Time is an Illusion

Written by Anakin McFly

He wakes in the DeLorean, slumped up against the driver’s seat. Through the windows he sees that it is dark outside; but inside there are dashboard lights and a soft radiance from the flux capacitor. The time circuits give off a ghostly glow of colour that shines sharp against his eyes. He looks ahead at the windscreen and in his reflection sees a trickle of blood down the side of his head. He touches it; the blood is almost dry.

Marty turns on the headlights. The twin beams cut through the darkness and reveal a silent stretch of road littered by damaged vehicles and scattered weapons. Short and nondescript buildings line both sides of the road, all in ruins.

“Where am I?” the whispered question escapes him. “When am I?”

And then for the first time since waking, Marty sees the time circuits – really sees them – and notices that the present time display is not displaying numbers, but words:

'Wake up, Marty'.

He stares at it for a while, his mind still disorientated from the crash and struggling to make sense of everything.

Finally he shakes his head.

“This has gotta be a dream,” Marty mutters. He grasps for the door handle and pushes the DeLorean’s gull-wing doors out and up, half-hopping and half-falling onto the asphalt.

He turns his gaze upwards. Wild bolts of lightning splice the blackened sky that looks unlike any sky that he has ever seen. There is no moon; no stars, no clouds; just a pulsating, shifting mass of black stretching in unending reign across the heavens.

A chill wind blows by and brings with it the lifeless smell of urban decay. Marty is the only living thing it touches, the teen standing on the road with windswept hair as he gazes out at the post-apocalyptic world.

Black holes gape out of broken buildings, some little more than empty frames with bits of hanging plaster blowing in the wind.

Marty turns around; and then he sees the Clocktower, and knows that he is still in Hill Valley.

“No,” he says, and in a trance he goes towards it.

The town pond has long since dried up, the grass of the surrounding area long since dead from lack of sunlight. Once there had been people here; strolling, laughing, skateboard chases; newspapers dumped carelessly in a public trashcan.

'Café 80's', reads a once-jaunty sign above a shop opening, and Marty places the year at not much longer after 2015. Or perhaps even before. He might have changed something, something that caused this… but what, he does not know, memories of the recent past all a confused whirl in his head-

“Wake up, Marty.”

He spins around at the voice, heart thumping, but there’s no one there.

The first real fear tugs at his mind. He starts to back off slowly, towards the direction of the DeLorean, but then he sees the light come on in the Café 80’s, and curiosity pulls him in the opposite direction from instincts telling him to run.

There is a man waiting for him inside. A black man, dressed in black, eyes shielded behind a pair of shades that sit on his nose.

Morpheus smiles. “Hello, Marty.”

As though on cue, a loud clap of thunder shakes the air.

“Time travel,” Morpheus says. “It is one of the most complicated programs run in the Matrix. The machines allowed it because they… saw it fit for us to enjoy some degree of fantasy in our lives that the real world could not offer. But unfortunately for them, they did not fully understand the vast amount of processing power that would be needed to sustain whole alternate realities just for the time travellers. Sit down, Marty.”

The teen edged nervously onto the chair. “Who are you?” he asks.

“My name is Morpheus.”

“How do you know me?”

“We… keep track of all time travellers. Often they will eventually grow suspicious. Constructed worlds can never fully replace the original, even if the original itself was never fully real."

Memories were starting to resurface now, triggered into clarity by the words. Yes; Marty had been feeling a growing unease with his life. Things had started getting unusually repetitive, robotic even. People never seemed to change. They didn't seem capable of changing. Stagnant personalities, repeated surprise events, the exact same kid accidentally falling into the town pond at the exact same spot at the exact same time in the morning two weeks apart…

“Are you saying… I wasn’t… really time travelling?”

“Yes.”

“But-“ The question dies on his lips. He does not know how to continue.

“Time is an illusion. Space… is an illusion. You have spent all your life lying in the exact same position."

More flashes of memories. Nightmares where he’d found himself submerged in red-lit goo, wires extending out from all parts of his body, nightmares that felt uncannily real but always faded in the end and went away; the brief flickers of green computer code everywhere that had greeted him upon breaking the time barrier the past few times, which he had put down to his imagination and tried not to think about-

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because your mind will not continue to accept the fantasy for much longer. And when you cease to accept that reality, it will not be long before the Agents track you down and kill you.”

#

The television is on and blares out more reruns of The Honeymooners. George McFly, a pathetic-looking man with oily hair and thick black-rimmed glasses eats his dinner of Peanut Brittle and laughs at the jokes on the screen. Next to him sit his wife and two children. He had three children, once, but the youngest mysteriously vanished one night. The police could not find him. The police don’t really care. The police laugh at George McFly behind his back.

The town lunatic Doctor Emmett Brown vanished too on that same night. Probably blew himself up, the whispered rumours go, accompanied by shaking heads and condescending looks. Might have killed that kid along with him, that little one who always hung around his garage. They spared some pity for Marty; he was still young.

On this night, the telephone in Doc’s empty garage suddenly starts to ring. On the third ring, Marty McFly stands there. He picks up the phone.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m in.”

He replaces the receiver and walks past the exploded amplifier to the garage door. He opens it, and stands there in the doorway gazing out at Hill Valley.

He’s finally home.

Back in sync with everyone else, back in the same world, back in the same future. And everything is back the way it used to be before temporal displacement occurred on October 26th, 1985. The family he grew up with is still here, once again, in their full lousy glory that nonetheless has the comfortable familiarity that his fake created version lacked... But all that can wait.

Shoes scrape gravel as he walks towards the gate that separates Doc’s world from the rest of humanity.

Marty shuts his eyes and frees his mind.

His sneakers leave the ground.

And he flies.

#