Moebius 2157 | ONC2019 Short List [Complete]

6 | Incomplete

Alyssa had often thought about death, and over the past months with Last Hope she had found herself thinking that ceasing to exist would probably be fundamentally different from it.

As she watched her own grandmother collapse before her, dead before her mother was even born, a sense of dread overcame her. A revolting feeling gripped hold of her entire body and caused her to shudder, and as it spread throughout her, she thought that this would be it. She thought that she would break apart into atomic fragments now, just like at the jump, and from there into less than that. Into pure energy probably, that would dissipate without leaving a trace in this place, in this time, except for perhaps raising the temperature of the room by a fraction of a degree.

But as she watched the blood around Pandora's body begin to pool and soak the crimson carpet with a slightly darker shade of red, Alyssa realized that her revulsion was a very visceral, real feeling. It was because of the sight of this woman, who looked almost exactly like herself, lying before her feet with a bullet hole in her head. It was like watching her own death without it actually coming to pass. It was all the fear and existential dread of mortality that she had pushed back for the past decade, welling up all at once.

She had seen so much death, pain and destruction - she had caused a lot of it herself - and had walked away from it unfazed, that it felt oddly selfish to feel so appalled, so deeply touched by this one dead body before her now.

"Pandora?"

In the bed, the President stirred between his sheets and tried to raise his head, but he was too weak.

"Pandora?" he asked again in a hoarse whisper.

Alyssa stepped over the body, and towards the bed, forcing down the urge to vomit. The guards at the far end of the floor didn't seem to have heard the shot, or they would have barged into the room already. She wondered if she ought to clean up the blood, or hide the body. The plan hadn't covered this eventuality, and the device on her wrist didn't seem to be able to adapt to this turn of events.

As for the President – she wasn't entirely certain if she still had to kill him, too, but from the looks of the man, if she just walked away right now, the job would do itself anyway.

Espira looked up at her with glassy eyes and a feverish gaze. His skin was a pallid yellow against the white sheets, and his breath was labored.

"Pandora, what happened?"

He didn't seem to notice the differences in appearance between Pandora and Alyssa, like her much shorter hair, and the black headgear with the visor resting on her head.

"Just a nightmare," she replied quietly. "But it will all be well from now on. So sleep now, Frederic."

She hesitated for a moment, then she leaned down and patted his hand reassuringly. The man closed his eyes with a raspy sigh and she turned around to leave. Behind her, she could hear him draw another deep breath, and then, just silence.

The quantum computer displayed nothing as she stepped out of the President's bedroom, and she realized that she didn't know where to go from here. She had only planned her mission up until this moment. She had suspected that something would go terribly wrong, and still there was a lingering ominous feeling when she thought about the body in the room behind her. Like a strange sense of a déjà-vu and a premonition mingled into one.

Her gaze wandered through the room aimlessly. Heavy, beige colored curtains adorned with golden tassels lined the entire wall behind the black desk, moving softly in a breeze. She moved them to the side. Behind them, the entire wall was covered by a window front, providing an excellent view on the city below, with its flickering, colorful lights dancing through the darkness and making the outside world look like a mesmerizing kaleidoscopic diorama.