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Retroville slept.
Porch lights glowed on quiet streets, the stars were hazy over the cul-de-sac, and every sensible kid was long in bed.
Jimmy Neutron, boy genius, stood in his lab and turned three massive knobs past sensible.
“Goddard, status report?” he asked, adjusting his goggles.
Goddard’s metal jaw clicked and his eyes blinked green, projecting a wireframe of the solar system into the air. “Temporal coordinates: calibrated. Spatial anchor: Retroville. Probability of mild catastrophe: eighty-three percent.”
“That’s just science being optimistic,” Jimmy said. “Tonight we make history. We’re going to open a window to the future, take a look around, then close it. Simple.”
Behind him, a familiar nervous voice squeaked, “Uh, Jimm-ay, can we maybe open a window to, like, the ice cream store instead?”
Jimmy jumped. “Carl! Sheen! What are you doing here?”
Carl Wheezer was half-hiding behind a workbench, hugging his inhaler like it was a teddy bear. Sheen Estevez was not hiding at all; he stood right next to the biggest, most dangerous console, poking things.
“We followed you,” Sheen said matter-of-factly. “I sensed a disturbance in the genius. Also, Libby said we should supervise.”
“Supervise Jimmy,” came a voice from the stairs. Cindy Vortex descended with a practiced eye roll, Libby at her side. “Because the last time he said ‘simple’, a duck had laser vision for a week.”
Libby grinned. “The duck did have drip, though.”
Jimmy opened his mouth to complain, then closed it. He had, in fact, armed a duck. “Okay, fine. But you all stand back. This is precision work.”
He turned back to the machine: a towering ring of metal and humming coils, cables snaking into the ground, and a console covered in buttons, dials, and one ominous lever.
Jimmy took a breath. “Temporal Gateway, test one. Destination: one thousand years into the future. Let’s see what human ingenuity has become.”
“Probably more llamas,” Sheen whispered.
He threw the switch.
The lab lights flickered. Static crawled up everyone’s arms. A low hum deepened into a roar, and the air inside the ring folded in on itself, becoming a swirling tunnel of blue and white.
“Behold!” Jimmy cried. “A stable portal through time!”
Cindy shaded her eyes. “If it’s so stable, why is it…sparking?”
The portal crackled, arcs of energy leaping out. Goddard barked mechanically and backed away, claws skidding on the floor.
“Minor,” Jimmy said through gritted teeth, frantically working the controls. “Fluctuation. I can compensate—”
A surge of light burst from the ring, washed over them, and the lab, the cul-de-sac, and Retroville vanished.
When Jimmy’s vision cleared, he was lying on something hard, cold, and slightly sticky.
He groaned, pushed himself up on his elbows, and realized he was on a metal floor. The air smelled like oil, coffee, and something faintly fishy. Above him, pipes and cables criss-crossed a concrete ceiling. A ventilation fan rattled. Neon light spilled in from somewhere.
“Okay,” he muttered. “Data check. Not my lab.”
“Definitely not Retroville,” Cindy said, sitting up nearby. “Retroville doesn’t smell like— what is that, burnt socks?”
Sheen sniffed deeply. “Mmm. The aroma of adventure.”
Carl sat up too fast, wobbled, and clutched his glasses. “Did we die? Is this—” he peered around— “some kind of industrial waiting room?”
Libby pushed her braids out of her face and stood, dusting off her skirt. “No obvious flames. I’m leaning toward ‘still alive’.”
Goddard whirred to his feet and began scanning. A holographic display flickered to life: locations, star charts, lines of alien text.
“Temporal displacement confirmed,” he reported. “Year: thirty-one oh two. Location: New New York City.”
“New New—” Jimmy’s eyes lit up. “We did it. We’re in the future!”
“Correction,” Goddard added. “We are also inside an industrial facility. And someone is approaching.”
A door banged open.
“What did I tell you people about leaving kids in the docking bay?” a voice said.
A man shuffled in, hunched, white-haired, and wide-eyed behind tiny glasses. His lab coat trailed behind him like a confused ghost. He wore slippers. He also wore the expression of someone who had seen so much nonsense that five extra children and a robot dog in his loading dock barely qualified as surprising.
“Hello!” the man said cheerily. “I’m Professor Hubert Farnsworth. You must be the interns Hermes ordered off the discount dimension.”
Jimmy straightened, adrenaline buzzing. “I’m James Isaac Neutron, boy genius,” he said quickly. “We appear to have opened a temporal portal by mistake— well, not technically a mistake, more of an uncontrolled success— and ended up here. Wherever ‘here’ is. Sir.”
“Ah, a fellow tinkerer!” Farnsworth’s eyes sparkled. “Always nice to meet a screaming tear in causality. Welcome to Planet Express. We deliver things and occasionally survive.”
Cindy folded her arms. “Do you also kidnap children, or is that a bonus feature?”
The Professor waved a hand. “If I were kidnapping children, I’d have done it on purpose. No, no, you’re clearly lost time orphans. It happens. Come along, we’ll see if we can shove you back into your own century before you destabilize the tax code.”
He turned and tottered back through the door. After a beat, Libby shrugged. “Well, he’s honest. That’s a start.”
Goddard tilted his head. “New data source detected. Probability of danger: very high.”
Sheen beamed. “He looks like he knows what an Ultra Lord is. Let’s go!”
The Planet Express conference room looked like a break room that had accidentally become a war room. There was a big table, mismatched chairs, a cracked viewscreen, a coffee machine blinking in distress, and a window that looked out over a sprawling future city of skyscrapers, flying cars, and glowing billboards.
Retroville’s kids clustered near the window, drinking it all in.
“Whoa,” Carl whispered. “The ice cream shop got…big.”
“There are hovercars,” Cindy breathed. “Actual hovercars. And giant tubes. And… is that a robot with a mustache?”
Down on the street, a robot taxi argued with a traffic cone.
“Goddard, record everything,” Jimmy said. “We may never get this chance again.”
“Already recording,” Goddard replied.
“Hey, Professor,” came a new voice from the doorway, lazy and confused. “We out of cheese puffs or did I just eat the container again?”
A lanky man in an orange jacket wandered in, scratching his head. His blond hair stuck out under a red cap. Behind him came a one-eyed woman with purple hair in a ponytail, and a shiny metal robot with a rectangular jaw and an attitude.
The man froze mid-step when he saw the kids. “Whoa,” he said. “Did we get de-aged? Nobody told me we were doing de-aging today.”
“They’re not you,” the woman said, then frowned at the kids. “At least I hope not.”
The robot peered closer. “I don’t see any beer or criminal records. Definitely not us.”
“Everyone, these are… what was your name, boy?” the Professor asked.
“Jimmy Neutron,” Jimmy repeated, trying not to stare at the robot’s cigar. “These are my friends Cindy, Carl, Sheen, Libby, and my robotic dog Goddard.”
The man in orange grinned lopsidedly. “I’m Fry. That’s Leela. And the walking toaster with a heart of scrap over there is Bender.”
“I’m not a toaster,” Bender snapped. “I’m a bending unit. I bend things. Including the truth, and occasionally, the law.”
Libby raised a brow. “You’re also very shiny.”
Bender paused, then angled himself. “You know, I am.”
Leela folded her arms. “So, temporal accident?”
“Yes,” Jimmy said. “I created a portal in my lab to observe the future. There was an unexpected surge and we were pulled through. My portal closed behind us. We need a way back to my time.”
Fry pointed at Jimmy’s hair. “Does everyone in the past have their hair like that?”
Jimmy instinctively touched his carefully sculpted quiff. “It’s aerodynamic.”
Cindy snorted. “Sure, Neutron. Your hair breaks the sound barrier.”
“Hey, leave him alone,” Fry said, unexpectedly defensive. “Weird hair’s a sign of greatness. Or poor grooming. Sometimes both.”
The Professor shuffled to the front of the room. “Good news, everyone!” he announced. “You’re probably not stuck here forever.”
Carl sagged in relief. “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is that in order to send you home, we’ll need to open a portal stable enough to connect to your original wormhole signature without exploding New New York. I’ll have to reconfigure the dark matter engines, rewire the chronitron modulator, and possibly anger several time-travel regulations.”
“That’s… a lot,” Jimmy said, intrigued. “Can I help?”
Leela gave Jimmy a look that was half fond, half worried. “You’re, what, ten?”
Jimmy lifted his chin. “I’m eleven.”
“See?” Fry said. “Ancient. He’s practically a grown-up.”
Leela sighed. “This explains so much about you, Fry.”
The Professor waved papers. “Fine, fine. Child labor is cheap. Fry, Leela, Bender, you’ll take the ship on a mission to Titan while I and… Jimmy, was it?… work on the inter-temporal return coil. You children, stay here. Don’t steal anything. Don’t sell anything. Don’t talk to anything that talks back with more than three eyes.”
As he shuffled Jimmy toward the lab, Fry lingered by the door, watching the boy.
“Hey, uh,” he said awkwardly. “Jimmy, right? Once you’re done saving reality… wanna see how a delivery guy lives in the future?”
Jimmy blinked. “Is that… scientifically educational?”
“Sometimes there are explosions,” Fry offered.
Sheen’s hand shot up. “Can I go on the explosion field trip?”
Leela pinched the bridge of her nose. “We can take… two kids for a short ride,” she said slowly. “No entering war zones, no getting bribed, and no selling them on alien eBay, Bender.”
Bender groaned. “Fine. I’ll put back the price tags.”
Libby nudged Cindy. “You go with Neutron so he doesn’t get eaten by a vending machine. I’ll stay here and learn how the future does music.”
Cindy rolled her eyes, but her cheeks colored. “He’s not going to get eaten,” she muttered. “But someone needs to make sure he doesn’t rewire the ship into a blender.”
Carl clutched his inhaler. “I’ll stay with you, Libby. The ship looks…spacey.”
“Spacey is kind of the point,” Fry said.
The Planet Express hangar was cavernous, and the ship gleamed in the center like a green bullet. Jimmy stopped at the foot of the boarding ramp, staring up at it, equations flickering behind his eyes.
“You fly that?” he asked, respect in his voice.
Leela smiled slightly. “Every day.”
“I optimized a rocket out of old washing machine parts once,” Jimmy said. “This is…better.”
Bender swaggered past. “You hear that? He thinks you’re better than laundry, Leela. That’s romance.”
Cindy elbowed Jimmy as they climbed the ramp. “Don’t start asking to drive, okay? I like existing.”
It only took a few minutes before the ship was in the air, rising above New New York. Through the windows, the kids saw the city open like a circuit board: towers, skyways, blimps advertising things they didn’t understand, and beneath it all, an ocean that glowed faintly from pollution and bioluminescence.
Jimmy pressed his hands to the glass, mind racing. “Look at all this tech,” he said. “Anti-gravity stabilizers. Fusion power. Autonomous tubes. This is what I wanted to see. What we could become.”
Fry lounged in his chair, feet on the console. “Yeah, it’s neat,” he said. “There’s also a lot more forms. You’d be impressed how many ways you can fill out ‘oops’ in triplicate.”
“Fry,” Leela said warningly. Then, to Jimmy: “It’s advanced, sure. But it’s messy. Humanity didn’t get wiser just because it got shinier.”
Jimmy considered that, watching a billboard flicker between ads for quantum toothpaste and a robot dating service. “In my time,” he said quietly, “I keep trying to fix things. I build gadgets, I solve problems. But sometimes I make messes too. Maybe I just assumed that by the future, someone would have figured out… everything.”
Cindy, sitting across from him, looked out at the city and then back at him. “Even you can’t fix everyone, Neutron,” she said. “And you don’t have to. Maybe the future’s just… people still trying.”
Fry stared at her. “Whoa,” he said softly. “That was deep.”
Bender flicked ash from his cigar. “Deep is when the bar tab falls off the edge of the universe and you still gotta pay it.”
“Relax,” Leela said. “This is just a quick hop to Titan. In, out, delivery, no catastrophes.”
The ship’s console beeped ominously.
Bender looked at the screen. “Huh. Is it bad if the warning light labeled ‘Temporal Shear’ is blinking?”
Jimmy snapped his head around. “Temporal what?”
Before anyone could respond, the ship lurched. The stars outside stretched like taffy, and the cabin filled with dazzling, twisted light. Jimmy grabbed the nearest seat, Cindy grabbed Jimmy, Fry grabbed his snack, and gravity decided to take a coffee break.
“What did you do?” Leela yelled, wrestling the controls.
“Me?” Bender said. “I didn’t even touch anything important! This time.”
Jimmy’s hair was almost horizontal from the pull. “That light— it’s a chroniton storm!” he shouted. “The ship must have flown through a temporal stress point. If we don’t—”
The rest of his sentence vanished in a howl of spatial distortion.
The universe hiccuped.
When things snapped back, the ship was no longer gliding calmly through space. It was… elsewhere.
The viewscreen showed a sky that was not black but a swirling curtain of blues, purples, and streaks of white. Fragments of things drifted by: a farmhouse, a traffic light, a chunk of asteroid with a fast-food sign sticking out of it.
“Okay,” Fry said, eyes wide. “I don’t think Titan ever had that many front porches.”
“We’ve been knocked into a temporal eddy,” Jimmy said, heart pounding with both fear and data-gathering delight. “A sort of junkyard of time. Maybe a spillover dimension where fragmented timelines end up.”
Leela gripped the controls. “Can we fly out?”
“Sure we can,” Bender said. “We just find the exit that doesn’t lead to annihilation.”
Cindy shot Jimmy a look. “Please tell me you have some idea what to do besides ‘panic and invent new big words’.”
Jimmy swallowed, brain racing. “Okay, think. The ship must still have a trace of its original timeline trajectory, and we have the chroniton emissions from the jump here. If I can access the engines, I might be able to recalibrate them to ‘sniff’ their way back to normal space.”
Leela stared at him. “You’re eleven.”
“You keep saying that,” Jimmy muttered. “But the math doesn’t care.”
Bender shrugged. “Let the twerp try. If he blows us up, it’ll be a quick end. I hate long goodbyes.”
Fry squeezed the edge of his chair. He looked from the swirling void to Jimmy’s determined face. He didn’t understand the science, but he recognized the feeling of being way out of his depth and trying anyway.
“Hey, kid,” he said. “You need someone to hit a button dramatically when you shout ‘now’, I’m your guy.”
Jimmy blinked, then smiled faintly. “I… actually could use a second pair of hands.”
“And two extra,” Bender said. “Which are attached to me. So, bonus.”
Leela sighed. “Have I mentioned that I hate temporal anomalies?”
“Only every other Tuesday,” Fry said.
Down in the engine room, Jimmy stared at the massive, humming sphere that powered the ship. It pulsed with ripples of blue light, bathing the chamber in an eerie glow.
“It runs on dark matter, right?” Jimmy asked.
Bender leaned on a railing. “It runs on underpaid Nibblonians,” he said. “But yeah, dark matter. Same thing.”
Jimmy took out a small device from his backpack— a multi-tool he’d built for fun, because of course he had. He began scanning the engine, watching readings appear. “If I adjust the chroniton flow regulator to align with the least-distorted timeline path, we could slip out the eddy via the path of least temporal resistance.” He looked up. “In theory.”
Cindy crossed her arms tight, clearly not liking the word ‘theory’ in this context. “And if you mess up?”
“We end up scattered across time like confetti,” Jimmy said. “But very informational confetti.”
“Oh, good,” she muttered. “As long as the data looks nice.”
Fry watched Jimmy climb up onto a platform, hands moving confidently. For a moment, the boy looked older— or maybe Fry just saw a kid who had never been allowed to be just a kid.
“Hey,” he said quietly, coming closer. “You okay?”
Jimmy didn’t look away from the controls. “If I say no, can we go home?” he muttered, then shook his head. “I’m fine. I’m used to this. Fixing things I broke. Fixing things other people broke. Fixing… stuff.”
Fry leaned against the console. “When I was your age, I was mostly breaking windows and my parents’ patience. I didn’t have to fix anything. I didn’t even know how.”
Jimmy risked a glance at him. “That… doesn’t sound very responsible.”
“Yeah,” Fry said honestly. “I was kind of a screw-up. I, uh, fell into a freezer tube on New Year’s Eve and woke up here a thousand years later. Whole future, just dropped on me. And for the longest time, I thought I had to turn into something amazing or else I didn’t deserve it.”
Jimmy frowned. “Did you?”
“Turn into something amazing?” Fry shrugged. “Depends who you ask. I still forget to pay bills. I still mess up. But I also saved the world a few times. Helped my friends. Tried to be better than the guy who fell into the tube on accident.” He met Jimmy’s eyes. “You’re already doing a lot, kid. It’s okay if you’re not perfect yet.”
Jimmy swallowed, gripping the railing. The hum of the engine vibrated under his fingers.
“I’m not trying to be perfect,” he said slowly. “I just… I don’t want my friends to get hurt because of me. Not again.”
Cindy, listening from below, softened.
“Then don’t,” Fry said simply. “You care. That’s half the work. The other half is… well, what you’re doing right now.” He gestured to the panels. “Trying. And letting people help.”
Jimmy took a breath. “Okay. Help me reroute these.”
Fry grinned. “Say no more, professor.”
Between them and Bender’s dubious wrench work, they re-wired the regulator, attached a set of improvised cables, and connected Jimmy’s multi-tool as a temporary guidance system. The hum of the engine shifted, lower and more focused.
“Leela,” Jimmy said over the comm. “On my signal, push the throttle to forty percent and angle the ship toward the least chaotic coordinate cluster on your nav.”
“Define ‘least chaotic’,” Leela’s voice replied.
“Whichever one makes the least migraine in your one eye,” Jimmy said.
“Surprisingly clear,” she said. “Ready when you are.”
Jimmy looked at Fry and Bender. “Okay. On three. One… two… three!”
Fry slammed the big red button Jimmy had pointed at. The engine roared, the ship surged forward, and the swirling debris of the temporal eddy twisted into a tunnel of light, shrinking, focusing—
And then they burst out into ordinary space, stars crisp and steady.
Leela whooped over the comm. “We’re back on our original route. Titan’s ahead. No fractures detected.”
Cindy sagged against a support beam, relief washing over her. “I am never getting in a spaceship again,” she muttered.
Bender clapped Jimmy on the back hard enough to nearly knock him over. “Not bad, shrinking violet,” he said. “You might make a decent criminal engineer someday.”
Jimmy rubbed his shoulder, but a grin fought its way onto his face. “We did it,” he said. “We navigated a temporal anomaly using improvised equipment and teamwork.”
“That’s just Tuesday for us,” Fry said, but there was pride in his voice. “Still, solid Tuesday.”
They made the delivery to Titan without further time-related disasters— only a small argument between Bender and a vending machine that ended in them both sulking. Fry bought everyone hot chocolate from a lunar cafe. Jimmy and Cindy watched distant Saturn turning slowly, a golden ringed giant, while Libby and Carl checked in via comm from Planet Express, where Libby had joined Amy and Hermes in complaining about paperwork and Carl had made friends with Doctor Zoidberg’s food stash entirely by mistake.
Eventually, though, they had to head back.
Back at Planet Express, the Professor stood in a cleared section of the lab, surrounded by machinery that looked like a broken carnival ride, a particle accelerator, and a spider web had collided.
“Behold!” he exclaimed as the kids and crew gathered. “The Temporal Re-Insertion Apparatus. Using the data Jimmy collected from your initial arrival and your little detour, I’ve calibrated this baby to send you back to your precise point of departure with minimal shattering of reality.”
“Minimal?” Carl squeaked.
“We’ll try for none,” Jimmy said hastily. “Professor, thank you. Your understanding of chroniton behavior is—”
“Vast, terrifying, and largely irresponsible,” Cindy murmured.
“— impressive,” Jimmy finished.
The Professor patted Jimmy’s hair, slightly singeing it. “You’re not so bad yourself, young man. For a pre-apocalyptic mammal.”
Leela crouched to Jimmy’s level. “You sure you’re ready to go?” she asked gently.
Jimmy looked back at his friends. Carl was clutching his inhaler but standing a little taller. Libby had a data chip full of future beats. Sheen was talking Zoidberg’s ear off about Ultra Lord, and Zoidberg was nodding as if this finally made sense. Cindy stood with her hands on her hips, giving Jimmy that familiar mix of annoyance and something softer.
He looked at Fry. “Will you… remember us?” he asked.
Fry rubbed the back of his neck. “Kid, I barely remember what I had for breakfast,” he said. “But yeah. I’ll remember. Hard to forget the day an eleven-year-old saved us from being turned into time pizza.”
Jimmy smiled crookedly. “You helped.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Fry said. “I got a reputation.”
Bender flicked his cigar ash into a waste bin marked “Highly Flammable”. “If you ever come back, bring something worth stealing.”
Libby shook Leela’s hand. “Thanks for not letting us die,” she said.
“Anytime,” Leela replied. “Preferably never again this way.”
Cindy stepped in front of Jimmy as they lined up on the platform. “Neutron,” she said quietly.
“Yeah?” he asked.
She hesitated, then punched him lightly in the arm. “You did good. Just… maybe next time, start with ‘talk to adults’ instead of ‘tear a hole in time’.”
He rubbed his arm, smiling. “Where’s the fun in that?”
She rolled her eyes but smiled back. “You’re impossible.”
The Professor flipped switches. The apparatus powered up, filling the air with a soft crackle. Goddard trotted onto the platform with the kids, tail wagging.
“I’ve locked onto your original temporal coordinates,” the Professor announced. “Prepare for re-insertion! Try not to think too hard during transit. Time gets offended.”
Fry raised a hand in a goofy wave. “Bye, Jimmy. Remember— it’s okay not to have it all figured out yet.”
Jimmy nodded. “Same to you.”
The light built, brilliant and warm. For a moment, Jimmy felt like he was falling and standing still at the same time. The last thing he saw of the future was Fry’s lopsided grin and Leela’s steady gaze.
Then the world went white.
Retroville’s night snapped back into place.
Jimmy, Cindy, Carl, Sheen, Libby, and Goddard landed in a heap on the lab floor. The Temporal Gateway stood where it had always been, humming softly, as if nothing had happened. The clock on the wall showed the same minute it had when they left.
“Temporal offset,” Goddard reported, rising and shaking himself. “Less than one second subjective local time.”
Carl groaned. “My stomach thinks it’s been a year.”
Sheen jumped up, arms spread. “That. Was. AWESOME. We met a robot! And a one-eyed space woman! And a guy who’s like an older, stupider you, Jimmy, but also kind of cool!”
Cindy pushed her hair back into place. “We nearly got turned into confetti,” she said. “But sure, let’s focus on the fanboying.”
Libby laughed, the sound shaking off the last of her fear. “Future beats are gonna hit different now,” she said, patting the chip in her pocket. “I saw where they might go.”
Jimmy walked to the portal machine and carefully, deliberately, powered it down. The coils dimmed. The hum faded.
“Neutron,” Cindy said after a moment. “You okay?”
He rested his hand on the metal frame. In his mind, he saw the future again: the messy, neon, fragile world. Not perfect, not solved. But still alive. Still trying.
“I’m… good,” he said. “I think I learned something.”
Sheen raised a hand. “Is it that robots are awesome?”
“Well, yes,” Jimmy said. “But also that I don’t have to fix everything alone. That the future isn’t some perfect answer waiting for me to catch up. It’s just people— and robots, and one-eyed pilots— doing their best, like us. And that maybe it’s okay if I’m still figuring it out.”
Libby smiled. “Wow. All that from one field trip.”
Cindy smirked. “Don’t let it go to your hair, Neutron.”
He glanced at her, then at his friends. “I think I’m going to lay off the big time experiments. For a while, anyway,” he said. Then, under his breath: “At least the ones without extra supervision.”
Goddard’s ears perked. “Record note: Jimmy Neutron voluntarily suggested adult supervision.”
“Delete that,” Jimmy said quickly. Goddard pretended not to hear.
Carl yawned. “Can we go home now? I feel like I aged ten years emotionally.”
“Me too,” Libby said, looping an arm through his. “Come on, we’ll walk you.”
Sheen pivoted dramatically. “To the snack future!” he cried, running up the stairs.
Cindy followed, then paused and looked back. “You coming, Neutron?”
Jimmy glanced once more at the dormant portal. Somewhere, a thousand years away, a delivery boy might be looking up at a star just a tiny bit brighter tonight, thinking about a weird kid with tall hair.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m coming.”
He flipped off the last switch, turned out the lab lights, and ran up to join his friends, leaving the future where it belonged.
For now.