B.E.A.T.R.I.C.E.

 

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.”