A/N: Thanks for the reviews! Quasi, your review tonight made me think, 'eh, maybe I'll just write a little more,' and that's the only reason this chapter got finished. My kid and Zero have both questioned my plot, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this, but you can at least have Zane seeing Future-Jo!

The car floated.

That was the first surprise.

There were no seatbelts. That was the second. Or maybe the baby, gazing warily from the backseat in that suspicious way that some infants have, was the second surprise.

But the big surprise was in how the car moved. Zoe punched a button – it looked a lot like the keyless ignition power button in a Toyota Prius, but in the dark Zane hadn't really noticed the car manufacturer – and the car responded by saying, in a polite female voice that didn't sound anything at all like Fargo's, "Destination?"

Zoe replied, "S.A.R.A.H., please," and then there was a moment of almost acceleration, and they were there.

"Holy shit," Zane said, awed. "What just happened?"

"What?" Zoe looked startled and then dismayed. "Right, I forgot. Well, we couldn't have used Henry's truck, anyway, we needed to get there quickly and – but I shouldn't have – oh, dear. This is going to be harder than – well, yeah. Cars have kind of, um, changed."

"Cars basically remained the same from 1901 to 2011. After over a hundred years of tweaking, what was there to do?" Zane asked, incredulous.

"Um, get rid of the internal combustion engine, for one. Gas is really expensive. Fossil fuels are so inefficient. And after – yeah, no, I definitely can't tell you that." Zoe shook her head as she slid out of the car and came around to the passenger side to collect her baby. "But the computer uses GPS to locate its destination," she added brightly, as she scooped the infant out of the car, protecting its head from bumping against the doorframe with the ease of long practice. "You can store destinations that you go to regularly, just like you can store phone numbers in a cell phone."

Wow, wow, wow. This was so cool. Zane wanted to know more. He yearned to pop open the hood and look inside. What could have been invented – wait. Teleportation? It was almost teleportation. If the Einstein-Grant bridge device worked by opening and closing wormholes, could you…? Blindly, brain totally focused on the physics problem that he'd just been posed, he followed Jo and Amy out of the car and down the steps into S.A.R.A.H..

It was a party.

He'd never seen S.A.R.A.H. so crowded, and looking around the room at all the almost-familiar faces was surreal. Henry had gotten old. And so had Kevin, but on him, age just meant full adulthood. But Fargo looked almost the same, a little less hair, a few more pounds, and that redhead next to him, one hand comfortingly on his shoulder, looked vaguely familiar. Maybe he'd seen her somewhere before? Carter, Alison, Zoe, people he didn't recognize and people he did – it was as if half the town had turned out to say hello.

The scattering of kids and adolescents was almost scary. There were definitely more than five of them, a lot more. Eureka had had some kind of population explosion in the years he and Jo had skipped. But those two that looked alike, both tall and gawky and dark-haired, they had to be the twins that were turning twenty-one next week. And that little one – peering at him from behind Carter out of the same blue eyes that he saw in the mirror every morning – who else could she be but Caiti, possessor of the world's highest measured IQ? He grinned at her, and she ducked behind Carter's back.

And coming out of the kitchen – holy shit. He felt an involuntary stirring and tried firmly to suppress it as he worked on the math. Say twenty-two years, minimum, if they had twenty-one year old twins. So she was maybe in her very early fifties? And time plus babies had meant maybe twenty pounds? But those pounds had turned into curves – really, really nice curves – and the face, which so often seemed stern and forbidding in his time, had softened and warmed and…yeah. She was the hottest middle-aged woman he had ever seen and he was more than happy to know that someday he'd get to sleep with her. Maybe she'd dump her husband for him?

And then – wow. He was grinning at himself and that was just the strangest sensation ever. He looked pretty good. Not like Jo-good – Lupo's age had only enhanced her beauty – but apart from a sprinkling of silver and some pronounced laugh lines around the eyes, he looked like himself. Stepping forward at the same time as the other him stepped forward, they reached for each other's hands to shake, even as Future-Jo was hugging his Jo, and the room was bursting into noise and chaos.

It was a solid hour before the greetings and introductions were over and the din died down. "All right, let's get started," his older self called out. The room started to clear, kids and parents slowly moving toward the door. Fargo stayed seated but the redhead with him rounded up some little ones and followed Zoe out.

"So am I right in thinking you've got an agenda here?" Zane said warily to his other self as he watched the twins disappear down S.A.R.A.H.'s ground-floor hallway.

"You could say that," he answered, clapping himself on the shoulder. "Today got here a little sooner than we expected it to, but we've been planning it for years, so we're hoping we're ready."

"Hoping?" Zane's eyebrows shot up. What was the big deal? If he'd been able to build a time-travel device twenty years ago, surely the technology had advanced enough that they could send Jo and him back to their own time with the press of a button. If he'd been working on it, he would have solved any problems long ago…

Oh, wait.

He had been working on it. This version of him. For apparently twenty years or so. "So what's the big deal? You must be able to send us back to our time pretty easily. Jo managed to get back to 2010 from 1947 on solar flares."

"The energy source is not the problem," Future-Zane said, gesturing Zane to a seat. Fargo, Henry, Future-Jo and Jo herself were the only others who remained in the room, although Zane caught a glimpse of dark hair behind a chair in the corner. He wondered if he should mention that the littlest Lupo-Donovan seemed to be eavesdropping but then shrugged mentally. He would have done the same thing as a kid, and if S.A.R.A.H. thought it was a problem, she'd rat Caiti out to her parents.

"So what is the problem?" Jo asked. She seemed not to have relaxed an iota, her posture still rigidly perfect, her face tense.

"The nature of time," Henry replied, just as Future-Jo said, "Preserving the future."

"We need you to do us a couple of small favors," Future-Zane said smoothly.

"Favors?" Zane couldn't help his own skepticism as he looked at his future face. Maybe he just knew himself too well, but something about this was sending up warning flags.

"Well, and one rather large favor," Future-Zane added.

"We need you guys to save my life," Fargo added. "Oh, and the rest of the world while you're at it."