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Jason blinked as his eyes adjusted to the sudden influx of light.

Several men walked around within the brightly lit skull of the creature. They were dressed in clean-room suits, hermetically sealed with their own oxygen supply.

That the men walked meant they were under the influence of gravity, and Jason wondered whether this view was onboard the Excelsior or on Earth. Their movement was too fluid for either Mars or Titan, where they would have appeared to rebound more, but either way, this view revealed a much more distant, future time.

Jason could make out Jae-Sun’s features through the visor of one of the suits. He’d aged considerably. Given that they were both already almost five hundred years old, that could only mean Jae-Sun had reached the limit of genetic renewal. As Jason understood the process, that would have made Jae-Sun almost a thousand years old.

“The collar is in place, but the damage appears too great,” one of the men said.

“I’m convinced we can do it,” the older Jae-Sun replied. “I’ve studied the design. I understand the physics.”

“But the dome would need shielding,” the other man said. “Without protection, you’d be exposed to the radiant energy within the wormhole. We have no idea what that would do to human tissue.”

A woman spoke. Jason had assumed all three scientists were men, because their baggy suits hid any hint of gender.

“You’re going to hit a backwash of energy, not unlike when a river opens out into the sea. Both sides of the timeline are going to pour energy into the void, trying to close the hole. I don’t see how anyone could survive given the damage to the alien dome.”

“And yet this creature survived such a trip to get here,” the aging Jae-Sun insisted. “Don’t you see? If we can harness this power we can change time.”

Jason was shocked to learn he could be so arrogant. This magnificent interstellar creature had once been nothing more to him that a vehicle to exploit. He’d given its life no more consideration than a child would stepping on a bug.

“Think about what you’re saying,” the woman pleaded. “You’re stealing fire from the gods!”

“Ha,” the elderly Jae-Sun replied, clearly surprised by the comparison with the fabled Prometheus. “Think about how society advances. We learn from our mistakes. We learn the hard way. What if we could learn the easy way? What if we could learn without consequence and avoid heartache and ruin? What if we could fix our mistakes?”

“But consequences are unavoidable,” the woman replied. “Time will not permit paradoxes. You cannot play God!”

“God was an amateur,” the old Jae-Sun snapped, his voice booming as he became more bellicose. “God knew the future and never changed a thing. But us, we have a real shot at turning back the clock and resetting the tragedies of mankind. We can prevent billions of deaths in the War of the North! We can avoid the loss of tens of thousands of other animal species to our own stupidity. We can undo extinction itself!”

“You are mad,” the woman stated firmly, raising her voice in defiance. “You’re drunk with power.”

He recognized the voice.

“Lily!” he whispered, reaching out with his hand.

The woman turned her head to one side as though she heard something from the rear of the craft, but that was impossible. They were separated by hundreds of years, and this was an illusion, a projection, a fabrication. In that instant, their eyes seemed to meet, but it wasn’t Lily. The eyes were too narrow, the jawline too broad.

The woman turned back to the older Jae-Sun, pleading, “This is wrong. Don’t do it!”

The aging man stood there, proud and defiant. He began to reply, but in real time, Jason pulled his hand back briskly, breaking the neural connection and returning himself to the darkness of the asteroid.

Jason was repulsed by what he had seen. He didn’t want to see any more. It wasn’t that he was in denial, but rather that he found it difficult to watch himself being swept up in the hubris born of time travel. The cavalier attitude he’d witnessed sent a chill down his spine. This was the egotism that defined evil across generations: Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, they all shared the same self-absorbed arrogance and myopia. They saw everything clearly, and they alone held the answers. It was the classic trap: blind stupidity and hubris.

For a moment, Jason wasn’t sure quite where he was. The visions he’d had were overwhelming in their clarity, fooling his senses and leaving him uncertain of when and where he was, but he quickly became sure he was back in the quiet of the present.

“I didn’t know,” Jason whispered to himself, realizing he couldn’t separate himself from Jae-Sun. They were one and the same person, the only difference between them had come from thousands of iterations through time.

“I thought I understood,” he pleaded to the empty vacuum. “But I didn’t.”

It felt strange to be defending actions Jae-Sun wouldn’t make for hundreds of years. Defending? Was he being defensive? Or repentant? Even Jason wasn’t sure at that point.

“That was a different time,” he insisted, feeling as though the silence of the creature somehow condemned him.

What was this magic? How could he see into a future that hadn’t happened yet? He had to destroy this device lest its magic fall into the wrong hands.

Magic! Yes, he thought. What else was this but sorcery by human standards? There had to be some science to the animal’s motion, but humanity was so primitive by comparison that this magnificent creature seemed almost divine, like one of the fabled cherubim that wept over the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Jason wanted to believe those words, but the red LED flickering on the side of the nuclear bomb spoke only of violence. It pulsated, casting an eerie glow in the open brain cavity.

“I can change this,” Jason said to the ghosts echoing around him in the darkness.

As he turned, his spotlights lit up sections of the wall in the skull. Words and equations had once scarred those surfaces. He could still see them in his mind’s eye.

“I can fix this!”

And with those words, he realized nothing had changed. This was the same hubris that had led Jae-Sun to travel back in time in the first place.

Looking at the rear membrane, he saw words once carved in desperation.

You can save her

You can save all of them

Her?

All this time, Jason had thought he understood the message he’d been sending himself across the vast expanse of space-time, but he hadn’t. For hundreds of years, he’d missed the real meaning in the messages he’d left for himself.

He’d never intended to save only himself. He’d never intended to save just Lily or even Lily and Lachlan. All along, he’d wanted to save them all.

There was much he didn’t understand about the feedback loop, but he understood the creature was somehow locked into a certain point in space-time, always returning to that stormy night off the coast of North Korea. But why?

At the time, all Jason could think of was that the injury to the alien’s neural compartment had rendered it essentially brain dead. But now his opinion had changed. He had seen an astonishing amount of cognitive function as the creature had shown him visions of its home, visions of its capture, and of the future.

The alien was wounded, of that he was sure. The damage to its skull was clear. The bit and bridle sat before him as a strange alien console with faint, exotic markings.

This dragon of the deep was crying out to him for help. She could see both the past and the future. Why had she continued circling over and over? Why return to that dark night off the coast of North Korea thousands of times? What was she waiting for?