Wes pushed away the entrance tarp, and they happened upon a scene that might as well have been frozen in time. The carpet was still covered in dry wall crumbs, the offending sledgehammer and other tools waited to be reunited with their owner, and the footsteps from a week-younger Wes and Jace were still fresh on the floor.

            “This is… kind of a head trip…” Jace mumbled.

            “Closest we’ve ever come to ‘doubling back,’” Wes replied. “I’m not looking forward to ever having to move around another version of ourselves.”

            “What if we don’t ‘fix’ the earthquake problem on our first attempt, then?”

            “Jace, if it really is a bomb, then we might not be around long enough to worry about that. You don’t have to come with me, you know. This really could be dangerous.”

            “No way, dude. The earthquake totally screws up my future, too. I need to see the reason I don’t currently exist. I’m with you all the way on this one.”

            “Heh. Brave kid.” Wes looked around the site. “We can’t entomb ourselves, but we can at least hide the murder weapons. Let’s toss the stuff in the elevator.”

            “Won’t we be trapped if we time-travel back to 1996 down there anyway?”

            “I don’t think it’s against the ‘rules’ to come back to our starting point and take the lift back up. As long as we do it, the bomb should stay diffused regardless.”

            “Wait, hold on… We haven’t even talked about how we’re going to deal with it in the first place. Did you work a summer job with the bomb squad or something?”

            “I wish. Look, we’ll figure something out when we see the thing. Worst case, I stick my quartz to the thing and send it to the far-off future. I figured out how.”

            “Hm. I guess that could work,” Jace said as Wes began prying off panels again.

            Once the way was open and the crowbar, sledge, and both flashlights were inside the elevator, the two stepped inside and Wes let the face-scanner from the future grant him access to the labs far below, which he now knew he would one day help create.

            They descended into the depths, and turned on their flashlights before the doors opened. After they stepped into the dusty crypt of a waiting area, Wes took out his metal keycard, took a deep breath, and approached the big blast door. Jace anxiously watched as his uncle dropped the card into the small slot on the side of the grand entrance.

            The security device let out a faint beep, and some subtle shudders in the walls and changes in air pressure signaled that the place was slowly coming back to life.

            After several minutes, dim emergency lights came on in the lobby, the air began to circulate, some machinery could be heard spinning up, and gears turned.

            “Sounds like generators are coming back online,” Wes surmised.

            “But there’s no way the lab could get back to 100%, right?” Jace wondered. “It’s been sitting here for, like, twenty years.”

            “As long as the door opens, we might be okay. I didn’t want to try getting the door open next April, when we have a time limit. We’ll time-skip once we’re inside.”

            Another minute went by, and the once impassable main entrance began to groan and slide open. The facility on the other side drew in the old air of the lobby, creating a noticeable breeze that beckoned in the duo. There was light on the other side, but not enough of it to make them feel safe navigating the strange place that itself had traveled through time. Keeping their torches going, they stepped through the door the moment it had opened wide enough to do so. It really was like walking into a sci-fi movie.

            The floors were a sterile, dark gray, matte metal, while the walls were similarly colored, made of large brushed metal panels. Between the segments were vertical strips of LED lights, although they seemed to be only just barely glowing. The central area of the lab was where three hallways converged, and it had nothing but a few chairs.

            “We should probably get a layout of the place first… Right?” Jace asked.

            “Before stumbling around in the dark in an unfamiliar underground lab from the future, while looking for a bomb? Yeah, probably a good idea.”

            “There aren’t, like, any signs pointing to where anything is…”

            “He probably never got around to putting them up. Um, let’s try left first.”

            Going down that hallway, a short one, led them to some frosted glass doors that had to be manually pried open with the crowbar, given that they couldn’t slide on their own with the lower power levels. The room beyond was the laboratory itself, filled with workstations, some of them missing components or nothing but empty desks. The screens were about as thin as the one in the lobby, and the four PC towers inside were solid black obelisks that Wes couldn’t even figure out how to open.

            “Ugh, they’re heavy…” he huffed as he picked one up for a moment.

            “Bet they’re expensive. But I don’t think this room’s important for us.”

            “I’m still a nerd at heart. I just wanted to see what’s next in computing.”

            “How much hard drive space do you think they got?”

            “No idea. I don’t even see a way to turn them on.” He plopped the heavy tower back onto the desk and thought aloud, “There’s a chance these are quantum machines.”

            “What’s that mean, exactly?”

            “Basically, super-advanced. If you’re calculating the physics of time travel, you might need something that can process multiple possibilities at the same time.”

            “I don’t get it, but I don’t think we should mess with too much down here.”

            “Just wish I could get some data out of these things, but… maybe they’re not even supposed to open. Huh…” He looked around one more time as they headed out. “My older, even more obsessed self must’ve pulled all-nighters in here, trying to crack some code. Probably trying to find out just what he was trying to crack in the first place.”

            “Sounds like this place turned you into a mad scientist.”

            “It’s not like I have some formal education in physics, but then again, a lot of the big discoverers in history didn’t. Spend enough time on something, and you’re going to stumble onto something. I had, will have, André around to guide me, too.”

            The right hallway of the junction was long and led to an uninteresting metal door, so Wes chose to go down the central corridor next. The lights toward the end of it were particularly dull, leaving the two to rely on their portable bulbs. They stopped at another security door, and hoping it had enough power to work, Wes slid his keycard into another slot. It let out a beep and the door unlocked, but didn’t open. The crowbar came through again, granting them access to the place’s inner sanctum.

            The control room looked just as it did on André’s video recording, although the large main console with a black glass surface was inactive, so Wes had no way to check out any of the possible settings that would show how such a massive device worked.

            Above the console was a thick viewing window, but past it was only darkness, as the glass was too reflective to allow the light beams through. After nervously eyeing the bulkhead-style door nearby for a moment, Wes began turning its locking mechanism.

            “Hold on, is that a good idea?” Jace asked. “We don’t know what’s in there.”

            “I’ll… close it right away if something begins to leak out.”

            “You’re not really making me feel confident here.”

            Wes took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and opened it just an inch.

            The air pressure inside the cave must’ve been close to nothing, as it rushed in from the control room and hallway via high-pitched wind. Once the chamber had equalized, Wes opened the door fully and swept his light across the space.

            “Holy crap…” he muttered. “Jace, look at this.”

            Cautiously, he joined his uncle at the door and added in his light. The house-sized cavern was a rocky dodecahedron, its twelve carved-out facets perfectly smooth.

            “This is where that ‘time-sphere’ thing was?” Jace asked. “There really is nothing left of it. It didn’t just explode or something, so… where did it go?”

            “André wasn’t even completely sure himself. It could’ve gone further back in the past than he did… Or into the future… Or maybe it just blinked out of existence.”

            “Wes. You have a blank stare again. You hanging in there?”

            “I mean… I could be looking at my crypt right now.”

            “It doesn’t have to be. You can decide not to go in there a second time.”

            “Yeah, but if I already did, why am I looking right at it? I mean, is this from an alternate timeline now? Or am I just destined to continue a cycle no matter what?”

            “I… really don’t think you should keep gazing into the abyss, Unk.”

            “Mm-hm… Okay. Let’s move on. Place makes me feel… I don’t like it.”

            He closed and locked the door tightly, and they quietly returned to the junction and went down the final unexplored hallway. Past the door, there was nothing special. The first room was a small cafeteria, with a single table and two unpowered vending machines likely filled with decades-old food and drink. A smaller hallway off to the side led nowhere, ending in construction tape. All that was left to explore were the rooms behind three different doors, one of which was just a bathroom with a shower.

            The door in the middle seemed to be André’s office. It featured a small, basic bed for longer nights, a desk with its computer and monitor removed, a locker, and not much more of note—other than a few dorky science posters from the 90s. Wes checked the desk and cabinet drawers, but they were bare. With nothing of much interest to see, they exited and went into the final room, which Wes assumed was his.

            Somehow, it was even more spartan than André’s—and smaller. Its concrete walls were bare, and the bed still had messy blankets from whenever Wes’ older self last slept under them. André couldn’t even bear to make them, it seemed.

            “I can somehow picture that obsessed version of myself, getting five hours of sleep in here a night just so I can get up early to start another long day of research,” Wes said with a sigh. “Sad, isn’t it, Jace? Not even a piece of 90s memorabilia to be found. I must’ve stopped caring about the past, outside of just wanting to revisit it.”

            “What’s that low rumble?” Jace asked, eyeing one more door on the back wall.

            Wes pressed down its lever and pushed it open to reveal another rocky chamber, almost as large as the one that held the actual time machine. Shelves of batteries and big capacitors covered the walls, while a tank of dully-glowing chilled liquid bubbled in the middle of it all. Some sort of electrical converter was the mechanism causing the faint vibration in the air. The fuel was running low, with only about a fourth remaining.

            “What is that thing?” Jace wondered.

            Noticing the liquid nitrogen tanks off in a corner, Wes replied, “I think this is a hydrogen power plant, keeping the place going. Future tech, but within reach.”

            “Think it’s enough to power the time machine?”

            “Probably not.” Wes closed the door and got back to looking around his on-site home. “I’m guessing André had to borrow power from the whole city to run it. And, also, this wasn’t meant to be a bedroom. Looks more like a utility closet.”

            “So… you move into this cramped, dark place just to avoid a commute.”

            “Yeah. Looks like it. I can’t wait to be this guy,” he said sarcastically, and looked at the wall safe in the room. “I think I’m done learning about myself today.”

            Eyeing the safe as well, Jace asked, “You wanna try opening that?”

            Tempted, Wes stretched out his arm—but his hand stopped a foot away from the safe’s keypad and he backed off, shaking his head. “Nah. We have a bomb to find.”

            Wes took out his quartz again, and Jace followed along.

            “How close should we… get?” Jace asked tepidly. “We haven’t seen anything that looks like a bomb, yet, so… how does someone get one down here?”

            “I’m thinking an hour before detonation, so a little after six, before our dinner that evening? Now we really will be going back to a time we’ve gone through before, so I hope that’s agreeable with spacetime and everything.”

            “Okay, but… That might be cutting it close.”

            Wes dialed in April 1st, 1996, 6:00 PM, and then eyed the power plant door.