Experimentation

 

 

Dyna sat in her dormitory room. It felt like months since she had been able to just sit around and relax. In reality, it had only been about one month. A month filled with debriefings over every aspect of what had happened in Wyoming, testing to ensure that there were no lingering effects from being in close contact with entities, regular training sessions, and more besides. Every day was long, hectic, and exhausting. Even if those days consisted of sitting around in a meeting room listening to other people give their input on events.

And yet, Dyna couldn’t really complain. Not after she saw the deposit in her bank account. The Carroll Institute paid all its psychic initiates. All of them, including Dyna, were considered Human Test Subjects for experimental medical procedures and were given salary accordingly. After being confirmed as an artificer, that salary got bumped up a bit. But after Wyoming… Dyna had asked Walter if there wasn’t some mistake. Someone had clearly had a brief spasm and their twitching thumb hit they keyboard too many times and added an extra two zeros to her deposit.

Hazard pay, he said.

Although Dyna wasn’t sure what she wanted to spend her newfound wealth on—maybe a car? She should probably send some back home to help her mother out too—she still got a bit of a dopamine spike every time she glanced at her account. It was enough to make her seriously consider asking for a similar assignment. It had been a stressful few days at the time, but a few more stressful weeks and she could probably retire in her early twenties if she was careful.

Not that she really wanted to do that. Not now. But having a fall-back plan would be nice.

Now, she sat at her desk in her dorm room, focused on what she did want to do.

Dyna had six tablets set up around her. Three had long passages of dry text displayed on their screens. The other three had gone into sleep mode. Technically, she didn’t need so many, but it was just easier to pull over a whole separate tablet and be able to open up relevant tabs there while keeping her other tablets open to different documents.

Her current subject of research was that of artifice. Essentially everything Doctor Cross knew about artifacts, their use, their creation, and anything else he thought to write into his many, many lengthy dossiers on the subject. A few of the tablets had ancillary materials written by other scientists, but Dyna had discovered that most of that was just confirming what Doctor Cross had already written. He was the foremost expert on the subject.

Unfortunately, the creation of artifacts was the most mysterious part of them. Everything else could essentially be analyzed in the laboratory after acquiring an artifact. The creation was almost entirely speculation. Educated speculation, but speculation nonetheless.

Artifacts, Dyna read from the Carroll Institute Internal Database’s overview on the subject of their origins, authored by Doctor Cross, are thought to require a number of elements present prior to their creation. An item may become an artifact when it embodies simple or singular concepts. They should generally not be able to be broken down into other conceptual items. If you point to an object and ninety percent of people will give the same or similar answer as to what you are pointing at, it could be a candidate. A bowl, for example, is always a bowl no matter its orientation or what part you point at. A car, on the other hand, might receive the answer of a car, or it might receive the answer of ‘window’, ‘door’, ‘wheel’, ‘engine’, ‘seat’, and so on and so forth.

Concepts are thought to be decided by undercurrents of psionic energy generated by the masses. The more meaning a local group of psionic energy sources (otherwise known as ‘people’) can attribute to an object, the more likely it is to undergo [REDACTED]. Following [REDACTED], manifesting as an artifact in full. This infusion of psionic energy can be gradual or rapid, but the actual moment of artifact instantiation occurs in a single moment. Instantiation releases a known psionic waveform emission, typically of a power great enough to detect through satellites equipped with the proper detection tools (see CI-ENG-98011).

The actual thesis on artifact origins went into a bit more detail, but unfortunately, not much. Most of what Dyna had been able to find was specific to finding and detecting artifacts, not their actual creation.

It was a bit frustrating, but Dyna wasn’t sure how much it actually applied to her.

Based on her experiences in Wyoming and with the mirror, she didn’t need a group of people unconsciously aware of an object to turn it into an artifact as the overview seemed to describe. She just needed herself. It was probably the same process beyond that. She was still infusing an object with enough psionic energy to instantiate an artifact. It was just all her mind doing so.

Dyna pulled out one of the drawers of her desk. The interior was completely lined with foil. It wasn’t a perfect seal and the foil wasn’t quite the properly treated foil that Ruby had made in Wyoming, but she thought she got the formula mostly correct from what she remembered. It helped that she didn’t actually have to sneak about. She could probably have just asked for proper protective equipment, but there was value in working on her own.

She was trying to learn. Not just about artifacts, but about psychics and entities and even mundane engineering. Seeing Ado’s creations and how easily the woman just knew what data she needed to get to modify those disruptor guns into actual weapons against the Hatman was something that Dyna wanted to do as well. That was to say nothing about actually creating a disruptor in the first place.

But that felt a long way off. Dyna was focusing on what she could do now.

And now, she pulled out a pair of glasses. They were transparent, completely clear from earpiece to earpiece, and made out of one single pane of… fiberglass? Dyna wasn’t exactly sure. It wasn’t glass-glass, but it wasn’t plastic either. Whatever it was, the lenses had faint patterns laser-etched into the sides, creating a circuit-board-like pattern. A small battery-powered LED light just behind one of the ears could be switched on to give the entire glasses a faint blue glow. The edges and laser-etched parts glowed far brighter.

It looked cool. Not really something anyone would wear in their day-to-day life. And it didn’t actually do anything. While it looked like some holographic headset display from a science-fiction movie, it was just a prop she had found online. A decorative bit of gear for costume work. Cosplay, Halloween, or whatever else someone might want decorative goggles for.

For over a week now, Dyna had been pulling the goggles out every single day and just… focusing on it. Trying to think at the goggles felt weird. A bit awkward, actually. But she thought it was working.

Dyna wanted a pair of goggles that would let her see what Ruby and Matt could see. That other side. It had worked before, temporarily, using Ado’s goggles. She was hoping to make the effect a little more permanent with these goggles. Ado’s goggles had been designed to do something—Dyna still wasn’t sure what, but with Ado’s milky eyes and the fact that she wore them in the first place, it only made sense—these cosplay goggles weren’t designed for anything other than looks. Theoretically, it shouldn’t matter. After all, the mirror had been just a mirror with some extra parts glued on and a short story wrapped around it all.

That had been enough for Dyna.

Taking a short breath, Dyna closed her eyes, put on the goggles, and opened them again.

Nothing changed. Just like the day before and the day before that. Dyna’s room looked normal except for, after flicking the switch behind one ear, the faint blue tint. In itself, that wouldn’t be that bad. Ado’s goggles had caused a warping effect that made Dyna nauseous just thinking about it. If that disappeared from this version of the goggles, Dyna wouldn’t mind at all.

The problem was that there were no other anomalous effects. Standing up and walking over to the window of her room, Dyna peered outside, looking for something out of the ordinary. She lifted the glasses up and looked again. A door being open with the goggles where it was closed without, someone standing around where they shouldn’t be, the entities of the other world, if that was possible. Dyna looked for anything.

And found nothing.

Returning to her desk, Dyna pulled out a small device. It looked like an infrared thermometer. The kind someone might use to tell their temperature when sick. But instead of measuring thermal degrees, this measured ambient randi levels. The unit of measurement for psionic energy. Pointing it at a random spot in the room got her a simple twenty-one. Technically, she should have measured the room before trying anything, but she knew from past days that twenty-one was about average.

Taking the glasses off and setting them on the desk, Dyna pointed the randi level detector at them and depressed the scan button. After a short moment, the device beeped. Thirty-two. Elevated randi levels, so there was definitely something there. Something happening.

Just to double-check, Dyna pulled out her mirror and performed a quick scan. Seven-hundred sixty-six. Quite a big jump from the glasses. Knowing, however, that the mirror had been nearly undetectable between when she first received it and when Doctor Cross officially classified it as an artifact, she was undaunted.

Having seen the charts of her mirror, a thirty-two was actually quite high. Her mirror had been doing strange things while having a randi level of only seven.

Unfortunately, the glasses still didn’t seem to do anything.

Maybe it was time to talk to Doctor Cross again. She didn’t want to. Technically, this wasn’t something she was supposed to be doing. Cross might not get her into trouble since he also wanted to investigate artifacts and their creation, but he might not have much of a choice. Within her room, Dyna had taken reasonable precautions toward keeping this all a secret. From the protective foil lining to making sure to disconnect all her tablets from the network after downloading all the files she wanted, Dyna was fairly certain that nobody knew what she was doing.

Bringing Doctor Cross into the secret… Well, as the saying went, two could keep a secret only when one of them was dead.

Dyna picked up one of the tablets again and started skimming through the contents. She doubted she would find anything that would help at the moment. The files she really wanted to see, documentation on her mirror and how it had become an artifact, were classified beyond her ability to access.

She had considered calling up Ruby again to try to steal the files like they had with those of her mental history, but that would probably leave a big trail behind. Emerald had warned her against trying something like that again, that she wouldn’t always be around to tidy up loose ends.

A knock at Dyna’s door interrupted her research. She quickly tossed the glasses into the foil-lined drawer of her desk as she called out, “Come in.”

Melanie opened the door, poking just her head inside. “Working again?”

“Learning,” Dyna said, swiping a file closed on the tablet. The rest had all gone into sleep mode and would require a password to open. “Something up?”

Mel’s smile darkened. “That… woman is here again. Asking for you.”

Dyna couldn’t suppress her grimace.

That woman was the entity.

She didn’t have a name. She didn’t want a name. Names, as she said, were human things. Although interested and excited to be in the human world, she didn’t want to be a human. She didn’t even want pronouns. Not just feminine pronouns, but anything. Dyna had tried using alternatives, but that only made her more upset.

It made referring to her somewhat difficult.

Unfortunately for her, human or not, she lived in a human world. Humans, for better or worse, needed ways to refer to others.

The Carroll Institute database file for her was reference ID 63211. Because of that, a few of the scientists had taken to referring to her as November. Not to her face, figuring she would wind up upset, but privately.

Someone must have slipped, however. Even though it was the very start of April, she had taken to scowling anytime someone mentioned any month.

Dyna sighed, stood, and headed out of her room. Mel stayed behind, waiting in the hallway where our bedrooms were. She didn’t particularly like November. None of the regular initiates did. Dyna wasn’t quite sure why she was allowed out without supervision—possibly because the Carroll Institute wasn’t the completely heartless black-ops organization that Ado thought it was—but she essentially had free access to any of the campus.

In an effort to learn, she had been attending every lecture, class, and research opportunity the institute provided to regular initiates.

Dyna frowned at her, standing in the open doorway. Static coursed over her body. Her eyes looked like windows into an old television tuned to an invalid station. Her hair, dark and longer than it had been a month ago, didn’t quite sit still despite the otherwise motionless pose she had.

Mel could create an illusion like that. Some people probably thought she—or someone with similar abilities—had done so. But people delved into their training to try to detect mental manipulations and came back finding nothing. As day after day went by, people started to realize that she was just naturally like that.

Whispers around the campus seemed conflicted on whether or not they liked her presence. In a campus filled with people of fantastic abilities and power, the odd one out still wound up ostracized.

“Hello, November.”

The woman narrowed her eyes. A faint flash of pure white overtook the black-and-white static snow for just a moment before returning to normal. “I don’t have a name.”

Dyna shrugged. “When visiting a foreign land, you should follow the local customs. We even have a phrase for that. When in Rome… Frankly, it’s annoying thinking of you as that woman or the entity or whatever else.”

“I would rather people not think of me at all. It’s dangerous.”

“Should have thought about that before wandering around where everyone can see you. With your distinct appearance, I would be surprised if everyone here didn’t devote several hours of the day discussing, wondering, and generally thinking about you.”

“Yes, but if someone were reading their thoughts, I could be anyone. Some random person.”

“There are very few random people with static coursing over their bodies.”

“Ascribing a name to me grounds me,” she said, ignoring Dyna’s comment. “It cements me further into the world.”

“And that’s… bad?”

“Half of me is still on the other side. I’ve had to subsume several others since arriving here. I succeeded. Easily,” she said, looking mighty proud of herself. “But were I to fail, I would likely simply disappear from here. If my existence is too concrete, they might make it over here in my place.”

“That’s… You’re in constant danger of just dying or something? Have you told the doctors?”

November shrugged. “It’s how it is. I’m not concerned for myself. I’ll end up someone else eventually.”

“But you’re concerned for us?”

“The Hatman could do what he did because he got over to this side. Something else taking my place is more likely to be like him than like me.”

“Ruby?”

November waved a lazy hand. “Barely a sliver over there. She might not even notice being subsumed, aside from losing out on being able to sense what is going on over there. Although, knowing what I do of her, I wouldn’t be surprised to find her fight back with a vengeance if a stray thought tried to integrate her. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her doing the subsuming. In fact, depending on the exact nature of her ability, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she couldn’t be integrated. Not that I have tried or anything. And I don’t think it will be a problem for too much longer. Her weight on this side is dragging the other side back.”

“She’s getting better?” Dyna sighed, glad she didn’t have to worry about Ruby that much. Though that still left November. “I hate to break it to you, but everyone has a way of referring to you. November among the scientists. The initiates, I think, call you Snow, though that is hardly a universal name. Just the most popular one passing through the various cliques at the moment. You can’t stop it, no matter how much you go around asking. Shouldn’t you try throwing your weight fully here? That’s how it is working for Ruby, right? Based on what you just said…”

“I’m not a human. I was never one. I don’t really want to be one. I can’t say for sure what I was originally. Maybe a stray thought from some psionically powerful woman. Maybe a collective thought brought into being through a corporate boardroom.” She shrugged again. “Trying to be more human isn’t my goal here.”

“And what is your goal here?”

November simply smiled. “Those glasses you’re working on, can I see them?”

Dyna narrowed her eyes. “How do you know about that?”

“You, Dyna Graves, have a great number of stray thoughts,” she said, smiling enough to show off her teeth. Sparks of static-like snow danced about between them. “May I come in?”