Peter Cawdron - Feedback

Jason started to pick one of the images up when he realized they had fallen in such away as to spell out a word. Each of the overlapping images formed part of a single word, a word that would only be visible if they fell in this exact manner.

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.

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.

Jason turned slightly and saw Lily lying on the pillow next to him. She let go, allowing him to turn and face her.

“Good morning,” she said, brushing her hair from her eyes.

The RV rocked gently as someone climbed back into the vehicle. The engine started and Jason felt the vehicle pull back out onto the freeway.

Light filtered in through gaps in the blinds.

Jason lay on his back with his hands behind his head. Lily rested her hand on his chest, sliding her fingers up under his shirt. He sighed, wishing life could be as simple as it seemed right then, but he knew the nightmare would continue today.

“Sleep well?”

“Like a rock,” Jason replied as Lily ran her nails across his chest. Damn, that felt good, he thought. He rolled sideways, resting his head on his elbow as he faced her.

“I don’t understand,” he confided, speaking in soft tones. “Up until yesterday, I was just an ordinary guy going to college. What changed?”

“You were never ordinary,” Lily said. She pulled her hand back. Her fingers rested on his forearm. “They needed you to think you were just like everyone else because it’s only when you’re relaxed that you doodle.”

Jason was silent.

“You’ve been doing them for years. Every time you scribble something on a scrap of paper and throw it in the garbage, someone hunts through the trash and matches the sketch with one of the formulas on the UFO. For you, it’s nothing. For them, it’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together.”

Jason looked deep into her dark brown eyes. Her voice was soft. There was compassion in her tone. Perhaps he was reading too much into her manner, but he felt like she cared deeply about him. The connection between them seemed like one forged over years, or perhaps decades, and not just a few days.

“They learned a long time ago that under stress you stop drawing, so they left you in the community.”

“What about Mitch and Helena?” he asked.

“I know they’re your friends,” Lily replied, squeezing his arm gently. “But they aren’t, not really. They’re NSA agents. They’re on a long term assignment.”

Jason was stunned. His mind was spinning with disbelief, but then he realized Mitchell was one of the people that had run down the street toward him when he jumped on the bike with Lily. So somehow, Mitch was mixed up in this, too. As much as Jason didn’t want to believe Lily, there was a nagging persistence to that statement in his mind. It was the little things. Mitch was always there. Whether it was calling him when he was doodling or catching up with him on the steps of the university after the meeting with Lachlan. Mitchell was always a little too close.

“And you?” he asked, stiffening unconsciously .

“Me?” Lily replied, touching her hand to her throat and gesturing at herself. It seemed to be a question she hadn’t considered before then. “I’m no actor. I didn’t come because I had to or because I was ordered to. I came because I wanted to be with you. My father has told me so much about you, about how he rescued you, but it wasn’t just you he saved from North Korea. He rescued my great grandfather, my uncle and my mother. He saved all of us.”

Jason watched as Lily swallowed a lump in her throat. She struggled to keep eye contact with him as she spoke.

“He told me that what they were doing to you was cruel. He told the NSA team they should be honest with you. They said they were making progress, but DARPA wanted more. My father tried to get permission to try another angle, to get you to relive that moment in the sea so many years ago. They told us this was the final attempt, that after this they would institutionalize you.”