A Soon to be contradicted View of the Future
Part Two
The Planet Express Ship lowered into the hangar, touching softly to the ground. Hermes, Amy, Zoidberg and the Professor walked down the stairs to the hangar floor, where they met Fry, Leela, and Bender as they walked out of the ship.
"Hooray, my friends have returned from another fascinating adventure!" Zoidberg warbled with excitement.
"Actually," Leela said, "everything went surprisingly well."
"You mean you three actually went somewhere without pissin' someone off or runnin' up medical bills? I didn't think it could happen!" Hermes said.
"Hey Professor, what's in the box?" Amy asked as Bender brought it out of the ship.
"A cat, among other things," he responded.
"There's a cat in there?" Leela said, shocked. "But it's completely sealed! How do you know if it's even alive?"
"You don't! That's the point of having the cat!" the Professor retorted, putting his hands on his hips.
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"I still don't see what the big deal with the shower was," Fry said as he, Leela and Bender were getting dressed in the locker room.
"Fry," Leela said, "just because I agreed to go on a date with you doesn't mean you automatically get to do everything naked with me."
"It did for all those other guys," Bender said. Leela narrowed her eye, but decided to let the comment pass.
"I'm sorry, Leela," Fry said. "Hey, Bender and I were going to have an All My Circuits drinking game, you want to join in?"
"No thanks," Leela replied, "I need to get some work done on the ship."
Heading out of the locker room, Leela went over to the ship and Bender walked up out of the hangar, but Fry paused for a second. He had a strange feeling, but he couldn't tell what it was exactly, or what he was feeling it about. He stood for a second, trying to get a handle on it. Suddenly, he knew.
"Leela, get away from there!" Fry yelled to her.
"Huh?" Leela said, adjusting one of her robotic ears as she looked up from her toolbox.
"Duck!" He ran across the hangar and jumped, tackling her and sending them both skidding across the floor. Leela waited for several seconds, but nothing happened.
"Fry, this isn't funny," Leela said, crawling out from under him. Her skepticism was broken by an explosion from the Professor's laboratory, sending the Professor clear over the conference room table, and a large piece of machinery shot out and landed right where Leela had been working earlier, crushing her toolbox.
"Oh my god…"
"Whoopsie. Sorry, everyone!" the Professor said loudly.
"Oh my god," Leela said again. "Fry, how did you know that was going to happen?"
"I dunno," Fry replied, "I just sort of knew."
"Yeah, I guess it's pretty easy to tell when something the Professor's doing is going to go wrong."
"No, that's not it," Fry corrected her. "It's like I knew what was going to happen before it did. I knew if I didn't get you to move you'd have been crushed."
"You mean like, you saw the future?"
"Yeah, I guess."
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The Planet Express crew found themselves yet again in Dr. Zoidberg's office, with Fry on the examination table in his underpants. The Professor was waving a rod shaped instrument around Fry, studying him intently.
"Well, this curling iron doesn't show any abnormalities in Fry's body, and neither did the hair dryer," the Professor said, tossing it to the ground. "Do you think it could have been something you ate? A prescient pie or an existential gumbo perhaps?"
"Well, Leela and I had dinner at a seedy restaurant last night where we didn't know what any of the food was."
"Hmm, that could be a possibility," the Professor said. "Now to determine if that's the cause, we'll need to cut you open and remove your intestinal tract. Leela's too, for comparison."
"Wait, can't you just take a urine sample?" Leela asked, while Fry clutched his abdomen.
"Oh, sure, if you want to pass up a perfectly good opportunity for disembowelment."
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"Oh boy," Dr. Zoidberg mumbled sadly under his breath as he walked into the room where Fry, now dressed, as well as Leela, Amy, Hermes and Bender were waiting to hear the test results. He turned to address the group and cleared his throat. "I'm afraid I have bad news. Although all of Fry and Leela's tests showed that they're perfectly healthy, in my medical-type opinion they have no more than twenty-four hours to live!"
Bender jumped to his feet from his seat on the counter. "Zoidberg, how many times do I have to tell you? Postmodernism does not belong in medicine!" he yelled, emphasizing the last few words by hitting Zoidberg over the head.
"Ow, your hitting is making me hurt, it is! Curse your causality!"
"Now, now, everyone," the Professor said, shuffling into the room, "the urine samples actually showed they both recently ingested high concentrations of complex silicates bonded to ice-ten! Of course, I have no idea what that means, but we can poodle it and see what it comes up with."
"Poodle it?" Fry asked.
"You know, searching the internet from Leela answered.
"I'm on it," Hermes said, and pulled up a hologram of a toy poodle from a projector over one of the counters.
"Here boy," he said to it, "I want you to find 'silicates' and 'ice-ten.'"
The dog ran off, disappearing for a few seconds, before returning with a list of results in its mouth.
"Good boy," Hermes said. "Now, drop it." The dog didn't budge. "Drop it boy, come on." It still made no response. "Hand it over you green snake!" Hermes said tersely and reached into the hologram to pull the results out of the poodle's mouth. A struggle ensued, but several minutes later Hermes walked back over to the Professor and handed him the results.
"Hmm," the Professor said looking over the results, "it says in this Tikipedia article that both of you consumed what is known as the Cocktail of Life, a drink native to Copenhagos h/2pi created from melting a sandslug with ice-ten. Oh lord, it's LSD all over again. You develop something for science and the next thing you know it's out on the street and people are singing songs about bearded rainbows. Anyway, ingestion can cause drooling, nose-picking, pants wetting, and generally acting like a moron for several hours after ingestion due to delta brainwave suppression, with a person having no recollection of what transpired."
"Well that sounds like Leela last night," Bender said, getting a nasty glare from Leela, "but not Fry."
"That's odd," Hermes said, "every semi-sentient creature in the universe has a delta wave, shouldn't they both have been affected the same way?"
"You think something's wrong with Fry?" Amy asked.
"Indeed. However, I didn't find anything else extraordinary in Fry's excrement, so more tests are in order." The Professor said gleefully. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a scanner with an oblong looped antenna off of the handle. For some reason Leela thought it looked awfully familiar, although she couldn't quite say why. The Professor pointed it at Fry's head, looking at the scanner's readout.
"Sweet mamma-jamma!" the Professor exclaimed. "Fry, your brain completely lacks the delta brainwave!" The crew gasped.
"What, how? I mean, I don't feel any stupider," Fry stuttered.
"Of course you wouldn't, you've never had a delta wave to begin with. It's not being suppressed, your brain can't make one!"
"But how's that even possible, mon?" Hermes said in disbelief. "Without a delta wave, he shouldn't even be able to brush his teeth! Oh, wait."
"Well, this would explain a lot," Leela said.
"But what does this have to do with me seeing the future?" Fry asked.
The Professor looked back at his gizmometer. "It seems that due to your altered brain structure, instead of destructively interfering with your delta brainwave, the ice-ten compounds constructively interfered with your quantum pilot brainwave!"
"My what?"
"Your quantum pilot wave," the Professor said, "it's what carries your consciousness through the fourth dimension. Most people have relatively weak wave signals, but some can be blessed with a stronger wave, allowing them to attain leaps of mad scientific wonder or host their own weekly talk show segments. Yours, however, has had its amplitude boosted so greatly you can do more than just predict what people want to hear, you can actually predict possible future timelines!"
"My god," Fry said.
"So Fry," Bender said, slinging an arm around his friend's shoulders, "how about you and me head down to the horse track with your new-found powers of foresight?"
"I don't know, Bender. I really need to go home and think about all of this."
"How about I walk you home, okay?" Leela volunteered, taking Fry's hand as they walked to the door.
"Aw, Fry, come on!" Bender yelled after them.
"Now, now, Bender," the Professor said, putting a hand on Bender's shoulder, "let the freaks of nature walk in peace."
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"Fry, I'm surprised," Leela said as she and Fry walked back to Robot Arms, "you handled yourself very maturely with Bender back there."
"Hey, it's not like I do everything he tells me to," Fry replied, trying to sound a little hurt. "Leela, look!" he said, pointing to a building in the distance. She stopped and watched him as he put his hand in the air so it looked like it was sitting on the building's roof. He lowered his hand, and the building fell beneath it, imploding in a cloud of dust. Fry chuckled mischievously.
"Fry, you really do have to treat this seriously," Leela said after the display, "who knows what consequences knowing the future could have?"
"I'm just getting the hang of controlling it, what's the big deal? Besides, if anything was going to go wrong, I'd already know about it."
Leela shook her head in exasperation, and they continued walking.
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The next day, the crew sat around the conference table, watching Hermes explain a graph of the company's growth in dairy transport. There'd never been a dairy delivery in the company's history, so it really wasn't of much interest. Suddenly, Fry burst into laughter, keeling over in his chair. The rest of the group stopped and looked around to try and find something funny, but couldn't. Hermes returned to his chart, picking up a pointer to aid his explanation. Unfortunately, when he went to make an indication, he put too much into the backswing, and stabbed himself in the eye.
"Sweet tsetse fly of Paraguay, the pain!" Hermes cried out, dropping the pointer and clasping his hands over his eyeball. Everyone else broke into laughter, except for Fry.
"Eh," he said jadedly, "it's just not as funny the second time around."
Hermes hurried to the kitchen to find an icepack, and was replaced at the head of the table by Professor Farnsworth.
"Good news! You have a delivery to make to the Galaxy of No Return!"
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"Who'd have known that the Galaxy of No Return just meant you can never return to that galaxy?" Leela pondered as she flew the ship back to Earth. Fry raised his hand. "Fry, just stop. I mean, don't you think you're getting a little- Oh lord."
"What is it?" Bender asked.
"It's the Nimbus," Leela said with disgust.
"Oh, you mean the ship with that guy you slept with?" Bender said.
"Yes," Leela said angrily, "but hopefully I can swing a few parsecs towards Betelgeuse and stay off of their scanners."
Fry sat up straight in his seat, his eyes gathering a look of shocked realization. "Leela, I know this is going to sound crazy," he said, "but we need to get to the Nimbus. Now."
"Fry, what are talking about?" Leela asked.
"Future vision thing!" Fry said. "If we don't get there soon, everyone on the ship's going to die!"
"Our ship or their ship?" Bender asked.
"Their ship," Fry answered.
"Damn it, I have to spend more time saving other people's asses?" Bender complained.
"Well we can't just fly by and let it happen," Leela said. "Let's go."
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The Planet Express Ship set down in the Nimbus's docking bay, where the crew was met by DOOP's most illustrious captain.
"The lovely lady Leela, what a voluptuous surprise," Zapp said. "So, your burning desire has led you to come crawling back to the Zapper at last."
"Not exactly," Leela said sternly. "We're here because something terrible is going to happen soon."
"We?" Zapp looked to Fry, who was standing anxiously next to her. "That would be terrible," he said sexfully. "Fortunately, I think there's enough room in the Lovenasium to accommodate all of your erotic fantasies. Kif, ready an extra bottle of champaggen for my chamber."
"Leela, we don't have time for this," Fry interrupted. "Something in the Love-nasal's about to make this whole place explode!" He grabbed Leela's arm and took off running.
"Hmm, must not want to lose the mood," Zapp figured, and ran daintily after them.
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Fry burst into the Lovenasium, Leela following him shortly. He looked around the room, trying to pinpoint the danger. His gaze came to rest on the bathroom, and he walked over to it.
"In here, the toilet," he said, opening the door. Leela walked over and looked into the room. Upon entering she found herself face to face with a toilet bowl stuffed to the brim with velour briefs.
"What are you doing in there?" Zapp inquired, having caught up with them. "I keep all of my sexcapade-related items next to the bed."
"Zapp," Leela asked, "why is your toilet filled with underpants?"
Zapp looked around nervously, remaining quiet for a minute. "Kif was on shore leave last week and I, I didn't know what to do!" he tried to explain pathetically. Leela turned her attention back to the toilet of doom and scanned it with that thing she wears on her wrist.
"Oh no," she said. "This says that the toilet is hooked directly into the Nimbus's main engine. An overload like this could have caused a… catastrophic failure."
"Wait, why would someone have their toilet hooked up to a spaceship's engine?" Fry asked.
"Ameche, when you're in a position of power, you have to exercise that power with everything that you do," Zapp said proudly.
"Come on, Fry," Leela said. "Let's get someone to clean this up, and then burn that pile of pictures next to the toilet."
"Way ahead of you on the pictures Leela," Fry said. "I'll handle it personally."
"No you won't," Leela said.
"Damn," Fry muttered, and walked out of the bathroom as Leela stared him down.
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That night, Zapp sat alone in his robe on the bridge of the Nimbus, a cigarette's red glow illuminating his face, and a bottle of comfort liquor in his hand. The Planet Express Crew had long since left, and the ship was sitting still, its engine shut off for maintenance from the toilet fiasco. The telescreen flicked on in front of him, and once his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out that it showed the inside of the Oval Office.
"Brannigan," President Nixon barked from the screen, "why haven't you started the invasion of Arabacus 12?"
"Well, we've been having some uh, minor delays due to a mysterious incident with the ship's engine," Zapp said.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Nixon demanded.
"That guy with the bad hair came onto the ship saying he could 'see the future,' and that the ship was about to explode or something," Zapp replied with little interest. "Sure enough it was, and I didn't even have a chance to get the vixen Leela…"
Zapp kept talking, but Nixon wasn't listening to him. "Ehrlichman's ghost, someone who can see the future? Aroo, I'd never have to deal with that Watergate crap again! Brannigan!" he said, pulling Zapp out of his oratorical meandering. "I want you to bring me that man!"