The second time around, she thought she knew what to expect so she tried to prepare herself to pay more attention. It was difficult, for lacking a brain apparently made it quite hard to concentrate on anything. But there was... something.

It was not unlike when the eyes tried to see in absence of something to be seen - like watching the flickers of nameless colors and dark light flashing in absolute darkness. Something was there, merely because it had to be, because the only way for there to be nothing would be if one didn't exist.

Right now the only thing about her left existing – as miraculous as that alone was – was her mind. It was frantically trying to make sense of the invisible imagery of a quantum sized probability landscape, while the inaudible sounds of her body being torn apart spread through the subatomic vacuum in an impossible echo, and the intangible pain of being stitched back together, piece by infinitesimally tiny piece, wracked a body that didn't exist.

This time, she didn't scream.

She couldn't have, even if she had wanted to, because just as she materialized, she crashed into a body of water. It was everywhere, filling her eyes and mouth as she struggled to get her bearings again, to gain control over the limbs that hadn't been there just a moment ago.

Once she had discerned the general concept of up and down, she noticed that something else was wrong. There was pain, in one of the limbs. It took her another, agonizingly long moment to understand where exactly the feeling was coming from and what the cause of it was.

It was her left hand. She couldn't move it. Frantically, she felt for it with her right, and quickly realized that it was impaled by a string of metallic wire, affixed on both ends to the structure that held the radioactive material submerged a few meters down below in the cooling pool. A memory flashed before her eyes, of a pencil snapped in half, the pieces separated by a sheet of paper.

That was why she was supposed to stand still during the jump.

She pulled on her hand, but the cable had pierced right through the palm and was lodged somewhere between bones and sinews. There was no way she could simply rip her hand away from it. The pain was throbbing through her whole arm now, and as she opened her eyes, a cloud of blood whirled through the water before her. Her lungs were burning with the urge to draw a breath of air, and her strength was waning.

But she hadn't made that jump through time just to drown fifty years in the past.

With her free hand, she yanked on the wire forecfully. It didn't move. She brought her feet up to stabilize herself against the structure for leverage, and pulled again. The wire sharply cut into her palm, but she kept pulling. And with a sudden snap, it came loose.

The pain of threading its remains through the hole in her left hand was nothing compared to the fire raging in her lungs. She fought back the urge to curse violently, saving every last bit of breath she had, until she finally shot up to the surface of the water.

Never had a breath of air tasted so sweet, not even when she had jumped for the first time and stepped out of the bunkers. Coughing and panting, she pulled herself out of the pool with great effort. For a moment, she remained on all threes, with her injured hand held close to her chest, and heaved up a gush of metallic-tasting water. She briefly wondered if she had swallowed it, or if her body had materialized around it.

With a groan of pain, she finally collapsed to the floor and rolled over on her back.

Slowly, as her lungs were filling with breath after breath, the burning pain in her chest subsided and only the dull throbbing in her hand remained. But the hardware of her suit had already recognized the damage, and underneath the fabric of the glove she felt strings of nanofibers snaking along her skin to patch up the wound and stop the bleeding. The system used to be able to inject painkillers into her body in such situations, but that was one of the few functions she hadn't been able to fix. Still, this was better than nothing.

She just rested there on the floor for a while, waiting for the suit to fix the hole in its fabric and her hand, when her gaze fell on the HUD of her visor.

20:39. Four minutes late.

Slowly, she raised her head and looked around. The room was exactly the same. Empty, and only dimly lit by the blue glow emanating from the cooling pool. The only sound was the soft splashing of the water as the waves of her struggle subsided.

She flexed her hand tentatively and winced briefly. The wire had been thin and had only left a small hole, and while the feeling was far from pleasant, but she had dealt with worse. She got up on her feet, and made her way to the exit.

The device on her wrist was quiet, nothing displayed on her visor and she had to rely on her intuition and memory from her first trip to this time and place as she stalked along the corridors of the research station.

A tingling sensation at the back of her neck made her shudder. It descended down her spine and then crept back up in continuous waves. She had a hunch what it meant, but she chose not to think about it long enough to indulge in that quietly nagging sense of regret that crept up. She could only hope the device, at least, would be able to reset or recover so she could use it again.

She came to a sudden halt before the bunker door. She wouldn't have to worry about cracking the mechanism, at least, because it was already wide open.

Her visor displayed the time as 21:32.

The last time she had passed through this door, it had been about fifteen minutes earlier, thanks to the guidance of the computer at her wrist.

Once more, she didn't dwell on the thought. It had been bad enough to run into one's own grandmother. She was glad she hadn't met herself face to face.

As she stepped outside to look at the motorway bridge overhead, she tried to come up with what to do next. Whether it was the shock of the jump or the general impulsiveness of her decision, her mind seemed wiped blank. Everything had seemed so simple just moments ago: Go back in time, change the world for the better. Not just through a minimal action. Through whatever it would take. And then, she would stay to see the outcome of her actions, and not have to die believing she had saved some enigmatic parallel world that may or may not exist.

But now, all thoughts in her head were focused on her past, and what she had left behind, in the future of this world. She wiped a tear form her eye before it could roll down over her cheek, and shook her head to clear it again. This precarious past was not the time to reminisce or regret her actions in a far gone future.

Her gaze fell on the device on her wrist, and she tapped the display with growing irritation.

ERROR: OVERLOAD. That was all it spat out in response. RESTARTING...

Once again, it seemed like she would have to make use of her own brain. At least this time, she didn't have to be as careful about the ripples she left behind.

So she went over her plan as she drove through the dark and rainy streets on a stolen motorbike a few minutes later. The neon lights danced between the veils of water, and rendered the asphalt a sleek black mirror that reflected fragmented rainbows in a mesmerizing spectacle. The city was dark and light at the same time, just like her heart was heavy and at the same time she couldn't help but revel in a feeling of freedom she had never felt like this.

No restrictions. No obligations. Nothing left to lose.

She glanced at the bracelet, the computer that held vast amounts of data on what was supposed to happen not just tonight, but over the next fifty years.

I can do this. I know what will happen, so all I have to do is make sure... it doesn't.

Disgruntled honks and shouts from pedestrians reached her ear from time to time as she wove the bike through the busy traffic, but she ignored them. Subterfuge didn't matter any longer. If she ran somebody over tonight, that would certainly change the future. But everything she knew about the future wouldn't matter from tonight on anyway, so why bother?

She pulled the brakes so suddenly that the bike almost flipped on the rain-slick street, and she barely brought it to a skidded halt as a realization hit her with the force of a lightning clash.

But if Pandora dies tonight... I don't know what kind of future that will bring.

Minimal change, maximum effect. The credo still held true – if she wanted to make best use of the data at her disposal, to ensure the best possible outcome for the world, she had to do it through minimal changes. Small ripples that would steer the outcome of this into a safe harbor, rather than a giant wave that might come crashing down with enough force to sink it all. She was alone, after all, so to change the fate of the world, she had to do it smartly, and not through brute force.

So to truly do anything, I have to... do nothing?

She looked down at the device on her wrist, which was still conspicuously silent and displayed nothing on her visor except for the current date and time. 23:55, March 15th, 2107. Above her, the lights of the city were glistening through the veil of rain. In two hours, the rain would have stopped, and Pandora Caine would be dead at the hand of her granddaughter.

I have to stop... myself.

She turned around the bike, and raced back towards the tower.

~ ~ ~

Alyssa had never seen nor heard an analogue clock in her life, but as she sprinted up the emergency stair case to the penthouse, she began to understand the meaning of the expression "the clock is ticking". Her own body seemed like the clock, and time was ticking away with her every frantic heartbeat.

The window of opportunity to pass through the main door undetected had passed, but she still had to avoid drawing any attention to her presence, so she opted for another kind of window. When she climbed up the last elevator shaft, she passed the maintenance tunnel she had taken the last time and continued onward. Through a hatch at the top, she arrived on the rooftop, but she didn't have time to pause and admire the fantastic view. Her visor informed her that time was running out.

She sprinted to the eastern side of the roof, and skidded over the edge while grabbing it at the last moment to slow her momentum and allow herself to swing back towards the wall. She almost crashed through the window right into Espira's office, but the glass was reinforced, and so she merely bumped against it. Her feet came to rest on the small ledge left by the half opened glass pane, and she slid through the crack, pushing it further open as she went, until she tumbled into the room.

Hastily, she clambered to her feet, struggling for a moment with the obnoxious beige-gold curtains. Finally free from the fabric she dashed to the door and bolted into Espira's bedroom.

Two heads turned, two pairs of lilac eyes widened in surprise.

"What the fuck-" Pandora and Alyssa exclaimed in unison, just as Alyssa raised her gun and shot the weapon right out of her other self's hand.

Silence descended over the room for a moment, but her own breathing and heartbeat were loud enough to rival an orchestra. It was eerie to find herself faced with not just one but two people who looked so much like the image she saw in the mirror each day. Their faces were the same, but where Pandora had an air of authority and glamor around her, Alyssa's look was untamed and ferocious. Both women exuded their own kind of lethality.

Alyssa realized that she hadn't quite thought about where to go from here. It was clearly too late to talk herself out of doing this, so the timeline was likely already disrupted. Even if Pandora, from the look on her face, had absolutely no clue what was going on, she would definitely not be the same after this.

"Who the fuck are you?" the other Alyssa finally broke the silence, staring at her in disbelief.

"Make an educated guess," she scoffed. "Now listen. You have to stop this. Killing her won't work. If you jump back you'll arrive in the same future and everyone is still gonna die. But if we change it in the here and now-"

"Jump back?" The other Alyssa sounded bewildered. "I never thought... I didn't think I could... Why would I-?"

Alyssa looked at the other woman, at herself, with consternation.

"Leon," was all she said.

The other Alyssa's eyes widened.

"But he will die," Alyssa said, "Everyone will die, if we don't do something about it, because they will turn off the air just a day after the jump, do you understand? We have to stay here and fix this."

The Other looked back and forth between her and Pandora, who had been shell-shocked into silence by the surreal situation. She had backed away, until she had hit the wall in an effort to increase the distance between herself and the two Alyssas.

"Stay here?" the other woman repeated. "If I can jump back, why would I chose to stay here? If I could see him again-"

She pulled the visor over her eyes and moved her hand over the display of her bracelet but froze. Behind the shadow of the screen, Alyssa could vaguely see her eyes dart across the displayed information, before her gaze became more distant again and focused on Alyssa's face.

"It's broken... I can't... I can't jump back..."

Alyssa cursed under her breath as she realized her mistake. Surely, this must have upset something. If her past self couldn't go back to 2157, to witness what was happening in Room 57, and to make the decision to come here - her head began to hurt as she tried to wrap her mind around it.

"This is bad..." she mumbled.

"It's because of you," the Other suddenly said.

"What?

"It's... two anti-time crystals in the same point in time," the Other said thoughtfully. "That's like two pencils trying to tear through the paper in the same spot."

She tore her headgear off and threw it to the side, and faced Alyssa with an angry glare from lilac eyes.

"You! You upset everything! Because of you I can't go back!"

"Listen to me," Alyssa raised her hands in a placatory gesture. "Calm down-"

"What on earth is going on?" Pandora's voice came quietly from the side.

"Forget about it," the Other snapped at the woman. Her voice dropped to a low growl as she shifted her stance, "There's seriously enough of us here. I'll rid this time of you!"

Her mirror image's face was distorted with madness and fury as the Other charged at her.

_______

A.N.
I'll be trying to slowly untangle the intricacies of the time travel aspect of the story in this and the next two chapters. If at any point anything makes no sense whatsoever, if you feel like Alyssa's thoughts are not conclusive enough to explain her motivations etc. please let me know. I put a lot of timey-whimey thoughts into this, but it's entirely possible that at some point my brain got wound into too much of a knot for me to spot mistakes.