Chapter 7;
"Mission Impossible"

"Are you okay? You seemed kinda spooked earlier..."

Speed was still holding onto his phone with both hands even though he had long since ended his call with Sparky. Now he was standing awkwardly in the doorway to Connor's dorm, still trying to think of how to say everything on his mind, assuming speaking his mind was even a good idea in the first place... He had no idea how Connor would react to any of it, after all. Still, he felt as if Connor could help, and, inexplicably, he trusted him.

He swallowed hard. "If—hypothetically, if I told you something...completely insane..." he began, trailing off as he tried to figure out how to continue.

"What kind of completely insane are we talkin' here?" Connor asked with undisguised curiosity.

"...Time-travel related?"

Connor's eyes widened until Speed thought they might pop out. "Please continue."

Speed swallowed nervously again. "Well, Sparky—" he ignored the stifled squeak that that had provoked from Connor "—has a guess that maybe somebody from an alternate timeline went back in time and changed something, so now the space-time continuum is screwed and it's giving me crazy dreams and visions and stuff, and I think maybe you can help us find a way to fix it before the universe implodes or something crazy like that."

Wow... He hadn't meant to just come out and say all of that... Let alone make it sound like this was relatively normal for him in the process. After a moment of stunned blankness, Connor seemed to wrap his head around everything Speed had said. "Awesome... I mean, that's horrible! Of course I'll help! It would be an honor!"

"Wait, that's it?" Speed asked incredulously. "You don't think I'm even a little crazy?"

"You said you've been having weird dreams? Well, I think I might have been, too..."

Speed had to encourage him to continue.

"Well... I usually have some pretty weird dreams, but for the past few nights, I've actually had some dreams about...about you, and me, and Lucy and Chim-Chim, and the Academy in general..."

"Let me guess, in them I grew up in an orphanage, dad is or was in hiding, you're my mechanic, and some evil committee is trying to steal the Mach 6?"

"...Well I don't remember that much from them, but that sounds about right."

"...Can we use your garage?"

Despite Speed's protests, Sparky was back in America by lunch the next day.

The younger Racer waited patiently at the edge of the campus, his anxiety obvious on his face as he repeatedly checked the time on his phone to occupy himself. Finally, as bus drove into his line of sight, slowing to a stop in front of the academy's driveway. Speed clenched his fists, staring hopefully at the bus as if he could see through it until it pulled away, leaving none other than Wilson Sparkolomew in its wake.

Speed glared at Sparky as the mechanic approached him. Sparky was obviously confused by the hostile stare.

"Do you have any idea how much trouble I'm going to be in if dad finds out that you're here?!" Speed demanded. He wasn't able to hold his dark frown for long, though; Sparky saw through the act, his eyes glittering with humor, and Speed's stern expression broke into a broad smile. The young racer practically leaped into the mechanic's arms, hugging him tightly.

"Good to see you, too, kid," Sparky laughed, and Speed didn't miss the note of confusion in his voice. He knew why it was there; he had never been a hugger.

Speed lead the mechanic up to the school and they immediately headed for Connor's garage. They avoided confronting anyone else. Neither of them wanted to waste any time, and Sparky still wasn't sure how to explain the situation to Speed Sr. and Trixie without getting Speed in trouble. 'That'll be one heck of a conversation.'

Speed was a little worried about how Connor would react to meeting Sparky—he had only just gotten the hang of having Speed for company, after all. With any luck, whatever he did wouldn't distract them from the situation at hand too much. And thankfully, Connor was able to mostly contain himself, restricting what could have been a verbal onslaught of a greeting to a compliment on Sparky's work and little more. Speed didn't stop glancing over his shoulder until they were safely locked inside the garage with no company other than the security camera in the corner (which thankfully couldn't listen in).

Sparky opened his briefcase and fished through the contents. "Okay. I've been thinking about what you've told me, Speed. Has anything else come up since we talked?" When Speed shook his head, he continued. "Good. As I was saying, I've been thinking, and I have a few ideas as to what might be happening." He brought a worn notebook out of his case, set the case on the floor, and sat on the sofa he had been using as a table. Speed and Connor sat on either side of him, watching as he flipped through half a book of various sketches and passages until he came to the specific walls of chicken-scratch he had been looking for. "First of all, I've been focussing on your dreams and hallucinations, Speed. I told you over the phone that they could be the result of damage to the space-time continuum, and I am still fairly attached to that idea, especially after the dream I had on the plane ride here... Don't ask, it was complicated. But it was also very helpful; other me has had nearly two decades to think through time travel, develop a working method of traveling through time which has been proven through several trials, and just all around figure out just about everything we need to know."

"Sparky ex Machina?" Speed snickered, earning himself a gleeful beam from Sparky.

"Exactly! Who knew that that sort of thing can happen in real life?"

"Except," Connor suddenly spoke up, "how much of all that do you remember from your dream?"

"Enough to get us at least started, and I seem to be instinctively becoming attached to certain theories as well..." Sparky replied. "In this case, and this case only, I think we'd be best off following my gut."

"What does your gut say?"

Sparky motioned down to a diagram he had drawn in his notebook, and Speed eagerly accepted the visual aid. (He was hardly understanding a word.) "My gut says that the magnitude of the timelines that are going parallel to each other is what's doing the damage. One timeline has nearly infinite possibilities branching from it, but perhaps never being followed. Even the mere existence of those branches, however, gives it epic scale. Minor time jumps—that is, ones which don't affect the timeline too much either because of how short they are or how little they affect the already established timeline—probably don't upset it too much, but going back in time and then doing something which butterfly-effects the whole future? Now you have two timelines with all those possibilities making too much noise and taking up way too much space, and they can't reconcile because they're so different. So now those dreams and visions? They're glimpses into the other timeline, probably from places where the timelines are clashing, for want of a better term."

"That's an awful lot of guesswork," Connor pointed out reluctantly.

Sparky just shrugged with a frown. "Since we're not the ones who have actually traveled through time, guesswork is the best we can do."

"Well, you've lost me," Speed said miserably as he rubbed at one of his temples.

"That's okay. Just know that there's a parallel universe, and it's existence is about to make the whole world explode."

"You couldn't have just said that?" Speed threw his hands up in exasperation, making Sparky chuckle.

"Wait a second..." Connor began suspiciously. "If the timelines have always been gearing up to destroy each other, then how come we haven't been having dreams and stuff before just recently? Wouldn't we have been seeing stuff like that the entire time?"

"I've thought about that, too," Sparky replied, tapping his own nose twice. "That's what's convinced me that the timelines are splintering; I've reasoned that we're approaching the moment when the timelines were originally 'connected,' per say. The moment when someone from the original timeline created a hole through which to travel to the moment they changed the timeline and created this one. That's probably one of the points at which the damage is worse, so it's the one we're noticing."

Connor nodded thoughtfully. "In that case, I'd venture an informed guess and say that that moment is our best opportunity to fix everything."

"Probably." Sparky agreed.

"I actually understood all that that time," Speed remarked. "And I'm guessing that by 'fix it' you mean going back in time again and preventing whatever got changed from getting changed?"

"Prevent the change, yes. But we might not have to go back in time to do it; we just need to get to the other timeline somehow," Connor corrected thoughtfully.

"Which is good because although we don't have the technology to actually travel through time, we'll probably be able to find a way to get to the other timeline just by taking advantage of how damaged it is," Sparky added.

"Ok, cool."

"Then all we need to do now is figure out what we need to stop from happening and when," Connor said eagerly.

Speed frowned. "How are we gonna do that, though? We can't just wait for whatever it is to happen, it'll be too late to do anything by then."

Sparky grinned eagerly and abruptly snapped his notebook shut with a sharp clap! that almost made Speed and Connor jump.

"No worries, I have a plan!"

A/N: Sorry this is a little later than usual. On the bright side, this should be the last exposition for a while... The next chapter (which I haven't written all of yet, bt-dubs) is where the "action" really begins. :D And yes, I just published one of my major pet peeves by pointing out one of the story's flaws in the narrative. I don't care though, Sparky ex Machina for the win.
Thanks for reading!