Back to the Doctor

Return to the Future Part 3

"Shouldn't we wait until tomorrow? When, you know, they're actually open?" Marty asked, fixing his red tie. He didn't think it would be a good idea to be the only person without a suit. Mickey had helped him find something passable in the wardrobe.

"It'll be easier with less people asking us why we're here."

"Yeah but… why are we here? I mean, what are we supposed to do?"

"Find information," Martha said. "For now."

They reached the front entrance to the Morton Robotics Company. Two large glass doors met them, locked. The Doctor waved his psychic paper over the card scanner and with a click the doors opened and they entered the lobby. A security guard looked up at them with a nod.

"Sign in," he stood up and handed them a clipboard with a pen.

Martha took it and quickly wrote down four false names. A Sunday security guard probably wasn't going to do any background checks on them. By the time anyone started asking questions they would be long gone.

They went into the elevator and stared at the buttons.

"What floor?" Marty asked.

The Doctor crouched down and started prying open a panel, then with a scan of his sonic screwdriver he looked up at them.

"There's a lab in the basement, we should probably go there, as well as the CEO's office on the top floor."

"We should split up, to cover more ground," Mickey suggested.

"All right," the Doctor stood up. "Martha and I will go to the lab, you two check out the office."

"I think I should go with you," Mickey said quickly. "You'll probably need more help down there."

Marty sighed. "I'll be fine by myself."

"Here," the Doctor handed him his screwdriver. "Take this. It's more useful than Mickey anyway."

"Watch it," Mickey warned.

Marty rolled his eyes and got out of the elevator. "Meet me back at the square, okay?"

"See you in an hour then," the Doctor smiled and the doors closed.

Marty quickly jumped onto the next elevator and pushed the top floor button. Nothing happened and Marty saw another card reader. He changed the setting on the screwdriver and scanned the controls until pushing the button finally started moving the elevator.

"This is a handy little tool," he grinned as he shoved it into his pocket. Was there any technology it could get around? Probably not, he realized.

After a minute of anticipation the elevator doors finally opened and Marty found himself in an atrium, with a high ceiling and large glass windows taking up the entire right and left side of the wall. There was an empty receptionists desk in front of him, and behind that a door he figured must have led to the CEO's office.

The door to the office was locked, but the sonic screwdriver soon fixed that, and he walked into the lush and enormous office. The thing was bigger than the ground floor of his house. There was a large desk against the windows on one side, a bar on the other, an assortment of chairs and couches in the middle.

Marty walked over to the computer on the desk, a strange flat screened one he'd never seen before. Computers in his time were small and bulky. This one had a screen bigger than his TV and displayed so many colours it nearly made his eyes hurt at first.

He didn't really know what he was looking for, but as he started clicking on things he eventually found a search option.

"Okay, let's see…" he typed in "robot," but that returned too many results, so he decided to add "time travel," but that returned nothing.

After a second he just wrote "time travel" and left it at that. He got four results. The first file was about Doc Brown. It was an article about an eccentric scientist going missing after rumours of working with a terrorist organization. Marty cringed at the memory, then closed the file.

So the company was interested in Emmett Brown, which as far as Marty was concerned could only mean they were interested in time travel. But how exactly had the company found out about the Doc's little hobby?

He opened the next file and got an unintelligible schematic. He pushed print, thinking at the very least the Doctor might be able to make something out of it. He folded up the printed pages and put them in his suit jacket.

The next file had his name in it.

It felt a little cold, reading the words. He wasn't entirely sure how to feel.

"Martin Seamus McFly – Deceased."

He was dead. He was dead?

He checked himself over, as though he would suddenly disappear or suddenly wake up in a coffin. Then he read the date: November 26th, 1985. There were numerous articles in the file, his school picture as well as pictures of his mother and father holding each other in tears.

"Local teens go missing."

"Search continues in vain."

"Teens met with demise?"

"No," he answered, but was too confused. He could understand them having files on the Doc, he was a known scientist and it was possible he mentioned working on time travel to someone else and this information got back to them – but what interest could they possibly have in him? Never mind why they thought he was dead – although it horrified him to realize after leaving with the Doctor he never came back – why did some company 30 years after the fact care?

Something clicked in his head, something he had always been too stressed or scared in any given moment to put together.

"Prime subject acquired," the robot had said in the time loop. There was something else, too, something the Sylcrat had said as they had tied him down and were getting ready to cut him to pieces.

"Not like the others," they had said. "You're human, but… there's something off about you."

What did they mean? What did any of this mean?

He opened the last file, this one titled surveillance, and found a treasure trove of candid pictures of his family. His mother, father, older brother and sister. The company was keeping tabs on them. He read a few lines, but stopped when he saw the word "divorce."

His mother and father had gotten divorced, and he knew it had to do with him going missing. He wrote down his mother's home address, his father's nowhere to be found, and got up to leave. He didn't care if there was more information he might find there, this was his life, and he needed to figure out how to fix it.

OOO

Her house was run down and little more than a glorified garage. The mailbox said Baines and Marty realized his mother hadn't even kept his father's name. He nearly pushed the doorbell, but then he realized he didn't know what to say.

"Hey mom, I'm back after thirty years – and I didn't age!"

What would she say? Well, she wouldn't believe it; that was for sure.

He saw someone moving in the window and ducked down. He couldn't resist the urge to look though. He wanted to get out of the view of the road and walked around to the side of the house along the driveway. The small kitchen window was there, though too high to reach. He pulled up a garbage can and climbed up.

Lorraine was in the kitchen, sitting at a table and flipping through the pages of some magazine. A cigarette hung out of her parted lips and she was holding a glass with clear liquid and ice cubes in it. He didn't think it was water.

She looked sad, and lonely, and impossibly old. In that moment he didn't care what she might say, he wanted to go in there and tell her everything was going to be all right, tell her that while he might have still been figuring things out, he wouldn't rest until everything was fixed again.

She lifted her head, as though she heard something, and turned to him. Their eyes locked for a moment and Marty tried ducking down, but lost his footing and fell.

His head hit the pavement hard, and he blacked out.

To Be Continued…

(I love Lorraine, and all her variations, and sigh… she is also one of the people who never got any votes in my poll. Seriously, why do none of the characters I think actually have any merit get votes? Ah well.)