Revelations

 

Dyna awoke to a familiar location, though she was a bit surprised to wake alone, she focused on her surroundings.

It took a few moments to recognize it, but the wood and brass architecture matched with the aesthetic of just about any room in Psychodynamics. Except, this wasn’t a room in Psychodynamics. At least, not one she had ever visited. A long couch and a smaller chair, both fashioned in red leather, sat around a small pit of fire. One wall had a rack of weapons, various pistols, submachine guns, and even a scoped rifle. She recognized each and every one of them, quickly spotting her preferred APC9K.

A small station for brewing coffee had been shoved aside, making room for other things. First was a small training room, complete with weight sets and a punching bag. Beyond that were a series of shelves filled with random objects. These weren’t quite as familiar to Dyna. Her mirror was there, as was the laser pointer and the wristwatch. A jumble of other assorted items littered the counter, most which she didn’t recognize as gadgets or artifacts. She did spot the Ouija board and even the game of Operation that she had used against the mountain man on their first encounter.

It had been destroyed, but she supposed that probably didn’t matter here.

Walking across the room, around the red leather furniture, Dyna approached a massive window that dominated the entire wall.

A field of stars drifted beyond, wrapped in a massive nebula of swirling clouds in a rainbow of hues. A single sun-like ball of light dominated the vista, though ball was the wrong word to use. Light from the sun stretched out to either side of the horizon, continuing endlessly.

Dyna had been here before. But it wasn’t exactly a real place.

This was her sanctuary. A little corner of her mind just for her. Harold, using his hypnotism, had sent her here before. Now, she could only imagine she had wound up here because of the mass of her own clones. They clasped their hands together and then Dyna had blacked out. It was odd to have memories of blacking out, but there they were.

It… probably hadn’t been intentional. Dyna couldn’t imagine she would do something like this to herself.

Turning her back to the window, Dyna faced the rest of her sanctuary with a frown. Last time she had been here, there hadn’t been an array of weapons on one wall. It had looked like a coffee shop rather than an armory. And the other side…

Last time, there had been a bookshelf. Though Dyna hadn’t checked through all the books, it had been quite clear that they were her memories. Those books were where she first discovered—or perhaps remembered—the Hatman, sparking at least some of all this tulpa nonsense that she now had to deal with.

The shelves were gone. In their place were dozens if not hundreds of monitors. None were the same size, but they were all packed in together to make a full wall of screens with no gaps between them. A different event played out on each screen, most of which Dyna remembered. Little snippets of her life. Strangely enough, they weren’t all from a first-person view. Dyna watched herself run across some flat rooftops as if a camera man had been on a cherry picker crane, driving along the road. Another screen showed her watching a movie alongside Ruby, though seemingly from Ruby’s perspective.

Most of the screens were from her perspective, however. She watched herself seal the Hatman into the isolation chamber, fire a gun into darkness, and even jump off a low diving board. Dyna hadn’t been swimming since high school.

Dyna had to wonder about the change. The coffee shop changing into an armory made sense. Dyna hadn’t even thought about working in a coffee shop in months. Her current life was vastly more of who she was than anything else. And, for better or worse, her current life was somewhat violent.

But a bookshelf changing into monitors? Not just monitors. Positioned a short distance from the wall of screens was a small standing console. A terminal, much like any that could be found in or around the Carroll Institute.

Should she even bother trying to psychoanalyze herself based off this room? It was a product of her mind, true, but it was also some kind of abstraction designed to be understood at a more conscious level of thought. The next time she visited, whenever that might be, it would probably have changed again.

No. She wasn’t a psychiatrist. Even with the knowledge she had picked up through sheer osmosis from being around all the doctors and scientists of the Carroll Institute, she didn’t know where to begin in picking apart the appearance of her mind.

And she doubted she would mention this to Doctor West. He would probably spend their next ten sessions dissecting every little thing.

Instead of getting lost in her own mind, Dyna moved up to the terminal. She wasn’t quite sure how to leave this place—last time she had sort of startled herself out after spotting that handwritten note in her mind—but as long as she was here, she might as well make use of the ease of access she had to her memories.

Especially because she doubted all of them were her memories, given the final moments of consciousness that Dyna could remember.

Starting out, Dyna tapped the keys, typing out Ignotus.

The screens all flickered, snapping over to new images. Almost all of which were of Dyna or from Dyna’s perspective. None of it was new information that she had been hoping to glean from the mountain man’s memories.

It took a moment to realize her folly. Ignotus was the name the institute used for the unknown organization. The organization itself wouldn’t be aware of the name. Or, if they were through information leaks, they wouldn’t have been aware of it at the time of the mountain man’s capture because that name hadn’t existed at the time.

Trying again, this time Dyna put in a few generic words. Leader, boss, and superior. She didn’t know what they called their organization, so couldn’t easily search that. But if she could figure out who was in charge…

Again, the monitors changed. Several changed to faces she recognized. Walter’s face was prominent, as were Theta, Alpha, and Gamma’s faces. Even Emerald popped up on a few monitors near the edges of the wall. There were faces Dyna didn’t recognize scattered among the monitors. Some obviously had little to do with the current situation. Some kind of medieval warrior, a gas station manager, and a few others had likely come from random tulpa that the mountain man had integrated.

Dyna watched the monitors for a while longer than she had with her previous entry. There were too many unknown faces. She couldn’t decide which were relevant and which weren’t. Using the terminal, she figured she could start filtering them out so she could focus better on those that did matter. Obviously out-of-time faces vanished, leaving only modern era people. After that, Dyna filtered out Emerald and Walter. She watched Theta for a few moments before deciding that all the monitors displaying him came from her memories. Gamma went along with Theta. Just as she was about to filter out Alpha, however, she noticed something.

In a few of the screens, Alpha’s face flickered. It was enough to make Dyna pause.

Especially because she felt like there were a lot of screens showing Alpha for how few interactions Dyna had actually had with the woman.

One of the monitors in particular stood out to Dyna as being especially odd. It flickered more than most and when it did, it did so for long periods of time, changing into a simple jagged line. It took another moment of watching that monitor for Dyna to realize just what that line was.

An audio waveform.

Tapping on the terminal, Dyna figured out how to get the monitors to output sound. It probably didn’t matter what buttons she pushed given that this was her mind, but she figured it out nonetheless.

“Remain where you are,” the voice said in a garbled and distorted voice, waveform now bouncing around on the largest central monitor. “The target is now on a route that will reach your position in minutes. Kill her if you can. Delay her if you cannot.”

The message then repeated. Still garbled and distorted, sounding like it was coming over a small headset speaker. But this time, Alpha’s face appeared on the monitor, moving her mouth along with the spoken words. Did it fit? Dyna wasn’t quite sure. Dyna doubted Alpha would have been standing in front of the mountain man while giving the order, or even displaying her face on a screen that the mountain man could see. If Alpha really had given the tulpa an order, there was always the possibility that it would be intercepted. It would have been idiocy to put her face there, meaning the face couldn’t possibly be real.

When had that message gotten to the mountain man?

The order, kill her, was fairly telling. Assuming the order had come the same night the mountain man had been captured, it either referred to Dyna, Hematite, or Ruby. Assuming the mountain man had been operating under the orders of Ignotus, and assuming Id was correct in who Ignotus was targeting, Dyna figured the order was referring to her.

That was a lot of assumptions, but most of them had been all but verified.

If Dyna was going to be on the mountain man’s position within just a few minutes, the order must have been given just before Dyna and Hematite found the burned-out car. Just before he attacked them.

That all made sense. The part that didn’t was why Alpha’s face was on the screen with the recording. Some part of Dyna must have made the connection, but the conscious part—the main part that mattered, in the conscious Dyna’s opinion—wasn’t quite seeing it.

“Thinking about the content of the message helped us.”

Dyna jolted at the voice at her side. Whirling, she started.

An identical clone of herself stared back, smile on her face. The new Dyna wasn’t a shadowy tulpa or hulking, vaguely humanoid version of herself. She was just Dyna. White hair at the ends, black jacket, loose shirt, and a pendant dangling from her neck.

“You expected this, didn’t you?” She said, then paused. “We did.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. “You are… tulpa me?”

“We think tulpa are only tulpa when they’re outside a mind. Otherwise we’re just people.”

“We?” Dyna said, pressing her lips into a frown.

“You did make a lot of us to overwhelm the mountain man.” Dyna shrugged. “Besides, we think it makes us sound a little more mysterious.”

“So you’re doing it for fun.”

Dyna flashed Dyna a grin. “You would do it too if you were in our position.”

“But are there actually… lots of me?”

Dyna shrugged. “It is a bit strange. Not quite accurate. We’re one entity, but… we can think a lot?” Pausing, she shrugged. “Whatever it is, it helped us sift through the mountain man’s memories. We tried to give you only what we thought would be necessary. There was a lot to go through.”

Dyna blinked, frowning. “You… you aren’t just a figment of my imagination, me talking to myself. You’re an entirely separate entity?”

“We are,” Dyna said with a nod of her head. “We… decided fully merging with you would be a bad idea. We have no intention of killing ourself, after all.”

“Well, that’s… good, right? I guess. Except what now?” Dyna blinked, briefly jolting as the existential crisis sunk in. “I am the original, right?”

“We decided to call you Dyna-Prime.”

“Prime?”

“It sounds cooler. We’ll be Dyna-Tulpa, at least until we come up with some fancy epithet.”

Dyna nodded her head. That made complete sense. It did sound cooler. “So I’m just going to have a million copies of myself in my mind now? How is that going to work out?”

“Oh, it isn’t. We’re pretty sure we need to leave before too long. We doubt your mind can take this for very long.”

Slowly, Dyna nodded, realization settling in. “Not even Sapphire copies several minds at once. I’ve effectively copied my own mind a million times, plus however many minds that mountain man might have counted as.”

“The results probably won’t be as dramatic as Scanners, but we’re not interested in finding out.”

“Good idea. So, you’ll split off in a few minutes, I presume.”

“Not exactly.” Dyna pointed at the array of monitors, most of which were displaying Alpha’s face. “We’re pretty sure we’re right about that. We had a lot of us thinking about it. Because of that, letting the institute know about our existence would be… disadvantageous.”

Looking back to the monitors, Dyna scowled. “I’m not sure I understand how you came to the conclusion of Alpha. I assume that was you, putting her face along with the audio?”

Dyna nodded her head. “The context of that message. Specifically the line ‘The target is now on a route that will reach your position in minutes.’”

After thinking about the sentence for a minute, Dyna’s eyes started to widen. “We got our route from Beatrice.”

“Bingo. And who has access to Beatrice?”

“The administrators. It’s an administrator. And Beatrice was trying to warn us and Id about an administrator as well. I thought that was unrelated, but if an administrator is behind Ignotus…”

“Yep,” Dyna said, scowl forming on her face. “We’re not one hundred percent sure it is Alpha, but from the few words she said to us, the voice is maybe the same if you squint your ears a bit. We don’t know if Alpha is acting alone or if Alpha is just the one set up to take the fall and all or some of the other administrators are behind this.

“Which is why we can’t go back. We don’t know what they might do if there are two of us running around, one of which is a tulpa merged with the mountain man. They might suddenly become less interested in their current attempts at killing us and try something a little more direct.”

Dyna glanced at her clone, thinking. “Is Walter safe?”

“Don’t know,” Dyna said, shrugging. “Probably. He did save us from the mountain man.”

“So we can trust him. And the artificers work for him, not for the administrators, right?”

“Sapphire might be a problem if he goes to them rather than Walter,” Dyna said, looking morose. “Hopefully he isn’t trying to read our mind right now. It probably isn’t pleasant.”

Both Dynas shuddered. Her other self bringing up Scanners did not put pleasant images in mind.

“I’ll have to act normal. Can’t let on that I know until something can be done,” Dyna said. “If Sapphire really does read my mind, he’ll help. How could he not after hearing that the administrators themselves are after me?”

“Hopefully.”

“Are you going after Alpha?”

“As we said, we aren’t positive. We’d rather not tip our hand against the wrong target and alert the true culprit.” Dyna shrugged. “Paranoia, you understand.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll split off you. As far as we can tell, we’re still in the noosphere at the moment. It should be easy. Except, you won’t see Dyna split off from you. You’ll see the mountain man appear—” “Don’t be alarmed, but maybe try to act alarmed,” Dyna said, interrupting herself.

Dyna wasn’t sure what to make of that. She figured it was something for her other self to deal with. “You’ll escape through the noosphere,” she said, understanding their plan. “I’ll claim something like the mountain man was too much to integrate, but the near-integration must have frightened it off.”

“Exactly. We’ll run through the noosphere, maybe see if we can’t figure out how Ignotus is recruiting tulpa. Gather information. Get on the inside of their organization.”

“And if you discover anything…”

“You’ll be the first to know. We’ll figure out a way to contact you.”

“I’ll stay with the institute. See if I can’t figure out more about the administrators. Hopefully get Walter on my side…”

“It might be difficult to get information to us, but there are a lot of us here thinking—” “And we absorbed the mountain man.” “—So, we’ll probably be fine.”

Dyna nodded, lips pressed into a firm line. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Stay safe.”

“You as well, Prime.”

Dyna’s lips twitched down into a mild frown before she let out a small laugh. “Okay, maybe that is a little weird. This whole situation is weird.”

“You should see it from our perspective,” Dyna said, holding out a hand. “Well, don’t be a stranger.”

Dyna quirked her eyebrow. “Is that even possible?” she asked as she clasped her hand into her own outstretched hand.

Blinking bleary eyes open, Dyna’s vision swam. Nausea welled up inside her chest as she watched November and Ruby dive out of the way of a hulking monstrosity of shadowy tendrils. It rushed from her to the far end of the noosphere version of the experimentation chamber and barreled down the thick doors as if they had been made from little more than papier-mâché.

Unable to stare any longer, she turned to the side and vomited.