Feedback

fe ED b A ck

Ordinarily, Jason wouldn’t have thought of this as anything other than an unusual coincidence. He was well aware of the human tendency to read more into shapes and figures than was there. The overactive imagination of Homo sapiens has given us the Virgin Mary on a slice of toast, he thought, along with Elvis on a burnt cheese sandwich.

Jason wasn’t one to fall for such mental tricks, except that another bunch of pages had fallen to form another word.

d E st R oY

What were the odds?

He wondered just how much of a freak chance it was to see two English words being spelled out from a scattering of loose papers.

It was nothing, he reassured himself. This was no omen.

Jason never allowed his mind to run to such nonsense.

The term feedback did get his attention, though, and he picked up a couple of the photos, looking at the calculations on them, thinking about their relationship to the concept of time travel.

“Like a message in a bottle,” Lily said, picking up the photos that had comprised the word “destroy.” Jason noticed how the simple act of moving the photos snapped the illusion, allowing any meaning to dissolve back into random, chaotic letters.

“What’s the significance?” Jason asked absentmindedly looking at one of the photos.

A formula had been carved into the surface of the UFO like love letters might be carved into the trunk of an oak tree. But in addition to the formula, a trail of d’s ran in an arc, leading to the corner of the photo where the d had been in d E st R oY.

Jason counted the d’s. There were five of them. They caught his eye because they clearly held some meaning, but whatever their significance was wasn’t apparent. As unusual as it was to see scientific formulas scratched into a leathery hide, at least they had a purpose. However the curved row of d’s looked meaningless. Why would anyone bother?

Lily didn’t reply to his question. She seemed as lost in thought as he was. She flipped through a few photos, pointing at a similar pattern with several other letter combinations that had gone into making up that cryptic phrase: feedback destroy.

“It’s nothing,” she finally said. “It is the equations that are important.”

Lachlan poked his head back in the door of the RV. Water dripped from his face.

“We’ve blown two tires,” he said. “It’s going to take us a while to change these.”

Jason yawned.

“Listen,” Lachlan added, pointing toward the bedroom at the back of the RV. “It’s going to be a long drive. Why don’t you get some shuteye?”

With that, Lachlan was gone, disappearing back into the darkness and the drizzling rain.

Lily gathered the photos, stacking them neatly on a bench beside the kitchen.

Lachlan was right. Jason had had no idea how exhausted he was until they’d stopped. The shift of attention had allowed fatigue to catch up with him. He left Lily in the main cabin and slipped into the darkened bedroom.

Jason decided he’d rest for a moment, perhaps just close his eyes for a few minutes before they got underway again. He kicked off his shoes and flopped facedown on the bed with his feet dangling over the edge. Burying his face in a pillow, Jason was asleep in seconds.

He woke to the sound of birds outside. For an instant, he thought he was lying in bed in his apartment, but those weren’t pigeons cooing. He could hear half a dozen different birds calling, and as he opened his eyes, at first he thought he was in a darkened forest. How could he be in a forest?

A hand slid around his waist. As he moved, the soft, gentle arm pulled him tighter, snuggling against him beneath a warm blanket.