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“You’re our ace in the hole,” Bellum added.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Lachlan said, placing a thick folder on the table in front of Jason. “This is everything we know. You’re welcome to look at everything.”

Lachlan signaled with his head and both Stegmeyer and Bellum followed him to the cockpit, leaving Jason and Lily sitting at the table.

Bellum sat down in the cockpit while Lachlan and Stegmeyer stood beside the door talking. They chatted softly with each other, but their conversation sounded forced, as though neither felt at ease. They were being polite, giving him some distance.

Jason stared at the folder.

“I’ll go too,” Lily said.

“No,” Jason replied softly, opening the folder and looking at the first page. “Please, don’t.”

Lily leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, smiling, “OK, then let me get you a fresh cup of coffee.”

“That would be nice. Thanks.”

Within minutes, Jason was engrossed.

Time seemed to come to a standstill.

Lily handed him a pad and pen. Jason arranged the photos across the table, shifting them around and linking them together. Photos were laid out on the floor, but not randomly. He was looking for patterns.

In among the formulas he saw the occasional word hastily scratched into the surface of the dark craft.

As he looked through the photos, he realized a number of terms had been repeated, so he tallied them. But whoever had taken the photos had been concerned with the formulas, catching only passing glimpses of whatever had been written elsewhere. It was stupid, Jason thought. He wanted to see everything written on the UFO, not just the scientific notations.

The writing was in English. That alone should have caught the attention of whoever took these pictures, he thought. They should have been trying to record everything, but they seemed to be interested only by the calculations, with some of the formulas being photographed several times from a variety of angles.

“What do you think this means?” Lachlan asked. He had returned from the cockpit some time ago. Stegmeyer was seated across from Jason, but he hadn’t even noticed her sit down. He was startled by the professor’s voice. He had lost track of time. The Learjet was beginning its descent. Jason glanced at his coffee. A thin film of milk had left a skin on the surface. Touching the cup, he felt how cold the drink was and resisted the temptation to take a sip.

“I think you’ve missed the real story here,” Jason said to Lachlan. “The formulas only paint part of the picture. Look at these words. Why are they here? What’s their purpose?”

Lachlan picked up one of the images, the word “ Condemned “ was visible on the edge of the picture, with only the lower half of the last three letters in the frame.

“What do you think it means?” asked Jason.

“I don’t know,” Lachlan replied.

“If you’re right, and this is a craft of extraterrestrial origin, then a number of questions spring to mind. Where’s the pilot? Where’s the crew? Why is the craft covered in scientific formulae and English notation?”

“I’m not sure,” Lachlan said. “DARPA are playing a long game with this thing. Rather than being invasive, they’ve gone for passive investigation, using sonics, x-rays, spectrographic analysis, even going so far as to build a massive scanner in place. They’re convinced the alien technology is recoverable, but it’s so advanced, so far beyond anything we can achieve they’re scared of breaking things without realizing it. Imagine Socrates examining an iPad and you get an idea of what they’re dealing with.”

“Do they have any thoughts on why the craft was defaced? Or who could have done this?” Jason asked.

“No,” Lachlan replied. “But some of those etchings are tens of thousands of years old.”

“That’s impossible!” Jason said. “The English language is barely a thousand years old. How can they…”

Jason’s voice trailed off. He could see the knowing half smile on Lachlan’s face.

“Time travel,” he said.

“Precisely,” Lachlan replied. “And on a scale that is unimaginable to us. We’re not talking a few decades or even a century or a millennia. This craft traverses tens of thousands of years in the blink of an eye. Now can you see why they’re willing to kill to keep this secret?”

“So,” Jason continued. “It’s not so much a question of where this craft has been up till now, but when.”

Lachlan broke into a full smile, adding, “English may only be a thousand years old, but given what we’re witnessing with the stability of existing languages on the Internet, radical changes are going to be the exception. Languages will continue to evolve, but they won’t drift and languish as they once did. English could last in pretty much its current form for the next ten thousand years!”

“And me?” Jason asked. “Does that mean I’m from the future?”

Lachlan couldn’t keep the smile from his face. He tried to, but he was clearly excited. He restrained himself, saying, “That’s one theory, my theory.”

“But why send a child back in time?” Jason asked. “What happened to the craft? What caused it to crash?”

“I don’t know.”

They were three simple words, but they were not the words Jason wanted to hear.

“We’ve struggled with this for decades,” Lachlan continued.

Jason saw Vacili’s camera was running, catching their impromptu conversation in electronic format.

“There’s a problem with your theory,” Jason said, gesturing at the camera. “If this craft is from the future, they’d know. They’d see this recording and could replay this conversation. They’d know something went wrong. They’d be able to reconstruct what was about to happen from their perspective, but what had already happened from ours. This should have never happened.”

“Unless?” Lachlan said.

“Unless somehow that knowledge is lost. But that’s fatalistic. It implies all our efforts are in vain, that everything we do becomes buried in time.”

Stegmeyer piped up, saying, “Now you see why we’re flying a bird into that power station? We need this to register on their radar.”

“But you don’t understand,” Jason said. “If the developers of this craft haven’t already seen that recording you’re making right now, they never will.”

“We could be wrong,” Lachlan offered.

“We could,” Jason conceded. “But then, what other explanation is there?”

“The future isn’t fixed,” Lachlan said. “Neither is the past. From our perspective, the past looks settled, but it’s not. Time is like a river. Water flows from the hills to the sea, but even a river is not a closed system. There’s evaporation, condensation and precipitation constantly renewing the river. In the same way, time looks like a closed system to us, but it’s not. Quantum probability waves move backwards in time changing the outcomes in the double-slit experiment. It’s a gross oversimplification to see time as fixed.”

Jason was quiet. He tapped the photos in front of him, thinking carefully before speaking.

“These equations,” he said. “They’re not related to time travel. They’re field strength calculations. They’re looking at the consequences of time travel, the causal relationships between matter and energy. Whoever wrote these wasn’t trying to figure out how to travel in time, they were trying to figure out the effect time travel would have on multidimensional space.”