For the next two weeks, she kept coming back to the research station every day. She told herself that she was only doing it because with the upcoming demise of humanity, there was little else for her to do. So she figured she might as well let the scientists show her around, and try to explain to her what they were doing, although she understood preciously little of it. Also, sometimes they would offer her coffee.

The sleek appearance of the research station crumbled upon closer inspection. A missing piece of glass here, a dislodged metal bar there, cracks in the floor, dust bunnies in the corners. The place was still comparably clean, but also very empty. And the only resource they had aplenty was space. The scientists had lived in seclusion, with seldom visits to the bunker city, and they had nothing to spare but the occasional cup of coffee. Only a small section of the vast research station was ventilated at all.

To her disappointment, the glorious saviors she had imagined turned out to be just a bunch of renegade eggheads, hiding like rats in the darkest corners of an abandoned sector of the bunker city. Well, their corner was actually very well lit. But they were nothing like she had imagined. And what they wanted from her, was the one thing she had sworn to never do again: to kill.

But over time, Alyssa realized that what they offered was in fact exactly what she needed. Not food, or water, or air, or a promise of luxury and comfort. As slim as it was, as crazy as their idea seemed, she soon understood why they had approached her, of all people. She didn't just have the perfect qualifications for the job. She was deficient in the one currency that they would be able to pay her in: hope.

The station and the people working there began to feel more and more familiar with every visit. And two weeks after they first contacted her, the three lead researchers invited her to a meeting, to finally explain to the former agent what exactly it was that she would be signing up for.

"The principle is simple," Baker began, as he shuffled over to a whiteboard in the small meeting room that they had convened in.

Physicist Solomon Baker was so old that one would think he wouldn't have to worry about living long enough to die of suffocation in the near future. Whenever Alyssa encountered him, she felt the urge to reach out to support his scraggy figure. He was thin like a skeleton, and stood, walked and even sat precariously hunched over. But the old man had fighting spirit in him, and if food, water and air ran out anytime soon, Alyssa didn't doubt that Baker would be able to continue to survive a couple of days longer than anyone else just on sheer dedication.

Alyssa watched wordlessly as Baker began to draw jagged notes and schematics on the whiteboard.

"About 140 years ago, scientists discovered a previously predicted quantum system called a time crystal. Now first you need to understand that a regular crystal is a very rigid atomic structure, which repeats periodically in space..."

"A pattern," Doctor Bellamy, sitting next to Alyssa elaborated at her slightly befuddled look.

Leon Bellamy was a physicist in his early thirties who had worked with Baker already before the war, and aside from quantum physics he was an expert at translating Baker's lingo into something a regular person could understand.

Meanwhile, the old man rambled on. "...given the translational symmetry and the invariance of the system..."

"The structure of a crystal is repetitive, over and over," Leon explained. "You can move it around in space, like flipping it over, but the structure will stay the same."

"...now a time crystal, on the other hand, does not just break symmetry in space. Based on a predicted ability to break temporal symmetry as well..."

"You can imagine it like an oscillation that never stops," Leon leaned in closer as he whispered to her. "And just like the repetitive, spatial pattern of a crystal doesn't change at any point in space, this temporal pattern of a time-crystal will not change over time."

Alyssa nodded slowly, her gaze still glued to the whiteboard, where Baker continued to scribble something utterly illegible with his arthritic hand.

"Following that great discovery," the old man continued, "There has been theoretical work that predicted a way to harness this property and create a so-called anti-time crystal, which-"

"Honestly," Alyssa interrupted him, "Is any of this really relevant to what we're about to do here?"

"Ah..." Baker scratched his head, which was adorned by a laurel of fuzzy white hair, and pondered for a moment. "No. I suppose not."

"All you have to understand," Leon said softly, "Is that fifty years ago, somebody who was working on these things inadvertently created something like... an anchor point in time."

Baker cleared his throat. "And we now have the means to access this point... we think."

"You think," Alyssa repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"We are fairly certain." Baker nodded.

"Terrific," she said drily.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and for a moment just tried to digest what these lunatics were telling her. They had told her before that the mission would be risky, and that she would have to trust in their expertise on the scientific matters. She still could not wrap her head around it, but as Baker's unnecessarily elaborate explanation clearly showed, they had put a lot of thought into this.

"Okay," Alyssa said somewhat hesitantly. "Now what does this mean for the mission?"

"Ah, yes. It means that we can send you back in time but only to this specific point in the past, fifty years ago," Baker said.

"Will I be able to come back?"

The room fell silent at her question. The scientists looked at each other with what Alyssa couldn't help but recognize as unease.

"If the first jump works... that... will be the least of your worries," Baker finally said. "There are many theories about time travel, but since it has never been achieved, we simply... don't know what will happen. It's entirely possible that just your presence in the past will already alter the timeline significantly. Imagine a change as small as breathing an oxygen atom that was supposed to form a free radical that would damage somebody's DNA and cause cancer-"

"Wait a moment," Alyssa cut in. "So you're telling me that the smallest change can fuck everything up. And yet you want me to go back and assassinate a man?"

Baker shrugged. "We don't really have a choice. All concerns about the robustness of the approach aside, the target has been chosen based on extensive simulations. It's the minimum feasible change that should have a maximally beneficial effect on the future."

"A single sacrifice for a greater good..." Alyssa mumbled under her breath.

Leon cleared his throat. "But to answer your question. Yes, technically, the technology we have developed should allow you to jump back as well."

"There is more," Doctor Latrobe suddenly said.

Rosalind Latrobe was in her early fifties, but her small figure and her habit to wear her black hair, which had not a streak of white in it, in two thick braids made her look a lot younger. She had been quiet up until now, her gaze fixed on the stack of papers before her. Now she looked up and peered at Alyssa over the dark rims over her thick glasses. The former special agent recognized the look in the older woman's dark brown eyes. It was the same mixture of conviction and worry that she had seen in her superiors countless of times, when they were giving orders that they were personally conflicted about.

"Rosie, I don't believe-"

"Shut up, Baker," the woman cut him off. "She should know about all the implications before she agrees to this."

The two glared at each other, and perhaps Rosie's glasses had some sort of protective effect in their staring contest, because it was Baker who yielded and averted his eyes first.

"Alright..." he sighed.

"When you go back-" Rosie began.

"If she goes back," Leon interrupted.

"If you decide to do this and go back, there is a distinct chance that any change you make, no matter how insignificant, might lead to a future in which you are not born," Rosie said.

"And that means?"

"We cannot guarantee your safety. You might just... stop existing."

The former special agent retained a deadpan expression as she looked at the scientist, causing the other woman to squirm uneasily. This was staring contest she wouldn't win. Surely enough, Rosie averted her gaze.

"Just... poof? Just like that?" Alyssa asked.

Rosie furrowed her brow. "We don't know. But it's possible. Anything that might create a future in which you're not born might cause you to stop existing instantly. Emphasis on might."

"I see...."

Alyssa mulled that over as she crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair. She looked back and forth between the two older scientists. They clearly knew what they were asking of her. The proposed experiment – for lack of any better term – seemed utterly insane. At any point along the way this could go so catastrophically wrong that she began to think that dying on this mission might end up being the least undesirable fate.

She had often wondered what it would be like to die, but always with a certain detachment from the existential dread that came along with the thought for most people. Perhaps it was a result of her martial upbringing, further fueled by her early military training and her career as an agent. Death had been her closest companion for almost a decade, and now that all her former colleagues were dead and everybody she had ever known and loved too, he was the only companion left.

But whatever it would be like, they would all die anyway, sooner or later. Considering the decrepit state of the bunker city, most likely sooner.

Next to her, Leon whispered, "But you know... we would understand if you don't-"

"So if I jump and don't turn to dust the moment I set foot in 2107," Alyssa cut him off, "and provided I manage to kill the target... what's the use? How could this prevent any of this?" She gestured around at the walls of the bunker room.

Rosie pushed together the papers before her into a neat stack and avoided Alyssa's gaze as she spoke.

"Your target will be President Frederic Espira," she said in a grave tone. "Perhaps you wouldn't know of this, since they didn't exactly teach it at schools in recent years. But numerous decisions made by President Espira during his second term have undermined our constitution and thereby served as the groundwork for turning the country from a democracy into a dictatorship. His successors then made ample use of that, and it's what has led our country and countless others into this idiotic war."

"The target... is the President," Alyssa summarized, staring at the woman blankly.

"Former president, yes. We can only send back one person – hence we need somebody with your skill set and experience at working alone - and we are further limited by the single time point that we can access, a day fifty years ago. There's only so much a single person can achieve... But our simulations show that most likely, if we take Espira out of the equation, chances are good that World War III will never happen."

Alyssa let that sink in for a moment, but then she shook her head.

"There's always war," she muttered gloomily. "If not in our country, then somewhere else. Even if we prevent this one, who's to say there won't be another somewhere else that kicks off the apocalypse?"

"True, but it's our best chance," Leon said. "Our last hope."

Alyssa was about to object again, but when she met his gaze she fell silent. There was just a hint of an optimistic and yet melancholic smile on his lips that somehow compelled her to keep the rest of her disaster fantasies to herself.

"You are our last hope, Miss Caine," Baker added.

She eyed the three scientists, pondering their words. Baker looked at her expectantly. Rosie pushed her glasses up her nose and gave her a quick, determined nod. Leon just stared at her blankly, his smile suddenly frozen in time and space like an anti-time crystal.

Leon was about her age, with just a few traces of grey among his tousled dark hair, and chestnut colored eyes full of compassion and kindness. He was an idealist, but unlike his two colleagues, he didn't just reserve that sentiment for their insane research.

Over the past few days, Leon had tried his best to explain to her what all of this was about. She had noticed his growing unease, and how torn he was between convincing her of the potential of Last Hope, and subtly trying to talk her out of risking her life for it. But as she looked at him now, she knew that Leon, too, didn't have a shred of doubt in him that their plan could work. It seemed to her that he wasn't so much worried that the jump might not work, but he worried about her being the one to make it.

She realized that among the four of them, Leon was the only one who didn't fully buy into what Last Hope was selling, even though he was a leading member of team. He still had some hope of his own left, something that kept him going and perhaps allowed him the delusional dream that this world wasn't way beyond saving in the here and now.

Alyssa didn't have that luxury. And so she would serve that greater cause, or die trying.

"I will do it. I will make the jump."

Word Count: 2342
Total: 7185