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“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?”

“We can't,” Jason replied. “Whether its now or in fifty years, any contact I have with that craft is going to result in the same outcome. If I come in contact with this thing, whether willfully or forced, the feedback continues.

“It doesn't matter how big or small a feedback loop is, if it always returns to the same point you always have the same problem.

“We don't know how long this has been going on. There's no reason to assume every trip back has started at the same point. We could have had this conversation thousands of times already.”

Lachlan thought for a second, before saying, “You're right. It's a chance we can't take.”

Lachlan delayed the attack by 24 hours to allow time to arrange their escape from the United States. That they would be hounded by law enforcement was beyond dispute. Rather than exposing the UFO to the media, they were going to destroy it.

“You'd better be right,” Lachlan had said the next day.

“There has to be a reason we told ourselves to destroy the reactor,” Jason replied. “We have to trust ourselves when we're the ones telling ourselves there's no other way.”

The inky black darkness inside the asteroid was mesmerizing, and Jason found his mind running to the past. He could remember the Learjet banking as it approached the nuclear reactor. There had been several large explosions at North Bend after the plane punched through the roof over reactor one.

A dark cloud seething angrily had risen above the shattered remains of the dome like the mushroom cloud from a nuclear detonation. Sporadic smaller explosions rocked the power plant for almost an hour afterwards. Finally, a brilliant blue-white explosion ripped out of the heart of the reactor with such ferocity that it blew apart the dark clouds looming overhead.

Their escape from the US had been carefully planned. Air travel was out of the question. From Oregon, they fled north to Seattle and on to Canada, traveling overland from Vancouver to Montreal. From there they boarded a merchant ship traveling to Cuba via Bermuda.

DARPA had burned enough people over the years in relation to the UFO that Bellum had no problem creating a false trail. His contacts left clues of an escape by land through Texas and into the lawless northern regions of Mexico surrounding Monterrey, keeping federal investigators off their track.

For almost two decades they were considered fugitives, but eventually the truth came out. Evidence of the UFO had surfaced quite early on in the FBI investigation, but it wasn't believed. Several high-profile leaks in the subsequent decades revealed the extent of DARPA research into the craft along with DARPA's plans to exploit the technology to allow the US to leap thousands of years ahead of other nations. Even the most die hard patriots could see such a concentration of power would be abused.

When the truth about the murders of Mitchell Jones and Helena Young were finally revealed, public opinion swayed toward the North Bend Six, as they were known. It took another seven years before they were granted amnesty.

During that time, Jason and Lachlan had made clandestine contact with the original Jae-Sun. He was born and raised in Orange County, Los Angeles and appeared to be the same age as Jason.

Jason had struggled with the realization that he was Jae-Sun. This wasn't some stranger divorced from him. They weren't twins. This was him in his infancy. Only the term infancy was a euphemism, as Jae-Sun was the same age as Jason, but for Jae-Sun nothing had happened yet.

Jason could remember the look on Jae-Sun's face when they first met. Rather than staring at a mirror, he felt as though he were looking at a video of himself.

“How can this be?” Jae-Sun asked, sitting across the table from Jason under the shade of an umbrella at a small cafe on the boardwalk in Havana.

A bright sun burned through the cloudless blue sky. Sunlight reflected off the waves in the harbor, blinding Jason, but he removed his sunglasses anyway so Jae-Sun could get a good look at his face.

Jae-Sun turned to Professor Lachlan, saying, “I appreciate you sponsoring my work, but ... but you want me to believe I'm looking at myself? That's just not possible. Is he like a twin, or something?”

Jason found it strange to hear himself being described in that way, as though he were somehow less than human. It was the “or something“ that cut to the bone. In Jae-Sun's mind, Jason was a freak of nature.

“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.

You can save her

You can save all of them

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.

Jason breathed deeply, sighing as he exhaled. It all seemed so easy in their planning. Time travel was too dangerous for humanity. Nuclear weapons had once brought the world to the brink of annihilation. What would a mastery of the very fabric of space-time afford this infant species still reaching out from its parent star?

This was a mercy killing, he told himself. The alien was brain dead. That was the only possible explanation he could conceive to explain why the creature had been locked in a time loop. He had no choice. He couldn't let this alien fall into anyone's hands. He had to destroy the creature, regardless of his own sentiments. Eventually, others would stumble upon these dragons of the deep, but perhaps by then humanity would have reached beyond adolescence.

“Farewell, old friend,” he said, using his suit thrusters to move forward and position the nuclear bomb so it was wedged between the console and the dome. All that remained was for him to return to the
Excelsior
and remotely detonate the device. He had to leave. He couldn't remain there. He had to see the plan through and end the madness of time looping over and over again.