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“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.”

A voice came over the intercom. “We’ll be landing in approximately five minutes.”

Jason looked out the window. They were flying along a valley, dipping below the lush, green hills on either side. They touched down and came to a stop in sight of a sign that read: Welcome to Portland, Oregon — Alis volat propriis — She flies with her own wings.

Chapter 15: Flight