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Disclaimer: The usual. I own nothing... and I most certainly don't own the two main characters, the 'verse it's set in, or any of the quotes I'm using as chapter titles.

The Usual Warnings: Slash, swearing, mature themes, time travel... Jack Harkness (eventually).

Author's Note: Just so you know, I've planned this story right through to the end, but have only fully written up to chapter ten, so far. I also have several other huge projects going on, as well, so I will be very slow to update. Consider yourselves warned.

As always, reviews are the fuel that keeps me writing, so please don't forget to leave some scraps for the craven attention-seeker.

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Chapter 1: "Welcome To The World Of Tomorrow!"

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Ianto Jones began to wake up slowly and groggily.

Then the world began to tilt at an alarming angle, and jolted him into full wakefulness rather suddenly. While this did serve to restore his equilibrium, and reassure him that the ground was not literally falling out from under him... his head now hurt like the world was ending. Again.

Or maybe just like a bad hangover. Hadn't had one of those in years, though.

He groaned weakly, "Uhgh... what happened last night?" he asked himself, screwing up his eyes tightly against a suddenly rather bright light that he didn't want to confront just yet.

He distantly noticed that his voice sounded strange to his own ears, and he frowned, assuming that he was must still be feeling fuzzy from whatever had rendered him unconscious in the first place.

He tried to figure out how he had been knocked out. Was he drugged? The last he could recall, he had been in the Hub. With Jack... and the stopwatch... and no clothes.

Alright, no thinking about that right now. Not until he knew where he was.

He tried to sit up, finding it very difficult to even lift his eyelids, let alone the rest of his body. He settled for squinting in the bright light, only to find himself face-to-face with an unfamiliar man, who was leaning over him and grinning enthusiastically. He had floppy fair hair and a distinct air of manic glee about him.

"Who're you?" Ianto managed to ask.

"Friends call me Max." the stranger said brightly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Or, more recently, Frankenstein. I just brought you back from the dead."

Ianto stared at him, "Wha-? How?"

He tried to move, but realised he was tied down. He managed to lift his head, and saw the clinical and efficient restraints on his wrists and ankles. And he was wearing a plain white t-shirt and pants... comfortable, but utterly hideous. In the wrong light, quite possibly blinding.

"Oh, don't worry about those." Max said, waving dismissively at the restraints, "They're a standard precaution, just in case you did anything rash, if you woke up and didn't understand what was going on. Relax, listen, I'll explain everything."

Ianto slowly lowered his head, and watched as the rather hyperactive man retreated to a nearby desk. Max was wearing the typical white coat of a lab technician or a medic, with a nameplate that identified him as 'Maxwell A. Powers'.

Scanning the room itself, Ianto considered that it looked distinctly like the unholy lovechild of a hospital and a mad scientist's laboratory. Incredibly disconcerting. Even more so than that time he had woken up in the Torchwood medical bay to find Owen hovering over him with that blasted singularity scalpel.

Well... maybe about equal.

"Okay, here's the thing." Max began, now seated comfortably at his desk, with notes and all. "We found an unidentified piece of advanced technology at the location of some pretty extreme temporal distortion. We couldn't backtrack it without risking injury, so all we have to go on are-" here he pulled a disgusted face, "-archaeological records. Those are pretty damned sketchy at best. We've got no idea who you are, so it was actually quite a huge risk bringing you back. On the bright side, at least we now know that you speak standard Earth English."

Ianto blinked at this, not wanting to contemplate the possible ramifications of those last words just yet. He waited silently, as Max read over his notes for a second, before continuing.

"The device we found was a neuro-receptive micro-recorder." He looked at Ianto, who stared impassively back. "It took a photograph of your brain, at one precise moment." This made only slightly more sense, and Ianto nodded slowly to show as much. "You're my favourite science project. I've spent the last two years trying to find a way to extract a copy of that data into a physical form. We have contacts at a genetics lab, so growing a new body for you was actually the easy part."

Ianto choked at this, "New body?!" he asked, completely shocked.

"Well... yeah." Max said, grinning, "According to what we can tell, it's been about three thousand years since that device was last activated. Y'don't think the original's in any condition to be lived in, anymore, do you? We had no idea who you were or what you looked like. You might not even have been human. You... were human, right?"

"Y-yes."

Max nodded efficiently, "We even took a wild guess at gender." he continued chirpily, "Fifty-fifty's good odds. Which were you before, by the way?"

Ianto felt sick at this. At the far-too-casual way this man was talking about it. He answered weakly, "Male."

"Oh... damn, I owe the boss fifty credits."

Ianto paled at that thought. Then something else that Max has said managed to register through his state of shock, "Wait, did- did you say three thousand years?" Three thousand years in the future!

And now he felt almost physically ill. This wasn't his body. This wasn't his time.

This was all wrong. So very wrong.

"Yeah." Max said, his tone softening to a vague semblance of sympathy, briefly, "Welcome to the year fifty-eighty-four."

Ianto stared for several seconds... then promptly passed out from shock.

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