Somewhen Out There

Written by Anakin McFly

5th November 1955
Hill Valley, California

It was the first of seven nights in the past, and Marty couldn’t sleep. He lay awake in the darkness as from some distance away came the sounds of Doc tinkering in his lab in some other part of the Brown mansion, probably trying to find a way to bring the teen home.

At any time now, Marty could just find himself erased from existence.

Erased from existence... Doc had told him about the ripple effect. Marty still had the chance to change back to normal what his actions that morning had messed up, and he knew this; but he nonetheless couldn’t stop feeling that at any moment, the ripple might just catch up with him and wipe him off the face of the space-time continuum without him ever noticing a thing.

Marty wondered what it would be like to not exist... to not be. Himself, all his memories, gone just like that, never happened...

How was he to know that saving his father from being knocked down by a car would amount to all this? On hindsight, that had been a stupid thing to do, but back then he had just acted on instinct.

He hadn’t really thought that there would be consequences, either. Somehow he’d had the idea that history couldn’t be changed; in some time travel stories he’d read, the timeline was fixed and doing anything in the past would mean that that thing had already, originally been done. Marty remembered wondering if that negated human free will, if you were unable to do anything in the past that hadn’t been done before. But it hadn’t really bothered him. After all, time travel didn’t exist.

Until October 26th, 1985, that is.

He had asked Doc what would happen if he couldn’t succeed in bring his parents back together and he was truly erased. If he never existed, how could be there to erase himself from existence, then? It had probably been a mistake to ask that question, because Doc immediately launched into a description of several possible outcomes.

The first and most likely was that Marty’s entire existence would begin at his point of arrival in 1955 and end when the time ripple caught up with him – the Echo theory. That way, the sole point of his existence would be to erase himself from existence. Irony existed in the space-time continuum.

Or by going back in time, Marty had created and entered an alternate universe. Therefore, by interrupting George and Lorraine’s meeting, he simply prevented the existence of this universe’s Marty McFly. So when the time came for him to be erased, nothing would happen; but if he did manage to go back to 1985, it would be the 1985 of this universe, where no one knows he exists. However, the simple fact that Marty’s photo of his siblings showed his brother already disappearing ruled out this possibility, unless more complicated temporal forces were at work.

A third option was that the space-time continuum found a way to preserve itself by making sure that even without Marty’s influence, his parents would still never meet – perhaps being knocked down by the car would kill George, for example.

Fourthly, the creation of a time loop could occur, starting on the 5th of November 1955 and ending on the 26th of October 1985 only to start again. The ripple effect would go on forever: Marty’s parents meet, produce him, he goes back and stops them meeting, he doesn’t exist, he doesn’t go back and stop the meeting, they meet, they produce him, he goes back and stops the meeting... over and over ad infinitum.

Alternatively, the universe might think this all too complicated and find it much more convenient to just blow up.

None of the options seemed remotely appealing, and Marty wondered what people would do if they found out that the fate of the space-time continuum lay in the hands of a time-lost seventeen-year-old. Marty longed to be back home. His life wasn’t the greatest then, but it was still his life and all he had known for the past seventeen years. And it was normal. He craved that normalcy – where things happened as they should; where his parents were the people he had always known and not the two teenagers he had met that day; where even the mere idea of time travel was confined to science fiction stories and not allowed to break through the barriers that separated fiction from reality. Marty wanted that security, the knowledge that the sun would rise the next day and he would still be there to see it.

Everything still felt like a dream. Marty remembered thinking that perhaps at any moment then he would wake up with relief in his bed back in 1985, and none of this would have ever happened. He’d pinched himself several times that day in the hope that that was true, but it was not long before he figured out that if this was a dream – which he was starting to strongly doubt – it was one he couldn’t wake himself from, and all he would achieve from pinching himself would be an awful lot of bruises.

Common sense seemed to tell him that all this couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t have just gone back in time and erased himself from existence like that; the notion was ridiculous. It sounded like something straight out of a Steven Spielberg movie. Everything had been so fast, so sudden...

“Why me?” Marty asked silently to no one in particular. The responsibility for the existence of the family he knew and so much more was a burden too heavy to bear. Everything rested on his actions now in the little time he had left.

He was a 1985 teenager stuck in 1955; there was no one he could talk to, no one who could understand him or his life. Coloured television, Pepsi Free, skateboards, reruns of The Honeymooners... At present, he was the only one in the universe who knew of such things.

Marty felt so alone.

For every moment spent outside, he was acting, pretending to be a part of a world he didn’t belong to. It was only with Doc that he could be himself, and even then there were limitations. The Dr. Emmett Lathrop Brown of 1955 was not the same friend Marty had known since his early teenage years; he would become him, eventually, but at the moment he still felt like a completely different person.

Of course, Marty was deeply grateful that the inventor was helping him to find a way back home. He couldn’t imagine what he would do without Doc’s help. He’d be stuck here with nowhere to go, maybe stranded in the streets of 1955 until the time ripple arrived and erased him.

Marty’s thoughts inevitably turned to Doc’s future murder in 1985 at the hands of the Libyan terrorists, and his heart sank. Technically it hadn’t happened yet, but for him it was as though it had. Memories of the first real killing witnessed don’t fade easily, especially not when the victim is your best friend.

He’d have to stop it, somehow... he wouldn’t be able to live with the knowledge that he had the means to do so, but hadn’t. He had a time machine at his disposal, for crying out loud. The only problem would be how he was going to go about it.

Marty doubted that the 1955 Doc would help him in this area; their conversations so far seemed to indicate that Emmett didn’t want to know anything more than absolutely necessary about the future. Even if he did manage to tell him about the murder, Doc might not let him do anything about it. He would probably think that it was meant to be and that it would not be wise to mess with the timeline considering how much damage the teen had already done to it.

He would worry about that later when the time came. The immediate problem was how to make sure George and Lorraine got together. It was still hard to think of them as being the same age as him. His father wasn’t very different as a seventeen-year-old – he still did Biff’s work for him, for one, only now it was homework and not reports.

But his mother... Marty preferred not to think about it. There were some things that shouldn’t be thought about more than necessary, and this was one of them, because it could seriously warp his life if he thought too much about it. So Marty didn’t think about it, and decided to turn his attention to something else – that nice clock hanging above the door, for example.

It was a nice clock. It told the time, too, and wasn’t traumatising like his encounter that morning with the seventeen-year-old Lorraine Baines... No! He was thinking about it again. Marty broke out in a cold sweat. No, don’t think about it, he told himself, look at that clock, that nice pretty clock that tells the time and says that it is...

Marty squinted in the dark and tried to make out where the clock hands were pointing. The hour hand was reaching twelve, and so was the minute hand.

It was almost midnight.

Marty was hit with the revelation that he had been in 1955 for almost a whole day. Yet it seemed only moments ago that he had seen his 1985 family – George, Lorraine, Dave, and Linda... It was strange to think that they technically didn’t exist anymore, strange to think that his memories were currently all he had left of them. If he, by some miracle or other, were able to go back to 1985 right now, they simply wouldn’t be there.

They were nothing now unless he did something about it, and soon, he would be too. There was a weird sense of release to it. Everything gone: no more problems, no more troubles, whatever wrongs he had done in his life all forgotten, erased by the hands of time.

Maybe he was already erased. Perhaps he would never succeed in bringing his parents back together, and all he was now was the echo that Doc had talked about.

Marty missed his family. Less than a day had passed, and he already missed them. He’d spent longer times away from home before and it hadn’t mattered then, but it had been different. Then he had known at least that they would still exist when he got home.

He knew so many people who would have jumped at the chance to erase their family from existence. He had to admit that he too had harboured such thoughts at some point or other in his life, but when it was really happening, it was just different somehow.

Somewhen out there, in some alternate timeline perhaps, his family was waiting for him.

Perhaps his parents would wake up early in the morning and find his bed empty. They’d call up his friends and Jennifer to check if they knew where he was, check to see if he was just sleepwalking or if he had run away from home... Dave would make snide comments regarding his possible whereabouts... Eventually, they’d call the police. The police would come, do a search, and they would never find him anywhere on the planet.

Some time later, his name would turn up in the newspapers with a picture attached. His name would be added to the list of missing people, and after several years he would pass away into obscurity.

Maybe that was what happened to all the missing people, Marty found himself thinking wildly. Maybe some of them are just lost somewhere in time with no way to get home.

Like me.

So maybe I’m not alone after all.

Maybe.

It was a comforting, if not somewhat outrageous thought. But it was enough for him at the moment, and it was late.

When the hour and minute hands of the clock met at the number twelve, Marty had fallen asleep. Doc came to check on him several minutes later before turning in for the night himself, putting aside for a moment the challenge of getting Marty home as soon as possible. He would manage it, somehow. You could accomplish anything you put your mind to, and this was a task Emmett was determined to accomplish no matter what it took.

In his bed, Marty slept and dreamt of home, dreamt of his family and Jennifer and of the life he knew so well.

And, somewhen out there, 1985 waited for his return.

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