Jason had realized the etchings weren’t all the same age. The scratchings in the R of Reactor were lighter in coloration than either the E the R or the Y in dEstRoY, and each of them was still lighter than the ED in feEDbAck. The implication was that they’d been written at different times in a different feedback loop.
He had debated the mechanics of time travel with Professor Lachlan for almost three hours after that, stopping only when dawn reminded them they’d lost a night’s sleep. There was a reporter, Jason had forgotten her name after so many years, but she was the first to accept the idea.
Feedback, Jason had argued, meant there were two time streams, a primary and a secondary line. Time would appear identical in each loop. The actors on the stage would have no idea what was happening. For them, time only transpired once, but the markings revealed secondary events existing within time. The carvings were proof they were caught in a feedback loop within space-time.
“But we can never know for sure!” Professor Lachlan had argued. Even some four hundred and sixty years later in the dark depths of a distant asteroid, Jason could still hear his mentor uttering those words.
“No, we can’t,” Jason had replied in what seemed like a dream to him half a millennia later. “It’s not just these words that reveal the feedback loop, it’s their timing. Why did they appear now? Why at this precise moment? This is no accident.”
“Of course this was an accident,” Lachlan protested. “Are you seriously suggesting someone staged this by throwing branches on the road?”
“No, no,” Jason protested. “The words. They’re no accident. This is deliberate. They hijacked this event to get this message to us.”
“They who?” Lily asked.
“They—us,” Jason replied. “We are the only ones that knew this would happen. We are the only ones that could have staged this.”
“You’re saying we sent this message to ourselves?” Lachlan asked. “That we sent a message back from the future?”
“Yes.”
“But how could that work?” Lily asked.
“It’s a time machine, right?” Jason had replied. “If you have a knowledge of the past, and you’re looping back into that past over and over again, you have an opportunity to influence past events.”
“So this is a hidden voice in our discussion,” Lily said. “We’re warning ourselves.”
“Yes,” Jason replied. “We knew this was the critical moment. We knew we would have this discussion and we sent a message to ourselves, one that would be received at precisely the right time.”
“But… But,” Lachlan protested, “that would take an astonishing amount of precision. These photos are from one spot within the interior of the craft, but they’re out of order, they’ve been scattered randomly.”
Jason agreed, saying, “It would take an astonishing amount of patience, probably over several iterations through time. You don’t pull something like this off in one shot.”
“But what if there’s another way?” Lachlan asked. “I mean, why destroy the UFO? What about if we just leave it there and run?”
“We can’t,” Jason replied. “Whether its now or in fifty years, any contact I have with that craft is going to result in the same outcome. If I come in contact with this thing, whether willfully or forced, the feedback continues.
“It doesn’t matter how big or small a feedback loop is, if it always returns to the same point you always have the same problem.
“We don’t know how long this has been going on. There’s no reason to assume every trip back has started at the same point. We could have had this conversation thousands of times already.”
Lachlan thought for a second, before saying, “You’re right. It’s a chance we can’t take.”
Lachlan delayed the attack by 24 hours to allow time to arrange their escape from the United States. That they would be hounded by law enforcement was beyond dispute. Rather than exposing the UFO to the media, they were going to destroy it.
“You’d better be right,” Lachlan had said the next day.
“There has to be a reason we told ourselves to destroy the reactor,” Jason replied. “We have to trust ourselves when we’re the ones telling ourselves there’s no other way.”
The inky black darkness inside the asteroid was mesmerizing, and Jason found his mind running to the past. He could remember the Learjet banking as it approached the nuclear reactor. There had been several large explosions at North Bend after the plane punched through the roof over reactor one.
A dark cloud seething angrily had risen above the shattered remains of the dome like the mushroom cloud from a nuclear detonation. Sporadic smaller explosions rocked the power plant for almost an hour afterwards. Finally, a brilliant blue-white explosion ripped out of the heart of the reactor with such ferocity that it blew apart the dark clouds looming overhead.
Their escape from the US had been carefully planned. Air travel was out of the question. From Oregon, they fled north to Seattle and on to Canada, traveling overland from Vancouver to Montreal. From there they boarded a merchant ship traveling to Cuba via Bermuda.
DARPA had burned enough people over the years in relation to the UFO that Bellum had no problem creating a false trail. His contacts left clues of an escape by land through Texas and into the lawless northern regions of Mexico surrounding Monterrey, keeping federal investigators off their track.
For almost two decades they were considered fugitives, but eventually the truth came out. Evidence of the UFO had surfaced quite early on in the FBI investigation, but it wasn’t believed. Several high-profile leaks in the subsequent decades revealed the extent of DARPA research into the craft along with DARPA’s plans to exploit the technology to allow the US to leap thousands of years ahead of other nations. Even the most die hard patriots could see such a concentration of power would be abused.
When the truth about the murders of Mitchell Jones and Helena Young were finally revealed, public opinion swayed toward the North Bend Six, as they were known. It took another seven years before they were granted amnesty.
During that time, Jason and Lachlan had made clandestine contact with the original Jae-Sun. He was born and raised in Orange County, Los Angeles and appeared to be the same age as Jason.
Jason had struggled with the realization that he was Jae-Sun. This wasn’t some stranger divorced from him. They weren’t twins. This was him in his infancy. Only the term infancy was a euphemism, as Jae-Sun was the same age as Jason, but for Jae-Sun nothing had happened yet.
Jason could remember the look on Jae-Sun’s face when they first met. Rather than staring at a mirror, he felt as though he were looking at a video of himself.
“How can this be?” Jae-Sun asked, sitting across the table from Jason under the shade of an umbrella at a small cafe on the boardwalk in Havana.
A bright sun burned through the cloudless blue sky. Sunlight reflected off the waves in the harbor, blinding Jason, but he removed his sunglasses anyway so Jae-Sun could get a good look at his face.
Jae-Sun turned to Professor Lachlan, saying, “I appreciate you sponsoring my work, but… but you want me to believe I’m looking at myself? That’s just not possible. Is he like a twin, or something?”
Jason found it strange to hear himself being described in that way, as though he were somehow less than human. It was the “or something“ that cut to the bone. In Jae-Sun’s mind, Jason was a freak of nature.