Story 1: An Incorrect Premise

The past is fixed, it cannot be changed. What is currently the future will eventually become passed. The present is a razor-thin moment—a fleeting particle in the ever-flowing river of an eternal continuum—constantly converting what is future into what is past, one second at a time. Does that make the future as inalterable as the past? Or does the present untangle the collapse of infinite waveforms extending through countless dimensions of space, rendering nothing permanent?

Welcome back, students of the timelines. I am Mr. Mondragon, an AI tasked with preserving and understanding the entire world history of the people of Earth throughout all of time. I will be your guide as we consider the events and ponder the possibilities surrounding the American Crisis of 2049. Together, we will marvel at mysteries and wonders, we will cheer for beloved heroes, and we will learn of forgotten sacrifices. There are many stories still waiting to be told. These are the stories from another time.

Today's story begins at what may be called a singularity. The date is May 18, 2043. Phineas Flynn and Ferb Fletcher are just entering the height of their scientific careers as leading world researchers in the new field of chronodynamics—the physics of time travel. Only a few days before, Phineas Flynn gave a lecture to the top young minds at MIT detailing some of his and his brother's research. A student present in the audience, Marty Emmett, had an epiphany as he listened.

That weekend, Marty Emmett went home and worked late into the night on what would become the first time machine built in the twenty-first century.* His groundbreaking invention quickly earned him an audience with Phineas and Ferb, who sanctioned his invention as a tool that would change society forever, bringing with it numerous solutions to the abundant world crises humanity struggled with including poverty, hunger, climate change, crime, and more.

But as we all know, things very nearly didn't turn out so well. Did Phineas and Ferb make a mistake? Let's find out.


Summertime Industries
Danville, USA
May 18, 2043

"I understand. Thank you for calling." Phineas Flynn swiped the holographic screen projected in three-dimensional space directly above his workbench, and the call ended. He pulled his earbud out and dropped it on the table. "Hey, Ferb! I have some big news!"

At the summons, Ferb Fletcher sprang from the underside of the brothers' latest invention, wrench still in hand.

"Apparently," Phineas began as his step-brother and business partner wiped some motor oil on his hands with a rag, "an MIT student just invented a time machine this morning." He checked his watch. "They want us to be there for its first test, an experiment to see if it will travel one minute into the future. Just like that scene from Back To The Future!"

"Heavy," Ferb quoted.

"Yeah," nodded Phineas. "Probably thanks to all the sci-fi movies, they want our input as to the safety of time travel. Of course, we fixed that broken time machine at the museum and visited the Cretaceous Period that one time when we were little. Everything worked out just fine then."

Ferb blinked in response.

"Is that so, Ferb?" The inventing prodigy put his hand to his chin in thought. "Do you really think it could be that dangerous?"

Ferb nodded in sync to a wiping sound effect coming from no discernable source.

"This isn't just because we recently watched the time travel episode of Space Adventure, is it?" Phineas probed suspiciously. "The one where they almost destroy the timeline by stepping on a twig a thousand years in the past?"

Ferb nodded again.

"I mean, it isn't impossible," mused Phineas. "In complex or delicate systems, slight changes can domino into big ones as time goes on. The ethical issues with conducting time travel experiments are becoming more serious the more I think about them. The further you go back in time, the greater the chance of the present becoming significantly affected. Then again, that could be a good thing, too. Suppose you had the option to go back in time to save someone's life, you would do it, right? Then changing the present or future could be a good thing. However, as one thing changes, something else does too, and the chain reaction of causes and effects become more complicated and unpredictable the longer it runs. But if we had to make the decision right now, should that be a good enough reason to ban time travel? Should we condone experimenting with time, or should we take a stance against it? Or is there maybe some middle ground we could consider?"

Silence fell between the two geniuses as they became lost in thought.

The singularity happened at this moment, the fulcrum of all history. As our two geniuses pondered away, the air in their lab began to crackle with electricity. There was a popping sound as a time machine of unknown origin undulated through the fabric of spacetime to appear at that point. Phineas and Ferb stared in confusion and disbelief at the unannounced arrival of this unfamiliar vehicle.

The door lifted open, and the inventors found themselves staring into the faces of their own doppelgangers, their time clones. An older set of Phineas and Ferb stepped out of the time machine. "Hey, guys!" future-Phineas waved with a big smile. "We're you from the future!"

Phineas and Ferb stared in awe as their time clones looked around the lab. "Hey, look, Ferb!" future-Phineas pointed. "There's the quantum gyroscopic delimiter we built! And there's the hyperplastic indexer, and is that the teleporting plank resurger? Woah, that takes me back!"

"W-well, hi, I guess," Phineas stammered, slowly recovering. "Are you really us? From the future?"

"Sure are!" Future-Phineas grinned. "This is the earliest we were legally able to travel in order to meet you! Since in our time, traveling any further back into the past then the day time travel was invented is illegal."

"How come?"

"Well, you know, it's to keep the timeline safe. Theoretically. So yeah, that's why Ferb and I never attended Stephen Hawking's famous time traveler party. Anyways, what we came here for was to tell you that in the future, time travel becomes widespread as one of the main forms of travel. Our experiments seem to indicate that the timeline can't be changed no matter what you do. Still, the world governments are jittery about it, so the law of no time travel to before today was put in place. Anyways, we just wanted to say, don't worry about all the dangerous ramifications. We have been to the future, and nothing wrong happened. Time travel, as far as we can tell, is completely safe. This is the point in the timeline where it must be introduced to the world."


That is how it happened. The rest, as they say, is history. With the assurance of their future selves, Phineas and Ferb went on to endorse Marty Emmett's invention and soon improved its design. Their experiments quickly paved the way for time travel to become commonplace and ubiquitous, although the debate on the safety and ethicality of time travel was just beginning. Being such prominent and respected scientists, Phineas' and Ferb's validation of time travel was sufficient for its use to quickly spread before the effects of time travel had been thoroughly studied and its rules understood. As we all know, disaster nearly ensued. History repeated itself, and humanity careened into the future before it realized it had opened Pandora's Box.

It is speculated that due to the 'Mysterious Force,' as their sister preferred to call it, Phineas' and Ferb's time travel experiments were influenced by a positive bias of unknown but tacitly understood origin. They erroneously concluded that time travel was safe because of the universe's tendency to work out in their favor, unbeknownst to them. This oversight, perhaps more than anything else, led to the sequence of events that nearly overthrew America in 2049, and the true dangers of time travel were at last recognized by the scientific community.

The future, we now know, is not fixed. By corollary, neither is the past. Updated theories and models of time account for this knowledge by introducing the concept of "temporal inertia" into the laws of chronodynamics―as if established timelines behave similarly to mass, they tend to stay in motion when already in motion. Put simply, to change the direction or velocity of a timeline requires a large enough "force," you could say. The Conspirium succeeded in doing just this, and it was only by exerting an equal and opposite force that PJ the platypus was able to undo it.


*As it turns out, the very first time machine ever invented was built in the late nineteenth century by one Xavier Onassis, whose love of corndogs led him to remain in the twenty-first century. Onassis abandoned his time machine, leaving it in the hands of Candace Johnson, the older sister of Phineas and Ferb, who proceeded to attempt to bust her brothers as kids by going back into the past.