Dyna slammed the door shut to the control room, not sure if she should spin the wheel to lock it or not. If Specimen Seven followed her through the halls, it might delay it. If it went straight for the vents, it might delay her. Casting a quick glance upward, she quickly found a grate dangling from a single screw in the cylindrical ventilation shaft that ran overhead. The other screws looked like they had been ripped right out of their sockets.

Leaving the door partially locked, Dyna hurried further into the room. She stopped at the terminal and snapped up Walter’s phone. A quick check over its front left her with a scowl. No signal. She stared for a long moment, confused. When she had shut off the Continuity Engine, the portal had snapped shut as well. Given the timing of the signal cutting off earlier, she had thought the portal was the cause.

Unless the portal had closed but the machinery was still on. That made… sense.

Dyna glowered at the phone for a long moment before shoving it into her pocket.

Her power was a field, according to Alpha, that constantly affected everything around her, adjusting things in small ways not to what she wanted but to what she expected. Unless she had severely misunderstood the purpose of that machine she had unplugged, that field was now active once again.

Dyna didn’t know how long she had before that thing came after her again. Beatrice was out as help. Her power might work or might not work, she wasn’t sure that she could control it effectively and even if it did help her out, Dyna wasn’t sure that she would notice versus how the world was normally. Her first order of business was to figure out how to keep herself from getting torn apart by Specimen Seven.

Dyna tapped a key on the keyboard in front of her. The screen lit up, unlocked thanks to Beatrice. There had to be something here. It was foolish to create super-powered tulpa without a means of handling them if something went wrong. They did have a way of controlling them but what if that failed? Where was the self-destruct failsafe? Where was the room full of anti-tulpa weaponry?

Alpha wasn’t that stupid.

There had to be something.

And if Dyna expected there to be something, there would be something. She just had to find it.

Dyna reset time. Twisting the bezel all the way around on her watch threw her back a full minute into the past, just as she was sitting down at the terminal. That was one minute guaranteed that Specimen Seven wasn’t going to attack her. She knew what commands she had typed into the terminal the first time around, what directories she had dug through.

Pulling out Walter’s phone, she set it to the side with a timer. Sixty seconds.

Dyna dove into the terminal once again, searching through directories, following folder structures that seemed promising, skimming through experimentation logs. As soon as the timer beeped, she snapped her hand to her watch and spun it around. Blinking, the timer now read fifty-nine seconds.

She tried again.

And again.

And again.

Sometimes, she reset the timer just a little early to avoid losing a second or two. Other times, she chanced a few extra seconds to finish reading an experimentation log.

Dyna wasn’t sure how much she could trust what she was reading. The dates on some of the earlier experimentation logs indicated that Alpha had been investigating the noosphere and tulpa for years now. However, she couldn’t be sure that this all wasn’t just her power generating reports out of nothing for her to read through.

Really, she wished she could go back. A year ago, before she knew about her power, she would have read through these accepting them at face value. Knowing about her power made it so that she wasn’t sure if she could trust anything. Her mind made it all real but unless everyone else believed it all as well, it wasn’t really real. There would always be little things that slipped through her power’s crack. Id’s little experiment on the flight, creating what Dyna expected was expensive alcohol even if it wasn’t actually, was proof of that. As was Alpha’s vanished family.

Dyna still wasn’t sure what could have happened there. She didn’t know enough. Maybe Id could have figured it out. Despite being an effective clone of Dyna’s, Id had memories and experiences that Dyna lacked.

There was also the fact that Dyna hadn’t really had a chance to think about it. She didn’t really want to think about it now either. Thinking about her power was giving her a headache.

Or maybe that was the time-travel.

Whichever was the case, Dyna came to a decision.

Things couldn’t stand the way they were.

Dyna reset time again and almost immediately found something promising. An experimentation log detailing an escaped tulpa causing havoc. It apparently killed a few people before being apprehended. Not by police, the Carroll Institute, or Alpha, but by a man wearing a bow tie and dark goggles who showed up in a van bearing a three-hexagon logo on the side. Alpha’s first encounter with Doctor Darq. Though the report did not mention them actually interacting, it apparently put him on her radar. More than that, it gave Alpha cause to investigate methods of control.

It took five more resets, reading related files and other experimentation logs from around the same time period before Dyna stumbled across just how Alpha was controlling the tulpa. Ingrained psycho-active command signals, inserted during the creation of her tulpa. This tower that Dyna was in was the broadcaster, keeping the tulpa in line with Alpha’s wants. If she shut it down, Alpha’s army at the Carroll Institute would be free from her directions.

Unfortunately, that didn’t help her with Specimen Seven. If the command signal worked with Seven, Frankenstein would probably be alive still.

It had been released early. Probably before the command signals were in place.

Dyna leaned back in the chair. She had a potential solution to one problem but not the most immediate problem. In fact, with as much as Dyna had skimmed over files, testing logs, and various commands inside the terminal, she was starting to doubt that she would actually find anything despite her power. It was impossible to prove that something didn’t exist in the machine. Beatrice could have proved it but not Dyna. However, the proof wasn’t in the machine.

It was in Frankenstein. If there was some kind of kill signal that would have taken out Specimen Seven, surely he would have used it. If there were guns and weapons here capable of harming a tulpa like Specimen Seven, surely he would have used them. If he could have done anything, he surely would have.

Instead, Dyna had found him hiding in the bathroom.

Dyna tapped her fingers against the desk several times, considering. Resetting time once again, she stood and hurried over to the bathroom. It was a small, single-occupant room with a toilet, mirror, coat hook, and a sink. Nothing else.

Nothing obvious, anyway.

Had Frankenstein been hiding? Or had he come here with a plan in mind?

Dyna started with the mirror, twisting the little plastic holders that kept it attached to the wall. She tossed it aside, shattering it, but only found a brick wall behind it. Outside the bathroom, she heard the timer start to beep.

Resetting time again, she grabbed the phone this time around and rushed back to the bathroom.

The coat hanger didn’t move. There was nothing behind the toilet or the sink—neither were the type that could be opened in any way aside from the obvious. The ceiling was just an array of pipes and one small ventilation shaft that didn’t look similar to the ones in the main rooms. It was probably a direct vent to the surface like most bathrooms had. That would let the tulpa out of this facility if it found it, unfortunately. Though at this moment, having it away from her might allow her a better opportunity to plan on how to get rid of it. Assuming it didn’t get rid of itself after escaping. Frankenstein had said that it was unstable.

Dyna blinked and, for the first time, looked down. In her first meeting with Frankenstein, he had been crouched down on the floor when she barged in. Why there instead of pressed up against the wall behind the door or using the sink or toilet for cover? Was he an idiot? Or…

There was a drain on the floor. A small metal grate likely put in place in case the water started leaking. One of the two screws holding the drain in place was missing.

Dyna reset time again, snapping back to the terminal. She stood immediately and hurried over to where she had thrown Frankenstein down before checking him for weapons. Tossed to the side of the room, she found a screwdriver, pliers, and a metal coat hanger.

He had been trying to get something out of the drain.

Taking the tools, Dyna hurried back inside the bathroom and removed the last screw. Prying up the small grate, she activated the flashlight on Walter’s phone and peered down inside.

The timer on the phone went off. Rather than restarting time, however, Dyna bent the coat hanger and stretched it down. Whatever was down there looked like a plastic bag with a fabric loop attached to it. It took two tries to get the hook around the loop before she managed to pull the whole thing up.

Peeling off the plastic, Dyna frowned down at her recovery. It was wrapped in a layer of foil. Not just any foil, but the psionic inhibiting foil that the Carroll Institute so often used for artifacts and other psychically sensitive items. Peeling it back, an utter calm came over her.

Inside was an artifact. Of that, there was no doubt. A small… fuse? It was a glass cylinder capped with silver metal. Instead of a fuse wire, however, there was a bright yellow spark dancing around on the inside. She had no idea what it was.

Alpha probably wouldn’t have hidden an artifact in a bathroom drain. That probably meant that Frankenstein had it here without her knowing. Some kind of back-up plan if something ever went wrong. A quick peek through the plastic bag revealed no notes left by Frankenstein to illuminate the situation. No label or clue as to what it was or what it was supposed to do. Just conjecture.

But…

Wasn’t that perfect for her?

The little spark in a jar could do anything. With her power, it would do anything. Or, at least, what she expected something like it to do. Dyna quickly ran over her preconceptions of the situation, analyzing them as fast as her mind could. Alpha set free an unstable tulpa. It likely had a delay before waking up, whether intended or not, allowing Alpha to escape through the noosphere gate that was further down the corridors. Frankenstein, left behind, quickly realized that it wouldn’t listen to commands and had hidden himself in the bathroom just before it awoke. It did and promptly started killing everything that moved, likely integrating the tulpa to make itself more stable.

Frankenstein, after it had left to attack the tulpa, came back out here, found his tools, and returned to try to retrieve this artifact in the hopes that it would help keep him alive or otherwise deal with the situation. Dyna had interrupted him before he could. When the tulpa attacked, forcing them out of this room, he had changed his plan to escaping through the noosphere. Dyna had interrupted that as well by shutting off the Continuity Engine, which inadvertently brought about Frankenstein’s demise.

Carefully, gently brushing her fingers over the artifact, Dyna touched it as if worried it might electrocute her. Much like when she had first chosen her mirror, the sensation of calm faded away. Touching it didn’t give her any more clues on how to use it or what it did but the fact that it acted like other artifacts she had touched was reassuring. It did something.

Through all of her experimentation with gadgets and artifacts, she knew a little about how to coax them into action. Psionic forces were the key. A little expenditure of mental willpower could go a long way.

Holding it out in her palm, Dyna focused. The spark grew brighter with a thought, illuminating the room in a bright white light. With another thought, it dimmed, extinguishing almost completely. All that was left inside was a faint red ember.

That gave Dyna some ideas. She didn’t like most of those ideas but they were there.

Drawing in a breath, Dyna clenched her fist and walked back into the control room. There wasn’t much more for her here, as far as she could tell. The only other thing here was the pressure chamber down the stairs that created tulpa and she had no idea how to work it. Maybe she could figure it out through repeated one-minute increments but unless she could make it do something useful in a single minute, she wouldn’t get anywhere.

Feeling mildly more confident, Dyna moved to the door and, hand on her watch, peeked out into the hallway.

No sign of Specimen Seven. Maybe it was still eating Frankenstein. In terms of mental capacity, a proper human was drastically more intense than the dog-like tulpa around the rest of this place. Maybe it took longer. Though with how badly it tore him apart, Dyna wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he died well before the process could complete.

Rather than head back toward that room—and Specimen Seven—Dyna moved back in the direction she had initially arrived from. To the best of her knowledge, none of the tulpa from the observation station had come down here. Or if they had, Specimen Seven had likely taken them out before heading over to the portal room. But Dyna wasn’t headed out of the facility.

She stopped at the first of the armory room she had visited before. Opening the door again made her wrinkle her nose. Although they were just tulpa, seeing a dozen bodies lying motionless on the floor made her a bit queasy. The smell didn’t help. While beings of thought in the noosphere, here they had real-enough bodies to fill her nose with a sort of ugly metallic smell.

Taking a quick breath of the hallway air, Dyna rushed inside.

She quickly replaced her lost PP-2000. Maybe it wouldn’t help against Specimen Seven but it worked fine against everything else. After that, she started looking around for other helpful things. She threw on a bit of body armor, a helmet, managed to fit a pair of grenades into a small pouch. A knife might come in handy.

Opening a tall off-green locker, Dyna sucked in a breath at the blocky black words written on brown paper.

Explosive Plastic Comp-4.

C4. Bricks of the stuff. A nervous shock tingled at her stomach for a brief moment. C4 was incredibly stable. It wouldn’t explode unless something deliberately set it off. Not even shooting it would make it go off.

When it did go off, it went off hard.

Dyna stared at it for a short moment and then started loading it, brick-by-brick, into the pouch she had found. This tower needed to go down. When she first realized that, she had thought she would find some power main to disconnect. Now?

Two lockers away, stored separately for safety’s sake, she found the other half of what she needed. Small radio-controlled detonators. Her training with the Carroll Institute hadn’t exactly covered how to prime and set C4 to destroy buildings. Being friends with Ruby, however, had taught her a bit more than any regular person really needed to know about setting explosives.

The blasting caps had a small dial on them, which seemed to let Dyna select a frequency. The clacker had a similar one. Flicking on a detonator set to a unique frequency and setting it on the floor, Dyna backed away and put her back to the side of a locker.

She smacked the clacker.

After a short delay, there was a pop around the side of the locker. It sounded like a firecracker going off.

Test complete, Dyna pulled a separate satchel off the rack and carefully placed the detonator and the blasting caps inside.

After one quick check to see if there was anything else she could use in the armory, Dyna stepped back out into the corridor and aimed back for the ladder that brought her down here in the first place. The central shaft was where all the vital equipment to this tower had to pass through. That seemed like the best place to set all this stuff up at.

If she found a main power switch, that would probably still be the better option.

It was always nice to have a backup plan.