A Story Within a Story

"Okay, you've lost me." Jo shook her head, frowning. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Future Jo stepped forward. "Let me start at the beginning then." She glanced at S.A.R.A.H.'s door, where her kids were departing. "Or at least the beginning as it was told to me."

"We came into the lab for some security-related reason – were we increasing the protocols? It was research on quantum entanglement, right?"

Jo nodded. "We were making arrangements to move everything down to Section 5."

"Oh, right," Future Jo agreed. "The Chinese had gotten interested in the research and some scientist had maybe said too much over an open line. But we spotted the bridge device almost right away, and went from playing it cool – determined not to reveal any more about the time travel to Zane than we'd already given away – to ballistic in about ten seconds flat."

Jo half-nodded as if to acknowledge the truth of the description.

Zane opened his mouth to drawl sarcastically, "Ten seconds? Lupo goes crazy way faster than that…" and then, spotting Future Zane's wince, closed his mouth again. Jo looked him at him curiously and he smiled, as innocently as he could. Maybe he'd just watch what he said for the next few minutes.

"He went to turn on the bridge device, we tried to stop him, but he managed to do it. Nothing happened. It was a relief, but we were still furious."

"Wait, wait. We? This isn't what happened to me," Jo protested.

"Right," Future Jo nodded. "It didn't happen to me, either. The first part did, but when Zane and I turned the device on, it took us to the future. Farther into the future than you went, though, by several months." She looked at her Zane, her expression worried, and he shrugged.

"Nothing we can do about it now, babe." He rubbed an affectionate hand along her back, and the corners of her lips turned up, just a little, before she looked back at Jo and Zane and continued her story.

"We – or rather, the first Jo – didn't respond well. It was a rough time. Alison was dead, Carter was devastated—"

"Alison was what?" Jo interrupted again.

Her future self nodded. "You heard me. Beverly Barlow stole the DED and during the course of the investigation, Alison was killed in a car crash. That was bad enough, but everyone was worried about the Department of Defense investigation. So First Jo, she screwed up. She convinced Fargo that Zane was too dangerous to have around and got him sent back to federal prison."

Jo's surprise showed, and Future Jo pointed out, "You know we thought about it once before. With that whole oxygen thing.* Fargo stopped us that time, but this time – well, he was as worried as we were. Getting rid of Zane looked like a smart choice."

Zane grimaced. Nice. Dammit, Lupo acted like it was unreasonable for him to want to understand what had gone on between them. It wasn't. She was the one who'd been acting weird, she was the one who'd thrown his grandmother's ring at him, she was the one who'd started whatever this thing was. Yeah, so he'd kissed her. If she hadn't kissed him back with the hottest melting touch he'd ever felt – if she'd just knocked him on his ass the way the Enforcer could have, should have, and would have… he opened his mouth to say something irritable and then spotted his future self's face and shut it again. Damn. What exactly had he said that his future self still remembered it as painful twenty-some years later?

"Three weeks later, Fargo was dead," Future Jo continued. "A freak accident when he accidentally got sent into space into what was supposed to be an unmanned spacecraft."**

Zane and Jo both glanced at Fargo, who rolled his eyes. "Not my finest hour," he said. "Not that I remember it. It didn't happen that way for us, obviously."

"Fargo's death, especially coming so soon after Alison's, was the beginning of the end for Eureka," Future Jo's voice was matter-of-fact. "Mansfield took the same route he'd taken after Stark's death and promoted Fargo's assistant to head of GD."

"Larry?" Jo and Zane said the name simultaneously, with identical expressions of horror.

Future Jo ignored them and continued doggedly on. "The accident investigations dragged on for years. After First Zane finished serving his sentence, he came back to Eureka, but First Jo was gone. We're not sure where, because he never knew. Meanwhile, the government was in the middle of a severe financial crisis and our budgets were slashed to the core. Just about ten years later, real research had totally dried up and all the stored projects were being destroyed. First Zane got called in to dismantle his bridge device, which had been sitting in storage for all those years. Before he did, he turned it on."

Zane's jaw dropped as he realized what must have happened. "That time it worked?" he asked.

Future Zane grinned at him. "I like to imagine his surprise when his past self popped up. Ya' got to figure, he knew absolutely nothing about the time travel, and hadn't seen Jo in years. I wonder how long it took him to figure it out."

Zane glanced at Jo. What he wondered was what it had felt like to have Jo disappear, someplace unknown. Had he worried about her? Had he been so resentful about being sent back to prison that he didn't care? Why wouldn't he have hacked a few government computers to find out? It was strange, and uncomfortable, to think that she could disappear and he would just let her go. Not that they were friends or anything – hell, they'd barely ever even had a civil conversation. In fact, most of their conversations ended with her reading him his rights. But still…He glanced back at his future self, who was smiling at him, a little wryly.

"But he didn't go back in time?" Jo asked. "His machine pulled us forward?"

Future Zane nodded. "Kevin reversed the polarity on the original bridge device on Founder's Day. The machine, as designed, creates a path to the future, not the past."

"But wait," said Jo. "When we first traveled in time, we didn't meet our other selves. We became them. Why wouldn't that happen again? In fact, why didn't that happen now?"

"For obvious reasons, experimentation is difficult, and dangerous," Henry said. "But we believe that when enough time separates versions of a self, the typical processes of aging, cellular regeneration, epigenetic modification, and so on, differentiates the identities sufficiently that instead of the consciousness of the original being replaced, as happened to us, both identities co-exist.

"Replaced consciousness?" Zane asked. "So this Jo, my Jo, actually is the Enforcer, just with a brain wipe?"

"Your Jo? Brain wipe?" Jo glared at him.

Future Zane was shaking his head. "Ya' had to say it." Future Jo was trying not to smile.

"There is nothing wrong with my brain, thank you very much, and I am not yours," Jo practically spit the words at him. Dang. He hadn't meant it that way, he wanted to protest. He'd gotten her mad without even trying.

"Every argument for the next decade," Future Zane sighed, before abruptly looking more cheerful. "Hey, make sure to take that into account when considering whether to erase your memory, okay? It'll be like it never happened."

Zane looked skeptical. Nothing he'd heard so far, including the idea that Jo was going to be mad at him for a decade, had come remotely close to convincing him to destroy his memory. On the contrary, he could barely wait to get home and start figuring out the physics of all this. Two Nobel prizes? That was nothing. He could be making scientific breakthroughs for the next thirty years based on this knowledge.

"Second Jo and Second Zane didn't take a lot of convincing to decide to try to change their future," Future Jo resumed telling the story. "Neither of them liked the looks of it. Second Jo promised not to send Zane to prison, and they went back to their time resolved to save Fargo. Eureka, too, if they could, but definitely Fargo. But when they got there, they discovered that Alison was still alive. Somehow, they'd already changed the past."

Zane frowned. How was that possible?

"Or their future selves – their new future selves – had changed the past," Future Zane added.

"I don't get it," Jo said. "If they changed the past, then the future would also change. They wouldn't have known enough to even want to change the past. Right? Isn't that how it should work?" She glanced at Zane.

Henry nodded. "What you're talking about is the basic paradox of time travel: if you kill your grandmother, you'll never be born, so how could you have killed your grandmother? We used to believe that paradoxes like that one prohibited time travel, but what we've learned is that they actually create time-loops, like the one we're caught in. Time – or rather, our experience of it – simply repeats itself."

"Einstein once said that people who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is just a stubbornly persistent illusion,"*** Zane said. "So he was right?"

"Yeah, but it's that persistent part that matters," Fargo said.

"Okay, that's just creepy," Jo said.

"Can't you use the bridge device to go forward?" Zane asked. "Break out of the loop that way?"

Fargo answered. "There is no forward. The bridge devices don't work past the day you arrive in the future which – as of today – is today."

"Does that mean…" Zane didn't want to say it out loud.

Fargo shrugged. "Yeah, it might mean the world ends tomorrow. Nice thought, huh? But we prefer to believe it means that the loop starts over."

"Think of it this way," Henry added. "Do you remember looking through a kaleidoscope as a kid? You rotate the tube and the pattern changes." Jo nodded. "Time is like a kaleidoscope. The pieces remain the same, but they fall into different positions when you rotate the tube. And you rotate the tube by changing the past."

"That is so cool," said Zane.

"That is so not cool," said Jo.

"As far as we know," Future Zane said, "This time loop has happened at least eight times. Every time slightly, or not so slightly, differently. The last time through, we thought that repeating the exact actions of the previous time might break the loop, get the future back on track, but it didn't work. We couldn't do it."

Future Jo was chewing on her lip, the way Jo did when she was worried, Zane noted. "You couldn't break the loop or you couldn't repeat what the Jo and Zane before you had done?"

"Both," Future Zane was also watching his wife. "The universe has too many random variables. So this time we have a more complicated plan."

"All right," Zane said, feeling wary again. "Let's hear it."

"We need you to go back in time to 1947," said Fargo. "You'll use Grant's bridge device to do it, but you'll bring your bridge device and Beverly's bridge device with you. At the right moment, you'll turn on Beverly's bridge device, bringing Carter and Grant back in time to save Alison."

"But why do you need us to do that?" Jo asked. "Can't you do it?"

"Sure," Henry answered, "and we have. But once the kaleidoscope spins, only you and Zane are still guaranteed to exist as the same people, so you're the ones who have to do anything that has to happen."

Jo turned to Zane. "This is starting to feel like a really bad dream."

"Oh, I remember that feeling," Future Jo smiled, but her eyes were still sad. "No, it's not a hallucination. No, you're not insane. And you're not in the infirmary recovering from a bad accident. This is real. Or at least as real as a place that might not exist tomorrow can be."

"So we go back in time, and save Alison," Zane asked. "That doesn't sound complicated."

"It's not yet," Future Zane said. "You have to stick around in 1947 long enough to turn off Beverly's bridge, after Carter and Grant get there. While you're there, you'll reverse the polarity on your bridge device and link the power switches of Grant's device and your device so that with one push of a button, you can turn on both."

"Turning on my bridge in the past means…"

"Right," Future Zane was nodding. "Instead of traveling to the future, you and Jo would have traveled – will travel – into the past, just as Jo expected, thus breaking the loop."

"That still seems straightforward," Jo sounded suspicious. "Where's the catch?"

"If we pull ourselves into the past while we're still there, we get erased, don't we?" Zane guessed. "Brain wiped by the new selves?"

Henry nodded this time. "We believe so."

"That's where the saving my life part comes in," Fargo added. "If we break the loop by letting you forget everything about the future, you won't know how and what to change. For all we know, you'll get stuck in 1947 and never get back at all."

"We believe," Henry started, then corrected himself. "We hope that by using the two devices simultaneously, you'll get safely transported to the future while your new selves go back to 1947."

"Won't the kaleidoscope be in mid-spin then?" Zane asked.

"We don't know," Henry agreed. "And it's possible that we'll be setting up a quantum instability that will destroy our portion of the space-time continuum."

"Ah, no offense, Fargo," Zane said. "But that seems like a pretty heavy thing to risk to save your life." He'd always thought the director was an ass, but being willing to gamble everyone else's lives seemed a little over the top, even for Fargo.

Fargo grinned at him. "Yeah, probably. But see, I got killed testing an FTL drive based on the principles of the bridge device."

"You – a what?" Zane's jaw dropped. "You cracked faster than light travel?"

"Fargo," Henry protested.

"Aw, come on," Fargo replied. "We've got to tell him enough to make it worthwhile."

"You want me to erase my knowledge of faster than light travel?" Zane was shaking his head. They were all insane, every one of them. This was the coolest science ever, mind candy, a playground of knowledge and insight and discovery, and there was no way he was just going to willingly forget about it.

"We've run dozens of simulations." Future Jo stepped forward, her expression intent, focused. "Hundreds of them. Our best chance – your best chance – of creating this future, the one we're living in right now, and of breaking the loop, is if you save Alison and Fargo, and then forget everything you've learned. Otherwise, your knowledge contaminates the timeline and the loop might not break."

"What happens after we come back to the future?" Jo asked.

"We send you back to your own time again, to about five minutes after you first left, and you – the ones with the knowledge – will become the Jo and Zane of that time," Future Zane answered. "The loop will be broken. You save Fargo, make sure that the discovery of FTL happens on schedule, and then…live your lives." He and Future Jo exchanged a long look.

Live your lives. They made it sound so simple. Why did Zane think that maybe they were leaving out a few details? He and his Jo exchanged a look of their own. He was going to have to think about this.

*From an extra on the S4 DVD. I hated that extra, actually. I thought Jo acted out of character and that it was horrible. But I'm using it as semi-canon anyway.

**One could, if one wanted to be as picky as my junior consultant (aka my kid), complain that Fargo would never have been sent into space without Zane. But in my opinion, one would be being unnecessarily rational. After all, playing in a working spacecraft in Eureka was bound to end badly.

***Einstein did indeed say that. I'd blame this whole story on him, but actually I found that quote long after I'd wasted many an hour trying to figure out how the Eurekan versions of time travel could possibly all work together.

A/N: I know this chapter was a lot of explanation, not a lot of action, but trying to fix all the logical holes in time travel stories is like trying to fix a leaky roof in a hurricane – new holes pop up faster than you can find buckets for the old ones. I hope I came at least pretty close to making sense, and I promise in the next chapter, I'll get back to the fun stuff. Caiti has been waiting offstage, just itching to start making trouble!