Back From a Future

Marty McFly wrapped his girlfriend, Jennifer, in a one-armed hug, as they both looked at the pick-up truck waiting on the garage. It was brand new, black in color, freshly waxed to a mirror-like finish.

Marty thought about how much things had changed since his accidental trip back to 1955. He still had Jennifer at his side, and the Doc was still alive, but everything else… well… it had changed for the better. Instead of slowly crumbling apart before his eyes, the McFly family had a bright future ahead.

And he could barely wait for the Doc to come back from the future!

Suddenly, a loud bang ruined the peaceful moment. Jennifer grabbed his arm instinctively, scared by the noise.

It took him just a moment to recognize the sound.

The man who ran to him a few seconds later just confirmed it. The DeLorean had returned to Hill Valley!

However, Doc Brown looked like he had seen Hell itself! His eyes, wild with enthusiasm whenever he talked about science and inventions; now where wild with fear. His white radiation suit was dirty and scuffed.

Doc pulled Marty into a desperate hug, as if to resssure himself Marty was alive.

"Doc, um… what's going on?"

"I…" words failed the eccentric inventor.

Marty guided him to sit on the curb. He turned to Jennifer, "Please, go to the kitchen and bring me a coke or something."

Scared, Jennifer hesitated for a moment, but a look to the face of the older man was enough. She nodded, and ran into the house.

Doc Brown held his head in his hands, and sobbed. "It was horrible, Marty…"

"Doc? What did you see?"

"Death." He closed his eyes. "Nothing but death. A dead city, empty. No one there, not even a corpse, a bone, nothing but empty clothes and ruined buildings."

"God… a n-n-nuclear war…" Marty gasped.

"No." Doc rubbed his face. "There was no radiation or anything. I checked. Whatever happened, it was not a bomb. The buildings were too well preserved."

Jennifer returned with a cold bottle of coke. "Here you go, Doctor Brown."

"Thank you, child." He drank greedily, as if he had just returned form the desert.

"Wo-wo-wo, doc; take it easy." Marty asked. Doc finished the drink in a few gulps.

"What happened, Doctor Brown? you look like you saw a ghost."

"That would have been preferable… a group of scientific colleagues have built some remarkable machines to capture and hold them indefinitively… but no…" The scientist put the bottle on the ground, looking from Jennifer to Marty and back. "Not ghosts, not really…"

"Doc?"

"You might as well tell her where you were last week, Marty. I'm going back home. I need a drink."

"You don't drink, Doc."

He closed his eyes, "I know. I need a drink."

"Marty? Jennifer asked, "what does he mean? You were here all week."

"Long story, Jennifer." He paused, "Are you sure, Doc?"

"Yes."

"I better get you home, Doc. You shouldn't drive, you are in shock or something."

"That would be best." He looked at his trembling hands.

"Jennifer, I'm sorry… I… I have to go. We will talk later, Okay?"

"Bring her along. Better place to tell her everything." Doc wheezed, standing up, a bit wobbly. "Could you ask your Father if I could leave my car here? Just for tonight? I'll pick it up in the morning."

"Sure, be right back."

The trio went back to the Brown Manor. Doc bought a six pack of beers in the way.

They sat down in the kitchen.

Silent.

It took a long while for Doc to settle down, a can of beer in his hands. He lowered his eyes, looking at it, like many men had looked to their drinks in the history of humanity. As if alcohol might contain the answers to their biggest problems.

"Jennifer." He said, somberly. "You must keep an open mind. I can prove my story. And Marty will corroborate it too."

She looked at Marty, who nodded solemnly. "It is unbelievable."

"For me, it starts in 1955. I was just trying to make a functional telepathic helmet. I had been working on that stupid thing for a couple of years, never got it to work. In an unrelated event, I hit my head and got the inspiration I needed for an even greater invention. The basis for a time machine!"

Marty followed, "And it took him about 30 years, a lot of money, and fooling some lybian terrorists with plutonium to make it work."

"What?" She exclaimed.

"I was there when he tested it, yesterday, at the Twin Pines Mall."

"Where is that? The only mall in miles is the Lone Pine Mall."

"That's what complicates things, Jennifer. Thing is, there once was a Twin Pine Mall, here in Hill Valley. I used to go there. But that place doesn't exist anymore. My fault."

"Wait, Marty, you didn't tell me that. Twin Pines?" Doc waved the beer can around.

"Remember Old Man Peabody?"

"Sure, he had the idea of…" Doc's eyes unfocused for a moment. "Breeding… pines. He had two pines near his house. Where the Mall is now."

Marty nodded. "I knocked down one of them."

"You changed history."

"Wait," Jennifer waved her hands. "Are you trying to tell me Marty visited 1955?"

"I did. And accidentally changed everything. Dad used to be Biff Tannen's doormat, piggy bank and slave. Mom was always depressed, and my siblings were not that well adjusted either."

"That's hard to believe…"

"Let me explain." Doc took a sheet of paper and a pencil. He traced a line from one side of the paper to the other. "Imagine this line is time. Here," he marked a dot at the beginning of the line, "Is 1955. Okay?"

Jennifer nodded. Doc marked another dot at the center of the line. "This dot here is 1985. Right now." He marked a third dot, at the other en of the line. "And this is 2015. Well… actually, 2016, I made a mistake when inputting the destination date, and ended up a year later than I originally intended." He shrugged. "I count myself lucky, had I arrived to 2015, we would be mostly unaware of the incoming catastrophe." He turned back to the paper, "All you know, all that you can remember, all that will be, is contained in this single line. Because we perceive time a a lineal progression of events."

He continued, "But, if a time machine is available, and a time traveler goes from, say 1985 to 1955, and changes a single event, maybe with their very presence," he traced a branching line, starting in the 1955 dot and running parallel to the first line, "all events after that change will be altered. Some will be barely noticeable by the time traveler once they are back in their own time, while other will be important." He marked new dots in the 1985 and 2016 positions. "And no one else would notice." He dropped the pencil and took the beer can in his hands. "Not unless they had previous knowledge of time travel. As is my own case. I was aware of some future events thanks to Marty."

"Wait a minute…" she gasped, thinking hard, "if you changed the past, and your family is different to the way you knew them… then you are not the Marty McFly I have known since third grade!" (1)

Marty paled. "Oh, god. That's… that's true. I'm sorry, I didn't realize!"

"Doc, where is the Marty I know?"

Doc shuddered. "He might be in a third timeline. One we don't have access to. Or… maybe the timelines fused together and Marty here is a kind of fusion of both versions of himself. But we can't know that yet, we will have to wait for a while."

"You said you had proof time travel is real. Show me." She demanded.

Doc pulled an envelope from his white suit. Inside, there was a letter, written on old-style stationery, to the Lou's Café name. It had been ripped to pieces and reassembled with tape. Yellowed by time. She read it.

"Murdered?" She whispered and looked at Doc and Marty.

"Yes. Those Lybians were really pissed at me. I have the vest in the DeLorean, if you want to see it. It has about ten bullets in, I have the corresponding bruises." He winced. "And the tapes Marty recorded for my alternate self."

"This looks like your handwriting, Marty."

"It is. I saw the Doc being shot, jumped in the car and drove away. Didn't realize the time circuits were on, and ended up in 1955."

"And then..?"

"I ran over a pine, and accidentally prevented my parents first meeting."

"Causing two paradoxes. The first one caused minor changes. The only one we notice is the name of the mall. The second one could have had grave consequences. If Marty's parents had not, they wouldn't have married, never had children, and Marty and his siblings are erased from existence. Or, in the best case scenario, would be completely different people."

"Doc and I managed to get them to fall in love anyway, and after a lot of problems, managed to get the DeLorean to time jump again, and here I am. Back to 1985, but a very different 1985. At least, different for me and my family."

"And a lot of people who don't know history changed. For them, changes are minimal, their lives would be mostly the same anyway. Have you noticed any really big changes? I know Reagan is President, just like you told me in 1955. Sadly, Jerry Lewis is not the Vice-President."

Marty thought about it. "Well… no. But I have been back only for a few hours."

"Okay, Okay," Jennifer waved her arms, "this is getting freaky. Now, just for the sake of curiosity, why don't you two simply demonstrate to me, this time traveling DeLorean at work."

Doc shook his head. "I have a very limited amount of plutonium."

"That thing is nuclear?"

"I said the same thing when he told me." Marty chuckled.

"We are going to have to do some very careful maneuvering to solve this. I can't allow Humanity to die!" Doc paced around the room, beer in hand. "We need to find out what happened and what to do about it. And I have only… eight plutonium canisters… enough for four round trips."

"Could we, I mean, couldn't you invent something more efficient, Doc?"

"Marty, your faith in me is moving; but I would need, I don't know… decades!" He sat down, leaned back on the chair, the fingertips of his right hand barely touching his temples, thinking hard.

Jennifer took the pencil, and traced a new line on the paper. "What if you start in 1955? With 1985 knowledge?"

Doc took the paper, looked at her with new found enthusiasm, "Great Scott! That might work!" He cracked open the can and took three long sips.

He then proceeded to fall down on the desk, instantly asleep.

"Oh, my God! Did he faint?"

Marty took the Can from Doc's hand. "Nope. He seems to be a lightweight. C'mon, help me get him to his bed. I'll take you home while he sleeps it off."

They dragged him to the bedroom. "For a lightweight, you are really heavy, Doc…" Marty grunted.

Author Notes:

I thought End of Evangelion and Back to the Future II happen duringthe same year. Third Impact is said to happen in January 1st 2016, while Doc Brown goes to October 21 2015. So, for the sake of the story, I introduced a minor mistake to allow Doc Brown to see the world post-Third Impact. I hope the fix I used is not too intrusive. I've had experiences with inputting numbers in a keyboard, and mistakingly pushing 6 instead of 5 is not that farfetched.

(1) Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, I used to collect the Starlog Magazine. After BTTF 2 was released, They published a very interesting article, "The Return of the Other Marty McFly", I think the author was Michael J. Wolff (really!). The article analyzed the inherent paradoxes to time travel, and one of the points was that after changing the past, Marty returned to see a double at the end of he first movie. That double was the one who grew in the changed timeline. Sadly, I never got to read the original article, "The Other Marty McFly" but that was the first of many articles that analyzed logically how several movie monsters or protagonist would work in the real world. If you can find those articles, check them out!