Administrator Alpha scanned the report from the most recent experiment for the umpteenth time. Each reading had her scowl deepening further and further as things just didn’t quite add up. Pulling up the report from Harold’s capture, she compared Dyna’s debriefing there to the one here.

The first and most obvious change was the lack of freely offered information. The Harold incident was full of offered conjecture, full thought process of every decision, and ideas for how she could have handled any given aspect of the incident in a more efficient manner. This tulpa experiment, on the other hand, contained just a simple description of events as they happened with no extra details. Everything beyond the description had been pried out of her by the debriefing personnel. Even those felt incomplete.

Dyna had focused entirely on events that could have been observed by an outside element. In fact, her debriefing report matched almost perfectly with that of Colonel O’Neil. Someone at the center of events should have had drastically more information.

The next oddity concerned the entity known as the mountain man.

In truth, Alpha had been hoping the mountain man would escape confinement. That was the whole reason she had pushed for approving the inane experiment in the first place. If the mountain man escaped, she had presumed that it would attempt to follow its most recent orders: killing Dyna. Alpha wasn’t exactly sure why it had gone after November first, but theorized that the tulpa was just too attractive a target and had overridden her final order. She had thought she stamped out natural instincts like that, but the odd quirk of tulpa attempting to absorb their fellows wasn’t easily suppressed.

Irritating, but that was not what had Alpha scowling at her report.

The mountain man ran away. It fled. Tulpa did not have fear responses. Not in the same way that humans did, anyway. She could order them onto obvious suicide missions and they wouldn’t begin to complain. That wasn’t even a side effect of the Psychic Dominator, which instilled her orders into the tulpa, they simply lacked a significant self-preservation instinct.

November was a bit different in that regard, but Alpha was willing to attribute that to her extended existence outside the noosphere.

Could that have been why the mountain man fled? Its time in containment warped its instincts? Plausible. While Alpha received regular reports from Phrenomorphics on the subject of tulpa, she honestly knew very little about them. Machinery replicating psychic powers were the domain of Alpha’s talents and specialties.

Alpha’s eye twitched as an incoming message popped up on her tablet. A request for her to return to the Carroll Institute campus for the time being. Alpha wanted to be nowhere near the campus. Not while that abomination roamed the grounds. The few times she had been unable to avoid returning had been harrowing enough.

Placing her tablet on her desk, Alpha stood and moved to the large windows of her office. High in the mountains of Puerto Rico, south of the city of Arecibo, Alpha made her home in the sinkhole of an old radio telescope, long since collapsed. With the closure of the educational center some five years ago, she had identified it as the perfect location to expand the Carroll Institute’s psionic radar network. In the place of the old telescope, a massive mast stood tall. Several L-shaped beams of metal slowly rotated around the central shaft, looking like a massive orrery. Several triangular blades, attached in a line just beneath the array of L-shaped beams, spun in the opposite direction.

The Psychic Detector.

It was a simple device, relatively speaking, capable of identifying anomalous spikes in psionic activity over a wide swath of the world. Several were placed around various territories and overseas bases that the United States claimed as their own, forming a near-global network. Satellites with similar technology observed any blind spots and formed a redundancy over covered areas.

But this one was a little different. More recent and designed by Alpha, it served an additional purpose. One she had slipped into its design during construction, unnoticed by any except, perhaps, Beatrice. But with the administrative authority over the glorified chat-bot, Alpha had been able to install a void in its cognitive functions, preventing it from seeing anything she didn’t want it to.

Leaving her office, Alpha stepped into the gondola lift. Pulling a lever disengaged the safety brakes and a press of a button activated the cables, bringing her down from her office to the base of the sinkhole where the Detector sat. The gondola, attached to the cable, entered a small garage-like opening in the side of the machine’s base and locked into place.

Walking through maintenance corridors, Alpha approached an unassuming ladder. Not the most convenient method for descending further into the facility, but one that few would bother to look for. At the bottom, a lever disguised as a pipe opened a panel concealing a keypad. A few quick presses, leaving her thumb on the last number for an extended moment, opened a part of the wall.

Alpha stepped into a long, narrow chamber that looked like it belonged to a submarine rather than a building. Cramped corridors covered with metal pipes and several air-sealed doors. Eventually, however, Alpha found herself inside a small control room. There was only one other occupant at the moment. A man who looked like he was dressed for winter in thick clothes. Even his face had a thick, quilted covering that hid any skin. Dark, impenetrable goggles hid his eyes while half of a glass ball adorned his forehead, in front of the quilted mask.

“Progress?” Alpha asked as she approached the massive table of buttons, knobs, dials, toggle switches, ratcheting levers, valves, and other devices that the cowled man sat in front of.

He didn’t turn to face her, focused on slowly twisting one of the bright red valves while watching a gauge increase.

Alpha didn’t distract him with further questions. Instead, she looked down into the room beyond the control panel where a horizontal cylinder made from glass and metal, looking like an antique hyperbaric oxygen chamber, hummed with an unsettlingly low tone. Shadows and light twisted behind the glass as the valve continued to turn. Pipes connected to the Detector above—or perhaps she should say Beacon—rattled as more shadows siphoned down into the hyperbaric chamber.

The man at the control panel locked the valve in place, reached up, and flipped one of the large toggle switches. Alpha averted her eyes just in time. Even looking down with her eyes closed, the bright flash of light, brighter than a welding arc, still stung the back of her retinas.

“Do you ever feel like Frakenstein?” a highly distorted voice asked. “The doctor, not the monster.”

“I am familiar with the story. Your clarification is unnecessary.”

He twisted a knob then flipped another toggle switch. “I just feel like I should be maniacally laughing right now. ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ you know?”

Alpha didn’t dignify his question with a proper response. She simply kept her eyes averted for a few moments longer as the doctor worked. Though she did wonder if he was worth keeping around. At least he didn’t go about correcting people for spelling his name wrong even in the privacy of their own heads.

Quashing a flash of irritation, Alpha looked up as she heard the siphon pumps winding down.

He was hunched over a small screen built into the control panel, mask and goggles preventing any idea of what he might be thinking. “Oh. That looks good. Remarkably stable, this one.”

That was good news. A majority of their attempts at forcibly integrating tulpa into one mass had been less… integrated than was required to maintain a stable form. The results, when pulled from the noosphere, were messy to say the least.

“I believe this one will be suitable for your purposes,” he said. “My best creation yet.”

“It is done, then?”

“Are these things ever done?” His costume made it a bit difficult to turn his head, but he still managed to shake his entire body. “I could spend the next ten years perfecting the amalgamation process, but you wouldn’t wait for that, would you?”

“No,” Alpha said, taking the stairs beyond the control panel down toward the hyperbaric chamber. The shadows were no longer present, coalesced into solid form. Alpha couldn’t see many details on the form, unfortunately. A bright white light occluded everything. It wasn’t as bright as that flash had been earlier, but it was enough to wash out the entire interior of the chamber.

“I followed all your directions for the baseline,” he called down from above, “but added a number of improvements and one or two alterations to make it… hardier with regards to the subject. The method that dispatched the… ah, I believe we’re calling him ‘mountain man’ these days. Whatever its name, repeating that method of attack shouldn’t work again here. Probably.”

“Defenses to the disruptors?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard back up at the control panel.

“Preliminary tests show high degree of resistance to the technology you provided. I cannot account for the experimental disruptor technology, unfortunately. It may simply be too strong and will overwhelm this one.”

“I am working on sabotaging the project. Do not allow it to influence you.”

“Yes, ma’am. Owing to the lessons we learned from the ‘mountain man’, this specimen should be quite hardy toward physical and psionic influences, however, it should be more intelligent as well, capable of proper reasoning and not just taking orders blindly.”

“I see,” Alpha said, lips curling into a frown. “Destroy it.”

The cowled man jolted to his feet, leaning over the railing that separated the upper level from the chamber floor. “You can’t be serious! After all the effort—”

“I have no need for a tulpa that will not follow orders. I could go to any human and get a soldier that won’t listen to me.”

“He will follow orders. Of that I assure you. It is merely that it will be able to understand what you want, rather than follow blindly the letter of your word,” he called down, voice frantic. “Give this one a chance. Please. You will not be disappointed.”

Alpha pressed her lips together. That was certainly a more appealing way to put it. “We’ll give it a test,” she said slowly. “Once it is finished, send it after our friends in Texas.”

“Ah!” The cowled man practically sagged in relief. “Of course. A worthy test. They are marginally more advanced with matters pertaining to tulpa than the Carroll Institute. I have full confidence it will succeed. And if it succeeds there, it will succeed at the institute.”

Alpha did not share his confidence. Too many of her plans had stalled, stopped, or simply vanished entirely. Or had been wrested from her control… That last point was a particular irritant. One that made her consider once again if that abomination really could alter thoughts as well as the rest of reality. That was the whole basis behind using tulpa rather than humans—beings of thought would be harder to alter than regular humans. Their willingness to throw themselves into danger, follow orders without question, and the occasional advanced individuals were purely side benefits.

“It is a shame about Tartarus,” the cowled man said as she ascended the stairs once again. “If their blundering hadn’t revealed the existence of tulpa to the institute, we could have marched over them by now. I wonder how they got so knowledgeable about tulpa. They came from nothing but your subject’s imagination, right? You think tulpa come from her too?”

“Tartarus did not emerge from nothing,” Alpha said through clenched teeth.

Tartarus had been hers. Darq had been hers. Waking up one morning to find all her passcodes failing, backdoors locked, and no way of even finding the facility had her livid. Even now, that anger hadn’t diminished. Even now, it took all her willpower to keep her sidearm in its holster and stop herself from shooting this man before he too could turn traitor.

Initially, she had thought the entire facility wiped from existence in an accidental usage of Dyna’s powers. Then Wyoming. A van bearing the name and emblem of Tartarus, driven by people she didn’t know, proclaiming that Id was their leader?

“Get everything in order for this test,” Alpha said. Not trusting herself to remain in close proximity to him any longer, she stalked back down the narrow corridor that had brought her here in the first place.

As soon as she made it up the ladder and back to the gondola she pulled out her phone and reinserted the battery. There were a few messages. Notifications, mostly, from the other administrators about their various projects. Alpha ignored all of them except for that of Gamma’s, the Phrenomorphics project. The Carroll Institute’s own attempt at cataloging, understanding, and experimenting on tulpa and the noosphere. She quickly skimmed through the banal portions of the report to focus on what really mattered.

Tracking the diminished mountain man through the noosphere. Not the easiest thing in the world, Alpha was well aware, but due to Id’s current presence within the Carroll Institute, they had been able to get into contact with Tartarus and were now using their research to augment their search. Alpha’s research.

She couldn’t even claim it without tipping her hand. All of it was being attributed to Darq.

That traitor.

Alpha sent off a council message, suggesting that perhaps it was time to put Id back where she belonged. The message hadn’t said so in such crude terms, of course. It was simply that, in the absence of any defined threat since the assassination attempt had failed, they couldn’t really justify keeping her around any longer. Not to mention, if they wished to foster a more collaborative environment with Tartarus, furthering the leader’s ire by keeping her imprisoned wouldn’t do them any favors.

And if Id just so happened to be back in her facility when Ignotus-33 chose to resurface and wipe them from the planet, then that would just be such a shame.

Such a shame indeed.