#futuristicfourweek2024

Hiro and Violet screamed again as the T. rex chomped down on Violet’s forcefield and began to shake it like a dog with a ball. Violet concentrated everything she had on not dropping the forcefield as Hiro crashed into her and the two teens bounced around the purple bubble. They could dimly hear Wilbur still shouting.

Suddenly they were spinning across the grass in bright sunshine.

“Wo-o-oah!”

They rolled and tumbled and somehow, finally, slowed to a stop. Hiro staggered up, swayed, and promptly fell over again, too dizzy to stand. Violet clambered to her own feet carefully, trying very hard not to lose focus on the forcefield. It looked like it was dripping drool.

“Ew…”

“At least the shield held,” Hiro wheezed. “Thanks, Vi.”

Looking out, Violet saw Wilbur, not too far away (apparently they had done more spinning than actual traveling, which explained why her head was doing cartwheels), hands on his hips, scolding the T. rex that had almost just eaten his friends, while it sat on its haunches with a shamed, hanging head.

A panicked shout for Wilbur to get out of there! hurtled up Violet’s throat, paused, and died. It was replaced by annoyance. Extreme annoyance.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” She looked at Hiro.

He’d managed to get to his feet, and was watching with a nonplussed expression.

“Seriously, Wilbur?” he yelled.

Wilbur looked over, grinning. Hiro and Violet glared.

“What?” Wilbur asked.

“‘What?’” Violet shrieked.

“When you said we should meet your family, this was not what I pictured,” Hiro complained.

“I told you I had pets!”

“You said you had dogs!” Violet said. “You said Buster was, and I quote, ‘a Kennel Club crossword champion’.”

“That is not a dog!” Hiro gestured violently at the dinosaur, which was trotting happily after Wilbur as he walked over to his friends.

“Because that’s not Buster,” Wilbur said as though Hiro and Violet were the ones being silly here. “That’s Tiny.”

A shadow fell over the bubble as Wilbur—and his scaly terrier—reached it. Violet looked up at the dinosaur. It was easily 10 or 15 feet tall.

“Of course it is,” she said.

“Bowler Hat Guy brought him from the past during that one incident I’m not really supposed to talk about,” (Wilbur ran on too fast for either of the others to point out that they already knew practically everything about ‘that incident’, because Wilbur was absolutely terrible at not talking) “and we couldn’t figure out exactly when or where from to put him back. I mean, you can’t just dump a T. rex anywhere—he’d totally mess up the local ecosystem! And then we accidentally socialized him, and you really can’t dump a tame T. rex anywhere.”

“I don’t think tame T. rexes try to eat people,” Hiro said.

“He wasn’t trying to eat you. He was playing.”

“How was that—!”

Violet’s indignant question was cut off by the jangle of Hiro’s phone. He fished it out of his pocket and looked at the screen.

“It’s Penny.” He put her on speaker. “Hey, Penny.”

“Hi, Hiro. Are you already at Wilbur’s?”

“Yeah; Violet, too.” He looked at Tiny, clearly pondering the best, snarkiest way to mention their situation.

“I wanted to tell him sorry for being late, and I’m heading over now, but he forgot his phone somewhere again.”

“I did not!” Wilbur protested. “I…put it in a secure location.”

“You lost it,” Penny laughed. “Why do you sound so muffled?”

Hiro flicked on video chat. After a moment, Penny appeared on the screen, squinting at her phone.

“Why are you in a forcefield?”

Hiro silently panned the camera over.

Penny yelped and vanished in a pinwheel of house-grass-sky-Penny-house-grass. A second later she snatched her phone off the ground again and gaped at it.

“Is that a dinosaur? …he’s not eating Wilbur.”

“He’s tame!” Wilbur threw out his hands in exasperation. “He only went after Violet and Hiro because Dad made him some extra-reinforced jumbo beach balls to play with, and he thinks the forcefield is one.”

Tiny looked up hopefully and thumped his tail at the phrase ‘beach balls’. Violet glared.

“…are you serious?” Penny said slowly.

“I—”

“You’re petting a T. rex without me?! That’s so unfair! Aw man, traffic’s terrible this time of day. It’ll take forever to get there.”

“I can get Uncle Art to give you a ride,” Wilbur said. “He left on a delivery out near you right before Hiro and Violet showed up, and his ship’s plenty fast.”

“Don’t you need your phone to call him?” Hiro asked at the same time Violet said:

“Wait, so all those times you mentioned his spaceship, you meant actual spaceship? Your cousins aren’t going to turn out to be vampires, are they?”

Wilbur glared at them both.

“That’d be great, Wilbur; thanks!” Penny called loudly over the phone, though she was clearly stifling laughter too.

“…I might need some help finding my phone, though.” Wilbur said. He looked pointedly at the forcefield.

Violet eyed Tiny skeptically.

“You sure he’s not going to eat us?”

“Hurry up and find Wilbur’s phone so I can meet the dinosaur, guys!” Penny called.

“His name’s Tiny,” Wilbur said.

“Oh, that’s so cute—”

“Seriously, Penny?” Hiro asked. “You don’t care at all that we’re about to get eaten?”

“Alright, here goes nothing,” Violet said. “But Hiro, you better keep that call going. If we’re going to get mauled by a T. rex for Penny’s curiosity, I want her as a witness.”

Five minutes later, tentatively scratching Tiny’s great bronzy side, Hiro asked:

“So, are the rest of your family this weird?”

“Oh, no,” Wilbur said with a shrug. “The frogs are all from this time period; Mom just genetically modified them for intelligence. Which reminds me, we better go in through the side door. They tried to start a protection racket with Uncle Spike and Dmitri’s lawn gnomes, and now there’s a mafia war going in the front yard.”

~

Flash!

Wilbur grinned into the light bursting across his face. He waved, paused for another storm of flashes, and kept weaving through the crowd. Flash—flash—flash; it seemed to take forever for him to reach the sanctuary of a bathroom.

Thankfully, it was empty. Wilbur exhaled hard and leaned on the sink. Looking up, he saw his reflection staring back at him. He was still grinning widely.

He shook his head like a dog shaking off water, grin dissolving somewhere along the way.

“Come on, Wilbur, keep it together,” he told himself.

He didn’t know why he felt so off tonight; premieres were easy. No acting to do except act like a cool, handsome TV star, and that Wilbur Robinson didn’t have to fake. Smile and wave and make sure to be seen by all the cameras, and don’t say anything rude to anyone. Easy peasy.

He was just…tired of events right now. He’d just come off a flurry of interviews to promote the new season, and now had bunch of premiers to attend (movies from the same studio they wanted to drum up publicity for), and after that they were jumping right back into filming for next season—Wilbur couldn’t remember the last time he’d been home.

One of his family members was always with him during shoots, of course, and he called the rest regularly, but it wasn’t the same. And just hanging out at the mall or park or chargeball court with friends seemed like a dream anymore.

For a moment, it really did seem like a dream. The mirror in front of him shimmered, and instead of pretentious tile, he saw funkily patterned carpet and neon lighting. A retro-style arcade, a Japanese boy with a robot hoodie leaning against a pinball machine, the redheaded girl playing scolding him not to make it tilt, mouth moving silently across the glass while the boy laughed just as silently, and the black-haired girl walking up to them with bags of gummy frogs and popcorn turned and looked back at—

Wilbur was standing in a glitzy bathroom staring at his own reflection. He felt dizzy for a moment, and then he had a headache, but by the time he rubbed at his temples, it had already gone.

“What the—”

He tapped the mirror. A second later he looked frantically around, but luckily the bathroom was still empty.

“Okay, I think that’s enough soda for one night. There’s no way I actually…”

Actually saw…he’d seen something right? He couldn’t remember what he’d thought was so strange about the mirror now.

Shrugging, Wilbur splashed some water on his face, checked his hair was perfect (it was, of course), and went back to rejoin the paparazzi party.

~

Penny climbed in her window and closed it as quietly as she could. It was harder than usual; her shoulder throbbed angrily. Peeling off her supersuit, she saw a nasty purple-black splotch across her upper arm.

She groaned—quietly; her mom did not need to know Penny was sneaking out to fight supervillains—and dug around for the first aid kit she kept under her bed. Crouching down and stretching out her arm didn’t play nicely with her tired body, and she teetered. A wave of vertigo swept her.

She fell, and while she fell her hands rubbed antiseptic into a cut on a girl’s arm, serious scarlet-and-black supersuit tied about her waist to reveal a cheery bubblegum pink tank top and a circus of bruises across her skin.

“Ow,” yelped one of the boys beside her, the one in the purple armor, as the one with hair like a black cockatoo’s crest tried to pull the armor off without jostling the other’s sprained wrist.

“This is exactly why you need our help,” complained the crested boy. “If you let us fight with you, you wouldn’t come home all banged up.”

“You don’t have any powers.” The armored boy shook his head. “It isn’t safe.”

“Neither do you!”

“I have genius intelligence and high-tech armor.”

“So why can’t you make us armor?” Penny asked.

“Do you really want to go through this every day?” the girl said, gesturing at her scraped up arm, as sarcastic as she was kind. “You two should—”

And then Penny slammed onto her bedroom floor, breathless and stinging with rugburn.

She just lay there, her shoulder aching and her eyes watering, but a moment later she realized her mom might have heard the thump and come to check on her. She grabbed the first aid kit and jumped under the covers with it.

When fifteen minutes had passed with no sign of her mom, Penny decided she was safe, and climbed out of bed again.

It took a bit of willpower; her bed was soft and she just wanted to go to sleep. She wasted no time changing fully out of her costume and into pajamas. Something flicked inside her head as she opened the first aid kit, pressed against the inside of her skull as she scrubbed dirt from her skinned palms and raw knuckles.

Crime-fighting would be so much easier in a team, she thought—and then was struck by how familiar the question was, like she’d asked it a dozen times before. Whatever it was pressed harder against Penny’s thoughts.

She almost had enough energy let to be curious about it. But the feeling came with a sense of vertigo, and she’d already fallen enough tonight. She shook her head, and was surprised to find her eyes wet; they shouldn’t still be stinging from her fall. She wiped them and pulled out ointment for her aching shoulder. A thought tried very hard to get into her head as she rubbed the ointment into her arm, but it wouldn’t come clear, and she was too tired to chase it. Maybe it wasn’t a thought at all, only exhaustion.

Shoving the first aid kit back under the bed, Penny climbed back under the covers. This time, she didn’t fight her weariness.

~

Violet rubbed her eyes, then looked at her worksheet again. The numbers refused to come clear. She glared at them.

“Oh, sure,” she mocked her past self. “I’ll just do a quick little investigation into the weird readings, even though Mr. Harrington told me it was just the sensors glitching. How long could it take? It’s not like being a teenager in college is hard enough.”

She sank back in her seat and sighed in frustration.

The thing was, the sensors were getting weird readings. And these weren’t the local weather station’s thermometer and windsock. These were state of the art pieces of equipment from a college science department—and a pretty good college, too; Violet’s scholarship afforded her that. Atmospheric pressure, gravitational shifts, a dozen other things that shouldn’t all be interconnected but were, somehow, in some pattern Violet could not figure out: they all said something was strange about the world.

Violet was pretty sure they said something was wrong.

But she couldn’t prove it, and if she didn’t do her actual homework, she was going to flunk right out of her scholarship. Shoving her hair angrily back from her face, she turned to grab her calculus notebook.

The cover shifted as she reached for it. It shook again, and again, harder each time, and then it flew open. The pages flipped past at high speed and the papers she had shoved inside it went flying. Violet shrieked and grabbed for them, but the whole room was suddenly filled with papers and empty chip bags and clothes and everything else light enough to be swept up by the wind buffeting the walls. Violet leapt for the window only to slam into cold glass; it was already closed. She whirled and stared at the room, clinging to the windowsill.

There was a flash of light—a deafening silence that left her ears ringing. And then everything was still. Lying on the floor in the middle of the room, where the chaos had been worst, was a small, metal object.

Violet walked over cautiously, waiting any moment for the laws of physics to go haywire again. They didn’t. She crouched down and peered at the object. It looked a little like a cellphone, and a lot like a prop from an old sci-fi TV show, assuming that prop had spent the last few decades being dropped and tossed in basements and dug out by kids who repaired it with duct tape and aluminum foil so they could use it to play space invaders. The cracked screen was blank and dark.

“You better not be giving off radiation,” Violet muttered, and picked it up.

The screen flickered to life.

“…ome in…nny? Wilbur? Anyo…Guys, if you’re there, please come in.”

Violet yelped and almost dropped the whatever-it-was (a communicator, apparently).

“Hello?” The crackly, compressed voice came again. “Is someone there? Hold on—”

The static covering the screen jerked, wavered into a different pattern of static, jerked again, and cleared enough for Violet to see a boy her own age looking out. He had either ash or a bruise smudged over his cheek, and around him Violet saw glimpses of tangled wires and control panels askew in their settings in…what? A machine? A lab? Wavering, distorted images moved nauseatingly on a glass panel behind the boy’s head.

He looked up from whatever buttons he was worrying over and at the screen with a rather desperate expression. His entire face lit up.

“Violet?” He laughed in disbelief, then whooped, pumping his fist in the air and directly into the glass overhead; it must be a dome, because the entire thing bonged ominously. He flinched away, looking fearfully at it, but nothing happened. He shook his hand. “Ow… Violet, are you okay?”

“Who are you, and how do you know my name?”

He stared, and then his frantic look came back.

“No, no, you have to know me. It wasn’t supposed to be this long—you should still remember—”

“Remember what? Who are you?”

The boy looked at her, and for a moment she thought he might cry. She was left breathless at how much it hurt. Something inside her sat up and whispered inaudibly along as the boy said:

“Hiro. I’m Hiro Hamada. I’m your friend.”

“I’ve never met you before.”

“But you should have; don’t you get it?” Violet just stared at him. He shoved his hands into his hair. “We’re best friends—us and Wilbur and Penny. But something happened, and now everything’s wrong.”

He stopped to draw in a breath. This was Violet’s chance to tell him whatever he was mixed up sounded dangerous, and if he kept stalking her, she was going to call the police. And then turn off the communicator. But he looked so upset, and the communicator had appeared in her room in the middle of indoor storm. And something was wrong. She knew it was.

Hiro was the first person who’d believed her.

She sat on her bed and tightened her grip on the communicator.

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” she asked.

“I don’t know exactly.” Hiro gestured in frustration. “I think the timeline got changed. I just keep getting weird readings on everything, but I don’t know what they mean! I think maybe time travel’s not actually my field, so I don’t really know what I’m doing. Except I don’t know how I know that, and—”

“What’s the tensile strength of steel?” Violet blurted.

“Uh—” Hiro blinked at her. “It’s, it’s not a constant. It depends on the grade of the steel and thickness of your material.You want to consider yield strength and elongation percentage, too, so depending on what you’re building…”

He trailed off, then drew in an uneven breath. He looked at Violet with wide eyes. She looked back with a hammering heart.

“Let’s not go off in a spiral,” she said, snarky tone rather shaky.

“How did you know to do that?” Hiro asked.

Violet shook her head.

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other for a moment, and then she watched determination spark in Hiro’s eyes.

“Something’s wrong with the timeline, and now I have to put it right. We have to put it right.”

“Who’s we?” Violet asked, even though part of her felt she already knew, lost names on the tip of her tongue…

“You and me, Wilbur, and Penny. I—” Hiro suddenly looked sheepish. “I don’t really know who they are, or you. But the anomalies all center around the four of us, so either we did something in the original timeline, or someone else was messing with time travel and we’re involved. Does that makes sense?”

“None of this makes sense.” Violet’s head was spinning. “How do you even fix a broken timeline?”

“I think we can if we put things back the way they were. There are rules about time travel—key events? I’m kinda guessing here. I was hoping you’d know.”

“I don’t know.” Violet hesitated. “Maybe one of the others does.”

“You see what I’m dealing with?” Hiro cried. “I know things, but I don’t know how I know. I definitely think one of you knows more about time travel than I do. I was trying to fix things, but I messed up. The last jump stranded me…whenever this is, and now I don’t have enough fuel to get out. I barely managed to get the comm out.” He looked around at the swirling colors. “I think I’m between whenevers, actually.”

Violet realized the wavering scenes weren’t on the glass, but behind it. A shiver of horror went down her back.

“Is there anything you can do?”

Hiro looked back at her, and the fear in his face softened away again. He grinned at her.

“I have a plan. But I need your help—Wilbur and Penny, too, if we can find them.”

Violet hesitated again. This was insane. And if it wasn’t insane it was wildly dangerous, not just to her but potentially to the entire world—the entire time-space continuum. But she liked Hiro’s grin. She felt like she could take on the world with that grin at her side. Maybe the four of them had, in the old timeline.