Walter stared down to the depths of the Vault. Psionically shielded glass separated him from the deep pit. Heavy vault doors lined the cylindrical room, layered on top of each other with no floor or connecting walkways between. There were only six doors on each level, but Walter couldn’t see the top or bottom of the shaft.

A platform, dwarfed by the empty space around it, climbed a sextet of pillars in the center of the room, one pillar for each corner of the hexagonal platform. Three men stood on the platform, easily visible against the black grated floor with their silvery suits. Except for their thick black gloves that went all the way to their shoulders, they looked like they were ready to march into a volcano. The silvery material of their long coats looked like an aluminized suit, but the purpose was far different. Instead of heat resistance, every aspect of the suit was designed to protect against psionic energy bombardment.

The platform slowed to a smooth stop at the same level that Walter watched from. A guard rail lowered into the platform as a walkway extended out, bridging the gap between the men and the rest of the facility. Two of the men gripped a sealed metal crate by the handles and started wheeling it across the walkway while the third followed behind them, ready to enact any one of a hundred different protocols should something out of the ordinary occur.

Walter couldn’t see their faces behind the wide silver visors, but he could imagine what they looked like. Sweaty and grungy with their hair matted and soaked. As smooth and shiny as the suits looked from the outside, Walter knew from experience that they were anything but on the inside. They were hot, smelly, and uncomfortable.

And the poor fools had to sit around in them for two hours at a time. Frankly, they were lucky that Psychodynamics mandated no more than three hours of exposure to high-psi environments in every twenty-four hour period.

One day, it wouldn’t be required anymore. There had been suggestions to implement a robotic retrieval system for over a decade at this point. It had finally been approved three weeks ago, but nothing had actually happened with it yet. Construction and maintenance in the chamber wasn’t easy, plans were still being worked on, but getting automated material retrieval in place would solve dozens of issues.

“Artifact four-eight-eight-four arrived in testing chamber at thirteen-oh-seven,” said the electronic voice of Beatrice.

“Doctor Cross confirms artifact arrival. Next test clear to begin.”

“Test four-eight-eight-four confirmed. Initializing.”

The three silver-suited men, now in a shielded chamber adjacent to the observation room, opened the crate. From within, they pulled out a wide-brimmed hat. One with a tall and conical crown, though it was flat on top. They placed it on top of a smooth platform made of a black stone. Like an iceberg, it stretched deep down beneath the metal platform. If one were to see it in full, it would look rather like a giant stone spike.

“Four-eight-eight-four in place on resonant stone.”

“Doctor Cross confirms the Hopkins Hat is in place. And would you take a look at that? Just like the other times.”

Walter turned away from the resonance chamber to face the rest of the observation room. Doctor Cross stood at the head terminal, watching a series of screens as he took notes on a separate table. Several other technicians stationed themselves down a few steps in the room, also with terminals in front of them. Some of their jobs were observation, but others were just there to ensure that nothing went wrong. One kept watch on the room integrity while the other’s primary duty was to keep an eye on the psionic levels in the Vault.

“See?” Cross said, pointing from one graph-filled monitor to another. “The moment the hat touched the stone, her agitation decreased. How wonderful! And by that I mean that this event is filling me with wonder.”

Walter didn’t respond. His eyes drifted away from the graphs to the large bank of screens mounted to the wall. The ones showing the interior of the room where Dyna now relaxed back against the chair, keeping her eyes closed. Prior to this, she had been pacing back and forth, constantly shooting glares at one of the walls in the room.

“Quite the little oddity you’ve got this time, eh?” Cross said, not taking his eyes off the graphs and charts. “Most subjects have quite intense reactions to the hat. Kelly, register the subject for additional compatibility tests with four-eight-eight-four.”

“Yes, Doctor Cross.”

“The same thing happened with the other artifacts, this reaction proves nothing,” Walter said, scowl on his face as he glared at the hat. One of many accursed items in their collection. Most people who touched it suffered asphyxiation or broken necks, often with rope marks around their throats. The few who didn’t… were worse. Following the second incident, all practical tests with the hat were suspended indefinitely.

No one in their right mind could claim that Dyna was a promising individual, but she did trust him. At the very least, she would have to be fully informed of the typical effects before being allowed in the same room with the Hopkins Hat.

Not that it would come to that.

“Administration will never approve testing with four-eight-eight-four. I don’t know why you bother bringing it out for these things.”

Cross chuckled, pressing his rectangular glasses to the bridge of his nose with his middle finger. “It is brought out precisely because it is such an extreme. It always elicits some kind of reaction in even the most psychically numb of test subjects. Most subjects, apparently. Fascinating to find an exception. But I wonder what will happen when we remove the hat,” he said, tapping one of the monitors at his terminal where a timer was rapidly approaching zero.

Walter crossed his arms, watching the screens overhead. Dyna certainly looked at peace at the moment. She even had a faint smile on her lips. Her foot tapped the ground in a rhythm as if she were listening to music.

Cross leaned forward and depressed a button next to the microphone standing on his desk. “Return four-eight-eight-four to containment. Bring up three-one-one-one. No! Three-four-one-one.”

The silver-suited men retrieved the hat, removing it from the pedestal and placing it back within the crate. Not that Walter paid them any attention. His eyes were locked on Dyna.

Sure enough, the moment the hat left the pedestal, her demeanor changed. Her foot stopped tapping and she sucked in a short breath. It probably wasn’t even a conscious change on her part. Her smile stayed, though not for long.

A jolt ran through her body as she whipped her head to face one of the four walls in the room. She stared for a long moment. Long enough for the artifact elevator to drop back down into the Vault. Readings from one of the charts showed her clicking the end of the pen dozens of times. The clicking continued right up until she stood from the chair, gripped the back of it, and turned it to face it away from the wall she had been staring at. She sat back down, leaning forward with one hand across her knees and the other shading her eyes.

Walter’s eyes flicked up to the wall she was now facing away from, wondering just what she saw there. Nothing good, obviously, but Walter couldn’t see anything. The walls were nothing more than psionically sensitive fabric. To his eyes, filtered through the camera and the screens, it looked like nothing more than a yellowish-green wall. The kind of color that, were it used on a public trash bin, no one would actually use it because of how utterly unnoticeable it was.

“Terrific, isn’t it?” Cross said, finally looking away from his monitors to catch a glimpse of Walter’s face. “She was more at ease with the hat than she is without it. And by terrific, I mean in its original meaning. This subject certainly is some kind of monster.”

“She’s a young woman. A little girl, barely out of high school.”

Cross smiled, pulling his dark goatee along with his lips. He didn’t speak for a moment, choosing to turn back to his screens.

Walter turned away as well, moving back to the Vault observation window.

“How are those two girls doing these days? Red and Green? Haven’t seen them around lately.”

Walter’s hands clenched. To anyone else, it might have sounded like little more than small talk. But Cross didn’t do small talk. He was a man utterly enraptured with his research and could talk on relevant topics for hours, but couldn’t talk on anything else. The few times Walter had seen him try to ask a coworker about their weekend, it had been like watching a chat bot try to hold a conversation. Not even a particularly advanced bot at that.

However, Walter was saved from responding by the two-tone indicator of an incoming announcement.

“Attention: Agent Walter, please report to Behavioral Analytics Laboratory immediately.”

Walter pushed away from the window, straightening his back and heading toward the door. “Alert me if anything changes with the girl.”

“Of course,” Cross said, not turning away from his terminal.

I wasn’t talking to you, Walter thought, eying one of the cameras in the room as its red light tracked his movements. It continued following him until the observation room door slid shut behind him.

The BAL was, unfortunately, nowhere near the Vault. It was in an entirely separate sector of the facility. That would require trekking back to the elevator, which really wasn’t so much an elevator as it was a tram system. It could do more than just up and down, including sideways, and slantways, and longways and any other ways traditional glass elevators could go in. When he and Dyna had descended into Psychodynamics, a replacement had moved into position within the Administration building.

Before he could get back to the main Psychodynamics lobby, his wristwatch vibrated. He swiped the face of the clock away with a finger to view his messages.

Your presence is no longer required in Behavioral Analytics Laboratory.

Walter stopped in his tracks, glaring at his watch. He stared for a long moment, considering returning to the observation room.

“I don’t need you to fight for me,” Walter said, continuing down the hall in the same direction that he had been heading. Rather than exit into the lobby, he took a detour to a large conference room. He hadn’t known for sure that it would be empty, but wasn’t surprised to find that it was.

There simply weren’t that many personnel trusted to be within Psychodynamics. One would think that mind readers would make vetting and hiring processes simpler, but the simple fact was that techniques existed to harden the mind against such intrusions. Even to the point where a mind reader wouldn’t be able to tell that they weren’t reading true thoughts. If anything, they made it more difficult.

The laboratory was expanding every day. One day, maybe even one day soon, these corridors wouldn’t be nearly so empty. There would still be traitors and spies, but the facility would just have to handle them as they came.

Psychodynamics created more research than it had researchers, after all.

The conference room wasn’t anything particularly special. As with most conference rooms, it had a large round table surrounded by chairs. A faceted monitor hung overhead, ready to display pertinent information to all parties while small brass-plated terminals were built into the table at each seat for private information, personal notes, and other individualized uses.

Walter took a seat in one of the red leather swivel chairs and pressed a few buttons, signing into the terminal. From there, a quick few key presses brought up Dyna on the overhead screen and camera feeds from the observation room on the personal terminal.

The experiment was continuing as planned, Walter noted with some relief. He trusted that Doctor Cross would follow the testing protocols, but he wouldn’t put it past the man to rewrite protocols during the test, push them to administration, and somehow get them approved within the hour.

The testing continued. Walter leaned back in the chair and watched, passive, for over an hour. Throughout it all, Dyna alternated between calm and agitated as artifacts touched or were removed from the resonant stone. He had to wonder if she even realized how she was acting or if, should he question her later, she wouldn’t be able to explain at all what she had been feeling throughout the test.

One thing was certain, her agitated states were increasing in intensity. At first, she had merely been uncomfortable. That elevated to impatience, worry, fear, even anger. The calm periods did not last long enough to bring her mental state back down. Typical testing protocol limited exposure to artifacts and offered longer periods of time in which the subjects were left alone, but that very protocol was having inverse effects on her.

Of course, normal subjects didn’t notice much of anything. The Hopkins Hat might elicit some reaction, but most artifacts failed to produce any response. Most subjects sat around, bored out of their minds as Cross narrowed down the class of artifacts most compatible with the subject. Only once they started specific class testing did subjects start reacting at all and even then, the reactions were far more muted than what Dyna was apparently experiencing.

Walter had theories. He no longer participated in most general research that occurred within Psychodynamics, but he was still a scientist. Shrinking the feed of Cross and the Vault to the corner of the terminal, he brought up a note taking application and prepared to jot down his own thoughts and observations for later refinement.

He made it three words into his notes before Cross ordered the removal of the current artifact, a rusted railroad spike.

The moment the silvers removed it from the resonant stone, Dyna jumped to her feet. The resonant pen, which she had been flipping between her knuckles and spinning around her thumb, fell from her hand. Walter wasn’t sure if she dropped it because she jumped up or if she jumped up because she dropped it. Either way, she used her now free hands to clasp either side of her head. Tilting her head back, she opened her mouth.

There was no sound in the conference room, but he could only imagine that she was screaming.

An instant after, while she still had her mouth open, three shrill wails sounded over the intercom.

A sound no personnel wanted to hear.

“Facility Alert: Brace for class three psionic cascade.”

Walter lurched from the chair as a rolling wave passed through him. The entire room twisted and spun about him. The floor rippled like someone had cast a stone into a pond while the walls stretched taut and snapped back. The rigid marble tile and wooden panels of the walls should have broken, cracked, and shattered. But they didn’t.

As the wave passed, leaving him with just a mild sensation of nausea in the back of his mind, the room flexed and returned to normal.

The camera feeds cut out momentarily. The observation room came back first. Walter imagined something similar had happened there. Half the technicians had collapsed to the floor, unmoving. Others clutched at their heads or vomited all over their terminals. Doctor Cross, far better trained, looked none the worse for wear. In fact, he had a wide, maniacal grin on his face.

Overhead, on the faceted monitors, the image was still blank. He reached down to his terminal, tapping away, trying to get any readings. The camera was out, but there were dozens if not hundreds of sensors, all with psionic shielding. Yet every chart he pulled up simply ended twenty seconds ago. Graphs displayed as flat, readings were all zero, and there were more null errors than he could count.

“Beatrice! Status of the compatibility room and subject?”

“Status unknown.”

Shoving the chair aside, Walter raced out of the conference room.

Two clipped beeps echoed down the halls. “Shielded maintenance team to Psychodynamics, Sector C, Artifact Compatibility.”

Another pair of high priority tones beeped. “Shielded medical team to Psychodynamics, Sector C, Artifact Compatibility.”

“Status?” Walter called out as he ran past an intersection.

“Status unknown. Recent request for medical is precautionary only.”

“And maintenance?”

“Artifact Compatibility is experiencing a door malfunction.”

Walter continued through the halls, wondering why he had selected a location to view the experiment so far from the actual room.

When he finally arrived, he slowed to a crawl, staring with an open mouth.

The hall was twisted and warped. Not broken. More like he had stepped through a funhouse mirror into an alternate version of the facility. Really, it was only the wall that the testing chamber occupied. The hallway floor and ceiling were normal save for where they intersected with the one wall.

Cross was already here. He had his hand out, palm flat against the door. Or where the door should have been. Much like the rest of the wall, it looked abnormal. Not quite a funhouse, but more like someone had managed to melt the metal and warp it toward one side.

Malfunction was a drastic understatement.

“Able to affect reality with nothing more than her mind. Quite the impressive specimen, Walter. Quite awe inspiring.”

Walter paid him little mind, focusing instead on what he could do. Which wasn’t much, but he could slam his fist against the warped metal of the door. “Dyna, can you hear me?”

“The subject failed to respond to my calls.”

Somewhat surprised he cared, Walter continued hitting his fist against the door until he heard more footsteps.

Two men ran down the hall wearing shiny silver suits. They wheeled a stretcher between them with bags of medical supplies set on top. There wasn’t much for them to do, unfortunately. Not with the door and wall in the states they were in. They tried calling out as well, but to no end.

Luckily, a second team of silver suited personnel charged up the hall not far behind them. They wheeled up canisters of gas, having apparently been informed that they would need to cut through the door. They wasted no time with chatter, setting up their cutting torches and getting ready. They shouted for Dyna to stand back from the door, again with no response. Even without that, they started cutting.

“I suppose I’ll head back to my office and begin my incident report,” Cross said, speaking casually to the point where anyone who overheard might think he was filling out a routine report and not… this.

Walter occupied himself differently, pacing back and forth in front of the door. His sunglasses weren’t rated for a cutting torch, but he still glanced toward it every now and again.

With the door being a sliding door, only one edge needed to be cut from floor to ceiling. Even with it warped, the maintenance crew was able to hit their shoulders against it and knock the door into the room.

They immediately backed away, allowing the medical team access. Knowing that they were the professionals here, Walter stood aside and let them. Until they hesitated at the threshold.

“What are you…”

He trailed off, lips tightening as he looked inside. The chair was there. So was the end table. Dyna was on the floor, sprawled out and unconscious, but visibly breathing. But the walls, ceiling, and floor had changed. Funhouse wasn’t the right term at all. More like a haunted house. A nightmare.

Jagged spikes, writing scrawled in red, chains and blades dangling from the ceiling, and even more besides. That wasn’t even including the twisted and warped tiles and panels. Dyna was not unscathed either. He didn’t see any visible injuries, but it wasn’t easy to tell for internal injuries. Her clothes were soaked with a red liquid that Walter feared was blood, but wasn’t quite willing to admit that to himself. It looked like she had been the victim of a Carrie-tier prank. The sort of things that, at Carroll, were dealt with in the harshest of punishments, often including memory alteration followed by immediate expulsion.

No student would have had access to this chamber. Not to mention that he had been watching the security footage live when the incident occurred. There was no perpetrator here save for the test itself.

“Get her out of there and tend to her, make sure she is alright,” Walter said. “But carefully. Don’t wake her. Keep her sedated until we get her in a psionic containment room. Alert me once she awakens. And, whatever you do, don’t let Doctor Cross have access to her.”

“Sir,” one of the two silvers said. At his commands, they entered the room.

Walter did as well, making sure to keep out of their way. The very center of the room was more or less untouched. Right around the black rug that the chair sat upon. Bending down, making sure to keep out of the way of the medics, he picked up the resonant pen and returned it to its containment box.

With that done, and with Dyna being wheeled down the hall, he exited the room and looked up to find one of the many security cameras.

“Get a team down here. I want notes and readings taken everywhere within the room and everywhere else in this sector.”

High priority tones sounded, echoing throughout Psychodynamics. “Shielded science team to Psychodynamics, Sector C, Artifact Compatibility. Immediately.”