"Fascinating," Commander Muri said as she gazed at Edward's armor. "But one thing puzzled me: if humans had your level of technology, how could the world reach such a state?"
"Didn't you read my file? I died in an explosion less than a year before the war started, taking my research with me."
"First, Dr. Azeem, and then you — it seems this world was destined for destruction," Muri muttered.
"Don't be so pessimistic. Now that we have the toxin and a female whitespikes, there is hope," Edward said.
"Maybe."
"The female is emitting a strange odor that the male can smell and trace from hundreds of kilometers. I've isolated it with my force field, but once I deactivate it, they will attack this base."
"Are you telling the truth? What is the basis for this statement?"
"You can test it out later," Edward rebutted. He was telling the truth since that's how these aliens tracked their queen and attacked this base. "I need access to this base's energy source since my armor cannot power up the force field for more than 8 hours."
"I'll verify first, but if you're telling the truth, this won't be an issue."
It didn't take long for the commander to detect the strange odor from the female whitespikes, but her team couldn't determine yet whether the male could track it from miles. But, to be safe, they followed Edward's advice. So, they hooked the armor with numerous cables as it released the field to contain the female.
Edward was in the room with Muri and the other scientists, trying to finish the toxin. However, if someone looked at him closely, they would notice he was wearing a glove with a strange alchemy circle. Ever since the US army tried to take him down when he was sleeping, Edward realized he couldn't rely too much on the armor, so he designed an alchemy that imitated Greed, one of the Homunculi from Full Metal Alchemist.
Upon activation, he'll control the carbon on his body to turn his skin into a hard material similar to graphene. In that state, he could survive most encounters in a modern period, including a nuclear bomb if he were not at the center of the blast.
While everybody was working, he was also deeply focused. He had hacked this base and retrieved the blueprint for the Jumplink. The design was both brilliant and puzzling. Dr. Azeem created a crystal called gravitoid that can create a gravitational field so intense that it became easier to access the fluctuations of space-time and travel to the future.
The original design of this jumplink was for space exploration. Space and time are the same, and the idea was to use the device to jump one minute or an hour into the future, but anywhere in space. With this technology, humans would have started the age of stars. Unfortunately, Dr. Azeem died suddenly before humanity could even test out the first jump, and the war started soon after.
Someone looked for his research note, trying to complete his work. They didn't find any, but they found some of his theories on possible backward time travel. The idea was to create an Einstein-Rosen Bridge as a link from this timeline to the past. Through the gravitoid, Dr. Azeem posited that it was theoretically possible to create a controllable black hole as an anchor and entry point in their timeline, and a controllable white hole as the second anchor and exit of the bridge in the past.
[AN: There was no description in the movie of how the Jumplink worked. This is my interpretation.]
'These people are all wrong. Dr. Azeem purposely hid his research because he wanted people to focus on exploring the universe, rather than meddling with the past. If they had continued his vision, humans could have mastered the way to travel to other planets by now and evacuated,' Edward thought.
"Well, none of that matters now. The technology of this jump link greatly intrigued him because of its affordability. The manufacturing cost of the gravitoid and the entire jumplink was so low that, considering all the means the empire had created for spatial or temporal travel, it was almost considered a penny. Above all, he has another upgrade for his Doom Armor.
'The time rules of most worlds will be different, but I can still use this technology to add teleportation to the suit,' Edward thought. With this new information, Edward began designing Doom Armor 2.0. This world was quite advanced, so he even found information about the early-stage development of Nanotechnology.
By the time he was done, the science team had finished the toxin, and Commander Muri approached him. "This is for you."
"You're done? That was fast."
"Take this to your timeline, find the source of the invasion, and kill them before they can spread."
"What about you?"
"Humanity was never meant to survive," Muri said. "We will manufacture as many toxins as possible and fight to our last dying breath, but there are only 500,000 of us and billions of them."
"A bit pessimistic, aren't we?" Edward said. He did not take the vial, but instead walked to their computers and examined the toxin's final configuration. "Morgana, enter virology creation mode." The armor, which was next to the female whitespike and releasing a force field to surround the entire room, suddenly released an interactive hologram from its eyes.
For the next hour, Edward played with the hologram as he slowly designed a complex structure. Muri and the scientists observed intently, and once he was finished, one of them stuttered: Is that…"
"A virus with the same effect as your toxin? You would be correct," Edward nodded. "It's already designed to be airborne, so you only need to release this thing, and in a week, all the whitespikes in the world will die a violent death."
The room was quiet.
"And that's just the beginning. I have two methods to increase your population and rebuild society. The first is that you need to contact the past governments. You make a deal with them to provide them with advanced technology, and in return, they must recruit people worldwide who are willing to abandon their current timeline and move into the future. I have already updated the jump link, so you don't have to worry about transporting them.
"The second plan is a cloning project. I need you to recover blood banks or any genetic data of humans left in this empty world. I will build a cloning lab to repopulate the world."
After the team woke up from their shock, they immediately started executing his plan — except the cloning lab. They felt this was too unethical, so they decided to wait for the outcome of the recruiting program. Qon and Jake returned to the past with the toxin, but Edward only sent his Doom Bots. The mission was successful as they wiped out the nest, Gwen killed the first female queen, and the team dug out the spaceship. There was a minor issue regarding the ship's ownership, but the bots suppressed everyone and took it away.
Edward received 1000 points for the mission, 1500 points for the spaceship, 300 points for saving Dorian by preventing him from being recruited, and an additional 500 points for the cure for cancer he sent to the latter. Now, he had 14,078 points.
Meanwhile, other aspects of Edward's Perfect Mission were proceeding accordingly. The whitespikes were systematically killed, leaving only a few as test subjects. The recruit in the past was better than he had imagined. Many people wanted to escape the capitalist hell scape that was the early 21st century, and they saw this program as the way.
And it was just regular people. Scientists, engineers, doctors, historians, and many other skilled people chose to migrate. While most were due to personal reasons in their lives, others were driven by curiosity for future knowledge, and the rest were motivated by a sense of duty. They wanted to rebuild that timeline into a better place.