Feedback

He and Lachlan had only ever lived through one iteration. Jason was only consciously aware of his singular passage through time. He’d avoided the feedback loop. Jason knew these ghostly memories weren’t his. They were from another Jason, one that existed in a previous time loop.

Memories flashed through his mind, glimpses of formulas and words, sometimes entire phrases carved into the skin of this magnificent animal. Jason had never seen the creature before in anything other than photographs, but thousands of previous iterations had etched these figures in his memory in defiance of time travel. He understood he existed in a vortex, with his life reset time and again, and in the deep recesses of his mind, he could still remember.

For Jason, the critical moment had come in the RV so many years before.

Rain had lashed the windows.

The dark night seemed to stretch on forever.

Their recreational vehicle had hit something while driving along an interstate and the cabin skewed sideways as the driver slammed on the brakes. Broken branches flipped up beneath the underside of the vehicle, slamming into the chassis and puncturing two of the tires.

The specifics of what happened next were lost to him, but he remembered being left alone with Lily.

Photos lay scattered on the floor of the RV.

They spelled out a dire warning.

fe ED b A ck

d E st R oY

Rea ctor 1

At the time, it had been hard to believe. How could photos taken in the past, falling in a chaotic, random manner, form a deliberate message? The implication was that the etchings represented not only the past but the future. Somehow, someone in the future knew that those past photos would fall in that exact manner and used them to send a message to the present, but that was impossible. Or was it? Jason thought the answer lay in the first word, feedback.

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?”