Two months after she had dedicated herself to their insane cause, Project Last Hope informed her that preparations were complete and so Alyssa, armed and armored, was heading down to the secluded research station for what would likely be the last time.

With rediscovered ease she moved in complete silence, not even her footsteps echoed through the corridors. She had spent the past two months training, honing old reflexes, and preparing herself for that one part of the mission that she could prepare for. At least when it came to killing, she knew what to expect. That part of the job was like riding a bike - something your body remembered, even if your mind had tried very hard to forget.

First, with some spare components the scientists had managed to allocate for her, she repaired the mechanical parts of her old combat suit. It was a relic from her time on the surface that she had kept hidden among her few possessions. It felt nice to wear it again. It still fit like a glove, unlike the standard combat uniform that was issued to members of Security.

The suit was uniformly black, reinforced with carbon fiber but still highly flexible and light. Woven into the fabric were nanofibers that enhanced the strength of her muscles. She had even managed to get the headgear to work again, after it had taken some damage during the exodus two years ago. Now the visor that concealed the upper half of her face and her striking purple eyes was dormant, but it could display all kinds of useful parameters about her surroundings and herself. She had turned it off while she walked to the abandoned sector. She hadn't managed to mute the incessant, nagging alarm informing her of the critically low oxygen levels.

The gun was the only thing she hadn't looked at during those two months, right up until she had taken it out of the box tonight.

She had trained again to shoot of course, to make sure her aim was steady, but only in simulations. Although she had to spend most of her meager savings in the arcades on Level Three, it had been worth it, and now she was almost as good as she had once been. The thought that she probably would never get to beat her own high score in Space Zombie Marauder Attack 3 made her feel weirdly wistful.

Suddenly, something caught her attention in the darkness behind her. A movement just at the corner of her eye. She mentally scolded herself for getting so lost in thought and not paying closer attention to her surroundings. She had honed her body and fixed her suit, but she would have to work on her vigilance again, too.

She continued walking and didn't turn around to look what was behind her, until she moved around another corner, and slipped into the shadows.

To the person who had followed her, it must have seemed like she had disappeared into thin air. But he didn't get to wonder long where she might have gone. She charged at the man, aiming her fist at his stomach. Her knuckles made contact with something hard, and she realized that he was wearing body armor under his ragged clothes. The realization only made her pause for a split second, before she opted to hit his face instead.

The looter's muffled scream tore through the silence of the empty corridor. He staggered back, and Alyssa shifted her stance, ready to throw another punch. She didn't want to kill but one man tonight, but if this one stood between her and her target -

She hesitated. Somehow, her fingers had found their way to her knife, and now she couldn't quite recall how she had pushed the man against the wall, and the blade against his neck.

Panicked, the man stared back at her, searching for her eyes behind the dark visor, and she froze.

He had the same eyes.

They were light blue and watery and not brown, but they had that same expression of desperation, were underlined by the same purple shadows, and underneath them were the same sharp cheekbones, almost cutting through the papery skin of his hollow face. The look in them was different though. This man was not surprised. Only afraid, and very much so.

"Please, I don't..."

"What are you doing here?" she hissed.

This was an abandoned area, and Project Last Hope had put up their base here precisely because nobody in their right mind would come here and stumble upon their work by accident. There was almost no oxygen in these corridors, and the only reason why Alyssa could walk safely through them was because she was wearing an oxygen mask. The man wasn't.

His breath was shallow and raspy, but she quickly realized that that wasn't just because of the thin air. A terrible disease must have made its home in his chest, and with his every breath it seemed to rattle on his rib cage like a prisoner on the bars of his cell.

For a moment, she stared at the man blankly, then she finally let go of him and backed away. He collapsed against the wall, his coughing a haunting, sickening sound that resounded eerily between the metal walls surrounding them.

"Why did you follow me?" she asked briskly.

Suddenly, the weapon resting in its holster on her right thigh seemed unbearably heavy, as she pondered how much the man knew, how much he might have seen, how long he might have been following her-

"I just thought you might... have..." The man's voice was wavering with every wheezy breath. "I thought you had a stash down here."

"A stash?"

"You know. Some stuff... hidden away, where others can't find it. I..." He coughed, fluids bubbling in his lung. "I'm sorry. I thought... if I take just a little bit, you wouldn't notice, and..."

"Is that how you got that armor you're wearing?"

The looter raised his head and looked at her, with his watery-blue eyes now wet with tears.

"He was already dead," the man whispered. "He wouldn't need it any longer anyway... I know it's wrong, and I.... I'm sorry, but... I have a daughter, and she's so hungry. And I just thought..."

"A daughter, huh?"

Alyssa wasn't sure if he was telling the truth or just coming up with a lie on the spot to invoke her pity. He probably didn't know that he wouldn't have to.

"How old?"

"Six..."

So she was barely four when we came down here, she realized.

She reached for her pocket, and the man backed away, his eyes widening in terror.

"Relax," she said. "Here. Take this."

The man stared at the small, rectangular object that she held out to him. The metal was tarnished, but still stood out against the black-gloved palm of her hand.

"...a stash?"

"My room," she clarified.

"Wha-?"

"Level five, sector three beta, corridor twelve. Fourth door on the left."

As the man didn't react, she pushed the small key into his hand and closed his fingers around it.

"Just... promise me one thing," she said. "There's a poster. Of a lake and a mountain range."

The man looked at her, confusion slowly drowning out the terror in his expression.

"Give that to your daughter. I don't care about the rest. Use it, sell it, burn it for warmth. Whatever."

"W-why?"

"I won't need it any longer anyway..." she said quietly and shrugged.

She took another step back, while the man looked up at her face, concealed behind the visor and the oxygen mask, and then down at the key in his hand again with a confused furrow on his brow.

"And now get the hell out of here before you suffocate," Alyssa said sternly. "It's not safe down here. There's killers and looters abound."

He couldn't see the small smile that tugged at her lips under the oxygen mask, and paled even more at her words. He just nodded slowly and shuffled along the wall, until he was past her and then hurriedly disappeared into the darkness of the corridor.

Alyssa stood there for a few more minutes. The weapon resting against her thigh felt somewhat lighter now, and somehow, the thought occurred to her that it might have actually been the key in her pocket that had weighed her down.

Twenty minutes later, she sat in the improvised medical examination room, undergoing a last briefing with her favorite three eggheads while two other scientists did a final check on the hardware.

"The device will convert matter into energy," Baker explained. "And that energy will be brought to resonate with the same frequency as the anti-time crystals. Once full resonance is achieved, the energy will be linked with the anchor in 2107, just like the crystals themselves are linked to that point in the past."

She rubbed one of the small lumps on her wrist. Numerous such nodes were part of the miracle device and had been implanted all over her body, but how all that amazing technology fit under her skin at all still completely baffled her.

"From there on, we aren't entirely sure what will happen." Rosie said.

"But we expect that you will re-materialize in the same spot in 2107," Baker concluded.

The scientist who had inspected the nodes along her spine with some sort of scanner stepped away and signified her that she could get dressed again, so she hopped from the medical examination table.

"The same spot?" Alyssa asked, as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of her suit again.

Baker nodded. "We can translate your energy only relative to the anchor, so we have to ensure..."

She threw a questioning look in Leon's direction, but he stood with his back to her, checking something on a tablet. She hadn't missed the fact that he had avoided to look at her from the moment she had been asked to undress.

"...allowing passage across the temporal dimension, but the conundrum of having no means for spatial displacement required..." Baker's rambling continued unhindered.

"Aha?" Alyssa said doubtfully.

"Baker, you really are like a convergent series," Rosie rolled her eyes at the older scientist, who looked back at her, puzzled.

"...monotonic and limited." She stuck out her tongue at him.

"Wha- how rude!" The old man huffed. "Mathematicians, pah!"

Their bickering made Alyssa smile. Over the past weeks, she had grown rather fond of it. It certainly helped to lift the gloomy mood whenever the topic of the various potential ways in which all of this could go horrifically wrong came up.

"Alright. Let me try to explain. Ever read Flatland by Edwin Abbot?" Rosie asked Alyssa, who shook her head.

"Well. Never mind. Let's see..."

She produced that stack of papers that she always carried around, and Alyssa wondered if she had only done so because she had been waiting for this precise moment to make use of it. Rosie placed it on a nearby table and pulled out a pencil. On the backside where they were free of print, she began to draw a series of circles, one on each sheet.

"The way our universe works, we are able to observe three spatial dimensions. Additionally, we observe the passage of time, which can be considered a fourth dimension. Now imagine a two-dimensional world, like this sheet of paper."

Rosie held up one of the papers, displaying a single circle at the edge of the sheet.

"This is what the passage of time would look like to a circle living in this paperworld, going about its daily business."

She flipped the sheets, one after the other, and with each consecutive image, the circle appeared to move slightly further along the paper.

"We, however, are three-dimensional beings. For us, it doesn't really look like time is passing. From our point of view..." She placed the papers next to each other on the table, and tapped on the circle on each one in emphasis. "We can easily access each point in time that the circle has experienced."

"So... if the circle could access the third spatial dimension, it would be able to... time travel?" Alyssa asked.

"It might be able to see the future, or the past, just like we see the circle's future and past." Rosie said. "What we are attempting here, by having you jump through time, is really more like this."

She rearranged the papers into a neat stack again, and placed the tip of her pencil against the top. Then, she pushed and twirled, until the graphite tip had torn through a few of the layers. Alyssa understood, even before Rosie removed the top most papers to reveal the mark the pencil had left on one of the lower sheets.

"So I will come out in the same spot that I jump from, got it."

"Exactly. And that's why the spot we chose for your jump is absolutely crucial," Rosie reiterated. "Because if you jump in a place that hasn't been exactly the same fifty years ago..."

She picked up the pencil again, and held it between her fingers for a moment. And then, with surprising strength, she suddenly snapped it in half. She placed the pieces on the table, and put her hand down between them, like a separating wall.

"You might come out on the other end like this."

Alyssa stared at the broken pencil, unsure what she felt about this new piece of information. She trusted the scientists with her life already, but they really made it increasingly difficult to believe in their technology. She was ripped out of her thoughts when Leon put his hand on her arm.

"I think that's enough now, Rosie. Thank you," he broke the silence of the moment. "Ally, let's go for a walk, shall we?"

She nodded slowly, and let herself be pulled out of the room by Leon.

"Meet you in thirty minutes at the jump spot!" Rosie called somewhere behind them.

She walked through the hallways at Leon's side in silence. Over the past weeks, she had grown increasingly fond of the company of the three scientists, and every moment she hadn't spent training or sleeping, she had spent here with them. She had ended up particularly close with Leon, because he was usually the one to explain to her what others were saying and doing. He was really good at that, and sometimes he would even give her little lectures on Physics.

She had never cared much about those things before, but as he spoke, she would always listen with rapt attention. She still understood far too little about the technology to truly know what they were talking about most of the time. But she appreciated Leon's efforts to make her understand, albeit lately he sometimes seemed to attempt to ease his own worries about the plan much more so than hers.

Either way, she always enjoyed his company, even if it was just spent in silence, like right now.

Their walk led them to the far end of the abandoned research section, an unused control room that had been stripped of all computers and anything useful long ago. There wasn't much left, but the room had a large window that provided a view on the jump spot down below. She understood now why the scientists referred to the place like that, and that it actually meant the precise spot on an elevated platform in the center of the room, and not the room itself.

"What about air molecules?" Alyssa asked, as she peered down through the window.

"What about them?"

"What about the air in that place where I will come out?"

"Ah! I see what you mean. Well, any gas will be easily displaced as your body materializes again. So should fluids like water. Now, with solid matter... that's somewhat less likely..."

His voice trailed off as she turned around and met his gaze.

As a scientist working on quantum something or other, he probably encountered impossibly complex and mind boggling things on a daily basis. And yet, for some reason he still sometimes looked at her as if she was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen.

It's probably the eyes, Alyssa thought to herself. It usually was.

Except that he wasn't only looking at her eyes, sometimes.

Alyssa didn't give a damn about her appearance, even less than that since she had left Security . The self-maintenance she regularly did was to cut her hair with a knife to subdue the straw-like, blonde locks into a more or less convenient bob cut. But Leon's attention had a peculiar effect on her. He didn't make her feel like she wasn't putting enough effort into her appearance, like other men had before him. Strangely, he seemed to not just like her despite the minimal effort she put in, but because of it. It nonetheless made her feel maximally self-conscious.

"Hey."

His quiet voice ripped her out of her thoughts, and she realized that this time, she had been staring at him, long after he had torn his own gaze away from her and redirected it at the window to the other room. Now he turned to face her again with a smile on his lips.

"I got something for you."

He reached into the pocket of his lab coat, and pulled out a small bundle of fabric. It was lighter than it looked like when he placed it in Alyssa's open hands. She untied the knotted ends, and her eyes widened in surprise.

"Are those..."

"Cookies," he confirmed. "No chocolate chips, unfortunately. Those were a bit hard to come by."

"What- but how did.... Why?"

"Remember last week, after the meeting... we talked about what we missed most about the surface. And you said..."

"I know I said that but I never thought..."

They were almost too precious to eat, but she couldn't resist trying. She picked one up. It was tiny, barely large enough to take a bite instead of eating it whole, but she wanted to savor it slowly. It was slightly crumbly, not too crunchy, and the perfect blend of sweet and tart.

"Lemon," Alyssa whispered in disbelief. "Seriously Leon, where did you get these?"

"I made them myself," Leon said quietly, and a hint of a blush appeared on his cheeks.

"No way. Where did you even find the sugar? The eggs? The lemon?!"

"I... improvised," he admitted with a crooked grin.

He must have spent hours between a kitchen and a chemistry lab, trying to come up with a way to mock the zesty flavor so perfectly, to imitate the crumbly consistency and blend it all together into pure perfection. Her eyes were filling with tears of joy at the delectable flavor.

"You like them?"

"They're heavenly."

She chewed on her lip as she looked down at the rest of the cookies in her hands, conflicted about having another one. She held them cradled like precious jewels, and she thought no words in the world would suffice to express how much she cherished this gift.

"Thank you..."

"Don't mention it."

"So... are these supposed to last for the trip?"

"Nah. They're for now. Unfortunately you can't really bring anything extra. There's only so much energy at our disposal to get something across. The system is capable of transporting the matter making up your body, but it gets harder for anything beyond that. Like the weapons you carry. We had to make precise calculations, almost down to the last atom."

"Oh. Well aren't you glad then that I wear my hair so short..." she mumbled, while munching on another cookie.

"Uh- what?"

She swallowed and cleared her throat. "Well if it's down to the last atom, I guess you're glad that you saved a couple there. Because my hair is short."

"I... I am glad," Leon said sheepishly. "I mean, not because of the atoms, but because it suits you and-"

"You'll have to help me finish these," she interrupted him, holding out a cookie to him. "Because there isn't much time and I- well..."

They looked at each other for a few seconds in wordless silence, and just like the cookies in her hands Alyssa was under the impression that there was a deep significance to all of this that she was too slow to really comprehend in that moment. She thought that time was a funny thing, with how the last two months had gone by in a breeze, and yet the things that had happened before she had joined Last Hope seemed like eons ago, and how those last thirty minutes until the jump could feel so short, and yet this one moment seemed to last an eternity. Still, it passed far too quickly.

"Sure. Of course," Leon finally said with a smile.

He took a step towards her, and tentatively took her hand in his. The world seemed to grind to halt completely. She had stopped breathing and her heart was caught between two beats in her chest, as he guided her hand until she gently put the cookie in his mouth. When his lips brushed against the tips of her fingers for a moment, her mind was wiped blank and she lost herself in a dimensionless space without time.

As Alyssa walked into the jump spot thirty minutes later, the scientists made way for her as if she was a black shark moving through a swarm of white fish. She didn't really notice it. Her mind still felt strangely blank, detached from the reality of her situation and from what was about to happen. Whatever that would be, in the end. Her gaze was glued to the spot where she had been told to stand perfectly still during the jump. That seemed rather ironic, now that she thought about it.

Baker was standing at the far end of the room, checking some data on a wall screen. The entire place was so chock-full with functional technology that she couldn't help but feel a sense of awe and admiration for this ragtag group of people that had come together in this place. To amass all those resources and keep this project going in secret, right under the nose of the authorities, was nothing short of admirable. Everyone here had worked hard over the past two years and had certainly made sacrifices to make all of this possible. And now here she was, a rundown former special agent, and they were all counting on her.

"There have been many attempts at President Espira's life during his first term," Rosie reminded her. "So security will be tight. But you will be fine with this."

The scientist presented Alyssa with something that looked like a black bracelet. It was a miniature copy of the quantum computer that had calculated the odds of saving the world if Espira died. The version that Rosie now affixed onto Alyssa's wrist was designed to adapt her mission parameters on the go, if necessary. It held vast amounts of data on the past fifty years, from general historical events to things as specific as the guard rotations and floor plans of the president's penthouse suite.

"The advantage of planning with hindsight," Leon had once described it with a slightly smug grin. "It will integrate with the hardware in your suit, and will also serve as a remote control for the anti-time crystal nodes in your body. It's like the key to ignite the engine."

As Rosie connected the bracelet to her suit, her visor flared to life. A rainbow of code lines passed over it until the systems integrated and the visor showed only the normal heads-up display, plus one additional parameter: the current time and date, 19:06 on 15th March 2157.

"Isn't that time display kinda useless?" Alyssa asked Rosie. "It's not like I can set it to jump to any other time than the target time, right?"

"No, but we have absolutely no idea what is going to happen to you once we send you there," Baker came over and chimed in. "So... the crystals we have created allow this device to determine the local time, based on their resonant state and their temporal displacement from the anchor."

"They... uh...?"

"When you arrive, it should display 20:35, on March 15th 2107. That's when you'll know all worked well," Leon explained.

"So it's exactly fifty years, on the day," Alyssa realized.

"That's more of a coincidence," Rosie said. "We've been working on this thing for a year and a half. I take it as a good omen that we finished in time for the semi-centennial... future- " She pondered for a moment. "...future-past memorial day of Espira's assassination."

"A good omen, huh..." Alyssa mumbled to herself, as Leon stepped closer and adjusted the device to her wrist one more time.

"Hey Ally."

She looked up, and met his warm gaze. He gave her a smile, and a weird tingling sensation descended down along her spine. She figured it was probably the nodes, booting up in response to the bracelet.

"Be safe back there, okay?" Leon said.

Alyssa nodded slowly.

"I... I'll try to come back," she said quietly. "To a better future."

At her words, Leon's face fell for a split second. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Rosie put a hand on his arm and pulled him back.

"Godspeed, Miss Caine," Baker said formally.

"Good luck, Ally," Rosie said. "Whenever you're ready, just tap the display."

A dozen pairs of eyes were burning on her back as she ascended the rest of the platform, and when she turned around to face the scientists again, a strange sense of anxiety filled her. Almost like stage fright. Luckily, she was a woman of few words and anyway didn't have to remember any important lines that she had wanted to say. All she had to do was push a button.

She regretted now that she hadn't bothered to get to know all of the people of Last Hope better. She didn't even know all their names. But perhaps that was for the best. It would make it easier for them, too, in case they would have to scrape the splattered, bloodied remains of her body from the walls of this room, if this resonance thing went terribly wrong.

You have a mission, she reminded herself. This world is dying. These people are dying. And you can stop it.

She moved her hand over the input display of the bracelet.

No. You can prevent it.

Among the crowd, her gaze lingered on Leon's face for a while longer than anybody else's. He wore a strange, barely visible smile that didn't reach his eyes the way it usually would.

Your mission is to save this world. Not for people like yourself. But people like them.

She pressed the command on the display, and for a moment, she thought nothing was happening. But as that moment dragged out, longer and longer, a searing pain began to spread through her body, emanating from her spine, descending along every fiber of her body and making its home in every node that had been implanted within her. The agonizing feeling tore through her, splitting her apart, and she thought that every atom of her being must have been aching.

But as she dissolved into nothingness, so did the pain, and along with it, every other sensation. The feeling of the fabric of her suit against her skin, the weight of the weapon against her thigh, and the display of the bracelet under her hand. The feeling of a solid floor underneath her feet. The feeling of up and down in general, and even the passage of time.

Strangely, the last thing to fade from existence was the taste of lemon, long after her tongue had already disappeared.

A.N.
Dedicated to cosmogyral-delirium , because cookies.

Word Count: 4707
Total: 11892