“And here we are,” Nyra said from the pilot’s seat after an effortless jump to the near-future. “‘Any random night’ in July, 2026… Passengers are usually more specific.”

           Jace and Laurie were looking out the long, narrow reinforced window along the aircraft’s starboard side, down towards Desert Tree Elementary’s night lamps. Jace then stepped away to reply, “Like I said, my cousin didn’t give me an exact date that he was returning to. But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have come back to a time when he’d have to go back to school soon. Not after everything he went through as the ‘time ninja.’”

           “Sounds like him,” Laurie added. “I’d guess the start of summer, so he’d get the longest rest possible. But how do you go back to everyday… high school after all that?”

           “Well, there’d be another reason…” Jace said and took out his phone. “His own memories of time traveling should fade by the time school starts. But here in July… I’ll just call him.” Everyone in the ship kept quiet while he tapped at his cousin’s face in the contact list, and once Warren picked up, they listened in. Jace tried to keep things casual and normal-sounding. “Hey, Warren. Yeah, so… You’re not busy, right? I just wanted to—huh? My voice sounds… Oh, yeah, I’m just a little stuffed up. Could we have a chat, in person, like… at your house, out front? I know… I know I’m a weirdo. It’ll be quick. Uh-huh… All right, thanks. I’ll be over… sooner than you’d expect.”

           Jace sighed and looked around at the others, and Nyra smirked before swiveling in her chair to face her console again. After tapping in a provided address, she nudged the throttle forward, and the night lights of the suburbs steadily passed by outside.

           “Jace, did you walk?” was the first thing Warren asked as his cousin came up the driveway. “What’s so important that we need to have an IRL night chat? W-wait…”

           “Sorry for ruining your night, cuz, but I had to ask…” Jace stepped into the light near an arms-crossed Warren and took a breath. “Does Toys ‘R’ Us ring a bell?”

           “Agh, damn it…” he groaned and rubbed his face. “I thought you looked shorter. Jace, what is it now? I just got back a few weeks ago. The memories are still fresh, bro!”

           “I was hoping they would be. Something came up—nothing to do with your dad this time, but we could still use your help. You got any interest in seeing the future?”

           Jace signaled with his hand, and Warren watched in mild curiosity as a floating rectangle of light opened up at the end of the driveway, with Wes inside of it.

           “So, we go from Dad being the problem to Millie causing havoc… No offense, Millie,” Warren said inside the shuttle, still cloaked at the end of the driveway where it just barely fit. “But it doesn’t sound like she’s having some nostalgia binge of her own.”

           “I hope another fight won’t come out of this somehow, but if it does, it’d be good to have you back for one more battle, kiddo,” Wes replied. “Even if you need a haircut.”

           The younger Millie let out a scoffing snort. “Come on, I’m the sneaking around nonconfrontational kind. You think she’ll get a spider-leg battle suit, shoot lasers and missiles at us like you did, Wes? She’s desperate, and after… something, but I dunno…”

           “Our-age Mill was working on a theory, I believe,” Arthur mentioned.

           Mid-Thirties Millie nodded. “I do have an idea that might blow your mind.”

           “You might as well hold off a little longer on sharing it,” Nyra advised. “There’s someone else we should talk about it with anyway, so save yourself some breath.”

           “All this fighting…” Laurie, staring at the floor, spoke up quietly. “You know I hate it when things get mean and physical. Did you try talking to your adversaries, Jace?”

           He huffed. “The things and people we fought weren’t really gonna see our side with some simple ‘charisma check.’ Warren, you don’t know what’s going on, right?”

          His messy hair shook. “Nah. If she’s not some older version of our Millie, and was close enough in age to fool you… Yeah, no ideas.” After a moment, he looked at Laurie and said, “Hey, Lor. I didn’t really say hi yet. Guess I ‘just accepted’ you being here.”

           She shyly replied, “It was just… dumb luck that I’m here. But I’ve had some fun, and I think I could be a professional time traveler… Um… Y-you got tall.”

           “Heh, you should see how much Jamie shot up in tenth—” he went quiet when everyone heard some shouting from outside. Warren bent down and looked out the narrow window, along with Jace. “Great. I think Sally’s looking for me.”

           “Your sis, right?” Nyra asked. “No room for more passengers.” She opened up the port side door, facing away from the house so that the light from the shuttle stayed hidden, and making twelve-year-old Sally’s words audible. “Better see what she wants.”

           “Warren! Where’d you go?” Sally called out into the night from the porch. “Stop being a weird broody teenager in the dark! Mom needs help with Apple TV passwords!”

           “All right, fine…” Warren grumbled to the others. “Give me a few minutes. I need to change anyway. Tch, man… I suddenly really miss my badass sword.”

           Those few minutes soon turned into centuries later, when the gang watched in excitement as the night skyline of Royal Valley transformed in a flash to a concrete jungle of shimmering glass, cloudy afternoon skies, and fog thick enough to obscure the mountains that should have dominated the horizon. The city now had over a dozen massive skyscrapers; none were familiar, though each was ripped out of a typical sci-fi or cyberpunk movie. Signage and bright holographic light displays pierced the sunlit streets in all colors, while vehicles with wheels passed by below on 29^th century clean, efficient roads and airlanes moved about flying craft and drones with no need for stoplights.

           “Welcome to 2884, the ticking present!” Nyra said over the gasps exhibited from everyone, except for the older Millie. “Take your time gawking, I’ll hold position for a mo’ to do all the check-in proceeds. It’s crowded like Bill & Ted’s phone booth in here…”

           “Oh, wow, oh man, just… Wow,” Colin was the first to speak up. “This really is the future. B-but it’s not like… a movie version of a future we see and think of as some… tangible thing on the horizon. This is… distant. Unrecognizable, alien. We’re primitives.”

           “All right, settle down, Colin. It is cool,” Wes said, “but if you spent two years time traveling and became aware of this place a while back, it’s… Okay, it’s still a lot to take in. This doesn’t look a thing like Royal Valley. And… is the landscape green?!”

           “So weird…” Jace murmured. “One minute, I’m in a condo eating Millie’s dad’s amazing pancakes, and the next…” He looked up at the older Millie. “Why is it green?”

           “Take a guess. The climate’s screwed up,” she replied matter-of-factly.

           “Of course…” Laurie said with a disappointed moan. “I knew it would be.”

           “Well… Nyra doesn’t like it when I put it like that, so to be more ‘correct…’ The climate shifted. This sight was a shock to me, too, seeing the desert valley lush and rainy. Earth was overheating by 2100, before geoengineering went big and serious. Now there are enough orbital mirrors to bring temps down to, like, 1800s levels or thereabouts, but you can’t whiplash the world like that and not expect things to get out of whack. The oceans rose centuries ago, swamped cities, shut down the Gulf Stream, triggered wars and mass migration… Things are on the rebound and sea salted land is being restored, but you can only send so much frozen water to the poles each year. It’s a slow process.”

           “Ugh… And the animal extinctions… Emiko would be heartbroken.”

           “Laurie is very conscious about this stuff,” Jace reminded Millie.

           “I remember that,” Millie noted. “But, Laurie, if it’s any consolation, it does also unite countries toward a common goal, it does not get terrible in our lifetimes, good work has been done, and the bad news will be spread over decades, not months.”

           That didn’t seem to assuage her, and Laurie became quiet and sullen.

           “How many people live here now?” Arthur wondered. “Did the city become a refuge or something? I can’t begin to imagine the state of current geopolitics.”

           “About a million, because the city’s been one of those ‘stable’ areas for centuries that people flock to. Countries and currency don’t exactly… work like they used to.”

           “You’ll have to save the catch-up for later,” Nyra interjected. “I figured this was gonna happen as soon as I reported my passengers. Wes, the chief of the local Time Police department wants to meet you, right away. Now’s your chance to make peace.”

           Wes fretted, “Oh, great. Are they going to wipe my memory? Put me in time jail?”

           “I have to be on their shit list as well,” Warren added, his tone of both anger and fear. “I never killed any cyborgs, but still… This isn’t how my night was supposed to go. I was about to get into my pajamas and chill out with some games, but nooo…”

           “Would you two relax?” Nyra groaned as she put some coordinates into the autopilot. “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think, because someone in this old bird did her job and, with some help from a local, pieced together the truth.”

           “Yeah, can’t say I’m convinced,” Wes muttered. “Lawyers are still around, right?”

           Nyra didn’t respond, so Wes went back to watching the city pass by outside and trying to identify any remaining landmarks or familiar roads. But it was all very different, which wasn’t surprising given the large passage of time. Laurie was particularly pensive.

           “Jace… Why is this year considered the ‘present?’ I get that it’s always ‘right now’ depending on what era a person lives in, and the ‘future’ never actually arrives, but…”

           He answered, “Lor… and Arthur and Colin. This is a lot for anyone to take in, but the truth is… this is the present, and nothing past that ‘right now’ is ahead of us. We live in the past. We’re part of history. We’re the ones that are out of time. Not Nyra.”

           This revelation gave Laurie and the two guys a lot to think about, and they went back to hushed chats as Wes remarked on the large complex they were approaching.

           “Now that place is huge. It’s like the Bladerunner building. Is it under renovation?”

           Nyra replied, “That’s headquarters. It’s being repaired… After you bombed it.”

           “It sounds like you’re public enemy number one around here, bud,” Arthur said as the shuttle landed on one of the dozens of aeropads along the half-pyramid-shaped building. After they stepped out and got their first whiff of the fresh, windy, and oddly humid air, he added, “I mean… bombing the police? The Time Police at that?”

           “Like I keep saying, I don’t know why I did it!” Wes argued, even while some big cyborg officers came to their sides and began escorting them into the building. “All I can remember is being in, like, a cave somewhere, and some kind of huge bomb was there, and I think me and Jace must’ve sent it to the future, but I just don’t…”

           “Shh,” Colin shushed him. “Stop speaking without an attorney!”

           The large group proceeded into a dark gray hallway lined with glowing strips of illumination that seemed to mimic sunlight. Jace, Laurie, Warren, and the quiet younger Millie simply tried to process everything they saw, not knowing what to think. It was the adults who were nervous—even Nyra, maybe about her own upcoming chat.

           The short hallway was more of a glorified airlock, so they quickly arrived at the heart of the megastructure. Like an arcology, the building was big enough to sustain its own lush environment, given life through an array of skylights. Foliage was everywhere, from the green barriers flanking fifty stories of walkways all the way down to a tree-filled park plaza below. Most of the employees that buzzed about the hive were of the organic and squishy kind, though they still had visible augments and implants. Those that saw Wes go by—perhaps Jace and Warren, too—were noticeably a little taken aback.

           “Unk… I’m getting the feeling we’re a little… famous,” Jace murmured.

           The elder Millie then mentioned, if just to breathe out some anxiety, “This is the site where King Arcade used to be, a long time ago. Just… a little fun fact for you.” She waited for a response for a few seconds, then added, “That’s more history I got into. By 2050, the ruins were cleared out and a park… you know, the outdoor kind full of trees, was here for about a century. After that, it became a military base again at the start of the Resource Wars. I think it’s obvious what that long, maybe inevitable conflict was about.”

           “Millie, please stop,” Laurie pleaded meekly. “I don’t want to hear all this…”

           “O-oh. Sorry… But good and bad come in waves, you know? The wars made humanity take space travel seriously, and we expanded to moons, planets, and asteroids for the things we fought over. And you have to admit… Royal Valley looks beautiful.”

           “I think Millie’s just trying to keep you from blabbing anymore,” Colin said to Wes.

           “This is us,” Nyra announced, stopping in front of a frosty smart glass door marked, ‘Central California Timeline Management Bureau. Chief Wisence Hawthorn.’

           “Hold on, I thought this whole building was for the Time Cops,” Wes wondered.

           “Time travel policing is actually one of the smaller departments. Vital, sure, but jurisdictions can cover hundreds of miles in this age, what with the response times we get through modern air travel. But you need departments for everything from the traditional patrolling, to cyber and AI criminal activity, to… pretty much anything you can think of. That’s enough exposition—we shouldn’t keep the chief waiting. She only asked for you, Wes, your kid and nephew, and the older Millie. The rest of you will have to wait out here. You can entertain yourselves by watching the birds that fly around.”

           “Good luck in there, Jace…” Laurie said passively and went over to the railing.