“Go ahead,” Jason said. “Open it!”
Jae-Sun swiped his index finger down the screen and the tablet unlocked, revealing a selection of application icons in a rainbow of hues.
“Finger prints are like snowflakes,” Lachlan said. “They're wonderfully unique, even among twins.”
“If you had an identical twin,” Jason began, but Jae-Sun finished his sentence.
“He would not be able to open this!”
Jae-Sun put the tablet down carefully, as though he were handling a priceless Ming vase. He ran his hands up through his hair, grabbing at the strands and pulling on them. Jason understood the gesture implicitly, he'd felt much the same way when he first learned of the UFO.
During that first visit, the three men talked long into the night, showing Jae-Sun all they knew. As unbelievable as it must have been for Jae-Sun, the fingerprints were the proof he needed. They couldn't be faked.
Knowing they had to keep their origin secret, Jason and Jae-Sun conspired to wear different hair styles and clothing types, as well as to avoid being seen together to reduce the likelihood of being discovered.
Over the next few years, they developed the theory behind the space-time compression drive, which helped to sway the political opinion increasingly calling for the pardon of the North Bend Six. The prospect of losing such research to the Russians or the Chinese had the US Congress in an uproar. Like Von Braun in the 1950s, all was forgiven for the sake of space exploration.
In the dark vacuum of space, the only sound was that of his breathing and the soft whir from the circulation vents on his helmet.
Jason's gloved hands stirred up dust, causing it to swirl before it sank into the depths, disappearing beyond the range of his spotlights. Without meaning to, he'd halted his descent. His memories were so vivid, he felt unstuck in time. He could have been flitting back and forth across hundreds of years in the quiet of the pitch black void.
“How long have you waited?” he asked of the alien, not expecting a reply.
Time was all important to Homo sapiens, but to a creature that could move through time, what was a moment? A day? A year? Was a century of any consequence? From his calculations, he thought the creature had only arrived recently, but in the dark depths of the asteroid he wasn't so sure.
“It's me,” Jason said, still running his fingers gently over the creature as he sank lower into the dark abyss. For the creature, this was first contact. It couldn't have known him, could it? Or did the concepts of cause and effect blur for an animal that lived its life traversing time?
Who was he? Jason or Jae-Sun? Names didn't really matter anymore. He was both. He'd always been both. Mentally, he identified as Jason, but being here with the creature, he understood he was taking the place of the original Jae-Sun, and he felt as though that were in more ways than just by his physical presence. He could feel the same temptations that had once stirred Jae-Sun. A desire to change the past, to fix things, to correct the mistakes and travesties of humanity and avert suffering. It was well intended, but Jason had always understood such intent was folly.
“How does this work?” he asked as he descended, his equipment cube keeping pace behind him.
There was no answer.
“If I prevent myself from going back, if I take the place of the original Jae-Sun and refuse to return to the past, what happens to me? Will I cease to exist?”
His breath condensed on the glass faceplate of his helmet. Immediately, a cool, dry draft circulated from the rim of the helmet, clearing his view.
In the darkness, the skin of the creature looked slightly stippled beneath his spotlights.
“Are paradoxes possible?”
He was talking to himself, he understood that. Reasoning through the logic of time travel as he slipped slowly further down the gentle arc of the creature's hide.
“In any other dimension, we ignore the paradox of direction. A skier ignores a mountain climber, even though their motion is contradictory. Is this the same? Is time just another direction? Is time a mountain slope so steep we only ever go one way? Are paradoxes a matter of perspective?”
He drifted down to the center of the alien creature, his fingers still brushing over the dark skin. As the dome came into view, he noticed dim red lights within the gigantic fractured skull. Carefully, he negotiated his way into the gaping hole in the side of the dome, again reliving flashbacks from previous iterations in time.
Jason looked toward the back of the creature's skull. Hundreds of years ago and in a different time frame, he'd thought of that hard, smooth surface as a wall, but as he floated there in his spacesuit, he could see it was a partition, a membrane segmenting the skull into quarters. His spotlight swept across the smooth surface. Once, words had been etched into that thick membrane.
You can save her
You can save all of them
Now, though, the wall was empty and those words seemed like ghosts from the past.
Jason understood that the overwhelming feeling of deja vu was from having stood here hundreds, perhaps thousands of times while trying to break the cycle.
His white equipment cube drifted through the jagged opening and inside the dome. In the glare of his spotlights, its sterile surface and hard lines looked alien inside the organic creature. Jason switched off the tracking system, leaving the cube floating beside him.
As his spotlight swung around, light rippled over the rough texture of compressed brain matter on the other side of the skull.
Rows of tiny red lights flashed in the vacant front-left quadrant of the dome. This front quarter was the only vacant space within the central dome.
“I'm sorry,” he said, not sure if the creature could hear him or even if it would understand. Perhaps he was speaking just to assuage his conscience. Perhaps this was a confession, one spoken to no one but himself in the bitter darkness.
“I wish there was another way.”
The empty void remained silent.
Jason reached out and keyed a code into the equipment cube. A compartment opened and he pulled out a clunky device that looked somewhat like a metallic basketball with tiny pipes and wiring wrapped around it, hiding its explosive shell and plutonium core.
To his surprise, he was breathing heavily. Physically, there was no reason to, but the stress of the moment preyed on his mind.
“Why didn't you run?” he asked, arming the nuclear warhead with his stubby gloved fingers. “Why did you loop over and over again? You had all of time and space. Why did you return to Korea time and again?”
A soft green LED turned red, indicating the bomb was armed.
Jason breathed deeply, sighing as he exhaled. It all seemed so easy in their planning. Time travel was too dangerous for humanity. Nuclear weapons had once brought the world to the brink of annihilation. What would a mastery of the very fabric of space-time afford this infant species still reaching out from its parent star?
This was a mercy killing, he told himself. The alien was brain dead. That was the only possible explanation he could conceive to explain why the creature had been locked in a time loop. He had no choice. He couldn't let this alien fall into anyone's hands. He had to destroy the creature, regardless of his own sentiments. Eventually, others would stumble upon these dragons of the deep, but perhaps by then humanity would have reached beyond adolescence.
“Farewell, old friend,” he said, using his suit thrusters to move forward and position the nuclear bomb so it was wedged between the console and the dome. All that remained was for him to return to the Excelsior and remotely detonate the device. He had to leave. He couldn't remain there. He had to see the plan through and end the madness of time looping over and over again.
There was something about the console that looked strangely out of place, and that distracted him for a moment, taking his mind off his singular purpose of destroying the creature.
Jason turned, drifting under power, controlling his motion with deft skill as he looked around within the alien sku
ll, wanting to understand what had happened to drive it into this abyss. He reached out and grabbed at the strange console as his spotlights pierced the transparent outer dome, lighting up the sloping front of the creature.
“What have they done to you?”
In those few seconds, he understood something quite profound, something that had escaped their attention for centuries. There were two alien species involved, not one. These magnificent beasts, capable of migrating through space and time were being hunted by some other alien culture, one capable of taming and controlling them. The console was a horse bit, a harness, some kind of biotech designed to control the creature, to transform it into a mule.
“Lobotomy,” he whispered in horror.
For all the interest Homo sapiens had in the fabled dragons of the deep, it seemed the real alien monsters were still hidden from sight. Someone had attacked this creature. To the best of Jason's knowledge, this was the first occasion in which there was any inkling of an aggressive, conquest-driven interstellar species that could represent a real threat to humanity.
He turned his attention to the ruptured section to his right. The membrane had burst and spilled into the empty quadrant. He could remember seeing this mass set like stone when the creature had been housed in reactor one.
Jason reached out and touched the dark, grey goo. Although it looked soft, it was as hard as a rock. As his gloved fingers ran over the bumps and undulations, images burst into his mind, except these weren't his displaced memories from the past, they were coming from the alien creature.
Large clouds of hydrogen billowed within a stellar nursery. At first glance, they seemed cold and menacing, and yet Jason felt at ease. Then he understood. The creature was sharing images and feelings with him.
Jason felt trusted. He couldn't explain why, but he knew there was no one else the creature trusted, and for the first time Jason had a glimpse of why it had circled so long through time trying to escape: there was no one else the alien felt it could trust.
His hand drifted away from the brain matter and the connection was broken. Immediately, he thrust closer, making contact again.
A thin, gaseous nebula surrounded the dark cloud, emitting a kaleidoscope of colors more beautiful than any rainbow.
Starlight lit up the tip of the molecular cloud, exciting the gas filaments and blowing the dark edges away like the wind eroding a sand dune. Judging from the surrounding stars, the cloud easily spanned a dozen light years or more. Several sections had broken away, floating like islands against the azure blue nebula.
A new born star lit up one corner of the cloud, pushing back the dark swirling mass and breaking free from its stellar womb.
“Home,” Jason whispered, understanding what he was seeing.
Given the sheer size of this stellar nursery capable of birthing hundreds of stars, was it really such a surprise that it should not also give rise to life? Jason could feel himself smiling with delight. Within that molecular cloud was a cocktail of chemicals containing more mass than anything found on ten thousand planets like Earth.
The dark cloud was deceptive, hiding the complex chemical reactions sparked by interstellar radiation. What was sunlight to Earth but the radiation of a nearby star?
Jason saw Earth in a different light.
Earth was exceptional among the planets surrounding the Sun, but perhaps it was exceptional on an even grander scale, being the exception to other celestial processes by which organic chemistry could form life. In that moment, he understood that the conglomeration of molecular clouds and the multicolored nebula that surrounded it like a cloak could give rise to countless lifeforms.
Was it that unlikely? He wondered. Life had arisen on Earth when it was a hellish, seething volcanic wasteland. The newly formed moon orbited so close that it caused tidal waves hundreds of feet high. The atmosphere choked with toxic fumes, almost entirely devoid of oxygen. The heat was unbearable. The planet was bombarded with tens of thousands of asteroids, causing earth-shattering impacts, some leaving craters that would have spanned most of the Continental US. And yet in the midst of all that, life arose. Perhaps life in space was more of a natural occurrence than anyone had ever dared imagine.
The vision before him was surreal.
Although his hand was outstretched and his thrusters continued to maintain pressure against the brain mass of the creature, the view before him was one of being transported across the universe. He could see his white spacesuit, with his gloved hand apparently pushing against nothing. Looking down, past his feet, the nebula continued to bloom below him. Had it not been for the resistance to his suit's gentle thrust, Jason would have sworn he was there, beholding the majesty of the nebula firsthand.
A flock of the alien creatures passed overhead. He could see them spinning about each other, playful and vibrant with life. Their saucer like shape seemed more fluid and organic than mechanical. They looped and twirled, like a litter of puppies playing, with their disc-like bodies flexing and twisting as if they were stingrays undulating through the ocean.
From his perspective, he seemed to be tracking along next to them as they approached the nebula, only the backdrop of the nebula never seemed to change. Its sheer size and the distance between them and the cloud made it seem as though it had been painted on the backdrop of the heavens. Michelangelo and Picasso could not have rendered a masterpiece so grand.
Then, without warning, a javelin shot through the air. At least, that was the impression Jason had. It was difficult to think of the colorful rainbow of gas clouds as a cold void, a lifeless vacuum at -455F.
The javelin moved in an arc, reminding Jason of the motion of a spear or an arrow on Earth, only in zero-g that meant its flight was powered, being guided onto its target.
The alien creatures had the appearance of stingrays without tails. They broke away from each other, dispersing with a sudden burst of speed. Blue lights flashed around them, peppering the nebula with blinding strobes as they disappeared into space-time, fleeing to the safety of some other place, some other time. One though, flipped on its side, wounded by the javelin.
“That was you,” Jason said in a voice breaking with emotion.
The wounded alien creature tried to escape. Flashes of blue light strobed around its circular hide, but several more javelins struck the animal. Was it an animal? We're all animals, Jason reminded himself, regardless of how civilized we try to appear. He had no doubt those that hunted these magnificent alien creatures somehow depersonalized their barbaric acts just as humanity had done for centuries when hunting whales or apes.
Another dark saucer-like creature appeared on the edge of his vision, with a row of javelin darts attached beneath its shell, strapped on like missiles on the underside of a warplane. The intruder rushed at the wounded creature.
Jason watched as spider-like aliens launched themselves from this marauder, thrusting through space and landing on the crippled alien. Some kind of particle beam erupted from one of these pirates, searing the central dome and creating the massive scar he'd floated through just minutes before when he found the alien in the darkened crevasse deep within OA-5772.
Jason could see that the spiders were capable of operating without a spacesuit. Their exoskeletons must have shielded their internal organs in much the same way as his spacesuit protected him.
Jason found himself wondering about the energy requirements of such celestial creatures and the need for their metabolism to maintain an internal temperature in which their biochemistry could function properly. That space was poor at convective heat transfer must have helped, but the extreme differences between starlight and shade would have made it difficult for any biological creature to negotiate. Perhaps this was why these creatures stayed well clear of the stars, he thought. Perhaps it wasn't the gravity wells they were avoiding, but the excessive heat. Or maybe it was both.
Jason wanted to study these creatures. He was fascinated by the possibilities filling his mind and he could understand how Jae-Sun
would have once felt the same way.
His viewpoint closed in on the fractured, smoldering dome of the creature and he could see one of the hunters setting up the console he'd seen glowing in the darkness.
The wounded creature fought, bucking like a bronco. Strobes of light continued to burst around it as the pirates set about breaking their captive's will. Jason found himself willing the alien to flee and in a flash of light it was gone. The marauders were left without their prey, drifting aimlessly through the nebula in response to the shockwave that reverberated when the wounded creature fled.
Jason was again in the darkness of the chasm deep in the shattered asteroid, only his viewpoint had shifted. Although his outstretched hand still pressed hard against the mass of brain matter, he appeared to be floating near the back wall of the skull. He watched as another astronaut sailed in through the gaping wound and at first he thought it was Lassiter.
A white spacesuit drifted before him. Spotlights flashed around the darkened interior of the skull.
“That's me!” he said, almost expecting to see himself responding to those words. It took a moment for him to realize he was seeing Jae-Sun in the original time stream.
His doppelgänger turned, looking through him, not seeing him.
Several more astronauts drifted by outside the creature, floating past like scuba divers in a dark cave. They attached cables to the outside of the animal.
The view before Jason flickered and suddenly the empty brain cavity was flooded with light.
Jason blinked as his eyes adjusted to the sudden influx of light.
Several men walked around within the brightly lit skull of the creature. They were dressed in clean-room suits, hermetically sealed with their own oxygen supply.
That the men walked meant they were under the influence of gravity, and Jason wondered whether this view was onboard the Excelsior or on Earth. Their movement was too fluid for either Mars or Titan, where they would have appeared to rebound more, but either way, this view revealed a much more distant, future time.
Feedback Page 27
