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.
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.
Here are the time loops traversed by Jae-Sun/Jason.
Other books by Peter Cawdron
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You might also enjoy the following novels also written by Peter Cawdron
http://www.amazon.com/Anomaly-Mr-Peter-Cawdron/dp/1478175559/
Anomaly examines the prospect of an alien intelligence discovering life on Earth.
Mankind’s first contact with an alien intelligence is far more radical than anyone has ever dared imagine. The technological gulf between mankind and the alien species is measured in terms of millions of years. The only way to communicate is using science, but not everyone is so patient with the arrival of an alien space craft outside the gates of the United Nations in New York.