A Glitch in Time

by Gary D. Snyder

Chapter 19:

As much as Cindy was used to having her way, being in charge of an impossible decision was not to her liking. Ron's suggestions and attempts to help weren't improving the situation or her temper.

"Why not just bring them back anyway?" he asked.

"If I did, and they hadn't fixed things, Kim might not exist when we brought them back. That's what Neutron said."

"Then why not shut down that black hole thingie and then worry about bringing them back?" he asked. "At least it would buy us time."

"Because if I changed the time lock to the singularity I don't know how to lock onto the others again," she snapped. "They'd be trapped in the '80s forever. It would be like having your TV stuck on one of those stupid rerun channels."

"But we'd have Wade to help us. I'm sure that he could get this time thing to work."

"Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not sure what all Drakken did to this but I'd bet he didn't leave any notes for Wade to figure it out very quickly." Her expression changed from irritation to misery. "And I don't want to wait until Neutron is over thirty before I see him again. Not," she added quickly, "that I really care about seeing him at all, that is."

The idea of seeing Kim twenty years older gave Ron pause as he thought about it. "Oh, man. My girlfriend would be almost as old as her mother. That is so sick and wrong! Although," he went on thoughtfully, "when I was about six, I thought Mrs. Dr. P. was kind of -"

"What are you babbling about?"

"Nothing," Ron answered quickly. "Well, can't we go back to them, see what the situation is, and then come back again?"

Cindy glared at him and pointed to the control console. "Do you know where the redial button is on this thing? All we'd do is end up spending the next twenty years or so with them catching up with where we should be and being nostalgic about stuff that wouldn't even have happened yet."

Ron nodded in reluctant agreement. "Living in the past would so not rock." He shrugged his shoulders, defeated. "So, what do we do?"

"I already told you. I don't know. What would you do?"

With the weight of the decision shifted to him Ron fidgeted uncomfortably. On paper the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few or the one, but in practice that axiom didn't sound quite as convincing. "Kim has saved the world more times than I can count," he finally answered. "If it came down to choosing between her and the world, I don't think she would hesitate picking the world. I don't know about Jimmy, but I think he'd do the same. What would they do if they were here?"

"If they were here we wouldn't have this problem," Cindy grumbled, not willing to be reasonable. "But…I guess your right." She turned to the control panel and prepared to reset the coordinates of the temporal complosion device and trap their friend in the past, raging inwardly. That idiot Neutron, she fumed. If only he'd told Ron how to use the time device I wouldn't be the one who had to –

She froze as that thought hit her. Jimmy hadn't told Ron how to use the device. Why hadn't he? I need someone here to watch my back, too, he had told her. Why had he said that? To keep her here, safe from possible danger? As pleasant as that thought felt she was sure there was more to it. Jimmy could have programmed this machine to disrupt the singularity at the specified time if he had wanted to. Instead, he had left her here with the responsibility and the decision. Why? To torment her with a decision like this?

No.

He trusted her to do the right thing.

But what was the right thing?

Whatever it was, she decided, it was something that had to do with something that only she, and not Ron, could know and could factor into the equation. Something, she was certain, that would be beyond any doubt. She lowered her hands, leaving the controls untouched.

"What are you doing?" Ron asked her, surprised. "I thought that we had to shut down that time thing!"

Cindy gave him a strange look. "We'll wait for the others."

"But we can't bring them back! You said that yourself!"

"No. We can't." Cindy shrugged, and despite having placed the entire time stream at risk with here decision felt curiously lighthearted. "But he'll find a way. Somehow."

On the way to the dance Kim had tried, without success, to contact Ron and Cindy. She finally admitted defeat and holstered the Kim-municator in its assigned pouch with a grunt of annoyance. "Nothing," she announced. "Either the communication link is down, or…"

"Or?" Shego prompted.

Kim heaved a sigh. "Or maybe Drakken's henchmen got the drop on them."

"Yes!" Drakken gloated. "My loyal henchmen will take care of your companions."

Shego nearly laughed at that. "Them? Are you kidding? Once they shut down for the day they stay shut down. You can't even get half of them to get up on time."

"Not all of them," objected Drakken.

"Oh, please," returned Shego. "You can't be talking about Commodore Puddles."

"What about the Shego drones?" Kim asked.

Drakken clutched at that possibility. "Yes! What about them?" he taunted. "Unlike some traitors I know, they'll follow their orders without question."

"Hey!" Shego snapped, thrusting a fist under Drakken's nose. "I'm still way cranked about you're building those things in the first place, so I suggest you zip it!"

As Drakken subsided Kim shook her head. "Ron and Cindy got past them before. But from what they said it was almost a fluke. I hope they're all right."

They reached the student union and joined the throng that was pressing forward into the dance area. As they did so Kim caught sight of James Possible and his date just as they saw her. The young man slapped his forehead and looked stricken. "I am so sorry," he fervently apologized as soon as they were within speaking distance. "I don't know why, but in the excitement I forgot all about you. How are you feeling? Are you okay?"

"Fine. Just great," Kim assured him. "How are things with you?"

"Well," James Possible confessed, smiling at his date, "it's going pretty well. I'm no fortune teller, but something tells me that this might just work out. I mean, really work out."

"For some reason, I feel the same way," the woman at his side added.

"Well, I had a feeling about you two," Kim smiled back. "Best wishes if, well, this turns out to be the real thing. You know."

"Thanks. Well, the dance is about to begin. See you around, I guess."

"Oh, you will. Just not as soon as you might think."

Kim turned to go and turned back at the man's call. "I'm sorry, but I never got your name," he said.

"My name? It's Kim. Kim Poss…umm…" Kim caught herself before blurting out her last name and tried to think of a convenient and convincing alias.

"Kim Possum?" the James Possible repeated. "That's an unusual name."

"Yeah," Kim fumbled. "Yeah, it is. You should meet my brother Stew, sometime. Well, gotta go!" She turned and hurried off before she could be subjected to any other potentially dangerous questions. The man and woman stared after her.

"An interesting girl," he said. "Somehow I get the feeling that she can do anything."

"And such a nice name," the woman responded. "If I ever have a girl, I think I'd like to name her that."

"Possum?"

She punched him gently on the shoulder with a laugh. "No, you goof," she laughed. "Kim. Or Kimberly." She laughed again. "You are such a kidder. As though anyone would seriously think of giving a girl a ridiculous name like Possum!"

The two moved towards the dance floor, with James Possible shaking his head in bewilderment. "I don't think it's that ridiculous," he said to himself.

Kim caught up to Shego, who had strong-armed Drakken to the stage where Jimmy had been waiting. He looked relieved to see them. "I see you got him. Is everything okay with your parents? Any problems?"

"So not the drama," Kim replied easily.

"Aside from the usual histrionics," Shego added, indicating Drakken.

"Good. Then let's get going."

Kim's face told Jimmy the situation before she had even spoken. "Some drama there," she told him. "We can't contact Ron or Cindy and ask them to bring us back."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know. Maybe the communications link is down, maybe something happened to them. Whatever the sitch is, we can't communicate with them. So how do we let them know to bring us back?"

Jimmy began pacing the way he usually did when he had a serious dilemma on his hands. He wished that Goddard were here to provide some options. "This is so not good."

"An I.Q. of 200-plus and that's the best you can do?" Shego commented.

"Give him a chance," Kim told her.

Jimmy didn't seem to notice. "Well, we're in the past. If we could get to where Drakken's lair is going to be we could leave a message for them to find in twenty years or so."

Shego shook her head. "Well, that's out. Right now the area where that lab will be is nothing but solid rock right now. There won't be any way to leave a message in there for another twenty years or so. And more likely than not Drakken or someone else will find it before the kiddies do."

Jimmy snapped his fingers. "Drakken!" he exclaimed.

"Who? What?" Drakken asked. "What 'Drakken'?"

"Leaving Drakken in solid rock," Shego mused. "Now, that's an idea."

"No," Jimmy said with some impatience. "He must have brought along some way of getting himself back. We can use his recall device."

Kim planted herself in front of Drakken. "Well?" she demanded.

"Recall…device…" Drakken stalled. "Could you tell me what it looks like?"

Her patience with him already exhausted, Shego grabbed Drakken by the throat and spoke in a no-nonsense tone of voice. "Well, gee. That is a poser. I know. How's about I pull various body parts off until I find something that you think looks like one?"

"You wouldn't," the evil doctor sneered.

"Okay, have it your way," Shego snarled as one of her hands lit up. "Nurse, restrain the patient. And skip the anesthetic."

Confronted with Shego's menacing disposition, Drakken wilted. "You'd…you'd really do that?"

"When I woke up this morning, it was not my plan to take twenty-some years before getting to bed again," she scowled. "If I have to wade through two decades of bad fashions, bad hair styles, the Macarena, country line dancing, and the dot-com fiasco it will be over your dead body!"

Drakken appeared to take these things into accound. "Good point," he conceded. "Okay. You win." He reached inside his coat and removed what looked like Rube Goldberg's insane conception of a combination remote control and cell phone. Kim held out her hand for it and he reluctantly brought it forward as though to give it to her, but at the last moment he dropped it to the floor and brought his foot down on it, scattering pieces of plastic and electronic components across the floor. "Woopsie!" he said in mock sorrow.

Shego was livid, or as livid as her pale green complexion would allow. "That's it," she choked out. "I'm going to kill him!" She was thwarted in her efforts by Kim holding her back while Jimmy picked up the shattered remains of the recall device.

"Why?" he asked. "Why strand yourself twenty years in the past like this?"

Drakken chortled and rubbed his hands. "Isn't it obvious? In the 21st century I'm just a run-of-the-mill evil genius. But back here, I have a twenty-year head start on everyone else. I know what stocks will succeed and when. I know what inventions will succeed and fail. With the information I possess, I can do what I've always wanted to do. I can rule the world!"

"That will be pretty hard from six feet under, Doc," Shego spat.

"Oh, come now, Shego," Drakken told her in a soothing voice. "There's plenty of pie to go around. Knowing the future will give you more opportunity here than you could ever have just living in the future. Is it really so bad?"

In spite of the burning fury she felt at Drakken's treachery, Shego couldn't help seeing things from Drakken's point of view. It was true that someone knowing what the next two decades would bring would have an almost infinite advantage over anyone else. As she dwelt on this Jimmy spoke up. "You're forgetting a couple things, Drakken."

"And those are?" he asked.

"First, we don't know how the future is going to turn out. Everything from this point on is totally indeterminate. That's why you didn't remember failing when you first decided to try breaking up Kim's parents twenty years ago. Until we return to the future this past hasn't happened yet. Anything we do will change the way things are going to turn out."

"The brainiac has a point, Doc," Shego admitted. "If we buy up all the hot tech stocks, won't that change some major business decisions and affect how things turn out in the future?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know," Drakken replied, refusing to be put off. "What's the second thing?"

Jimmy pointed in a random direction. "That singularity is still out there. Unless we get back in time to stop it there's a good chance that everything past, present, and future will cease to exist. By smashing the recall device you've not only trapped us in the past, you've jeopardized the entire time stream!"

Kim had been collecting the scattered and shattered pieces as the others had been talking and now brought them to Jimmy. "I think that's all of them. Is there any way you can fix it?"

Jimmy surveyed the ruins and looked doubtful. "Maybe. I don't know. It looks like a lot of the components here are totally ruined."

"There must be parts here you can replace them with," Kim pressed.

"Possibly. The technology of this time is pretty primitive. You're asking me to work with tools that are little better than stone knives and bearskins." As he surveyed the pieces he shook his head. "From the power rating of these parts I don't know that we could find parts that would generate a signal strong enough to get through before the circuits burnt out. We'd have to be a lot closer."

"How close?" Shego asked.

Jimmy did some quick calculations in his head. "Allowing for a safety factor, we'd have to be within two or three years of our target date."

"Great!" Shego muttered. "Waiting two or three years less will be a big help."
Drakken gave them all a triumphant smile. "It looks like it's my way or…no, strike that. It's just my way," he observed. "Anyone interested in joining with me in filing a patent for a graphical user interface operating system?"

"Better do it fast, Doc," Shego deadpanned. "Something tells me we don't have a lot of time."

"No," Jimmy said in a strange tone that made the others stare at him. "We don't have a lot of time. And that's what's going to get us out of here."

End of Chapter 19