Stolen Information

 

Emerald’s car was the sort of thing that Dyna expected from an overly prepared doomsday prepper. She had seen the armory of weapons in the back before, which ranged from a dozen pistols of varying makes to high precision sniper rifles, but was still surprised with the sheer amount of stuff that she had to dig through to get to Emerald’s stash of ballistic vests. Long-lasting food, mostly in the form of Meals Ready-to-Eat, literal kegs of water, wilderness survival gear, first-aid and other emergency medical supplies, and, of course, more weapons.

Having a ballistic vest securely in place did made her feel a little more comfortable. Not in a physical sense, but in a mental sense. The largest injury Dyna had physically suffered was a small scrape from when she stumbled back against the rough brick wall of the Men’s Wearhouse building. The more time that passed, the more the gaping hole in her chest felt distant. Like a nightmare she had woken up from and was now starting to forget.

While she welcomed the phantom pain fading away, Dyna did not forget that people were after her. No matter what Doctor West said, it was obviously not paranoia. In fact, she would say that she hadn’t been attentive enough. She should walk around with her mirror in hand constantly, never letting it out of her sight.

Dyna, noticing the aside glance she was getting from Emerald as the latter drove the car, forced a smile. “I’m fine.”

“Walter wants us back with him.”

“I’m fine,” Dyna said again. “We’re closer to Harold than he is. If Ignotus was tipped off because of my mistake in opening my big mouth, or simply because they were watching the store for whatever reason, then he’ll have heard as well. We need to hurry before he can disappear again.”

“I agree. That is why I haven’t turned the car around. I just want to ensure that you are alright.”

Dyna didn’t bother saying that she was fine a third time. Instead, she kept her eyes moving from her mirror to the windows of the vehicle. “Should I drive?”

“After your ordeal?”

“There was no ordeal. It never happened.” In her adrenaline-fueled agitation, Dyna had said everything that she could remember happening in that aborted timeline. Including how grievous she believed her injuries to have been and how Emerald had probably died. Now, however, she was regretting that.

Dyna didn’t want to be coddled. She wanted to find out who was trying to kill her and end the threat. At the moment, her greatest lead was Harold.

The man knew something. Letting him slip through their fingers…

“I say I should drive,” Dyna said, “so that you can use your pocket watch and reach Harold in an instant.”

Emerald pulled the car over without hesitation. “I thought about it, but figured I shouldn’t leave you on your own. If you’re feeling well enough…” Leaving the keys in the ignition, Emerald opened the driver’s side door.

Hand in her pocket, presumably holding her pocket watch, she disappeared before even stepping outside.

Dyna felt a sudden queasy sensation well within her stomach. She was sitting still. A still target was easier to hit than one in motion. Her mirror, however, showed no observers. Not willing to give in to a panic attack over literally nothing, Dyna clenched her teeth and clambered over to the driver seat. She set the case containing her submachine gun on the passenger seat, loaded and ready to fire the moment she needed it.

Slamming the driver side door closed, Dyna pulled out her phone. Ignoring the small crack in the glass from where she dropped it, she quickly dialed a number.

“This is Beatrice.”

“Give me directions to Harold’s position.”

“Understood.”

Now moving, mirror wedged into the dashboard so that she could see it, Dyna calmed down a great deal.

Calming down carried with it a vague sensation of defeat. Emerald wouldn’t have balked. In fact, her natural ability, if Dyna remembered correctly, was seeing into distant alternate realities. Perhaps somehow related to the tulpa, perhaps not. Either way, she had likely seen herself die before. Something like this wouldn’t have phased her. She would just smile and carry on.

Ruby wouldn’t have smiled, but she would have carried on regardless. Even losing limbs wouldn’t keep her down unless she literally couldn’t move. And then, she would only be down until she fixed herself.

Dyna wanted to be more like them. Instead, her thoughts drifted to Hematite.

Hematite’s ability, by all accounts, was strong. Near overwhelmingly so. It didn’t really look like that from Dyna’s perspective, with Hematite having been injured so grievously. But she had theories about that. It could have been Dyna’s fault. Between the Ouija board and Dyna’s actions, Hematite’s intuition and subsequent luck manipulation may have been impossible to facilitate. The exact specifications of Hematite’s abilities were difficult to measure and test. Dyna had sat through a few exercises to try to determine whether she or the Ouija board interfered with them.

They had all come back inconclusive.

However, a simpler solution put forth by Hematite herself was that she simply wished to retire but didn’t want to let Walter and the other artificers down by saying so. Thus events conspired to take her out of commission.

Dyna didn’t think less of Hematite for that. Hematite was a normal person who had gotten wrapped up in all this psychic business. Dyna felt the same when it all first started. But now?

Hematite had never gotten used to it. She didn’t like getting dropped into a war zone to recover artifacts. She didn’t like using her abilities to their fullest potential.

Dyna did. Dyna wanted to use her abilities and to show them off. It had been a bit frightening at the start, but the more she engaged in the life of an artificer, the more she wanted to continue.

And then comes a little bullet to her chest and she finds herself shaken?

It didn’t feel good.

Dyna set her features into a look of grim determination. If she had nearly died, it just meant that she wasn’t good enough yet. She needed to make better gadgets. As long as she stayed alive, she could fix that. Other people didn’t have the luxury of simply making things for themselves, but she did.

Considering Ruby’s ruby, Dyna wondered just what it would take to make something like that.

“You have arrived at your destination.”

Dyna pulled the car to a stop, looking out the window at truck stop motel on the outskirts of Idaho Falls. “Thank you, Beatrice,” she said, double-checking her firearms as she spoke. “Harold is here?”

“Nearby street cameras place him entering Room 3 sixteen minutes ago.”

That would have been just before Dyna and Emerald were attacked by the tulpa. “He still here?”

“He was not spotted leaving.” Beatrice paused for a moment before adding, “Emerald’s transponder signal is vanishing and reappearing randomly around the premises. I believe she is searching for him.”

Made sense. Dyna, exiting the station wagon, grabbed her APC9K and kept it down, yet ready. She probably shouldn’t be walking around with such a large firearm on open display, but she had just taken a bullet to the chest in an alternate timeline. She wasn’t going to go around unprepared.

Emerald was surely aware of her presence. The motel wasn’t a large place, just a few rooms lined up alongside a narrow parking lot. A simple peek out the window would have been met with a familiar station wagon. She wasn’t appearing before Dyna, which Dyna took to mean that she had yet to find anything.

Although Dyna figured Emerald had already searched it, Dyna started out heading to Room 3. There were no perspectives on her mirror, but she remained cautious as she moved anyway. The door was already open, hanging ajar.

The motel room wasn’t large. There was a single bed, a narrow dresser with an old television on top, and a tiny bathroom. Given the open door and Emerald’s presence in the area, Dyna would have expected it to be a bit messier than it was. Something like the blankets being torn off the bed, the drawers flung open, the mattress upturned, and so on. But it looked rather ready to be used.

Perhaps that would have taken too much time. Emerald couldn’t affect things while time was stopped, thus she would have been inside the room turning it inside out while Harold ran away.

Shrugging, Dyna started moving about the room. Ruby talking about traps back when they had been hunting the Hatman had her wary of opening drawers haphazardly, but taking care, she opened the end table, the drawers under the television, and two bathroom drawers. Aside from an empty notepad that looked as if it had never been used, a bible that looked as if it had never been used, and a television remote that had been used enough times to wear out most of the buttons. Nothing odd at all. And nothing that indicated anyone had been here.

At least not until she looked in the shower.

Most motels supplied shampoo and soap in little tiny bottles. Very few supplied large bottles, shaving cream, and fancy razors. It was the one piece of evidence Dyna had found that someone had used the room recently. Knowing a little more about the Carroll Institute’s information-gathering psychics, she knew objects like these could help track down Harold. So she stepped into the shower to collect them.

The moment she did, Dyna felt a chill run down her spine.

Some sound, maybe just the hum of the distant city on the wind, cut off completely. Aside from her own breathing, she could hear nothing. The light changed as well, turning from bright daylight coming in through the open motel door to a near-twilight.

The bottle she had been reaching for vanished, replaced with a tiny bottle of shampoo that she expected to find in an unoccupied motel room. Except something was wrong with it. It clearly had words written across the front, but she couldn’t read any of them. They were just gibberish. Moving gibberish. The letters shifted and merged into one another.

Feeling more than hearing something behind her, Dyna spun on her heel and raised her APC9K.

A soldier stood staring at her, having come from around the corner. With most of his face covered in a balaclava, she could only just see the surprise in his raised eyebrows. Clad in black and with a PP-2000 in his hand, Dyna didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger before he could raise his weapon. With the laser pointer aimed firmly in his direction, the causality-violating bullets ignored his armor, taking him down in an instant.

He didn’t stay down. Unlike other tulpa Dyna had shot, his form shimmered and twisted, looking more like a shadow than the solid body he had appeared with a moment ago.

Bullets ripped through the shadow as it scurried back, clinging to walls and corners of the motel room. Yet, Dyna noticed, the bullets made no sound. The walls, floor, and even ceiling definitely got hit as the bullets phased through the shadowy creature, yet didn’t get so much as scraped. No bullet holes appeared in the glass mirror over the bathroom sink. The porcelain of the toilet remained intact.

Dyna put together what had happened in a mere second, recalling all the reports she had read from November and Ruby.

This was the other side. The world of the tulpa. The plane of reality that the scientists were starting to call the ‘noosphere’. The text being unreadable was the biggest clue. Ruby had been quite insistent that no signs or other text she had seen while trapped in the other world had been legible. And the shadows… This was a world of thought, not physical form. Tulpa, beings of thought, might need a physical form in the real world, but here?

Dyna peered around the side of the bathroom wall with her mirror, watching other shadowy figures lurk and move in impossible motions. Some had more physical bodies. Others were pure shadow.

There must have been a spatial anomaly in that shower. A subtle one, less obvious than the one in the wedding hall.

She glanced back toward the shower. Maybe she could see it now, vaguely. Kit Maple had stepped through one back at that abandoned school’s auditorium. She could do the same, walk back and find Emerald for backup. But before she could…

Movement in her mirror drew her attention to one human-looking figure.

One familiar human-looking figure.

The shadowy creature that Dyna had chased off slunk up to Harold. Dyna didn’t hear anything, but she watched as Harold’s eyes widened. He looked back to the room.

Dyna jumped around the side of the bathroom wall, opening fire on the tulpa without reservation.

This was evidence enough. Harold was in league with Ignotus-33. She didn’t know why he had crashed that wedding. Frankly, she didn’t care at the moment. If he didn’t escape, he could tell all about it in interrogation.

Dyna expected him to run. Her plan was to dispatch the tulpa, or disrupt them to the point where they wouldn’t be threats, then to drag him back.

Run he did, but the tulpa didn’t go down quite as easily as expected. The first tulpa must have let it happen, intending to warn the rest of them. Beings of thought in a world of thought didn’t care quite so much about bullets ripping into them. Dyna, a being of flesh in a world of thought, didn’t think she could shrug bullets off quite so easily. She had to duck back behind the wall in a hurry when one of the tulpa she had hit first got right back up and leveled its PP-2000 in her direction.

Dyna felt the bullets impact the wall. Until that very moment, she hadn’t even thought about the harrowing possibility that thought-based walls wouldn’t stop bullets. But they did. Thankfully. In fact, perhaps they stopped the bullets better than the actual walls would have given that they were probably just thin slabs of drywall.

As soon as the hail of bullets stopped, Dyna turned the corner and quickly fired off a few more shots.

It wasn’t doing any good. And Harold was nowhere to be seen anymore. Gone, rushed off, probably to find another spatial anomaly. If she could just get past these tulpa…

Tulpa could die. She had talked with November plenty about the subject. They killed each other all the time. Or… ate each other. Ripped each other apart and integrated them into themselves.

Dyna didn’t know how to do that.

But an idea popped into her mind.

What was it that November had said? Dyna had a lot of stray thoughts?

She could sure use a stray thought right now. One that would go integrate all these tulpa and leave her free to chase down Harold.

The moment she thought that, something peeled away from her body. Dyna couldn’t quite explain the feeling. It was a bit like the mental equivalent of peeling the protective plastic off new electronics. Somewhat satisfying, yet as the last little bit peeled away, the snap made her shudder.

A shadow stood in front of her. One shaped vaguely like Dyna, complete with body armor, weapons, and even her eye-shaped pendant. It had no face, however. Just a flat, smooth surface with a few bumps where eyes and a nose should have been.

After regarding Dyna for a mere moment, it vanished around the corner.

Dyna couldn’t follow right away. Bullets were still hitting the wall.

They stopped quickly enough, however, allowing Dyna to peer around the side.

Her… doppelganger? Her tulpa? Whatever it was, it was ripping through the room. Its featureless face now sported a maw of sharp, interlocking teeth. Teeth it was rapidly shoving the remains of one of the tulpa into. The other tulpa were now firing at Dyna’s mental clone, but they were doing about as much damage to it as Dyna had done to them.

Dyna watched in a bout of morbid fascination as her clone didn’t even finish shoveling one tulpa into its mouth before diving after another. It ate that one, slurping it up, and moved on.

In short order, there was only one enemy tulpa left. And it apparently decided not to stick around. But Dyna’s clone grasped hold of its shadow, lifted it up, and slammed it down to the ground before diving into the ground after it. One large mass of shadow thrashed and twisted in the twilight of the motel room until there was nothing left but Dyna and her own clone.

The clone looked around the room once. Finding nothing else to attack, it turned to Dyna.

Dyna didn’t tense up. It was a frightful sight, this clone of hers with its shark-toothed grin, but something about the situation didn’t scream danger. Rather, the tulpa clone walked over to her, moving almost hesitantly. Then, it held out a hand as if to shake.

It wasn’t a greeting, an acknowledgment, or anything else of the sort.

Dyna took her clone’s hand.

The moment she did, her clone lunged at her, diving into her.

Dyna reeled back as a dozen fragmented shards of memory stabbed into her mind. A soldier in the Middle East moving from adobe to adobe, clearing corridors. A cook disappointed in his latest attempt a simple soufflé falling through. A woman, reaching forward to light up a red light. A swordsman fighting on the Basilica’s steps during the sack of Rome. A loving embrace of a man knowing he was going to die and a woman trying to tie a white cloth around his arm…

Grinding her teeth together, Dyna staggered back, shoulder hitting the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut, warring with memories that weren’t her own. Stray thoughts that had made up the tulpa here. The worst, however, came in the form of herself.

Dyna could see herself, watching herself stare at herself.

She took off, special, unique. She knew what she had to do.

And she did it well, eating and consuming, ripping and tearing. Nothing could stop her because that was what she had been made for. She knew with absolute certainty that no tulpa, no matter how experienced, would integrate her instead. That was simply how it was.

Until she finished. Purpose spent in under a minute, she had nothing else to do but return. She didn’t want to return, but she knew that it was what she had to do. There was only ever one way her brief existence was going to end. If she stayed separate too long, she would diverge too much, become too much of her own person. And that, quite simply, was unacceptable.

Dyna had done what was best for Dyna.

They were, after all, one and the same.