The First Time...Or Maybe Not
A/N: This is just a little one-shot I had about Doc, and what his thought's would be like immediately before the first temporal experiment, in the final timeline-given that he knows so much about what would happen by this point.
Saturday, October 26th, 1985
'Doc' Emmett Brown couldn't but help wonder how many times before had this scene played out...
Never mind the fact that he was about to engage in an endeavour in which the words 'before' and 'after' really had very little meaning...
Never mind the fact that this moment, like every other moment since the Dawn of Time, existed only once...sure, with time travel, it could be replayed over and over again endlessly like a videotape...but it truly existed only once...
It was one of the stranger paradoxes of time travel. For him, this date, this night, this moment, this event...were all happening for the first time. Never before had he experienced this. Never before had he sat in his van, in the parking lot of Lone Pine Mall, awaiting the arrival of one Marty McFly while making final preparations for what was undoubtedly the greatest scientific experiment of all time!
Except that he already knew that his invention had proceeded well past the 'experimental' stage...which was in a way, the source of his dilemma...
For how could he believe that this was truly the 'first time' any of this was happening...since it had already happened before?
More than once before, in fact...
He had been there...even though he had not been there. It had happened...even though it hadn't happened yet...
Of course, the logical way to rationalize it (if such a thing could possibly be rationalized!) would be to accept that it was other versions of him who had already lived through this moment...in other realities...and that it was therefore, technically, still the first time for him!
But then again, hadn't those 'other selves' been variations of one person...namely, himself!
After all, hadn't it been him who had been shot dead (or rather, would have been shot dead) in this very mall in a matter of minutes? Marty had warned him of course, and changed his destiny...but wasn't it his destiny that had been changed, and not that of some parallel universe doppelganger...
Everything he knew about time travel and the space-time continuum...everything he had gleaned from his two visits from Marty back in 1955...indicated that there was only one reality. One timeline. And that divergences caused by time travellers caused a 'ripple' to move through the same timeline, altering it rather than creating a new reality.
Like how Marty's actions in 1955 had 'rippled' forward to this moment, such that this time round, he was wearing a bulletproof vest underneath his radiation suit to survive the Libyans attack. And what was more, he was a hundred percent certain he would survive the attack!
'This time round'...there he went again! Didn't the use of this phrase itself imply that there had been another time...even though this was the one and only...
He knew that there had been the first time when he hadn't had the bulletproof vest and had died...he knew there had been another time when he had the bulletproof vest but wasn't completely certain of his survival...and then there was this time, when he not only had the vest but knew he would survive simply because he knew he was destined to end up in the Old West...
At least three distinct realities. At least three distinct versions of this moment. And yet, it was the same moment in time, as unique as any other.
This was the paradox he simply couldn't grasp. The paradox he had been fighting a losing battle with in his head ever since he had arrived at the mall.
He felt like an actor, playing a part which had been played so many times before. His life was a stage, and space-time continuum the demanding director who decreed that this scene be performed over and over again till it attained perfection, and then some more...
Yes, he thought to himself, that was a good analogy. All he had to do was think of himself of an actor, playing out a part destiny had scripted out for him...a part he was neither the first to play nor would he be the last to...he just needed to give it his best shot!
Godspeed, he said to himself, as he drove the Delorean out onto the stage...
And before long he found himself delivering the opening speech of this play...
"Good evening, I'm Dr. Emmett Brown, standing on the parking lot at Lone Pine Mall. It's Saturday morning, October 26th 1985, 1: 18 AM...and this is Temporal Experiment Number 1".