"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

-Unknown.

Vem's day had not gone as planned.

First of all, they did make it to London, but Lir stormed out of there after a half an hour, saying that the accents were driving him crazy. Things improved when they toured Paris for an hour, even if Vem fell in the Seine, and Lir couldn't stop laughing for half an hour. Then Lir found out how seriously the French took their food, and spent the visit to Notre Dame gorged on pastries. The visit to Rome was okay, even if the Coliseum turned out to not be the best place to try and land a invisible spaceship, and Greece was great. Vem asked the guide questions about how the Parthenon was built for an hour, and Lir tripped on the front steps.

Then things got a little weirder. Lir said he wanted to see Japan.

"No, Lir." Vem said as she got back on the ship.

"Why not?" Lir complained as he used his new human legs to walk up the ramp.

"I'm not going to another stupid human country. The big thing made out of marble was a little interesting, but now I'm bored. We're going back to the base."

"Fine. I'll drop you off there, and then got to Japan."

"No, Lir, you have to come back too."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

"No, seriously, why?"

"Lir, I'm not going to repeat myself!"

"Come on, Vem…"

"Did you even hear what I just said!" Vem said, throwing up her arms, "I'm not going to repeat myself! I'm your superior commander!"

"Yeah, by like, half a centimeter." Lir said, rolling his eyes.

"Well that's a half a centimeter more than you!"

"I guess you're right… Using my authority as a Taller, I hereby make it illegal for Taller Vem to order Taller Lir around."

Vem's mouth hung open in shock. "You little weasel! You can't do that!"

"Actually… I can."

"I'll just repeal it!"

"Using my authority as a Taller, I hereby make it illegal for Taller Vem to repeal any laws made by Taller Lir, or change them or their effects in any way."

Vem's eyes narrowed in fury. "You-You can't just take advantage of the Irken legal system!"

"I should've done this a long time ago!" Lir said happily, sliding into his seat.

"You worm! Slime! Stop messing with the bureaucracy!"

"Yeesh, you're almost as mad as the time I stole your credit card…"

"You did what!?"

"Naw, I was just trying to get you even more worked up."

Vem's face darkened to a deep green, and she advanced towards Lir, ready to wrap her fingers around his throat.

Lir just smiled, still seated in the pilot's chair. "Before you do that Vem, you might want to consider something important."

"What?" Vem asked in a tone that suggested its owner should be in a mental institution.

"While I distracted you by getting you angry, I flew the ship twenty thousand feet into the air. We're halfway to Japan already, and you don't know how to fly this thing."

Vem looked out the window to see that they were indeed over the clouds, screamed, and spent the rest of the trip hitting herself in the head with the yellow pages.

Tenn's day had not gone as planned.

Skool had been a bit of a let-down (Nowhere near as bad as Zim had made it out to be), and when she had gotten back down into the base, she couldn't find anyone.

Tenn marched frustratedly down the hallways of the new parts of the base. Every once in a while she would stick her head into a nearly-vacant mess hall, and ask the few occupants where the others were. They usually told her that they didn't know, or that they were in the upper parts of the base.

Eventually, Tenn managed to get an officer to tell her that the off-duty soldiers had gone over to the labs to see what Zim was doing there.

"Crap! Zim specifically ordered them to stay out of those rooms!" Tenn yelled after the officer gave her the details.

"Where is Zim, anyways?" The officer said before sipping on his soda.

"Upstairs… I think I might have broken his brain…"

The officer just shrugged, and went back to his argument over whether you should eat human food if you ran out of rations with a private.

Things were not much better in the labs: The soldiers ran around, laughing and messing with equipment, picking things up and putting them back in the wrong places, and some of them had broken the eternally-euphoric 'Nick' human out of his containment tube and were watching him juggle fruit.

"You, stop trying to eat the squid! No, it does not still have a human brain in it! Zim fixed that guy a month ago!" Tenn called to various Irkens who were messing around getting some of them to stop what they were doing, others to just go to another experiment, "No, don't push that! Yes, there is a problem: What if that was a self-destruct lever or something? Okay, yes, Zim would probably put the self-destruct in an obvious place marked by big letters, but you don't know for sure, and- Hey! What did I just tell you about pouring soda in there! Would you all behave? We're guests here, and you can't just go around destroying his stuff!"

"Uh, Tenn?" Skoodge asked, suddenly appearing at her side.

"Look, Skoodge, I'm kind of busy right now-DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT, PAL!-so just hurry up with whatever it is you're asking, before-WAAAAAALLLLK!-something bad happens." Tenn said, trying to carry on the conversation while managing the crowd.

"Well, um, my air vent turned out to have a lot more room than the other soldiers' rooms, and I had an idea to entertain people." Skoodge began.

"Why didn't you just ask the Tallers?" Tenn yelled over the din, catching a particularly bad misbehaving soldier by the collar.

"They're still gone, and the other guys kind of-"

"Yes, yes, you have my permission. I gotta get everyone out of here."

Meanwhile, back in the living room, Zim stood stuck, trying to come up with a witty comeback for Tenn, and failing miserably.

Eventually, GIR wandered into the room, sipping on a chocolate SuckMonkey. He sat down on the couch, and began to suck on the drink so hard it pulled his face inwards. The slurping noises got Zim's attention, and he looked down at GIR.

"GIR! Get off the couch: The SuckMonkey will leave a stain!"

"Okee-dokee!" GIR squealed, jumping off the couch and spilling his entire drink on the cushions.

The Invader, in typical Zim fashion, ignored the spill and Tenn's point, and instead walked towards the fridge, intending to get a drink a head down below to see how things were going.

About a minute later, the Irken Armada came rushing out of Zim's labs, followed closely by the screaming Irken, who somehow had gotten a pipe and was swinging it over his head.

"I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT!" He screamed, almost taking off someone's head.

Tenn, who had been standing in a doorway farther down the hall, watched Zim chase them all out, then turn around and lock the door, stalking off and grumbling things like 'I can't even trust them Irkens to not touch my stuff… Look what they did to the mayonnaise!'

Tenn sighed, and looked down at her Fleet Commander uniform. They were houseguests for the craziest lunatic in the Irken Empire, the Tallers were flying around the world and had left her in charge, half the Armada was gone, the Tallests might be dead for all she knew, and her soldiers were more interested with playing with Zim's stuff than fixing the spaceship.

"It's not that bad." The computer said in a bad attempt to be comforting.

And now a hunk of machinery was pitying her. She had hit rock bottom.

It was time for some potato chips.

Dib's day had not gone as planned.

Immediately after the turtle had popped into his yard, the man had ran inside, and grabbed a Tupperware bowl to throw up in, after that, a more normal looking woman, probably Greek, had come in and had started yelling at him in Sanskrit. They had calmed down, and after the man, dark-skinned and black haired, probably from India, had figured out he spoke English and had established what year it was, pocketed a dollar from the woman and said they would explain everything in the living room.

He brought in a soda and a lemonade for the two strange people who had come out of the turtle in his backyard. It most certainly was a turtle, albeit a gigantic cyborg one, and Dib was pretty sure it had eaten one of the rose bushes.

"So… Um… Who the heck are you people?" Dib asked a little bluntly, staring at the strangely dressed people before him.

The man on the right looked up from the bowl he had thrown up in recently. "I'm Raj Bihar, and this is the horrible demon monster who drinks all my coffee-" Here he gestured towards the woman sitting next to him, who hit him on the head with a magazine, "-I mean Helen. We're time-travelers! Oooooooh!" He felt sick again, and bent back over his bowl.

Dib blinked. Out of all the strange things in his life, this was way up there. Probably worse than the whole 'Chickenfoot' thing.

"Please ignore him," Helen said, rolling her eyes, "I think he's a bit punch-drunk right now."

"Uh-huh…" Dib said, glancing at the turtle again, "And you're time travelers?" Helen nodded. "And you come from the future? In a turtle?"

"Actually, the past," Raj said, regaining some of his composure. "I'm from Patna, or where it will be, about… two-thousand years ago now?"

Helen mulled it over. "… three-thousand."

"Right, and Helen is from Athens, about 500 B.C."

Dib blinked, mentally debating whether or not to call the police.

"Oh, no, we're not crazy," Raj said with a grin, "After all, we did show up in a time-traveling turtle."

Dib frowned. "Okay, you do have a point, but how do I know it's a time-traveling one?"

Raj dug around in the pocket of his strange clothes, and pulled out a 2050 quarter for Puerto Rico. Dib looked at it for a second, decided it was genuine, and looked up at them in shock.

"Why did you come here? Why was now so important?"

Helen rolled her eyes. "Raj was being an idiot again, and tried to see how far in the future he could get in one second, starting at 1 A.D."

Raj grinned. "Who's the bigger idiot: The idiot, or the idiot who says 'Yes' when the other idiot proposes?"

Helen hit him upside the head with the magazine again, but she smiled a bit, and Dib saw her adjust her ring.

Dib sat down in the armchair and massaged his temples. "Let me get this straight: I'm having a conversation with Raj and Helen Bihar, time travelers from ancient India and Greece, respectively, who traveled through time in an enormous turtle, as part of a race?"

Raj coughed. "Uh… yeah, that's about it."

Dib sighed. "I'm not going to even try today… I'm going crazy."

"No you're not!" Raj said in an attempt to be friendly, "Besides, I've known lots of crazy people, and they're not all bad. I'm even married to one!" Here Helen hit him with the magazine again.

Dib sighed. "So… What's with the clothes? They from the future?" He said, pointing at the loose-fitting dark green cotton robes Raj wore.

"Actually, those come from back home. I go back there every few weeks, and mom always insists on giving me something new to wear."

Dib nodded. "Okay… Wait, if you're from the past, where did the turtle come from?"

"Good question: I don't know. I was out and about one day, down by the river, when I accidentally fell down a cave. You can imagine what was down there."

Story of his life," Helen said with a sigh, "Sees a giant cyborg turtle with a hatch built into its shell at the bottom of a mine shaft, and he goes inside."

"Well, hey, it's not like it belonged to anybody," Raj said defensively, "It told me so. Besides, I was stuck down there, and the turtle did seem interesting."

Dib frowned. "You just found a time-traveling turtle-ship at the bottom of a mine shaft in one thousand B.C.?"

"Pretty much."

"… What do you do with it?"

"Well, I'm on a big tour of time: See the great Empires of the world, the most beautiful places in history, that really good restaurant back in Timbuktu where they still accepted rupees."

"Mostly he just messes around with his giant turtle." Helen said flatly.

"Pretty much." Raj said again with a shrug.

"… So why are you still here?" Dib said, shooting the turtle a quick glare as it tried to eat a tree.

"Now, that's what I call bad manners." Raj said, rolling his eyes, "Asking why your guests haven't left yet."

"You nearly gave me a heart attack when your turtle materialized on my lawn."

"Touché… Well, we're here because the turtle's still fixing itself, and something big is gonna happen in this year."

"What's going to happen?"

"Well, for starters-" Here he was interrupted by a vicious elbow to the side from Helen, who began to rapidly yell at him in their strange language. Raj started talking back, and soon they were entirely ignoring the befuddled Dib.

Eventually Raj lost the argument, and turned back towards Dib. "… Apparently I can't tell you. You'll probably know it when it happens."

"Okay," Dib said, thinking the Irkens probably had something to do with it, "But, wait, why don't you go around preventing the great tragedies of history? Like the Titanic?"

Raj shook his head. "You can't change history. You just can't: I don't mean it in the 'No one knows what will happen!' ethical reason for it, I mean you literally can't change history. That's why I don't go to far into the future: If the time right now became the past of some other time, I wouldn't be able to change it, even if something bad happened to me. Understand?"

"Not at all."

"Okay, you know Schrödinger's cat? He made up this theory that if you put a cat in a sealed box, with no way of knowing what was going on inside, next to a vial of poison that had a fifty percent chance of breaking and killing the cat, then the cat would exist in a halfway, undefined state where it was neither alive nor dead. The cat would stay like this, until you opened the box and observed what was going on inside. Then it would become alive or dead. Of course, it's just a metaphorical way of explaining an aspect of particle physics, but it has bearing on what is going on here: What if I look in the future, and end up learning that there's an aspect of history that I can't change, whether I like it or not. Get it now?"

"No. The cat would be alive or dead, and you just wouldn't know. It would have been dead the entire time, whether you looked or not. Just like history would always turn out that way, whether you knew it in advance or not."

"See, that's what I told Schrödinger, and he just rolled his eyes. Think of it as reading the big unmasking part of a detective novel. The rest of the book just isn't fun anymore."

"Okay, I think I understand… But then what are you doing here then?"

"My first trip took me to 2885. I decided that was my upper limit."

"Okay… So why can't you alter history?"

"Well, it just works that way. Suppose you were trying to go and stop the Titanic from sinking: You'd probably show up too late, or come out of the time stream too late and slam into an iceberg, which pushed it fast enough to slam into the Titanic. Then you're sitting in your giant turtle wishing you hadn't done that, feeling like a guy who kicks a pebble and starts an avalanche."

"Ah."

"Yes. That doesn't mean that I can't interfere with time at all: Suppose every person from the Titanic was teleported to the planet of happy bunnies. Would that violate history?"

Dib nodded.

"Not necessarily. The point of altering history is that the future remains unchanged. In the future, average schoolboy Dib grew up knowing that the Titanic was a horrible disaster, that everyone left on board drowned. Or at least thinking that."

Realization dawned on Dib. "You mean, that as long as nobody from the parts of the future that you knew about acted any different, then anything could have happened?"

"Yes. If I destroyed a civilization of super intelligent grapefruit from the beginning of time, it would be fine as long as no one knew about them, or at least didn't act on the knowledge in any way to affect the things I know for sure from my experiences throughout history. It's not that there's a rulebook, it's just that history, all of time, has a set course. It doesn't mean that we have no free will, it just means that history, whatever it really is, is settled. It can't happen a different way."

"Wow… That's scary. The philosophical implications are enour-" Dib began.

Gaz's s loud voice thundered down from upstairs: "WOULD WHOEVER IS DOWN THERE SHUT UP ABOUT TIME TRAVEL! YOU'RE DRIVING ME CRAZY!"

Raj looked up in fear to the source of the noise. Helen yawned. "Yeah, no offense honey, but when you try to explain the intricacies of time travel to people, it gets kind of annoying."

Raj sighed. "Yeah, okay. Well, we're going back to the turtle for the night. We're probably going to be staying here for a few months, to see the big historical event. That okay?"

"Yeah! This is great!" Dib said in excitement.

Raj nodded, and he and Helen left. As Dib got ready to go to bed, his mind swirled with the possibilities of time travel, until the specifics of what Raj had said caught him.

Stay here?