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There was something about the console that looked strangely out of place, and that distracted him for a moment, taking his mind off his singular purpose of destroying the creature.

Jason turned, drifting under power, controlling his motion with deft skill as he looked around within the alien skull, wanting to understand what had happened to drive it into this abyss. He reached out and grabbed at the strange console as his spotlights pierced the transparent outer dome, lighting up the sloping front of the creature.

“What have they done to you?”

In those few seconds, he understood something quite profound, something that had escaped their attention for centuries. There were two alien species involved, not one. These magnificent beasts, capable of migrating through space and time were being hunted by some other alien culture, one capable of taming and controlling them. The console was a horse bit, a harness, some kind of biotech designed to control the creature, to transform it into a mule.

“Lobotomy,” he whispered in horror.

For all the interest
Homo sapiens
had in the fabled dragons of the deep, it seemed the real alien monsters were still hidden from sight. Someone had attacked this creature. To the best of Jason's knowledge, this was the first occasion in which there was any inkling of an aggressive, conquest-driven interstellar species that could represent a real threat to humanity.

He turned his attention to the ruptured section to his right. The membrane had burst and spilled into the empty quadrant. He could remember seeing this mass set like stone when the creature had been housed in reactor one.

Jason reached out and touched the dark, grey goo. Although it looked soft, it was as hard as a rock. As his gloved fingers ran over the bumps and undulations, images burst into his mind, except these weren't his displaced memories from the past, they were coming from the alien creature.

Large clouds of hydrogen billowed within a stellar nursery. At first glance, they seemed cold and menacing, and yet Jason felt at ease. Then he understood. The creature was sharing images and feelings with him.

Jason felt trusted. He couldn't explain why, but he knew there was no one else the creature trusted, and for the first time Jason had a glimpse of why it had circled so long through time trying to escape: there was no one else the alien felt it could trust.

His hand drifted away from the brain matter and the connection was broken. Immediately, he thrust closer, making contact again.

A thin, gaseous nebula surrounded the dark cloud, emitting a kaleidoscope of colors more beautiful than any rainbow.

Starlight lit up the tip of the molecular cloud, exciting the gas filaments and blowing the dark edges away like the wind eroding a sand dune. Judging from the surrounding stars, the cloud easily spanned a dozen light years or more. Several sections had broken away, floating like islands against the azure blue nebula.

A new born star lit up one corner of the cloud, pushing back the dark swirling mass and breaking free from its stellar womb.

“Home,” Jason whispered, understanding what he was seeing.

Given the sheer size of this stellar nursery capable of birthing hundreds of stars, was it really such a surprise that it should not also give rise to life? Jason could feel himself smiling with delight. Within that molecular cloud was a cocktail of chemicals containing more mass than anything found on ten thousand planets like Earth.

The dark cloud was deceptive, hiding the complex chemical reactions sparked by interstellar radiation. What was sunlight to Earth but the radiation of a nearby star?

Jason saw Earth in a different light.

Earth was exceptional among the planets surrounding the Sun, but perhaps it was exceptional on an even grander scale, being the exception to other celestial processes by which organic chemistry could form life. In that moment, he understood that the conglomeration of molecular clouds and the multicolored nebula that surrounded it like a cloak could give rise to countless lifeforms.

Was it that unlikely? He wondered. Life had arisen on Earth when it was a hellish, seething volcanic wasteland. The newly formed moon orbited so close that it caused tidal waves hundreds of feet high. The atmosphere choked with toxic fumes, almost entirely devoid of oxygen. The heat was unbearable. The planet was bombarded with tens of thousands of asteroids, causing earth-shattering impacts, some leaving craters that would have spanned most of the Continental US. And yet in the midst of all that, life arose. Perhaps life in space was more of a natural occurrence than anyone had ever dared imagine.

The vision before him was surreal.

Although his hand was outstretched and his thrusters continued to maintain pressure against the brain mass of the creature, the view before him was one of being transported across the universe. He could see his white spacesuit, with his gloved hand apparently pushing against nothing. Looking down, past his feet, the nebula continued to bloom below him. Had it not been for the resistance to his suit's gentle thrust, Jason would have sworn he was there, beholding the majesty of the nebula firsthand.

A flock of the alien creatures passed overhead. He could see them spinning about each other, playful and vibrant with life. Their saucer like shape seemed more fluid and organic than mechanical. They looped and twirled, like a litter of puppies playing, with their disc-like bodies flexing and twisting as if they were stingrays undulating through the ocean.

From his perspective, he seemed to be tracking along next to them as they approached the nebula, only the backdrop of the nebula never seemed to change. Its sheer size and the distance between them and the cloud made it seem as though it had been painted on the backdrop of the heavens. Michelangelo and Picasso could not have rendered a masterpiece so grand.

Then, without warning, a javelin shot through the air. At least, that was the impression Jason had. It was difficult to think of the colorful rainbow of gas clouds as a cold void, a lifeless vacuum at -455F.

The javelin moved in an arc, reminding Jason of the motion of a spear or an arrow on Earth, only in zero-g that meant its flight was powered, being guided onto its target.

The alien creatures had the appearance of stingrays without tails. They broke away from each other, dispersing with a sudden burst of speed. Blue lights flashed around them, peppering the nebula with blinding strobes as they disappeared into space-time, fleeing to the safety of some other place, some other time. One though, flipped on its side, wounded by the javelin.

“That was you,” Jason said in a voice breaking with emotion.

The wounded alien creature tried to escape. Flashes of blue light strobed around its circular hide, but several more javelins struck the animal. Was it an animal? We're all animals, Jason reminded himself, regardless of how civilized we try to appear. He had no doubt those that hunted these magnificent alien creatures somehow depersonalized their barbaric acts just as humanity had done for centuries when hunting whales or apes.

Another dark saucer-like creature appeared on the edge of his vision, with a row of javelin darts attached beneath its shell, strapped on like missiles on the underside of a warplane. The intruder rushed at the wounded creature.

Jason watched as spider-like aliens launched themselves from this marauder, thrusting through space and landing on the crippled alien. Some kind of particle beam erupted from one of these pirates, searing the central dome and creating the massive scar he'd floated through just minutes before when he found the alien in the darkened crevasse deep within OA-5772.

Jason could see that the spiders were capable of operating without a spacesuit. Their exoskeletons must have shielded their internal organs in much the same way as his spacesuit protected him.

Jason found himself wondering about the energy requirements of such celestial creatures and the need for their metabolism to maintain an internal temperature in which their biochemistry could function properly. That space was poor at convective heat transfer must have helped, but the extreme differences between starlight and shade would have made it difficult for any biological creature to negotiate. Perhaps this was why these creatures stayed well clear of the stars, he thought. Perhaps it wasn't the gravity wells they were avoiding, but the excessive heat. Or maybe it was both.

Jason wanted to study these creatures. He was fascinated by the possibilities filling his mind and he could understand how Jae-Sun would have once felt the same way.

His viewpoint closed in on the fractured, smoldering dome of the creature and he could see one of the hunters setting up the console he'd seen glowing in the darkness.

The wounded creature fought, bucking like a bronco. Strobes of light continued to burst around it as the pirates set about breaking their captive's will. Jason found himself willing the alien to flee and in a flash of light it was gone. The marauders were left without their prey, drifting aimlessly through the nebula in response to the shockwave that reverberated when the wounded creature fled.

Jason was again in the darkness of the chasm deep in the shattered asteroid, only his viewpoint had shifted. Although his outstretched hand still pressed hard against the mass of brain matter, he appeared to be floating near the back wall of the skull. He watched as another astronaut sailed in through the gaping wound and at first he thought it was Lassiter.

A white spacesuit drifted before him. Spotlights flashed around the darkened interior of the skull.

“That's me!” he said, almost expecting to see himself responding to those words. It took a moment for him to realize he was seeing Jae-Sun in the original time stream.

His doppelgänger turned, looking through him, not seeing him.

Several more astronauts drifted by outside the creature, floating past like scuba divers in a dark cave. They attached cables to the outside of the animal.

The view before Jason flickered and suddenly the empty brain cavity was flooded with light.

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.