The main 3W facility was quiet but for the whistle of air conditioning, the clicking of keys, and the crunch of an apple. Two employees and a skeleton were the only souls present. Not counting the millenia worth of stored ones outside the office, but only one person knew about that.
"Did you vote, ma'am?"
"Was that today?" Missy asked around a mouthful of apple. It seemed her manners were just slip-sliding away in her old age. And good riddance. She'd spent so long being proper and polite to an obsessive degree that, nowadays, she reveled in being gauche (to an obsessive degree).
Dr Chang nodded, though he didn't take his eyes from his screen. Missy sat perched at the edge of his desk like some purple-frilled scavenger bird, just waiting for the tedium of form-filling or her own boredom to claim his life. He was a relatively new hire, though, so the novelty hadn't worn off for either of them yet. "Harold Saxon's going to be PM."
"You aren't the one deciding that, poppet."
They lapsed back into silence except for the occasional correction by Missy of Dr Chang's work. The click-clack of the keys had a cadence that about drove Missy up the wall, that wilted her down from her usual poppy, pleasant self. That subconscious four-beat rhythm bounced around the quiet of her mind and had been since she'd begun running parallel to her earlier timeline. She had known it was likely to happen, what with two of her in one time period on one planet and her constant exposure to the Archangel network, but it didn't mean she had to like it. It was quieter inside the Institute, cut off from the world as it was, but the drums still snuck in on Dr Chang's mind.
"They say he's a shoo-in for it."
"I don't trust him."
Chang looked offended, but at least that meant he'd stopped typing to scowl behind his overly large glasses at her. Missy massaged the bridge of her nose and dropped the half-eaten apple in the waste bin. She then pulled out her phone and opened her to-do list. After an embarrassing amount of items, she reached the end and typed in: new keyboards.
"What's not to like?"
"Don't you think he's a little too pat? The man's practically promising - " she cut herself off with a sudden chuckle, "- practically promising utopia." Utopia, heaven, the promised land, Missy did like to reuse plots.
"Is that so bad?"
"Is it good?" Missy asked, pushing lightly on the mental conditioning. She'd done a good job with it back when she was Saxon. Chang's little primitive mind was balking at the merest ghost of an idea that Mr Saxon couldn't be good, but not enough to be obvious. She stood and walked behind him, letting her hand trail momentarily across his shoulder, offering a little more pressure to the conditioning. "With how you lot fawn over him, you'd think he was Rassilon himself."
"Who?"
Missy patted Chang on the arm. "Never you mind, deary. He thinks he is too. That's a man who wants to rule the world. Or destroy it."
Chang frowned like he didn't want to let it go, but a little suggestion under the Archangel's control and he did. It was best not to push too much, fun as it might be, lest she get noticed by the wrong person. At least she had just as much access to the network as her past self did, and Missy put it to good use. She stayed hidden, out of sight, while that gangling tangle of pinstripes went dashing all about London. Her meeting with her own Doctor, all eyebrows and crags and red-lined jackets, was coming, she could feel it in the air. Years away but closer every day. She might not be prim and proper anymore, but Missy still had that obsessive streak that had her stalking timelines so that she met him at the right time, in the right order.
Missy just had to weather one or two apocalypses, courtesy of herself. She headed toward the door, heels clicking smartly on the tile floor.
"As you said, though, he's a shoo-in. Soon, Mr Saxon will be our new prime minister." Missy stopped and turned back to face the room, a hand on her hip, the other thoughtfully placed on her chin. One-tenth of the population could clog up her data slice something awful, and it, being Gallifreyan, wouldn't forget once this was all over and done with, leaving just masses of duplicate files. People. Duplicate people. She still had to pretend to care about them, because Dr Change did and he really was far too empathetic sometimes. "Oh, dear. Mr Saxon's gonna be our new prime minister. I'd better make some backups."
"Backups of what? Everything's automated." Chang had returned to his typing, barely offering Missy a glance until she made kissing noises at him and snapped a photo when he looked up. He'd probably not last through the year that never will be, poor sweet poppet that he was. She clicked out of the camera and back to her home screen, switching to her Heaven app to begin the backup. She'd figure out something more permanent later, and returned to her to-do list to add, just below new keyboards in both importance and numerically, prep Heaven for paradox.
"Never you mind that either."
Maybe, once her own plans were safe and the paradox machine was up and running, she'd pay Mr Saxon a visit. That had been a strange run, even by her standards. It'd be interesting to see how it looked from the outside.