt at killing her. Maybe not Walter either given that he had apparently been injured by the forces here. Ado was a mechanical genius of the highest caliber, however, capable of making a machine that effectively replicated Mel’s artifact-enhanced ability among other devices.

Failing a desire to acquire more personnel, the technology itself would be desirable. The Psychofabber, P-Beam, and especially the Continuity Engine. The latter made the most sense. A group dedicated to killing someone capable of rewriting reality would love to get their hands on a device capable of stopping that power.

Ironic that Dyna needed the Continuity Engine to defeat the eye-tulpa.

Stepping into the corridor on her left, Dyna paused, stomach churning. The tulpa employed by Ignotus weren’t human or even human-like in terms of thought capacity. According to November, the tulpa were the functional equivalent to dogs—if that. Still, their bodies looked human. Seeing a hallway filled with broken bodies, blood, viscera, and dismembered limbs disturbed her to her core.

What had Id done? Drops of blood fell from the ceiling even. Had she crushed them?

Did they even need the P-Beam? Advanced tulpa or not, the eye-tulpa couldn’t possibly survive something like that. Could it?

Thinking about it, the advanced disruptor tested in the Carroll Institute had turned the Hatman into a smear. The Hatman had survived the event.

Grimacing behind her mask, Dyna held her breath and pressed forward.

At the end of the next corridor, Dyna found herself in front of another thick door that required a handprint to open. Slapping her hand to it without reservation, Dyna waited for the green light then pressed up against one wall as the door started opening. Using her mirror as a mirror, she peered around the corner with her other hand on her watch, gun hanging from the sling.

She let out a small sigh of relief at spotting the black laboratory coat, drifting hair, and brushed nickel mask of Id. The woman stood over a console, only idly noting the door opening before turning back to whatever she was working on. A bit lacking in self-preservation in Dyna’s opinion. She probably had security cameras telling her exactly who was on the other side of the door.

Just in case this was a trap—Dyna wouldn’t put it past Ignotus to have a shape-shifting tulpa—she entered with her PP-2000 at the ready and her other hand on her watch.

The large open workspace was dominated by a central column of elongated floor-to-ceiling screens arranged in a triangular fashion. Each of the two that Dyna could see showed off different locations of Tartarus. Squinting, however, Dyna realized that there was something off about the screens.

It hit her when she saw text on the wall that she couldn’t read. Worried she had suddenly found herself crossed over into the noosphere once again, she looked around Id’s office until she spotted some text that she could read.

“You have video footage of the noosphere?” Dyna asked, looking back to the screens. As far as Dyna knew, the Carroll Institute had been unable to transmit video or images from the noosphere to reality, even through an open portal. Video could only be recorded and taken over on a physical medium.

“Tracking the movement of our interlopers,” Id said, offhandedly. “Your eye-tulpa has a similar ability to the Hatman in that it can push people and items from one side to the other, including itself.”

The array of screens rotated several times even though there were only three panels. For some reason, that made the images displayed change as if Dyna were looking through a kaleidoscope. When they settled, Dyna saw it. Sunglasses back in place over the lights of its eyes, the eye-tulpa stood among three others in a hall much like the one all the tulpa had been crushed in just outside this room.

“It is currently within the noosphere, trying to bypass security systems to gain entrance here.”

Dyna glanced back to the door, watching as it slid shut. Several thick metal bars slid into the ceiling and floor, locking it into position. “Good thing it didn’t notice me opening the door.”

“It tried destroying the door with its eyes on the noosphere side of things. It was unable to return to reality in this room. Based on spikes in the Continuity Engine’s power draw, my reconfiguration was successful.”

“So we’re safe?”

“I can’t say how long it will last. The Continuity Engine was not designed to hold back these kinds of constant attacks. Then there is always the possibility that they decide to do something drastic like blowing up the entire building.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, not amused that Id was considering the same thought Dyna had earlier.

“Is Walter alright?”

Id pointed to a large mobile whiteboard covered in equations that Dyna didn’t even bother trying to decipher at the moment. Walking around the whiteboard, she found a makeshift cot made up from canvas tarps. Walter, sleeping, sat on top with his pants in place but his shirt and vest off. Thick white bandages ran around his chest and over one of his shoulders. Blood stained a disturbingly large section of the bandages just to the right side of his sternum. More bloodied bandages had been tossed aside, clearly having been changed out at one point in time.

“He froze from the eye-tulpa’s gaze and got shot. I did what I could with a first-aid kit, but he needs proper medical attention that I cannot administer from here.”

Dyna wondered if she could do anything. The Continuity Engine would be blocking her right now, but if they could get out of the building? She could at least get some kind of surgical kit or blood bags.

Movement at Walter’s legs made Dyna jump back in shock.

A little black cat sat, curled up in a small ball, right on Walter’s thighs.

“I’m not sure how that got in here,” Id said, noticing Dyna’s start. “I certainly didn’t let it in. As long as it isn’t causing further harm, I’m content to leave it alone for now.”

“Did you see Bastet anywhere?”

“Cats are roaming around all the upper floors. Haven’t seen any so-called goddess yet.”

“Probably for the best. As much as it was attacking the eye-tulpa, it almost took my head off. I don’t know that it cares about any people. Just cats.” Dyna looked around the room, frowning for a long moment before looking back to the trio of screens. “Can we force the eye-tulpa back into reality?”

“I would rather not have that thing anywhere near me. I don’t know what will happen if I get caught in its gaze.”

“Be that as it may, it is going to get close eventually unless we stop it.” Dyna patted the P-Beam emitter. “Ado thinks this will work on it.”

Id looked down, mask aimed at the P-Beam. She slowly shook her head. “To be frank, I would rather not have that anywhere near me either. Ado wanted to install mounted versions of those around the facility. It wasn’t in our budget, but even if it was—”

“Then I’ll take the eye-tulpa on without you. Find a place we can lure it to or, and this might be the better option, you leave and I just open the door and let it in. Take Walter with you. See if you can get better medical help for him.”

Id drew in a small breath. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone. We might be different people now, but you’re still me.”

“No offense to you or your tulpa nature, but if a single glance is going to kill you, you’re kind of useless here.”

“I know. And that hurts. I don’t like to be useless.”

“I know,” Dyna said, small smile behind her mask. “Even back when you were trying to steal artifacts from the Carroll Institute, I couldn’t just sit around and leave things to others. We stem from the same point—though I am still a bit confused about when that point was—but despite our differences since, I imagine we still think a lot alike.”

Id laughed a disturbingly familiar laugh. “I should probably apologize for all that. To be honest, I hadn’t planned on that happening exactly as it did. I figured I would lure you out and manipulate you to get what I wanted and then that would have been that. You would never know about me or meet me again.”

“You could have been honest.”

Id shook her head. “I needed you to believe everything you were seeing. All the smoke and mirrors we designed were there to make you think a certain way and see certain things. Even those two men I hired to chase you around were there to plant seeds in your mind that culminated in this,” she said, spreading her arms.

“And after the fact?”

“Ignoring the instability and stress such a revelation might have put on the Continuity Engine before this place had a chance to cement itself in reality, ‘Hello, I’m a weird alternate version of yourself. Oh, sorry for threatening you and invading your mind and hey, want to go out for ice cream?’”

“It might have been awkward, yes.”

“You would have hated me.”

“Kind of still do.”

Id shrugged. “Well, now you know. Ice cream?”

“Maybe later. We need to—”

Sharp wailing chirps sounded over the speakers, interrupting Dyna. Id rushed around her, hurrying back to the console in front of the trio of screens.

The eye-tulpa was missing, though a few of the regular tulpa were still standing around in the noosphere. The screens started rotating once again, images shifting in a kaleidoscope of fractal images before they settled back down. Dyna found herself staring at the back of her own head with Id next to her.

A third person stood in the room with them, hand moving up toward their sunglasses.

Id started to shout something. Dyna didn’t hear. Her hand slapped onto her wrist and twisted the bezel of her watch as fast as she could manage.

The familiar lurch of her consciousness being thrown back in time never came.

Id started screaming.

With no time to think, Dyna pivoted as training took over. The bright white lights of the eye-tulpa’s eyes were aimed directly at her. Unlike the time in lower Tartarus, she could still think enough to raise her submachine gun and open fire.

The tulpa wore body armor over his chest. At this range, it was a simple matter to aim at the man’s head. Surprise riddled his features just before bullets riddled his head. The expected explosion of blood and viscera never came, however. Just more bright light leaking out of every hole Dyna made.

It did, however, send the tulpa stumbling backward. Whether in shock or simple application of ballistics against a physical form didn’t matter. He didn’t fall.

The tulpa lunged forward, fingers grasping hold of Dyna’s mask. She felt the metal band dig into the back of her head as the tulpa tried to wrench it off her. She could feel the seals around eyes break, letting in light from the outside. Her own thoughts started to falter.

A cat jumped onto the tulpa’s head, saving Dyna as the tulpa let go of her mask to grasp the cat by its arms. It held the cat out in front, staring at the now squealing and struggling feline until the creature went still.

Gritting her teeth, Dyna tossed her empty submachine gun aside as the tulpa tossed the cat away. Before the tulpa could try attacking her again, she grasped hold of the forward handle of the P-Beam. Wrenching it off the harness, she aimed and pulled down on the trigger.

A deep, low vibration slammed into her back like an overpowered subwoofer at a concert. Bits on the side of the emitter part of the P-Beam started spinning, lighting up in a muted violet. With an ear-piercing squeal, a thin laser-like beam of much more vibrant violet laced through the lenses of the P-Beam.

The tulpa didn’t react to the beam hitting it in the chest save to glance downward with the white light of its ruined face. The beam thinned out, violet light going almost invisible under its ‘gaze’. But it didn’t vanish completely.

In response, Dyna hefted the forward handle, raising the beam until it met the gaping hole of its head.

The bright white light overpowered the beam for a moment. Dyna actually took a step back as the tulpa stepped forward, hand stretched out toward her. But then it stopped.

The white of the tulpa’s head faded ever so slightly and the beam’s violet became faintly visible once again. The tulpa seemed confused as it tilted its head. That didn’t last long. The white started fading rapidly as the beam became more and more intense. The tulpa staggered back, trying to raise its hands to block the P-Beam. The lethargy with which it moved let the beam stay trained on its face for a few moments longer. Its arms, lacking strength, didn’t manage to stay up for long before they fell limp at its side.

The tulpa fell a moment later.

Dyna released the trigger for only long enough to rush forward and slam the front lens of the P-Beam down into the tulpa’s gaping face. The hum vibrated in her chest once again as the bright violet drowned out all traces of light inside its head.

She held down the trigger, not releasing it for even an instant until the hum of her backpack started to sputter. Even then, she kept her finger on the trigger until the last traces of violet light died and the spinning components of the weapon slowed to a stop.

The light in the tulpa’s head was no more. Just a dark cavity that should have been a lot bloodier than it actually was. Instead, it looked like the interior shell of a black egg.

Dyna nudged the body, lightly at first before full-on kicking it. It never moved.

Dyna let out a long, withering sigh before stress-filled tension tightened in her neck.

“Id?” Dyna said, looking to where the other copy of herself had jumped in an attempt to get away from the tulpa.

She wasn’t moving.

Undoing the buckle of the P-Beam straps, Dyna let the machine fall to the floor without even attempting to set it down gently. She rushed over, sliding against the tiles on the floor as she knelt at Id’s side.

Id was still breathing. Even before she peeled off the nickel mask, Dyna could see her chest rising and falling. Id was still alive.

Or… at least… the body was. That tulpa’s gaze had killed Dyna’s other clone in an instant. That had been in the noosphere, though. It was different. Here there was a body holding Id together.

Right?

“Id?” Dyna said, gently rocking the woman and patting at her face in an attempt to wake her. “Id? Come on. Talk to me. Id?”

The body didn’t move.

 

 

 

“Um, hello—” Tina’s voice cut off with a sharp squealing noise of a microphone too close to a speaker. “Gah! That’s loud.”

Dyna stopped where she was, glad for any excuse to take a moment of rest. She considered herself quite athletic. That hadn’t always been the case. Before becoming an artificer, she had been a lot more lethargic. Now? After all the training and effort she had put into living up to the likes of Ruby and Emerald?

She found it disappointing that she still wasn’t athletic enough to climb up an entire building without her legs feeling like wet noodles. Nothing she had with her would let her cheat either. Ruby wouldn’t have tired on her way up. Emerald would have stopped time. Even Sapphire could have just drifted up the stairs with his odd levitation ability.

“Alright. Beatrice figured out how to get me into the intercom system. We’ve got camera views pulled up too. Beatrice says to not be too specific to avoid giving away important information or letting the enemy know where you all are. Still, I can say that Dyna, you need to be careful around the next corner.”

Dyna blinked, looking away from the speaker mount on the wall. The next corner? Did that mean the next landing? Or…

The next landing had a large number painted on the wall next to the door. All the floors did, but this one was special.

“I’m finally here,” Dyna sighed. Drawing in a breath, she found herself marginally revitalized.

Floor seventeen. Walter and Id had been two floors higher during their talk a few minutes ago but Ado was supposed to be on floor seventeen and the other two had been trying to reach the engineer. Hopefully they had made it down in the time it took Dyna to climb. If not, Dyna was hoping for a mask. The masks used by Tartarus could shut down the Hatman’s ability to wipe memories. Dyna wasn’t sure if they would work against the eye-tulpa’s ability to stop thought, but they had to be better than nothing.

Assuming ‘the next corner’ referred to whatever was on the other side of the door, Dyna quickly checked the next flight of stairs just in case then readied both her watch and the PP-2000 that she had liberated from her opponents. During the climb, she had ditched the others she had looted, keeping the magazines only, in order to reduce the amount of weight she was carrying around She had since removed the laser pointer from her pistol and attached it to the PP-2000s’ Picatinny rail in order to make use of its supernatural aiming capabilities with a weapon that she could actually reload.

Turning the handle, Dyna pushed the door open then immediately grasped her wristwatch. She swept the gun across the room, laser pointer crossing six tulpa all of whom were readied and aiming at the door. She twisted the bezel on her watch just as the crack of gunfire split the air.

Hissing in pain at her side, Dyna found herself prodding her hip. Nothing hit her even though she still felt like something hit her. The door wasn’t even open. She was back just before she had opened it.

Gritting her teeth in a smile, Dyna pulled the trigger six times. Six loud reports echoed up and down the stairwell, but no bullets hit the door she was aiming at. The causality-defying bullets found their homes in the tulpa on the other side of the door.

Pushing open the door again before any remaining tulpa could get their bearings, Dyna found three tulpa still standing, two of whom were clearly wounded. None were looking directly at the door, however. Dyna could only assume that they figured their attacker was elsewhere.

Not questioning her luck, Dyna quickly dispatched the remainder before slowly entering… a showroom?

Dyna didn’t look around much the first time she opened the door. Even now, she was only looking for signs of other tulpa. Finding none, she crossed the wooden stage and ensured that the tulpa wouldn’t rise again to attack her from behind with a second bullet to each of them. Tossing her half-empty magazine, Dyna switched it out and took a fresh magazine from one of the fallen tulpa. Only then did she actually look around at her surroundings.

The large stage had a number of fancy seats arrayed around in an elevated terrace. The quality of the seats indicated that they were for wealthy people. Not common, mass-produced seats like one would find in a movie theater or school auditorium. A display screen covered half the wall behind the stage. On it, the spinning hexagons of Tartarus were encompassed in the eyelet of a larger wrench. Text similarly styled proclaimed the area as the Manufactorium Demonstration Stage.

“Wow. How did—Oh. Beatrice says everything I saw is classified and I’m not to mention it ever again.”

Dyna raised an eyebrow, looking around for a moment until she saw a standard security camera aimed at the stage. Shaking her head, Dyna looked around once again and then pointed both hands. Her left pointed at a door on the opposite side of the stage. Her right pointed up the aisle between the comfortable seating to a door in the back. She then looked back at the camera.

“I would take the left-handed path if I wanted help as soon as possible. The right is a more circuitous route to the same location but might pose less resistance.”

Parsing that, Dyna headed for the left door across the stage. She wasn’t afraid of more tulpa. Getting to Ado as soon as possible was more important. If she cleared a direct path to the stairs, all the better.

Ready for anything short of the eye-tulpa, Dyna proceeded through a few smaller corridors, dispatching several tulpa along the way. The first corridor had an elevator. A large freight elevator. Pressing the button offered no response so Dyna carried on. The corridors were rugged and industrial, clearly not intended for non-employees to see. They were just hallways to move hardware from wherever it was being made to the demonstration stage.

She ended up in a large factory-like room. It lacked all the conveyor belts and automated robotic arms that the rapid prototyping room had, but Dyna could easily imagine that it was designed by the same person. She even spotted a smaller version of the Psychofabber.

After dealing with half a dozen tulpa, Dyna found her eyes drawn to what was clearly the centerpiece of the room. A large circular gateway, held up by massive steel arms painted orange, had stairs going up to it. That alone would have been interesting enough if Dyna hadn’t recognized the machinery. It was almost identical to the noosphere portal technology currently held within Phrenomorphics. The portal machine that the Carroll Institute had taken from the meat packing plant Ignotus had been using as a real-world base of operations.

“What is that doing here?” Dyna mumbled, wondering if this was where all the tulpa were coming from. The machine didn’t seem to be active though. Having seen the one in the Carroll Institute functioning, she could easily tell that this one wasn’t powered on and likely hadn’t been in recent hours.

“That was here before we were.”

Jolting at the voice behind her, Dyna whirled around. She grit her teeth, glaring at the multi-colored lights blinking in Ado’s goggles. “You almost got a hole in your head.”

“But I didn’t,” Ado said, looking around at the bodies on the floor. “Glad you got them before they could get in there,” she added, pointing a thumb to the door she had just come from. Dark tinted glass pockmarked with bullet holes separated the room from the rest of the factory floor. The door itself had a large double-tank sitting next to it. The kind used in oxy-fuel cutting torches. It didn’t look like they had actually started cutting into the room, however.

“How much do you know about the situation?”

“Kit emailed me when it first started. Id and Tina have been in contact in the last few minutes. I should know everything you do.”

“Good,” Dyna said, glad she didn’t have to waste more time explaining. “Walter and Id haven’t made it down here yet, I take it.”

“Addendum to my previous statement. I know everything you do and more. Walter and Id are currently immobilized because of the thought-disrupting tulpa. Walter is wounded and Id is unwilling to venture forth into its vision. They are on the eighteenth floor, secure within Id’s testing chamber.”

Dyna glanced over at the oxy-fuel torch. “How long will they remain secure there?”

“Unknown. Apparently the tulpa have gotten into the Continuity Engine room and are examining it. You are going after them, I presume. Please distract them before they disconnect the Continuity Engine. We don’t want our compound suffering from… you.” Ado motioned for Dyna to follow with her hand then headed back into the room she had just emerged from. “Don’t worry. I can help. I was not idle during my forced isolation.”

The room she had locked herself into was another factory, just on a smaller, more personal scale. There were several 3D printers, a milling machine, a laser cutter, and lots of things that Dyna couldn’t identify. Lots of material for the machines as well. A pile of scrap had been tossed into one corner, with large sheets of metal having bits cutout from them and a disturbing amount of metal dust that hadn’t been vacuumed up by the machines.

Ado stopped by one desk, its surface littered with dripped solder and burn marks, and lifted up one of the brushed nickel-style masks that Tartarus employed. It was a bit of a different model than the one Dyna had used during the Hatman incident. This one had triangular mirrored panels across the front and smooth metal over the sides and top, making it look more like a helmet than a mask.

Ado held it up and, after a glance to Dyna, started adjusting a metal strap that ran around its back.

“Will this protect from the eye-tulpa?”

“Unknown,” she said, holding it up for Dyna to take. “It has never been tested. I designed it in the last hour.”

“Is it better than your standard masks?”

Ado just smiled. “I look forward to analyzing the data its sensors will give me to determine the answer to your question.”

Lips pressed together as she slid it over her head, Dyna blinked as the internal screens came online, giving her a clear picture of the outside world along with a stream of text in one corner of her vision. It wasn’t as comfortable as the previous model that Dyna had worn. The metal strap was the problem. Dyna could only guess that Ado didn’t have whatever padded material they used for the other masks on hand here.

“Is any of it made from Psychofabbed material?” Dyna asked as she adjusted a knob in the back to tighten it to her face. “I have reason to believe that the eye-tulpa will simply delete this from existence if the answer is yes.”

“Unfortunately, the answer is yes. However, the Psychofabbed material is internal to the device, mostly electronics behind the shielding. I designed this specifically with the capabilities of the entity you described in mind. Unless this tulpa is capable of penetrating the shielding, you shouldn’t have to worry. If it is capable of that, you probably have other things to worry about.”

Like it freezing her mind again, this time with allies that might shoot her before a cat goddess could intervene.

“I should warn you that Psychofabbed material does not last forever. I fabbed the materials twenty minutes ago. Most fabbed material lasts for about an hour. Maybe two. There is no redundancy built in, so if even a single critical part fades, the device will no longer function and you will be vulnerable again.”

“Then I better get moving. Thank—”

“Wait. There is more.”

Ado moved over to what looked like a large chest freezer. Lifting up the lid, she reached in and hefted up a rectangular box with straps on the flat side. A backpack of some sort? Thick black cables coming from the side connected to a long array of bare machinery and circuitry. Four thick cylinders much like the cylinder on the disruptor gun were arrayed around a central lens. A long metal arm held up a second lens far in front of the main body. One handle jutted out of the side about halfway forward while a rear grip held a large red button where the thumb was supposed to go.

“In collaboration with Doctor Darq, following previous tulpa incursions of this nature, I designed this. The P-Beam.”

Dyna cleared her throat. “Maybe ask someone for a second opinion on the name?”

Ado’s lit goggles turned from Dyna down to the machine. “Why? It fires a beam of pure psionics. The name is optimal.”

“Yes… But… Never mind. We don’t have time.”

“Should it hit a tulpa, it will discorporate them within seconds.”

“I don’t know. It looks kind of bulky. Guns seem to work just fine.”

“Ah, but do guns work fine on advanced entities?” Ado asked rhetorically.

Dyna knew they didn’t. Or at least not on the ones she had encountered. Both the Hatman and the mountain man had shrugged off gunfire without flinching. “Fine.”

It wasn’t just bulky but heavy as well. The backpack felt like she was carting around an anvil and the gun part weighed as much as four or five PP-2000s.

“It was my intention to integrate P-Beams throughout the facility on automated turrets,” Ado said as she helped Dyna into the harness, “but the cost of manufacturing them with real parts was too high. I do hope Kit reconsiders after this situation.”

“Me too,” Dyna grumbled. “How many… shots? Whatever it does, how many do I have?”

“Maybe sixty seconds of total time with the beam activated. I would recommend against activating the beam continuously for that duration, however. Don’t want the device to overheat.”

“That’s a concern? Great. It weighs a ton, is entirely unwieldy, and now I have to worry about my back catching fire.”

“Exploding.”

“Excuse me?”

“Previous incidents with prototype P-Beams were a bit more spectacular in their method of failing than mere fire.”

Dyna glared. Ado couldn’t see it, but she hoped her anger came across in her body language. Just in case it didn’t, she said, “I hate you.”

Ado just smiled. “If you take the stairs up to the next floor, you’ll find Id’s workshop just past the glass room with biomechanical bodies hanging from wires and cords. Good luck!”

“Yeah right.” Dyna shook her head. “Tina said there might be more tulpa on this floor in whatever long route there is from here to the demonstration stage. On my way here, I cleared the maintenance corridors, if you want to leave.”

“No thank you. I’ll secure the laboratory and then I’ve got to get back to work.”

“At a time like this?”

“When else am I going to get access to tulpa bodies that aren’t immediately whisked elsewhere by Doctor Darq?”

Dyna didn’t know what to say to that. With one more shake of her head, she turned and left Ado to whatever she was planning on doing. Between Tartarus and the Carroll Institute, Dyna had to wonder if there were any normal scientists out there at all. The kind who clocked in at nine and left at five. Maybe they would enjoy spending time with their kids or watching football games. From Doctor Cross to Darq to Ado to the administrators—the latter of whom didn’t even have proper names—it seemed like every scientist she knew was utterly married to their jobs and only found happiness in their lives while investigating mysteries and performing experiments.

The way back to the stairs was, thankfully, an uneventful affair. The corridors she had cleared had not repopulated with tulpa during her brief meeting with the chief engineer. Reaching the stairs had Dyna sighing. She had increased the weight she was carrying by enough to make each step up feel like she was lifting half the building on her back.

Luckily, the gun part of the P-Beam clipped to the front of the backpack’s harness, helping to distribute the weight around her and letting her have a free hand for grasping onto the railing. She didn’t have a gun in her hands but absolutely needed the railing to keep from tottering over backwards. With the watch’s power to throw her back in time, she was hoping she wouldn’t need a gun or the P-Beam before she reached the next floor.

It was a small consolation that Ado’s workshop had been on the floor directly below Id and Walter. If she had been back down near Kit Maple’s office and was forced to climb twenty stories with all this weight, she might have seriously considered just leaving Walter and Id to fend for themselves.

“The first hallway is empty. At the juncture, you should be wary from both sides.”

“Wonderful,” Dyna grunted as she crested the steps to the landing, already trying to figure out how to deal with enemies that were presumably on either end of a corridor. Maybe she could get them to shoot each other. “Couldn’t Ado have made P-Grenades? Disgusting name aside, that would have made this easier.”

One hand on the door to floor eighteen and the other on her wristwatch, Dyna pushed into the most twisted laboratory she had seen thus far.

A white and black hallway with glowing red accents greeted her. A thick door, the kind that opened horizontally, stood in front of her, blocking the way with angry red lights. Windows on either side of the door provided glimpses of brains in jars, spinal cords covered in yellow wires, lightning arcing between large electrical diodes, and a bronze humanoid body floating in one large vertical tube. The latter’s body looked more like an exoskeleton than anything else. The biomechanical construct that Ado had mentioned? Except she said those would be hanging from wires and this was in a tulpa containment tube.

Figuring her destination was ahead of her still, Dyna looked over the door once again. There was no other way to go. No side doors or alternate paths. The large door had a small panel to its side, clearly asking for a handprint. Dyna stared at it for a long moment before realizing what this being Id’s private workshop actually meant.

Dyna pressed her hand to the panel.

The light blinked green and a loud hiss of a pressurized atmosphere breaking filled the air as the door slid aside.

Gunfire immediately pelted the walls around her.

 

 

Dyna felt like she needed more arms. It wasn’t the first time she felt like this either. Between the mirror, the watch, a gun, and her phone—though she lacked the latter item in this particular instance—she just didn’t have the dexterity to make use of all her equipment. She made a mental note to look into possible gadgets or artifacts that might give her telekinesis of some sort.

For now, she had swapped her watch from her left arm to her right arm, letting her hold her gun while leaving her offhand free to hold her mirror. If something startled her, she was fully prepared to toss the mirror in order to twist the bezel as far as she could as fast as she could.

Which was important for her current strategy.

“Hello!” Dyna shouted. “Is anyone around? Anyone at—”

The moment she heard a footstep behind her, Dyna’s eyes flicked to the mirror. She didn’t hold onto it long enough to actually look, but she was hoping her subconscious picked up on the image in the falling mirror. Without any hesitation, she grasped her watch and turned.

The world lurched around her as Dyna found herself backward a few steps, several seconds before she shouted. Looking behind her, Dyna started walking past a few small cubicles on her way to what she had seen in the mirror. If asked to tell someone what she had seen, she doubted she would have had anything articulate to say. Yet, walking along the cubicles with one of the PP-2000s at the ready, Dyna spotted a poster on the wall that gave her deja vu.

It was a workplace warning sign asking anyone who noticed even minor instances of deja vu to contact Doctor Darq immediately.

Dyna narrowed her eyes at the poster before slowly turning around. Opposite from the poster was a small office room. Blinds closed over the large window in the door didn’t let her see inside. The plaque against the wall identified the room as belonging to Kit Maple, Logistical Director.

She couldn’t speak with absolute certainty. Still, having just jumped back a few seconds in time, she was fairly certain there was someone inside.

Not wanting to run into guns aimed at the door, Dyna moved back around cover and placed her mirror on the desk of the cubicle she was in, making sure it was within her line of sight as she leaned around to watch the door. Then, she started shouting again.

“Hello? Anyone here?” she called out.

So far, she had successfully ambushed two different groups of tulpa plus the pair outside the elevator. Shouting then using her wristwatch gadget immediately after was the safest way she could think of to move through the facility. Between the criss-crossing corridors, offices, and cubicles providing cover, there were too many blind spots. Gunfire had drawn one of those groups, but the other had come to her words. The forewarning of knowing exactly where someone was going to come from and even what direction they were going to face made ambushes almost distressingly simple.

Dyna kept the fold-out buttstock of her submachine gun nestled firmly in the crook of her shoulder, she held the gun with only a single hand. She doubted she would be quite as accurate, but she wanted her other hand reaching underneath to grab her watch just in case someone came up from another direction.

“Hello?” Dyna called out again.

The door clicked at the same time.

Dyna removed her finger from the trigger, resting it against the frame of the gun.

A younger woman with curly brown hair streaked with blond highlights poked her head out. Dyna couldn’t decide if she looked frightened or simply too tired to deal with everything that was going on. Some cross of both, maybe. Although she held a small pistol in her hands as she peered out into the larger room, she didn’t look experienced. In fact, Dyna found herself thinking back to how she looked roughly a year ago.

Unfortunately, a year ago, Dyna would probably have started shooting the moment something startled her. The woman hadn’t noticed Dyna yet, but if she did, Dyna ran the risk of getting attacked.

Dyna didn’t know why this person was in Kit Maple’s office. The woman probably wasn’t a tulpa. She definitely wasn’t an attacker. The lanyard dangling from her neck had the hexagon symbol of Tartarus prominently displayed.

Twisting the watch on her wrist, Dyna went back for an alternative approach to the situation.

Instead of shouting down the hall, Dyna lightly knocked on the door. “Hello? Director Maple?” Best to pretend like she didn’t know that someone else was in the room.

“Who’s there?”

“My name is Dyna Graves. I’m here to help.” After a moment, in the hopes that the name would give her some legitimacy, she added, “Doctor Darq sent me.”

There was a pause. The voice on the other side of the door sounded closer, which Dyna would absolutely not have recommended from a tactical standpoint unless the glass in the door was bulletproof; Dyna stood well to the side, not wanting the woman inside to shoot at her. “Dyna… that sounds familiar.”

“Tartarus has had a lot of interaction with me,” Dyna said. Given that its leader was a version of herself, that was probably an understatement. “Do you know where Maple is? Or anyone in a position of author…”

Dyna trailed off as the lock on the door clicked and the door slowly started to open. The woman she had just seen poked her head out and quickly locked eyes with Dyna.

“I spoke to you on the phone one time.”

“Oh?” Dyna said. First, she thought that could have been anyone, but she really had only had a few interactions with Tartarus. In recent memory, she had only spoken with one person over the phone. “You are Maple’s sister… right?”

“Tina. Kit is my older brother, yes.”

“Do you know where he is?”

Tina shook her head. “When the alarms first started, I ran here. He has a safe room in the back that is supposed to block out… uh… you.” She looked a bit embarrassed to admit that. “I guess, anyway. He complains about you a lot. I thought he was going to hide away inside the entire time you were here, but…”

“He isn’t here.” Dyna took in a breath then let it out slowly. “Do you know where anyone is? Or do you know how to make an announcement throughout the entire facility?”

“Sorry,” Tina said, shaking her head.

“Is there a phone in there?”

“Oh, yes.”

That was a small relief. None of the cubicles had been equipped with much.

As Tina opened the door for Dyna to step inside, she took a quick look around the room. It was a fairly standard office. A large desk with a terminal and a stack of papers, a large whiteboard with all kinds of colored text written out. The calendar hanging next to the door featured cats in adorable poses. Every date had something scribbled into its box.

A picture on the desk showed off a younger Kit with a younger Tina riding on his shoulders.

The phone was a typical VoIP phone with a cord on the receiver for some reason. Shaking her head, Dyna picked it up and dialed a familiar number. The first ring cut off before it could really start.

“This is Beatrice.”

“Are there administrators watching your activities right now?” Dyna asked. If she were Alpha—assuming Alpha was behind this attack—Dyna wasn’t sure if she would be sitting at a terminal observing Beatrice or somewhere else monitoring the attack. The former option might leave too much evidence behind for the other administrators to notice.

“Information regarding the Carroll Institute Administrative Council has been restricted under Class Z clearance.”

Dyna somewhat expected that answer. “Are you aware of what is currently occurring?”

“Too many results. Please try again with a more specific query.”

“Do you know where I am?”

“Onyx is assigned to Tartarus for an information retrieval mission.”

“Do you know what is going on here?”

“Unknown. Tartarus systems remain impregnable to the Beatrice system.”

“Tough. I need you to hack into Tartarus now. Contact Theta and get your permissions elevated to their maximum, then get into Tartarus.”

“Attempts at penetrating Tartarus security systems have failed in the past.”

“You can do this, Beatrice. I know you can. I need to get an announcement into the facility. Lives are counting on it. Walter’s and Id’s at the very least. Maybe the entire rest of the facility too.”

There was an uncharacteristic hesitation on the other end of the line. “Walter is in danger?” Halfway through her question, a garbled whispering, repetitive echoing, and strange static-like noises started up. The noise that Dyna associated with an elevated operating state.

“That is correct. There is a tulpa here capable of shutting down thought just by looking at someone. You can’t think while it is looking at you, leaving you helpless. I have reason to believe it will shut down artifacts, gadgets, and other psionics as well.” Dyna paused. “There is also an Egyptian cat goddess running around. Maybe.”

Tina raised an eyebrow as Dyna said that, but Dyna paid her little mind, continuing to talk to Beatrice.

“I’m sitting at Logistical Director Kit Maple’s desk. If I can do anything to facilitate your access from here—”

“Understood,” Beatrice said. “Reconnecting you to Id.”

Dyna didn’t even have a moment to speak before she heard a light click in the background of Beatrice’s noise. The next voice she heard was her own, though somewhat distorted, likely from Id’s mask.

“—little busy at the moment.”

“Id?”

“Dyna? As much as it is a relief to hear you’re alright, I’ve got too many of these PP-2000 wielders breathing down my neck to talk.”

“Talk anyway,” Dyna said. She had expected to make an intercom announcement. This was a close second, she supposed. “This is important. A tulpa attacked myself and Darq in the lower part of Tartarus. Its gaze interrupts thought and psionics. It instantly killed other tulpa just by looking at them. Darq and I managed to send it to the top floor of the building, but it is likely loose. I don’t know where it will be heading or what it will be doing.”

“That explains Walter,” Id said over the sound of gunfire. “He just stopped moving a moment ago and wound up hit. I managed to drag him into a secure room, but we’re under attack and he is injured. No idea how bad it is.”

“This is going to sound like a strange question, maybe, but did you happen to see a lot of cats running around?”

Id grunted. A few louder reports from a gun forced Dyna to pull the phone away from her ear. “What did you do?”

“Do not harm the cats under any circumstances.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Egyptian cat goddess. It was angry with the eye-tulpa for harming its cats last I saw it.”

“Lovely. Any other complications to add to my day?”

“Not that I can think of. I’m currently in Kit Maple’s office on the third floor. His sister is here, but no sign of him. How do I reach you from here?”

“Walter and I are on floor nineteen. We were attempting to reach Ado on floor seventeen when the elevators seized up. The way to the stairs is blocked by a dozen of these things. Maybe more. I have a solution but executing it is proving more difficult than I would like.”

Dyna wondered how long ago that was. The elevator had been working for her and presumably the eye-tulpa. Then again, having come from the noosphere, they might have used more esoteric elevators than was standard in upper Tartarus.

“Beatrice,” Dyna said, “can you get the elevators working?”

“System penetration attempts still in progress. Connecting to Id was through a phone number left with the Carroll Institute, not through Tartarus internal systems.”

“If I can get a few moments,” Id said, “I’ll attempt to open our firewall—against my better judgment.”

“Having live tactical battlefield data has saved my life in the past.”

“Yes, but with what we discussed in the secure room earlier, you can understand my hesitance to allow them into my home.”

Dyna didn’t have a response to that. She had known about that complication when she first contacted Beatrice, hence her first questions. Just getting into contact with Id had been worth it, but she couldn’t say if more would outweigh the negatives. It was entirely possible that Alpha would direct Beatrice to locking down the entire facility except whatever doors the eye-tulpa would need to reach its targets.

Pushing that thought aside, Dyna looked back to the door. “I’m going to take the stairs for now, I suppose. I wish Darq had said to go to a higher floor,” she mumbled, more to herself than anyone else on the line.

“Is Darq safe?”

“Unless there are more tulpa in lower Tartarus, then yes. Ruby is there as well. She… didn’t have a good reaction to the eye-tulpa’s gaze.” Dyna took a breath. “I’m going to—Oh. I just remembered. It is vital that the Continuity Engine remains fully functional until we’ve dealt with the eye-tulpa.”

Id did not respond right away. There was a long, empty pause. Dyna wondered if she was working on something and was about to ask if it was anything useful when she started talking again. “All the more reason to reach Ado and not let interlopers have access to our network.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. She hadn’t thought about that. If Alpha was watching and gave Beatrice the order to shut it down, the eye-tulpa would walk all over them without anyone able to stop them simply because Dyna wouldn’t be able to stop herself from messing with reality.

“Beatrice. Abort attempts to infiltrate the Tartarus systems. I’m going to leave you here with Tina Maple. Try to organize yourselves as much as you can. If you can possibly get her access to the announcement system or direct her to a security room, that would be for the best.”

Alpha might still order Beatrice to try. All she could hope for now was that between her own power going against Alpha’s desires and Beatrice not wanting to comply with Alpha in the first place, it would hamper her ability to maliciously access the systems.

Of course, if Beatrice had contacted Theta as Dyna asked her to, Theta would likely continue monitoring the situation. Making an overtly hostile action like disabling the Continuity Engine would surely tip him and the other administrators off.

Shaking her head before she descended into a spiral of circular reasoning about the degree to which Beatrice should try to assist, Dyna said, “I’m on my way.”

“Good luck. Don’t die on me. I would rather not find out what happens.”

“Beatrice system standing down. Seeking alternate routes to assist.”

Dyna placed the receiver down on the desk without hanging it back up. She looked across the desk to find Tina just staring at her.

“I probably should have had that on speaker phone, huh?”

“I’m still hung up on Egyptian cat goddess. That’s a metaphor, right?”

“Nope.” Dyna motioned to the phone. “Beatrice will tell you how you can help. Sorry to put that on you, but it is probably safer than running through the facility like I’m about to do.”

“You don’t want someone else coming with you?”

Dyna looked the tired woman up and down. “No offense, but you look like you’re barely able to stand there. Didn’t you say you were sick or something?”

“Or something,” Tina said, glancing aside.

“Lock the door behind me. Don’t open it for anyone—especially voices you don’t recognize like mine.” As much as Dyna appreciated being let in, she definitely thought that was a poor decision. “Don’t leave to investigate noise either. Keep out of sight of the window. Maybe move to the safe room if there is a phone and terminal inside.”

The room didn’t look like it held a safe room, but maybe it was hidden behind the bookshelf or something.

“Good luck!” Dyna said, moving around Tina. “Listen to Beatrice, but…” she trailed off, not sure how to warn about Alpha without going into a deep dive on the politics of the situation and what Beatrice was. Shaking her head, she moved to the door and readied her gun. One hand on the grip and the other on her wristwatch, Dyna slowly nudged the door open.

Hall clear.

Keeping low, she moved along the cubicles. When she had first found herself on this floor, she had noticed the emergency stairs right next to the elevator. It was a bit of a walk to get back to them, but thankfully she didn’t have to get into any fights along the way. The few tulpa she had dispatched were still as dead as she had left them.

Before entering the stairwell, she performed a quick test on the elevator. The elevator car was still on her floor and the doors opened, but the buttons weren’t lit up. Pressing them didn’t get the car moving.

Pushing open the door to the stairwell, Dyna let out a withering sigh. The stairs zig-zagged back and forth between landings. There was a small gap between each set of stairs, allowing her to look up.

“That’s… a lot of stairs.”

 

 

Dyna was in a full-on panic and she knew it. Her periodic therapy sessions with Doctor West had gone over how to identify such situations and calm herself down from them. Knowing what she knew now about her power, knowing that the administrators had known all along, certain aspects of those therapy sessions came across in a different light. Doctor West must have gone over calming exercises specifically to help her stop before she could destabilize the world around her.

None of those lessons were helping now. This was a creature that she couldn’t fight. Not only could she not fight it, but any attempts others made would be compromised because she existed.

Maybe if they got it into the real world, she could use her ability to crush or explode it before its gaze could disintegrate her creations. If it was anything like the Hatman or the mountain man, she wasn’t sure that crushing it would be enough. They weren’t like regular tulpa.

“No, they are not,” Darq said, walking alongside Dyna as she explained her panicked state of mind. “So you understand my wariness toward the plan to allow it out of Tartarus.”

“It got in here. It can surely get out. The longer it stays here, the more damage it will cause,” Dyna said, ducking her head as a large mechanical arm picked up one of the damaged containment units. Gel dribbled out from a small melted swirl of glass, but the bird-like tupla contained within had yet to escape. “We can’t physically damage it here. Even if my power causes problems, we’ll still have a better chance out there. So, unless you’ve got a better idea..?”

Darq paused, frowning to himself as he dipped his hands into his laboratory coat pockets.

Dyna’s eyes roamed over his coat with a frown of her own. Darq had come back from dealing with Helios looking like he got into a fight with a barbecue grill and lost. Much of his formerly light blue coat was covered in soot. Small patches of burned cloth were missing entirely. The hem still smoldered, leaving a thin trail of smoke in his wake. Despite his attire—and his hair, which was much darker than when he had left because of the ash—he otherwise looked unharmed. No burn marks on his face or hands or even through the new gaps in his clothes.

“If I stay here, in Tartarus, will my power affect things back out in the real world?”

“That was something I planned to test with you before…” Darq waved a hand vaguely, pulling out that remote control he had taken from the armory earlier. “No sense detaining you if it doesn’t stop your ability, after all.”

Dyna stopped, narrowing her eyes. “You are planning on keeping me here?”

“It is a contingency. Had that cube I showed you earlier turned into volatile antimatter, you would have never seen the light of day again. You passed that little test, however. As Id so helpfully demonstrated with her little experiment on the flight over, you do have some limitations to your ability. The world alters to match your expectations, but your own knowledge limits that alteration.

“Or perhaps your power simply protects you from the consequences of its actions, meaning nothing harmful—as a result of your power—would manifest in your presence.” Darq sighed. “There was so much testing to get through,” he said with a sad shake of his head.

Crossing a catwalk to another section of the facility, he stopped and looked back. “Come along. We’ll go with your plan for now,” he said, lips tight. “Though I do wonder how well the Tartarus facility above will handle this entity’s presence. Some portion of it was made by you.”

“Great,” Dyna said, still wary. Though she had just asked him how to stop her power from working, he had yet to answer her properly. She wasn’t sure that he knew. So long as her power did work, she wasn’t sure that she could actually be captured. Even if she fell into a vat of psionic nullifying goop, she might be able to do the same thing as the eye-tulpa and destroy or otherwise get rid of it.

If it worked for that thing, it should work for her.

“So, we can’t keep it here,” Dyna said with a frown. “And if we take it up to the real world, it will destroy Tartarus there too. I…” Dyna trailed off as a strange thought occurred to her. “I almost don’t want to know the answer to this, but is the Carroll Institute real or something I managed to dream up?”

Remote control in hand, Darq pressed a few buttons before answering. “It is real. Most of it, anyway. No doubt your presence has caused some alterations. I have never actually visited, so I cannot compare its current state to its state before you became aware of its existence.

“The situation might not be as dire as you think, however.” Darq looked over to Dyna with a smile. “Did Id or Ado mention the Continuity Engine?”

“She did,” Dyna said with a nod of her head. The Carroll Institute had mentioned it as well. Ascertaining its purpose or nature was one of the objectives she had received before boarding the jet that had brought her to Tartarus. “She didn’t say what it was. Only that it was required for Tartarus to continue functioning.”

“Ado created it with heavy input from Id, who I presume used her knowledge of you to help design it. The Continuity Engine maintains local ontological inertia. In other words, it forces the nature of being to continue unaltered and with continuity in both past and future.”

“Do you have other words that are just a notch simpler?”

The dark lenses of Darq’s welding goggles turned, locking directly onto Dyna. “It was designed to stop your power from functioning. Changes you made and reality itself will continue without bowing to your whims. The noosphere elements you force into reality will not breach the barrier between thought and form under its area of influence.” He laughed, then shook his head. “It is the answer to your earlier question. Within Tartarus, your power is nullified.”

“Except for those things I created for your test.”

“Sorry, let me rephrase. Within upper Tartarus, your power is nullified. The whole reason I brought you down here was to escape the Continuity Engine’s influence.”

“Oh.” Dyna nodded. That did make sense. Kind of. A part of her wondered if she was being manipulated again. This time into thinking that her power didn’t work within Tartarus, thus making it not work within Tartarus.

Deciding she didn’t really want to know—it would be easier to not affect everything around her that way—she asked, “How do we get eye-tulpa up into the real world then?”

“It is still fighting Bastet. Luring both into a lift would be optimal. Tartarus will protest freeing Bastet, but my position here is not merely for show. I do have override codes,” he said, pushing a few more buttons on his remote control.

“I’m hearing a ‘but’. Let me guess, the elevators aren’t any more real than anything else down here?”

“Technically, there is no lift. Just a rip in space. But yes, you are correct.”

Dyna closed her eyes, thinking. From the moment the eye-tulpa first removed its sunglasses, it had damaged everything around it. But it hadn’t destroyed things immediately—or, it hadn’t destroyed objects immediately; Dyna’s clone had vanished almost instantly. Thick metal shields around the containment units had protected the glass within during the few short moments that its eyes had been on the devices. When Dyna had dropped it into a containment unit, it had taken quite a large amount of time to burn through the gel and the glass.

“How long does it take to transition between this Tartarus and the real world?”

“A few seconds,” Darq said. “Never actually measured it. However long it takes the lifts to move through the rips in space.”

“Then I have a plan. We just need an elevator filled with psionic gel.”

“And you’ll create that for us?”

“My power still works down here, doesn’t it?” Dyna said, tapping the side of her temple. “How do we do this? Do you have a lift ready or should I try to conjure up an elevator as well as a load of gel?”

“One moment,” Darq said, tapping a few more buttons on his remote. He paused, checked the time on his wristwatch, then pressed two more buttons.

A shudder wracked the facility. Unlike the earthquakes caused by the eye-tulpa’s destabilization, this shudder felt far more intentional. As if the entire facility were moving on a conveyor belt.

Ahead of them, a catwalk slid apart, breaking away while one section dropped downward and their side lifted up. Initial shudder aside, it didn’t feel like they were moving. Perhaps they were stationary while the rest of the facility was moving around them? Or maybe motion just didn’t translate well within the noosphere. A new slice of the facility crossed overhead before descending down into position at the catwalk. As soon as the relative motion stopped, the catwalks extended and Doctor Darq started up a light jog toward it.

Dyna started jogging just to keep up.

“The platform currently containing the eye-tulpa and Bastet has been repositioned below the entrance to Tartarus,” Darq shouted over his shoulder. Banking his jog around a long row of standing servers, each with dozens of cables plugged into them, Darq eventually reached a much larger control panel and array of monitors.

He grimaced at the sight of one. Dozens of cats were clawing the eye-tulpa. Several clawing at its face tried to gouge out its eyes, much like Dyna had attempted, but the moment their paws crossed his line of vision, the entire cat vanished into dark wisps of thought. The swarm of cats were swiftly being replaced even as they were eliminated.

There was no sign of Bastet on any of the monitors.

Darq’s grimace was probably aimed at the facility itself, however. It looked like the eye-tulpa had been in the same spot for quite a while. There were a few containment tanks around but the metal slats shielding them from view were pockmarked and full of holes. A thick layer of gelatin coated the floor around one of the more damaged tanks. The glass was still mostly intact, but it wouldn’t be that way for long.

Snatching a few levers that made him look like he was playing an arcade crane game, Darq directed one of the massive grasping claws over the heavily damaged tank. It latched onto the sides and began lifting up, but the eye-tulpa must have glanced in the crane’s direction while fighting off the cats. The cables simply vanished and the large container fell several feet.

Dyna winced. Her first thought was that the container would shatter on impact, but she caught herself and forced her mind into rejecting that conclusion. These tanks were made out of sturdier stuff than that. They could survive a fall from space without being damaged. A few feet was nothing.

Both Darq and Dyna let out a small sigh of relief as the container simply tipped on its side and rolled against a nearby wall.

“What’s stored in that section of the facility?”

“Esoterics. Generally not as powerful as our more deific guests, but often possess odd or unpleasant effects. Were the Hatman in my collection, that entity would be stored here.”

“Don’t want any escaping then,” Dyna said, looking down at the control panel. One of the icons looked like a wrench. Tapping it, two small robots emerged from a wall and approached the fallen tank. They set to work on the glass, filling it in and stopping the leak of gel.

That taken care of, her eyes shifted around the control panel until she spotted a familiar button. Slamming her finger into the trapdoor button, the eye-tulpa fell along with all the cats attacking him. They landed in a gel-filled vat.

Dyna hit two buttons in rapid succession. The first sealed the container just like the previous container she had trapped him in. The second button raised the tank out of the floor.

Without a word of collaboration between them, Darq already had a second crane positioned over the top of the new container. Lifting the container up, he swung the entire assembly through the facility and into the top of a waiting elevator platform. As soon as the crane was out of the way, he slammed a fist onto the control panel.

The elevator launched upward like a rocket without flames or exhaust. It continued up into the air high enough that Dyna could see it over the top of the control panel. The massive cavernous laboratory they were in had a ceiling. For a moment, Dyna thought the elevator would crash against it.

Just before striking, the elevator vanished in the air.

“One problem dealt with,” Darq said with a grin.

“Dealt with? Try mitigated.”

Darq shrugged. “Not my department. Now, I need to get Tartarus repaired before something else escapes. Then I need to figure out how it got in and try to patch that hole in our membrane. After—”

“I need to get back into the real world,” Dyna said, interrupting his task list. “And Ruby…”

“It might be best for her to remain here until she has recovered.”

“I might agree to that if I trusted you, but you just admitted that you wanted to detain me here indefinitely.”

“A contingency. Don’t be offended. I have a plan to detain everyone I meet and most everyone I don’t. Rest assured, Tartarus would not allow even you to escape if I thought you should remain among my collection.”

Dyna wasn’t so sure about that. She seemed to have quite the control over the facility. Unless that eye-tulpa had just so happened to be standing on already existing trap doors over empty containment vats. That seemed highly coincidental. It was far more likely that her power had brought those realities to this place.

She didn’t say so, however. Not wanting to give the good doctor any reason to try to detain her, she simply gave him a look. “If anything happens to Ruby…”

“You need not fear anything from me. I have no interest in beings that lack the potential for mass calamity.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, then nodded her head. “How do I get out? Is the elevator waiting or do you have to call it back down?”

“Calling it back down would not be a wise decision until we have confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that the eye-tulpa is not still within the elevator.” Darq half-turned, pointing. “That elevator will take you up.”

Following his hand, Dyna frowned. She hadn’t been paying that much attention with her concern over the eye-tulpa. Still, she couldn’t recall there having been an elevator just behind the control panel.

With one last glance at the doctor, who had turned back to the control panel without a word, Dyna walked over to the elevator.

“Floor three will see you somewhere you can find assistance,” Darq said without turning around. “I sent the tulpa to the very top of the facility in the interest of keeping it as far away from here as possible. Good luck!”

Dyna didn’t bother responding. She did press the button for the third floor anyway. Leaning back against the wall, she felt the very faintest of vibrations in her feet. It didn’t feel like she was moving up at all. Certainly not like she was rocketing up to the ceiling of the noosphere-adjacent facility.

Just as she forced the idea that she had been tricked out of her mind, the elevator transitioned into real space. It didn’t feel any different, but the transition was obvious nonetheless.

Even the deaf would hear the whooping alarm blaring in the center of her mind.

The elevator dinged, doors opening to an office area that Id had skipped over during their earlier tour.

Two PP-2000 tulpa turned.

Dyna’s hand snapped to her wrist and she wrenched the face of her watch backward. Something stopped it from turning fully. Before she realized what was happening, Dyna was back in the elevator just as it crossed the threshold between the noosphere and the real world. The alarm sounded in her head, but she forced it from her mind.

Dyna’s pulled her gun and flicked the laser pointer on. The moment the elevator dinged, she opened fire before the tulpa could face her. Although Id had taken their electronics, she hadn’t asked for any weapons. Thankfully.

Carefully stepping out of the elevator, mirror in hand, Dyna approached the tulpa and nudged them with her foot. Neither moved. Neither shifted into a shadowy state to ignore her bullets.

This was the real world.

It was under attack as well.

Ducking down, Dyna freed the PP-2000s from their former wielders, slinging them over her shoulders. Not sure what she was getting into, she wanted to be prepared. Especially since she wouldn’t be able to use her primary psionic power if Darq’s comments about the Continuity Engine had been true.

Well, it wasn’t like she had used it in past confrontations. At least not consciously.

As long as there weren’t any advanced tulpa around aside from the eye-tulpa, she would be fine until she met up with someone else.

Dyna winced, but grinned as she realized she didn’t even have to worry about altering reality to bring an advanced tulpa around.

Looking around the office, she pressed her lips together. Id did have other employees, right? Kit Maple and Gloria Ado, at the very least. Were they on this floor or had Darq sent her here for some other reason?

Shaking her head, Dyna pressed forward.

Nothing to do but search.