Pete Cawdron - Feedback

“Un fucking believable!” he cried. “We hit the jackpot!”

“Yes,” Jae-Sun replied softly. “Yes, we did.”

Would he ever be able to tell the true story? He wondered. Would he ever be able to reveal all he’d seen? It wasn’t the dragons of the deep humanity needed to be wary of. What were those spidery pirates? Where were they from? What would happen when humanity first encountered this hostile alien race?

Whatever was to come, they had the past to build upon. Perhaps this console would give them a glimpse into the nature of these other alien creatures. At some point, he’d have to reveal what he knew, but not now. For now, it was enough to know these dragons were benign.

In the distance, hundreds of miles behind Lassiter, there was a faint flicker of blue light. The dragons were coming for her. In his mind, Jae-Sun remembered those ghostly words from within the alien skull.

You can save her

You can save all of them

In the end, he really could save them all.

Thank you for taking the time to read Feedback, and for supporting independent science fiction. Please take the time to leave a review online as your insights and feedback are invaluable (no pun intended). Independent authors thrive on word of mouth advertising, so if you’ve enjoyed this story, please tell your friends and recommend they grab a copy.

Thanks go to Brian Wells and John Walker for their assistance with the scientific aspects of this novel, and to my editor, Ellen Campbell, for her patience in working through the seemingly endless revisions, and to Jae Lee for his insights into Korean culture. The cover art is by Jason Gurley. Thanks also go to those beta-readers who helped fine-tune the content before the general release: Damien Mason, Bruce Simmons, Jamie Canubi, Tomi Blinnikka and TJ Hapney.

The world of publishing is changing rapidly. Whereas once big name authors dominated the best seller lists, now days there are more and more independent writers climbing the charts. If you liked this story and would like to be a part of its success, please tell a friend about it and take the time to leave a review online. Reviews are the lifeblood of independent fiction. Your thoughts and insights help others decide whether this is a novel they’d enjoy.

Several years ago, Professor Stephen Hawking pointed out that time travel is impossible because of feedback. If you tried to connect any two points in time with a wormhole, the energy from both the past and the future would pour through the gap, rushing through and causing a feedback loop much like a microphone being left next to a speaker.

In this novel, we explored the concept of a broad feedback loop, where the start and end points in time are separated by decades and the feedback comes not in the form of energy but in knowledge. In both cases, though, feedback builds until the loop is broken. Although the bulk of this story traces only one iteration within the feedback loop, the following image shows the entire sequence of events as described in the epilogue. Rather than timelines splitting into parallel universes, Feedback relies on the idea that space-time is plastic and malleable, with time being as flexible and robust as any other dimension. For us, paradoxes don’t occur because time is linear, but should a time machine ever be invented, paradoxes could occur as easily as they do in any other dimension.

Here are the time loops traversed by Jae-Sun/Jason.