CHAPTER ONE
Zero Hour

Friday, October 25, 1985
11:52 PM

Emmett Brown pulled the large, white storage van into the alley behind his garage. He glanced down at the clock on the radio, having hoped to be back a lot sooner than this. He was cutting it close; by the time he'd gathered everything up, he would barely have enough time to prepare it and review the experiment before Marty was to meet him. Granted, it was the middle of the night, and a few minutes' time might not make much of a difference in the long run, but tonight was all about time.

Tonight, time and its parameters, its properties and possibilities were all going to be redefined if this experiment worked. Those few who already commended his work in the scientific community would herald him amongst the greatest minds in history. And those who respected him as much as the shit on their shoes would suddenly have big smiles plastered on their faces, professing that they had "believed in him all along" or apologizing profusely just to be in the good graces of the man who made time travel possible.

If all went accordingly, that is.

"Damn."

Einstein barked from the passenger side of the cab's bench, pawing at Emmett's wrist as he shut off the ignition.

"All right, all right," Doc said, sliding out of the cab so that his dog could get out. "I hope she remembered to put some food out for you. Stay close and keep quiet, now."

Einstein scampered off around the corner of the garage and out of sight. Doc looked up then, scanning the streaked windows to find the dramatic light show of the television flickering within the sitting room. He pressed his lips together and hurried inside, so sure of what he'd find – Emma balled up on the couch asleep with the TV on, an empty jar of peanut butter lying next to her.

He doubled back to the small kitchen area curiously, and again his suspicions were affirmed. He sighed, smiling to himself when he saw two cases of her favorite food stacked next to the refrigerator on the floor, most of the first case gone. He looked back towards the sitting room at the sound of her voice.

"Einie! Hey, boy! Oh, I missed you, too!"

The dog barked enthusiastically. Doc left the kitchen, walking across the sitting room again to the couch as Emma scratched Einstein behind the ears vigorously. She gave him a sleepy smile.

"Hey, Dad. Next time you barely live here, leave Einstein," she yawned, the dog lying on his back across her feet. She bent over and rubbed his belly, cooing at him. "I missed my puppy dog. Yes, I missed you!"

"Next time I leave you grocery money, I hope you use it for something other than twenty-four jars of peanut butter," he said, still amused behind his stern look.

Einstein rolled off Emma's feet and allowed her to stand. She reached up on her tiptoes to kiss her father's cheek.

"I did," she said, being pulled in for a hug. "I got bread to make sandwiches."

He didn't look too amused at that, but she smiled up at him nonetheless.

"So," she said, her voice sing-song, "what's this big breakthrough all about?"

"All in good time," Doc replied, quickly getting back on track. He pulled a piece of paper out of the front pocket on his white jumpsuit and handed it to her. She unfolded it, dutifully reading it over as he gave her further instructions on their way out of the living room.

"I need everything on this list put in the truck immediately. Put everything in the cab. I don't want the back compartment opened until we get to the mall. You get what's on there, and I'll handle the radiation suits and plutonium."

He darted away. Emma stopped mid-step on her way through the lab. "Did you just sa–"

Narrowing her eyes, she stared after her father, confused as he bent down in front of his bed and dragged a big metal case out from underneath it. Her first few questions were answered; she swallowed hard at the biohazard sticker, eyes widening instantly as she read 'PLUTONIUM' below it.

She huffed incredulously.

"How long has that been there?!"

"Shh! I brought it in Tuesday night after you had gone to sleep," he said, hastening out the door with it. "Don't worry; it's been in this special lead-lined case, so there was never any risk for exposure."

"Oh, well, that makes it fine, then!"

Emma followed him outside to the van. "Where did you get plutonium? What are you working on that you needplutonium?"

Doc pushed the case under the driver's seat of the cab, rounding her with an austere, anxious frown.

"Go get the things from the lab," he hissed.

Emma deepened her brow, stepping in front of him. "Dad, what's going on? Are you okay?"

When he turned to her with a knowing grin, she straightened uneasily. As bizarre as she was accustomed to him being, this was one of those moments where he looked borderline manic. It wasn't just because of the intensity of the excitement in his wild eyes, but it was that knowing aura behind the excitement and in the curve of his wide grin. Any lesser person would have backed away.

"This is it, Emma," he said. "This is the one."

Preoccupied by her father's insistence on being infuriatingly ambiguous and vague, Emma had absentmindedly collected the items on the list he'd given her, save for the video camera. This discovery led to her digging change out of the ashtray of the van and crossing the parking lot to the payphones, yawning through several rings until Marty answered.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it's Em. Are you still coming down here?"

"Yeah," he drawled. "I'll be out of here in two minutes."

"We need you to stop by our place for the video camera. I forgot to grab it."

"Sure. Did you find out what he's been working on?"

Emma looked back across the parking lot as Doc climbed into the back of the van through the cab. A glow of bluish light came from the windows. She hugged herself with her free arm.

"No. And I'm half-afraid to find out."

Marty chuckled in the background. She shook her head.

"You don't understand," she said quickly. "He's freaking me out. He has a case full of plutonium."

"What? Where would he even get plutonium?"

"I watched him shove it under the seat in the cab, Marty. He's brought the radiation suits and everything."

"I'm sure it's fine, Em. I'll stop for the video camera and be there soon, okay?"

"All right," she conceded. "Bye."

Emma had taken to sitting on the ground next to Einstein after her father had instructed her to place a stopwatch around his neck. She watched the truck shake slightly as he ran around inside it, insisting that if she came in, she not enter the storage compartment. Finally, when Einstein ran off to a nearby tree, she got up, pretending that dusting off her white pants would magically rid them of her decision to sit on damp asphalt. She walked to the driver's side door, yelling in at him.

"Aren't you at least going to tell me what it is?"

Doc poked his head through the small door between the seats of the cab and looked at her. His daughter was his partner in nearly every experiment, even if it was only to tighten a bolt. She wasn't used to being so excluded from his projects, and revisiting the last several weeks, Emmett realized he hadn't said two words to her about anything he was working on – time machine, amplifier, or otherwise. It wasn't fair to hold her in such suspense, and the contempt on her face said as much.

Doc stepped into the back of the van, letting the door swing open as he disappeared with a beckoning smile.

Emma quickly grabbed the steering wheel and seat, clambering into the cab after him. She touched the tiny, hollow door as she inched into the dark compartment, immediately walking right into a thinning vapor and hard, metal protrusion. She yelped, pain shooting up the front of her shin.

"Ow!"

"Careful, careful!" Doc said off to her right somewhere. "Here."

Overhead, two rows of dim fluorescent lights crackled to life on either side of the ceiling. Emma looked down at what she had walked into – a car bumper. Still shaking the grimace from her face, her eyes wandered up, instantly captivated by the heavily modified automobile before her.

"Whoa." Emma slid along the tight space between the passenger side of the vehicle and the wall of the van, tentatively letting her fingertips graze the cool steel of its body. "What did you do to it?"

"Do you remember taking it upon yourself to alphabetize all of my blueprints when you were six? You came across something called the 'flux capacitor?'"

Emma smiled; she did. It was a strange, equilateral "Y" that vaguely reminded her of a biohazard symbol like the one on the back of her father's radiation suit, harkening back to the fact that plutonium was involved in this experiment. Closely examining the large rectangular thrusters on the back of the car, she nodded.

"Yeah, but this is a DeLorean," she half-laughed. "It doesn't look anything like what was on that blueprint. Unless you added a thing or two."

Doc beamed from the other side of the car. "It's inside."

Emma looked up, coming around to his side of the car as hydraulics raised the door over their heads. Emmett urged her inside, and she ducked in, trying to take in all of the gadgetry.

"Is this thing still a car?"

"Look behind you. Between the seats."

There it was – the flux capacitor in all its glory. Its three slender, fiber-optic cables had currents of light energy coursing through them towards its apex, the mild fizzle and zap of electricity humming spiritedly from within the case. Eleven years after seeing it for the first time on paper, it was now a tangible entity thriving with possibility. She looked back at her dad, who had leaned in beside her to admire his creation.

"Well, it's great," she said, "but what does it do?"

"Oh ho," Emmett laughed. "You just climb over there while I back it out, and I'll show you."

Emma carefully crawled over into the passenger seat, crouching in it as she absorbed the overhaul he had done to the interior of the car. When Emmett got in, the door hissed to a close, and he turned the key in the ignition, starting the engine. Everything glowed – buttons, knobs, gauges, things she wasn't even certain should glow. Letting her feet slip to the floor, Emma leaned forward to inspect the readouts on a silver console mounted just below the tape deck.

"What's this? Is it part of the flux capacitor?"

"It's powered by the flux capacitor," Doc said, hitting a button on the visor above his head. The back of the van began to open.

Emma squinted at the black label under the red display.

"'Destination time'?"

The car jerked into gear, and Emma's face nearly hit the console as her father began to back the DeLorean out into the parking lot.

"I'll explain in a moment!"

Emma slowly sat back in her seat, marveling at everything around her with as much apprehension as intrigue. What did the flux capacitor even do?

Moments later, she was pulled from her reveries when Doc greeted Marty. Emma let the hatch door soar over her head and popped up over the roof of the car to see him. Marty turned the camera on her, zooming in.

"Fun new toy?"

She shrugged. "I'm still not sure what it does."

"If you'd roll tape over here," Doc said from next to the driver's door, "we could get to that a lot sooner than later. Emma, next to Marty. Thank you."

Emma raised her eyebrows, Marty smirking as she joined him. She folded her arms over her chest and looked back up at her father, giving him her undivided attention. Marty turned forward as well and pulled the lens back, settling Emmett in the middle of the frame as the scientist straightened himself professionally.

"Okay, Doc. It's all you."

"Good evening. I'm Dr. Emmett Brown. I'm standing on the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. It's Saturday morning, October 26, 1985, 1:18 AM, and this is Temporal Experiment #1."

Doc then turned to his ever-faithful Einstein, corralling him into the driver's seat of the car. Emma followed Marty closer to the DeLorean, and she was briefly entertained by the thought of Einstein driving the car telepathically.

Doc moved off to the side after buckling in Einstein, holding up the dog's stopwatch next to an identical one around his own neck.

"Please note that Einstein's clock is in precise synchronization with my control watch. Got it?"

"Check, Doc."

"Good."

Emma fixated on the small, boxlike item Doc pulled out from behind the dog as he shut the hatch, stepped back, and extended a four-foot antenna from it. Her eyes lit up. She latched on to Emmett's right arm, itching to get her hands on it.

"What a remote!"

"You got that thing hooked up to the…car?"

Emma smiled up at the DeLorean in astonishment when its motor awoke at the push of a button. It was all she could do to keep herself from jumping up and down.

"Can I do it?"

"Not now, not now," Doc said, taking his arm back from his daughter. "Just watch."

The back tires spun wildly, and the three of them watched as the DeLorean swerved away in reverse before driving off into the distant lot. Emma couldn't take her eyes off it; she had tinkered in engineering, but in no way had she come close to remote-controlling an actual car. Her father ordered Marty to redirect the camera to the DeLorean as it skidded to a halt, backed up another twenty or thirty feet, and stopped. Its engine gave a low, beastly growl.

Doc slipped behind them, grabbing Marty's elbow and pulling him along after him. Emma followed without coercion, waiting on bated breath with eyes as wide as her father's as they stood directly in front of the far-off vehicle, Marty between them with the camcorder.

"If my calculations are correct," – his smile turned smug – "when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit."

Emmett flicked a tiny red switch, slowly moving his other thumb under the right-center lever. He pushed it upwards gently, and a football field away, the DeLorean's wheels screeched, thick, white smoke billowing from the friction generated by the back tires remaining in place. Marty bumped into Emma as he nervously scooted away from her father, so she quickly traded places with him, running over to his other side. She craned her neck between the beeping remote control and the climbing pitch of the DeLorean's stationary acceleration.

Finally, when the counter on top of the remote reached sixty-five, Emmett snapped the red switch down, and the car came screaming towards them ferociously. Entranced, Emma's mouth opened as she involuntary took a small step forward, allowing her father to reach behind her and catch Marty when he went to bolt away from the oncoming car.

Emma let out a shaky breath and narrowed her eyes as the DeLorean barreled toward them. Suddenly, brilliant blue sparks of incredible light exploded along the synapses of the vehicle, leaping into and cracking through the cold air surrounding it. Courage waning, she dropped her face into Emmett's arm when the blinding, blue-white radiance became too much. A deafening whoosh crashed over them like a tidal wave, but a car never collided with her. She looked up as Doc spun around with Marty, a pair of fire trails in the wake of the missing car.

She cursed herself for looking away when she did, chest heaving as she followed the flames between her father and Marty's feet. Emmett began to laugh in disbelief, shouting and jumping next to her with the remote control over his head triumphantly.

"What did I tell you?! Eighty-eight miles per hour!"

Emma was speechless. She should be dead right now.

"The temporal displacement occurred exactly 1:20 AM and zero seconds!"

Marty looked to be as stunned as she was, perhaps even more so. She staggered up next to him as he dropped the scalding license plate back to the pavement, both of them still searching for a car that wasn't there. She swallowed.

What did the flux capacitor even do?

"Jesus Christ, Doc. You disintegrated Einstein!"

Emma wheeled around at her father. "What? What did you do?!"

"Calm down! I didn't disintegrate anything!" Emmett said, digging a notepad from his front pocket as he hurried over to them. "The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact!"

"Then where the hell are they?!"

"The appropriate question is, 'when the hell are they?' You see, Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler. I sent him into the future!"

Emma stared at her dad levelly, no longer attempting to logically grasp the situation as he ran to the opposite end of the diminishing fire trails. "I'm sorry, what?"

"I sent him one minute into the future!" Doc said, running back to her as Marty wandered away. "And at precisely 1:21 AM and zero seconds, we should catch up with him and the time machine!"

Her face fell. Andy Griffith and peanut butter had left her with some doozies before, but this?

"Okay." Emma put her hand over his furious scribbling, making his insane expression meet her hard one. "What the hellare you talking about? The future? Are you sure you didn't just make them invisible?"

For some reason, she was ready to accept that as a more plausible circumstance than time travel.

"Yes! And it worked! My time machine worked!"

"Wait a minute, Doc," Marty said, rejoining them. "Are you telling me that you built a time machine…out of a DeLorean?"

"The way I see it, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?"

"Style?" Emma asked incredulously. "That's why you used a DeLorean?"

"Not just why. It has a practical aspect," Doc defended. "The stainless steel construction made the flux dispersal –"

Emma squinted at his beeping wristwatch when he did, and he took her by the waist, hurrying her off to the side by her tiptoes as he pushed Marty backward. Before she was out of his grasp, a series of cracks broke over them, and she turned, watching the DeLorean materialize right where they had been standing not seconds before, continuing on its trajectory from exactly one minute ago. She was still working through a particularly gripping stupor when Einstein appeared in the driver's seat unharmed, happily wagging his tail.

"Einstein's clock is exactly one minute behind mine and still ticking!"

The dog jumped from the DeLorean, barking all the way back to the van.

Emma turned back to her dad, her eyes wider than she had ever known them to be.

Forget Andy Griffith and peanut butter. His "serious shit" theory was right on target.

"He's fine, and he's completely unaware that anything happened! As far as he's concerned, the trip was instantaneous! That's why Einstein's watch is exactly one minute behind mine," Emmett explained, brimming with elation. "He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time!"

Although Marty was still taking everything in, Emma finally began to smile, violently knocked sideways by the realization of the importance of what had just happened and what it meant for her father. For science.

"Oh my god!" she laughed suddenly, causing Marty to start. She leapt at her father, bouncing with uncontrollable excitement. "You just made a dog travel through time!"

"Yes!" Doc said, matching her manic, open-mouthed grin as he gripped her shoulders. "Now you understand! I did it! Time travel is possible!"

Emma was certain she was going to spontaneously combust from the overwhelming exhilaration. "This is huge!" she gushed, firing off questions in rapid succession. "How did you do it? How does it work? Is it the flux capacitor? Is that -?"

"Here! Come over here," Emmett said, pulling Marty and the video camera in tow. "I'll explain everything!"