Jason could make out Jae-Sun's features through the visor of one of the suits. He'd aged considerably. Given that they were both already almost five hundred years old, that could only mean Jae-Sun had reached the limit of genetic renewal. As Jason understood the process, that would have made Jae-Sun almost a thousand years old.
“The collar is in place, but the damage appears too great,” one of the men said.
“I'm convinced we can do it,” the older Jae-Sun replied. “I've studied the design. I understand the physics.”
“But the dome would need shielding,” the other man said. “Without protection, you'd be exposed to the radiant energy within the wormhole. We have no idea what that would do to human tissue.”
A woman spoke. Jason had assumed all three scientists were men, because their baggy suits hid any hint of gender.
“You're going to hit a backwash of energy, not unlike when a river opens out into the sea. Both sides of the timeline are going to pour energy into the void, trying to close the hole. I don't see how anyone could survive given the damage to the alien dome.”
“And yet this creature survived such a trip to get here,” the aging Jae-Sun insisted. “Don't you see? If we can harness this power we can change time.”
Jason was shocked to learn he could be so arrogant. This magnificent interstellar creature had once been nothing more to him that a vehicle to exploit. He'd given its life no more consideration than a child would stepping on a bug.
“Think about what you're saying,” the woman pleaded. “You're stealing fire from the gods!”
“Ha,” the elderly Jae-Sun replied, clearly surprised by the comparison with the fabled Prometheus. “Think about how society advances. We learn from our mistakes. We learn the hard way. What if we could learn the easy way? What if we could learn without consequence and avoid heartache and ruin? What if we could fix our mistakes?”
“But consequences are unavoidable,” the woman replied. “Time will not permit paradoxes. You cannot play God!”
“God was an amateur,” the old Jae-Sun snapped, his voice booming as he became more bellicose. “God knew the future and never changed a thing. But us, we have a real shot at turning back the clock and resetting the tragedies of mankind. We can prevent billions of deaths in the War of the North! We can avoid the loss of tens of thousands of other animal species to our own stupidity. We can undo extinction itself!”
“You are mad,” the woman stated firmly, raising her voice in defiance. “You're drunk with power.”
He recognized the voice.
“Lily!” he whispered, reaching out with his hand.
The woman turned her head to one side as though she heard something from the rear of the craft, but that was impossible. They were separated by hundreds of years, and this was an illusion, a projection, a fabrication. In that instant, their eyes seemed to meet, but it wasn't Lily. The eyes were too narrow, the jawline too broad.
The woman turned back to the older Jae-Sun, pleading, “This is wrong. Don’t do it!”
The aging man stood there, proud and defiant. He began to reply, but in real time, Jason pulled his hand back briskly, breaking the neural connection and returning himself to the darkness of the asteroid.
Jason was repulsed by what he had seen. He didn't want to see any more. It wasn't that he was in denial, but rather that he found it difficult to watch himself being swept up in the hubris born of time travel. The cavalier attitude he'd witnessed sent a chill down his spine. This was the egotism that defined evil across generations: Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, they all shared the same self-absorbed arrogance and myopia. They saw everything clearly, and they alone held the answers. It was the classic trap: blind stupidity and hubris.
For a moment, Jason wasn't sure quite where he was. The visions he'd had were overwhelming in their clarity, fooling his senses and leaving him uncertain of when and where he was, but he quickly became sure he was back in the quiet of the present.
“I didn't know,” Jason whispered to himself, realizing he couldn't separate himself from Jae-Sun. They were one and the same person, the only difference between them had come from thousands of iterations through time.
“I thought I understood,” he pleaded to the empty vacuum. “But I didn't.”
It felt strange to be defending actions Jae-Sun wouldn't make for hundreds of years. Defending? Was he being defensive? Or repentant? Even Jason wasn't sure at that point.
“That was a different time,” he insisted, feeling as though the silence of the creature somehow condemned him.
What was this magic? How could he see into a future that hadn't happened yet? He had to destroy this device lest its magic fall into the wrong hands.
Magic! Yes, he thought. What else was this but sorcery by human standards? There had to be some science to the animal's motion, but humanity was so primitive by comparison that this magnificent creature seemed almost divine, like one of the fabled cherubim that wept over the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant.
“It doesn't have to be this way.”
Jason wanted to believe those words, but the red LED flickering on the side of the nuclear bomb spoke only of violence. It pulsated, casting an eerie glow in the open brain cavity.
“I can change this,” Jason said to the ghosts echoing around him in the darkness.
As he turned, his spotlights lit up sections of the wall in the skull. Words and equations had once scarred those surfaces. He could still see them in his mind's eye.
“I can fix this!”
And with those words, he realized nothing had changed. This was the same hubris that had led Jae-Sun to travel back in time in the first place.
Looking at the rear membrane, he saw words once carved in desperation.
You can save her
You can save all of them
Her?
All this time, Jason had thought he understood the message he'd been sending himself across the vast expanse of space-time, but he hadn't. For hundreds of years, he'd missed the real meaning in the messages he'd left for himself.
He'd never intended to save only himself. He'd never intended to save just Lily or even Lily and Lachlan. All along, he'd wanted to save them all.
There was much he didn't understand about the feedback loop, but he understood the creature was somehow locked into a certain point in space-time, always returning to that stormy night off the coast of North Korea. But why?
At the time, all Jason could think of was that the injury to the alien's neural compartment had rendered it essentially brain dead. But now his opinion had changed. He had seen an astonishing amount of cognitive function as the creature had shown him visions of its home, visions of its capture, and of the future.
The alien was wounded, of that he was sure. The damage to its skull was clear. The bit and bridle sat before him as a strange alien console with faint, exotic markings.
This dragon of the deep was crying out to him for help. She could see both the past and the future. Why had she continued circling over and over? Why return to that dark night off the coast of North Korea thousands of times? What was she waiting for?
Finally, he understood. She was waiting for him. She needed him to understand what had to be done at this precise moment. She wanted him to set her free. It had taken thousands of iterations to bring him to the point when he could help her.
In the original timeline, Jae-Sun had been selfish, self-centered. Now, though, Jason knew what she needed him to do.
In the vision of the nebula, her fellow creatures had fled through space-time, leaving in their wake flashes of pale blue-light. And he'd seen this earlier today. He'd thought it was Cherenkov radiation breaking before his retina, but it wasn't. They were out there, waiting to effect a rescue.
This was the answer he was looking for. This was an alternative that could break the time loop. All he had to do was to lead the Excelsior away and leave her to her kind.
This wasn't part of the plan, but to hell with the pl
an, he thought.
“I understand,” he said, gently touching at the brain mass that had revealed those visions to him. Everything they'd gone through, it must have been all she could do, all she was capable of in her injured state, desperate to escape.
He drifted forward and removed the nuclear device, deactivating the bomb. The red LED switched to green as he packed the bomb back into the equipment cube. His gloves were clumsy, or was it that his fingers were trembling? Jason couldn't tell, but the realization of how close he'd come to destroying this intelligent alien shook him.
“This,” he said, turning to face the strange console. “This must go.”
While working with the equipment cube, he had drifted sideways and somewhat upside down relative to the floor of the cavity. The floor itself sloped down at an angle of roughly seventy degrees within the asteroid, and yet in the near weightlessness he could convince his mind that the angled surface was flat. Slowly, Jason aligned himself with the floor, grabbing hold of the console.
“Let's get this off you.”
The console looked like a mesh of smooth, brushed aluminum with organic branch like edges weaving down into the floor. There were dozens of tiny lights, barely visible in the darkness. As his spotlight drifted over them, they seemed to disappear. At first glance, the console seemed to be part of the vessel, but Jason had seen how brutally it had been set in place.
He planted his feet on the floor immediately below the console and grabbed at the thick edge. Flexing with his thighs, and keeping his back straight, he pushed off, trying to pry the console loose. There was a little give, but the console remained stuck.
Working hand over hand, he moved to one end of the console. Jason positioned himself carefully and instead of slowly increasing pressure, he thrust downward with his boots while pulling upwards with his hands. His head and neck arched back as he strained to pull the console loose. He could feel this end of the console starting to budge.
“Come on, you bitch!” he cried, jerking at the alien device.
Pulling himself along with his gloved hands, he moved to the other end of the console and pried at the structure. This end moved more than the other. Slowly, he was jimmying it out of place. He repeated this several more times until the console drifted just a few feet above the floor, still held in place by thin tendrils reaching out like roots.
Jason was sweating. His suit compensated for the exertion, lowering the temperature and circulating dry air to draw off the humidity produced by his perspiration.
Lying on his back, he reached under the console, grabbing at the roots. Lying there, he felt the vertigo of spacewalking. He could have been lying next to the floor, leaning against a wall or drifting close to the ceiling. All possibilities were equally valid, but for his sanity he chose to think he was lying there, even though he was floating inches above the floor.
The creature shook as he jerked at the roots, tearing them free like loose wiring.
“I'm sorry,” he whispered, pulling the debris away and watching as the console toppled slowly, propelled forward by his jerking motion.
With the console floating freely within the skull cavity, a rainbow of colors began appearing on the surface he'd thought of as the front windshield.
“You like that, huh?” he said, smiling to himself.
Jason grabbed the console, using his maneuvering thrusters to drag the console toward the fractured opening. The computer controls in his suit struggled with the center of gravity being shifted to one side, and he quickly powered down, arresting his motion before he spun out of control. The only way he was going to get this out of here was by using the equipment cube to drag it, as the cube was designed to retrieve collection samples and its navigation systems could deal with more complex maneuvers.
Attaching the console to the cube was easy enough.
It was time to go.
“Goodbye, my dear friend,” he said, taking one last look at the soft, kaleidoscope of colors pulsating through the cavity. “Take care of yourself.”
Slowly, he drifted out of the yawning hole in the skull cavity, watching as the cube followed automatically behind him. The console caught on the edge of the skull, but the cube adjusted its motion, working the console out of the gap.
Jason couldn't look back. Tears welled up below his eyes, sticking to his cheeks like globs of glue in the low gravity. He shook his head, shaking them loose so they would be drawn away by his helmet vents.
His spotlights illuminated the sloping body of this majestic creature as he ascended, but he couldn't bring himself to look at the central core. Above, a handful of fleeting stars provided the only hint of the universe beyond this dark cavern.
As he approached the top of the fracture in the asteroid, the dim light spilled in around the edges of the yawning canyon. Again, he could see the scratch marks where the creature had scraped against the dusty, rock walls while fleeing for the safety of the darkness.
For a moment, Jason floated above the crevasse. Chunks of dusty blue ice mixed with rocks and boulders. The dark crack beneath him looked more ominous than familiar.
“Farewell,” he said, accelerating away from the fracture in the asteroid.
The equipment cube mirrored his motion, following behind him with the console in tow. If he changed direction or came to a halt to examine his wrist console, the cube darted around, compensating for the added mass it had to deal with.
He cleared the lip of a vast impact crater and returned to the way-point set by Commander Lassiter. His surreal experience inside the darkened fracture seemed almost like a dream out here among the stars.
Jason steeled himself. As far as the universe was concerned, he was Jae-Sun again, in demeanor and attitude. He had to play this part once more, one final time.
Jae-Sun activated his coms and caught the tail-end of chatter with the Excelsior.
“—roughly two hours, but he—wait, I've got him on radar,” Lassiter said.
Jae-Sun could see the young man in the distance, just a speck of white drifting above the murky grey asteroid with its pits and boulders, craters and cracks.
“Did you find her?” Lassiter asked.
“Her?” Jae-Sun replied, his mind still awash with all that had happened. “No. There was nothing down there. But she'd been there. I found some debris, part of a control panel.”
“Hot damn!” Lassiter replied with excitement.
Jae-Sun found it strange trying to mimic the young man's excitement. He smiled as he sailed up to him. Yes, he thought, I should be excited about finding evidence of an intelligent alien species.
Lassiter came around beside the equipment cube, drifting by the console as he examined this strange and curious alien device.
“Un fucking believable!” he cried. “We hit the jackpot!”
“Yes,” Jae-Sun replied softly. “Yes, we did.”
Would he ever be able to tell the true story? He wondered. Would he ever be able to reveal all he'd seen? It wasn't the dragons of the deep humanity needed to be wary of. What were those spidery pirates? Where were they from? What would happen when humanity first encountered this hostile alien race?
Whatever was to come, they had the past to build upon. Perhaps this console would give them a glimpse into the nature of these other alien creatures. At some point, he'd have to reveal what he knew, but not now. For now, it was enough to know these dragons were benign.
In the distance, hundreds of miles behind Lassiter, there was a faint flicker of blue light. The dragons were coming for her. In his mind, Jae-Sun remembered those ghostly words from within the alien skull.
You can save her
You can save all of them
In the end, he really could save them all.
Afterword
Thank you for taking the time to read Feedback, and for supporting independent science fiction. Please take the time to leave a review online as your insights and feedback are invaluable (no pun intended). Independent authors thrive on word of mouth
advertising, so if you’ve enjoyed this story, please tell your friends and recommend they grab a copy.
Thanks go to Brian Wells and John Walker for their assistance with the scientific aspects of this novel, and to my editor, Ellen Campbell, for her patience in working through the seemingly endless revisions, and to Jae Lee for his insights into Korean culture. The cover art is by Jason Gurley. Thanks also go to those beta-readers who helped fine-tune the content before the general release: Damien Mason, Bruce Simmons, Jamie Canubi, Tomi Blinnikka and TJ Hapney.
The world of publishing is changing rapidly. Whereas once big name authors dominated the best seller lists, now days there are more and more independent writers climbing the charts. If you liked this story and would like to be a part of its success, please tell a friend about it and take the time to leave a review online. Reviews are the lifeblood of independent fiction. Your thoughts and insights help others decide whether this is a novel they'd enjoy.
Several years ago, Professor Stephen Hawking pointed out that time travel is impossible because of feedback. If you tried to connect any two points in time with a wormhole, the energy from both the past and the future would pour through the gap, rushing through and causing a feedback loop much like a microphone being left next to a speaker.
In this novel, we explored the concept of a broad feedback loop, where the start and end points in time are separated by decades and the feedback comes not in the form of energy but in knowledge. In both cases, though, feedback builds until the loop is broken. Although the bulk of this story traces only one iteration within the feedback loop, the following image shows the entire sequence of events as described in the epilogue. Rather than timelines splitting into parallel universes, Feedback relies on the idea that space-time is plastic and malleable, with time being as flexible and robust as any other dimension. For us, paradoxes don’t occur because time is linear, but should a time machine ever be invented, paradoxes could occur as easily as they do in any other dimension.
Feedback Page 28
