Moebius 2157 | ONC2019 Short List [Complete]

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..."