“I assure you,” Lachlan replied. “Jason is your future self, dislocated in time.”
Jae-Sun didn’t look convinced.
Jason sat there quietly as the professor explained, “Time travel rolls back the clock, but without proper shielding, a time traveller is not excluded from that process. Just as there’s no preferred location in space, there’s none in time, and with the alien craft damaged, you reverted back to your age at the destination.”
Jason pulled a computer tablet out of his bag and handed it to Jae-Sun, saying, “Perhaps this will convince you.”
“Yes, yes,” Lachlan added with some excitement.
Jason gave Jae-Sun a moment. His doppelgänger turned the tablet around so the dark screen faced him, and looked up as if to say, so what?
“It’s locked,” Jason said, gesturing for him to turn it on.
Jae-Sun pressed the small button at the base of the tablet and the screen came to life, showing an icon in the shape of a thumbprint with a thin green line scanning slowly down the print.
“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.
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.