Disclaimer: This work of fiction is based on characters and situations owned by the Walt Disney Company. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from this. The followingis purely for entertainment.

Love Knows No Chronology

By Jeune Ecrivain

Rating: PG

Summary: Phil/Keely reunion fic. Having returned to the 22nd century, Phil reflects on all of his past experiences and makes a decision. This chapter and the next will be a short story Phil himself writes about his experience, then in the third (and possibly a fourth), we find out what he does with that short story.

A/N: This first chapter is not very heavy on the romance, but the next two or three chapters will be. Also, there is a reason that I won't mention Phil or Keely by name until chapter three. Just humor me.

For two or three centuries, there has existed a theory in some form or other that the automation wrought by technology is the antithesis to the human experience. Proponents claim that every technological advancement that further automates any activity originally an intimate part of human life, however mundane, detracts a portion from the collective pool of daily experiences that, in ways that become only remotely tangible even after a long period of time, make up no small part of the richness of a human lifetime.

It was Robert Wobby who had most effectively formalized this school of thought and brought scientific attention to it for the first time since mankind had even been aware of his immense and growing technological prowess. Yet to the young man who now sat bemusedly and rather sadly in his robotically cleaned and computer-run home, surrounded by all the comforts of 22nd-century life, Wobby had just been another name to memorize while "going to school" with the virtual classroom device that had overtaken the traditional classroom at the close of the 21st century. It resembled a thick and shiny aluminum visor worn over the eyes like the virtual-reality viewers of some of the more upscale video games of the early 21st century. The wearer of this contraption would be welcomed by a holographic teacher whose words were effectively supplemented by images, videos, recreations, and reenactments that displayed behind the teacher as if he or she were standing in an old-fashioned 21st century OmniMax theater.

Once again, the youth found himself returning to his habit of comparing almost everything that had once been second-nature to him to their 21st century counterparts or imitators. The reason for this was the same reason that Robert Wobby's theory, or Wobbyism as it was popularly called, had acquired new and critical meaning to him. Ironically, it was due to another 22nd-century theorist that he had been able to acquire a profound appreciation for Wobby's ideas.

In the very late 21st century, a time when time travel had only recently entered the realm of scientific reality, the general public was frightened that an overzealous physicist anxious to execute the technology that had come to be known as "the Holy Grail of theoretical physics" would incite a "butterfly effect" and would forever change the world that had come to be – the world that they lived in – by influencing past events and changing the course of events in history. The government had been poised to pass legislation banning time travel, or temponavigation as the more erudite called it, altogether…until a quirky but brilliant scientist named John Killims had mathematically proven his theory of essendum est futurum ("what must be will be"). Using the methodology and technology behind temponavigation as background, he had used three virtual blackboards full of numbers and mathematical symbols to prove conclusively that if time travelers from the present influenced any past events or circumstances in a way that would somehow alter history, fate would always find some way to compensate for the temponavigators' influence and restore the natural course of history. Thus was born Killimism, or scientific fatalism, had which allowed temponavigation to become first an acceptable activity, then a routine historical research technique, and finally a leisure activity.

Therein was the root of the young man's changed perspective. When a time travel vacation had gone horribly wrong, he and his family had returned to the 22nd century only to inadvertently become famous…after being marooned in the years 2004 to 2008 for four years! To avoid the paradox of returning to the present a mere month after they left (as was originally planned) having aged four years, his father had purposely returned them to 2125 instead of 2121. Still, nothing would ever be the same for the family of four. They had single-handedly resurrected questions about the safety of recreational temponavigation, becoming household names in the process.

While the global society was reacting to their plight, the family itself slowly began to realize how the experience had changed their outlook on everything they had once been so accustomed too. It was easy enough to settle into their old lives, but each member of the family was forever marked in someway by their extended exposure to a 21st century lifestyle.

The youth's younger sister could be seen playing with an "antique" basketball just as often as she could be seen challenging herself at laser squash. The youth himself had gone to great lengths to acquire a hoop from a museum so that they could occasionally play some one-on-one. This was especially telling, because the once insufferably capricious tomboy used to have no time to spare for bonding with her brother. Now, though she remained as always rough around the edges, maturity and experience perhaps beyond her years had taken a toll on her disposition.

Meanwhile, the parents of the family found themselves unusually bored as time went on, and though neither of them seemed to admit it, the youth was suspicious that it had been the more manual tasks of 21st century house and family maintenance that had kept their minds sharp all that time and perhaps even kept them from becoming depressed or going insane in light of what otherwise would have surely seemed to be a desperate situation.

Their old friends were often amused by their habitual use of 21st century lingo, while people who didn't know them personally would often badger them with questions about what life was really like "back then."

The youth, for one, had grown to dislike the phrase "back then." To his old friends, it was an abstract world long past. For him, however, it was a chapter in his life that he would forever remember and ponder about. He had come to believe that there was a peak in the chronology of technological development where technology and the richness of human experience said to be hindered by it were relatively balanced. There was a point in human history where technology was as high as it could be without its effect on the daily, menial experiences that enliven the human experience being so great yet as to merit any real sense of loss or widespread superficiality, and the young man believed that the approximate time period when this equilibrium occurred had been the very time period in which he had spent four years stranded.

However, the young man would have been kidding himself if he claimed that this was even the primary factor that kept drawing his thoughts and desires over one hundred years into the past. No, no. The real reason had blonde hair and blue eyes.