Feedback

by Cawdron, Peter

  Jason fought to get beneath the professor, hoisting Lachlan's arm up over his shoulder. Together, they staggered up the craft.

  As they approached the dome, the gradient lessened, making the climb easier. Down below, explosions rattled the scaffolding.

  Jason had no idea how many armed men had stormed the nuclear reactor building, but Bellum was holding his own, that much was clear. Handguns cracked as they fired, rifle shots echoed around them. A flash of light lit up the shaking scaffolding, followed by a thunderous crack.

  “No more,” Lachlan cried as Jason dragged him roughly up toward the dome of the UFO. “I ... I can't take any more.”

  Jason swung the professor down, resting him gently against the dome.

  The central dome of the creature was easily thirty feet in diameter, but it was torn and damaged. The front portion had been ripped open, but the wound was old. Jason could see inside the cavity. There were electronic monitors and computers set up on tables. Wires snaked their way out from inside the dome, leading over to the scaffolding on the far side of the craft.

  Lily crouched by her father, pressing on the wound in his shoulder.

  “I'm dying,” the old man said.

  “Don't say that,” she cried.

  “They've hit an artery,” he managed. “It's just a matter of time.”

  Jason took his mentor's hand. Immediately behind Lachlan's head there were more words, only this time they were in complete phrases.

  You cannot save him

  You can save him

  Listen to him

  Lachlan must have seen Jason staring. He turned to one side, twisting his head and looking up.

  “When we first met,” he grimaced. “You told me you knew how I died.”

  Jason held his hand, not saying anything.

  “I've always known this day was coming, but I believe in you. You can change this,” the dying man said, struggling to breathe. “History doesn’t have to repeat.”

  “Time travel won’t allow for paradoxes,” Jason replied. “Nothing changes. Nothing can ever change.”

  “Who says it’s a paradox?” Lee said, gasping for breath. “I think I finally understand what this is, what all the scribbling is ... For years, we’ve wondered about the meaning. We didn't understand that the equations are not the answer, they’re part of the question. A question that has been asked over and over, through thousands of time loops spanning tens of thousands of years.”

  The old man slumped against the wall of the central dome. Jason squeezed the dying man’s hand gently.

  “Feedback,” Professor Lachlan said.

  “Feedback?” Jason asked, his mind remembering the word he'd seen chaotically spelled out when the photos had fallen to the floor of the RV. “You mean, like a microphone getting too close to a speaker?”

  “Yes.”

  Jason looked up, looking at the scratchings and messages, the words that seemed so disjointed and confused.

  “So all this, it’s feedback from previous iterations? These messages we see here. These are messages we've left for ourselves?”

  The professor nodded, his breath hitching as he said, “Each message defies fate. Each etching represents a small, subtle change. Each disproves the apparent static nature of time.”

  “So we can break out of this feedback loop? We can end this?” Jason asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Feedback builds until something gives,” Jason said, realizing what the professor was getting at.

  The old man nodded, saying, “Each time, we learn more.”

  “But it’s too late!”

  “It’s never too late,” the professor said, struggling with those final words. His eyelids drooped. His head bowed, and his hand went limp.

  Lachlan was dead.

  Jason struggled to swallow the lump in his throat. Tears spilled down his face. He was overwhelmed by the loss of this man. His mentor. His friend. This man who was two men had saved his life. Jason owed him every breath. So much had been lost here. Jason barely knew the man that had rescued him from North Korea, but he knew he owed him a debt that could never be repaid.

  “We should have left,” he sobbed, feeling the weight of the professor's death because of his irrational insistence that they stay with the craft. “I'm sorry. You were right. We should have grabbed what we needed and ran.”

  Lily cried. She rested her head on her father's shoulder and sobbed, combing his thin hair with her fingers.

  “You and I,” Jason said, grasping the professor's hand and squeezing. “We have lived for thousands of years, never able to escape this prison, but this time, it will be different. I promise.”

  Jason knelt beside Lily, gently rubbing her shoulders, whispering to her. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

  Bullets sliced through the air around them, zipping past just inches away from striking them. A battle continued to rage beneath the creature, but there was only so long Bellum could hold out. It was only a matter of time before he was outflanked. Gunmen were moving in from all sides.

  In the confusion, Jason had lost sight of Vacili, but the cameraman had been there. He'd followed them onto the wing of the craft although Jason had no recollection of him jumping down from the scaffolding. A blinking red light on the camera told Jason he'd caught Lachlan's last few moments on video.

  Jason looked up at Vacili, looking deep into the dark, cold, impersonal camera lens as a bullet struck the back of Vacili's head. An explosion of red sprayed to one side as the cameraman's body crumpled and fell. His lifeless body slid a few feet after hitting the hide of the great animal, while the camera rolled down the sloping wing, slowly gathering momentum before it bounced off the edge and out of sight.

  Lily grabbed Jason, holding on to him as though she were desperate not to fall. Jason could feel the terror in her trembling body.

  On the distant scaffolding, April Stegmeyer's body lay prone, sprawled to one side in a pool of blood.

  The gunfire beneath the UFO ceased abruptly. Bellum was either dead or had been wounded and captured.

  “We need to go,” Jason said, pulling Lily to her feet.

  “Where?” Lily asked.

  “We'll go where we've always gone. Back in time.”

  As the words left his lips, he realized she was going to die. He wasn't sure whether she would die there in the nuclear reactor, within the time stream, or in the dark waters off the coast of North Korea, but there had only ever been one survivor, a boy. And that was the answer to the calculations. What was the consequence of traveling through time with a ruptured shield? The answer was that any matter that travelled through the wormhole reverted to its then current form. But that couldn't be the whole answer. His body had retained its magnificent genetic changes, but where had those genetic enhancements come from? Were they the result of exposure to radiation while traveling through time? But surely, he thought, such radiation would be destructive. There was some other hidden element he didn't yet understand. Some other influence swaying the course of the mighty river of time, and that puzzled him.

  “We should run,” Lily said, pulling away from him, dragging him from the dome of the creature. “We need to get back to the truck. If you go back in time, this will never end. We need to get back out the way we came.”

  Jason never saw the shooter, but he heard the shots ring out, echoing around the vast dome.

  Lily's body convulsed as three bullets ripped through her abdomen. Bright red blood sprayed across the dark hide of the creature. Lily sank to her knees and fell to one side clutching at her bloody stomach. She screamed in agony.

  “No!” Jason cried. Crouching beside her, he raised her head and cradled her in his arms. “Oh, no. Not you too!”

  “You have to run,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “You can't go back. If you do, you'll never escape. Your only hope is to get out of here.”

  Her body spasmed, but the spasms were only from the waist up. Holding her, he could feel her shattered spine. She
was paralyzed from the waist down. Blood and fluids poured from her wounds, soaking his hands.

  “No, no, no,” he murmured, brushing her hair to one side and inadvertently smearing blood on her forehead. “It can't end like this. Please, don't let it end like this.”

  “Don't you see,” she gasped, squeezing his hand. “This has to end. You have to break out of the time loop.”

  “No,” he whispered. “I can't leave you.”

  “You have to,” she said, closing her eyes as she whispered, “Run!”

  Like Lachlan before her, Lily's body went limp in his arms. Her eyes flickered open, but they stared blindly up at the vast ceiling of the reactor dome.

  “Nooooo!” he screamed, arching his back and tensing every muscle in his body in a futile bid to roll back time, but there was nothing to be done for her.

  Run!

  Lily's last word seemed to echo in his mind.

  Run?

  Sitting there, he trembled, trying not to collapse beside her lifeless body. Jason was shaking uncontrollably. Standing seemed impossible, let alone walking or running. Here he was, sitting on a time machine, unable to roll back just one minute to save the young woman. He couldn't explain the connection he'd forged with Lily over those past few days, but it had been severed violently and abruptly, tearing at his heart.

  Soldiers dropped onto the edge of the UFO. They were shouting, waving, firing their rifles. Bullets whipped by his head, passing just inches from his face.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, resting her head gently on the thick hide of the interstellar beast. With two fingers outstretched, he closed her eyelids. It seemed only decent and proper. He couldn't pretend he didn't care. He couldn't pretend that just moments before, her body hadn't been animated, radiating a life he found deliriously intoxicating. The realization that Lily was dead caused a knot to form in his chest. A knife through the heart couldn't have felt more painful, he thought.

  Run!

  Again, her soft admonition reverberated through his mind. She was right. He had to run.

  Jason grabbed the pickaxe and ran. His legs felt weak, drained of strength, but he forced them on. Bullets whizzed by, cracking through the air as they shot past him at supersonic velocities.

  Jason ran on blindly, but he was running around the center of the UFO, not away from it. If he wanted to escape, he should have run toward the walkway. His mind felt drugged and lethargic, still reeling from shock.

  He climbed into the shattered dome on top of the vast creature.

  Immediately, the alien animal responded to his presence. Light began pulsating out from the center of the craft, running in ripples across the immense hide in much the same way as a cuttlefish displayed a variety of colors. The soldiers were thrown backwards, as if hurled outward by a massive electric shock.

  Jason got his first good look inside the vast cavity that was the head of the creature. That the beast was organic was not readily apparent because the outer skin was transparent, like a massive windscreen. From the outside, the central dome had appeared dull grey, but from inside the view was clear. There were controls, at least they looked like controls. Row upon row of lights lit up on a bank in the craft, but the far side of what could be mistaken for a cockpit had an earthy feel. Severed roots and crushed rocks lay in complex matrices, interlaced with each other, connected by thin, sinuous veins. The contrast between the two hemispheres of the dome was stark, giving the impression that they didn't belong together.

  The rear half of the alien skull appeared to be sectioned off. A series of hurriedly scrawled formulas scarred the wall. These were the most advanced calculations he'd seen. They were complete. He recognized several portions from the photographs he'd seen in the RV.

  The creature throbbed and pulsated. He could feel her lifting into the air. Outside, scaffolding fell away, crashing to the ground. Soldiers were yelling and firing, but where Jason was, there was only silence. They appeared to be acting out some part on a stage without any sound to accompany them.

  Jason turned back to the scratches on the rear wall. He fought with his legs to stay upright as the craft swayed in the air.

  Lachlan was right. What seemed like a single strand of time to Jason was in fact a time stream that repeated thousands and thousands of times. Each time the outcome had been the same. The only difference was those etchings. Among the chaos, they were all that mattered. They were the fleeting efforts to steer a new course.

  You can save her

  You can save all of them

  These were messages he'd left himself.

  The scratches outside had been from previous iterations of both him and Lily as they fought to understand what was happening to them time and again, but inside this dome, the only handwriting was his.

  Standing there, he realized he had a plan. Jason still hadn't quite comprehended what that plan was, but he knew why he went back in time. He couldn't run. He was always going to go back for her. He had to save her. That's what this was about: love.

  Jason had gone back innumerable times out of his love for Lily and her father. And he had a plan, he knew he had a plan, a plan that had been formed over thousands of cycles, a plan carved here on the walls of this vast creature, only he had to figure out the messages he'd been sending himself.

  The animal continued to pulse, increasing in its frequency and the brightness of the light it emitted.

  “I know,” Jason said softly. “I understand the pain you've been in for so long. You want to be set free, too. I can do this. I can change this. I can bring about the end. Stay with me, my old friend. Together, we are going to change this and bring you release from the torment and pain.”

  Jason stepped back, his eyes focused on the back wall, intently wanting to understand the message he'd sent himself.

  He knew in past iterations he would have turned because he would have wanted to see the spectacular sight of the creature bursting through the dome over reactor one. He'd have relished the vision of time and space warping around him and the majesty of traveling a wormhole through space-time, but to escape he had to ignore all that. He had to knit the threads of a plan being passed down through time. The answer was right there in front of him, he just had to see it, he had to see it just as he had in times immemorial.

  You can save her

  You can save all of them

  And that was when it struck him. Finally, he understood. He'd never seen these words. If there had been photos taken of these words, they never made it to Lachlan. Perhaps they hadn't been deemed important, but for some reason this message only ever reached him now, although portions of the calculation lower down made it back to him in the RV.

  Jason closed his eyes, picturing the photos scattered on the floor of the RV. They'd fallen out of sequence, scattered in a seemingly random pattern, but they'd formed coherent words.

  fe ED b A ck

  d E st R oY

  Opening his eyes, he ran his fingers over the thick hide of the animal as it rose thousands of feet above the Earth, readying itself for a jaunt into the past.

  There it was. He recognized the letters, if not the order.

  fe fe fe fe ck b ED A ED ck A

  To anyone else, these letters would be nonsense, but the first three fe's were there as markers, slowly lining up those two letters over several iterations so they appeared in precisely the right spot within the photograph. Whoever had taken the pictures must have resolved never to show him anything that appeared unsettling, or they hadn't seen any significance in these letters and so ignored them, but either way, this was the only means by which he could talk to himself across the gulf of time.

  Each of the letters was part of a multi-iteration attempt to warn himself of what was to come.

  E d R st oY

  There was destroy.

  Jason leaned close, studying several small scratches in the shape of v's and ^'s. Instantly, he understood what he was telling himself. He'd previously calculated where the edge of those photos had bee
n. He'd already mapped out where the final words should go. This was it, this would be the last iteration. With this, he could end the cycles.

  Jason held up his pickaxe, looking carefully at the markings and remembering the sequence in which the photos had fallen. Quickly, he scratched two words into the wall, using all the space he felt was available.

  ctor 1 Rea

  Reactor 1. That was the missing piece of the puzzle,the final portion of the plan. He went back over the R, making sure it stood out clearly. This was what he needed, he was sure of it.

  Jason thought back to his state of mind in the RV after they struck the branch on the road. He remembered how he'd wondered about these words, and he remembered the conversation he and Lachlan had, the discussion about the three reactors.

  Would this message work?

  Would Jason believe someone was talking to him across the vastness of time itself?

  Would Lachlan believe in this ad hoc message across the ages?

  He knew Lily would.

  What would they do?

  Would they destroy the dome?

  His only hope lay in that Learjet punching its way through the dome over Reactor 1 and destroying the time machine.

  Would the blast kill the creature?

  He'd seen Mercy scratched on the side of the craft, and now he understood why. Standing there in the cranial structure of the beast he knew it desired release, yet another message from its scarred hide.

  Was that what this was all about?

  Was that why this astonishing animal continued to loop over and over within space-time? Was it seeking release?

  The alien had been injured. From what he could tell, almost quarter of whatever made up its brain had been destroyed at some point in the distant past. As best he understood what he'd seen, this magnificent animal was on the verge of being brain dead. It had suffered for far too long. Yes, he thought, Reactor 1 completed the message he'd been trying to send for thousands of years. Reactor 1 would bring about the end.