“MARTY! You made it!!”
Marty frowned. His suit was rumpled. A brown patterned tie that didn’t really match the tan, slightly oversized jacket, hung askew. The back strand dangled next to the front giving it an odd dual look that contributed to his overall bedraggled appearance.
“I’m a hot mess, Doc. It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”
The Doc sat in the booth smiling with his eyes slightly bugging out. “GREAT SCOTT! I never imagined the timelines would lead you here.” He looked around the shuttered restaurant. Dayglow formica was covered in a layer of dust. Posters of a dark-skinned, pre-first nose job Michael Jackson hung on the walls competing for cobwebs with framed monitors that had the image of Ronald Reagan burned into their screens.
Marty sank into the booth wearily. “Cafe’ 80’s could have worked. What led me here was investing in the those damn hover car conversions. Goldie Wilson III kept blaming the oil industry for the delays, and I believed him. Should have known he was lying the minute Biff became an investor.”
“I did warn you and Jennifer,” Doc said gently. “Your futures weren’t written yet. The 2015 you saw wasn’t necessarily the one you’d reach. Any number of random chance occurences and hoverboard technology gets born… Or never exists.”
“If you’d just give me the one I left in the old west -”
The Doc shook his head making the wild mane of snow white hair whip violently. “Can’t do it, Marty. Parents groups contact Libyans and all hell breaks loose.” He pulled out a wrinkled newspaper showing Hill Valley’s Clock Tower burning and the headline “Local HoverBoard Factory Burns” plastered at the top. “Besides, that technology is too ripe for disaster. My boys took a bull in the 15th century and… well the nursery rhyme “the cow jumped over the moon”… that was them.”
The bell on the front door jingled as it opened. A woman in a perfectly tailored suit jacket and business-sensible skirt stepped inside. She shut the door behind her and elegantly walked toward Marty and Doc, a large handbag hanging from her forearm. As she moved, her face flitted back and forth. One step she had a pointed nose and slim cheekbones. The next, her nose was more pert, the cheeks rounder, her lips more narrowed. “Hi Marty,” she said seductively. She changed, turned to Doc, and said more high pitched, “Hello Doctor Brown.”
“And what the hell is this, Doc?” Marty yelled. “Ever since I got back the first time, Jennifer’s been different. One minute she looks like my high school girlfriend. The next, she looks like the actress from Adventures In Babysitting.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jennifer and Doc said in chorus.
“Fine,” Marty spat, “keep ignoring it for another thirty years.” He drew the rough shape of a Delorian in the dust of the table, then wiped it off angrily. “So why did you want to meet, Jennifer? You want to lord your flatscreen TV billions over me some more?”
“I told you,” Jennifer said with the instant heat of a never-ending disagreement, “I only remembered seeing fax machines and a wall-mounted TV. You said,” her voice changed to an insulting pitch, “‘No way could anyone make a TV that thin.’ It’s not my fault you only put money in faxes. And it’s certainly not my fault e-mail killed them.”
At that, Doc raised his hand. “Actually, that was me. I’d seen how much paper was being wasted in the Hill Valley landfill, so I created a reusable electronic message template and traveled back to the 70’s. I left a copy in Boston and another in San Francisco. The various computer science students of the time snapped it up. I’d hoped for a completely paperless business world, but I didn’t realize the financial impact on you personally.”
Marty stared murderously at the wild looking scientist, but before he could speak, Jennifer dropped the purse onto the table with a loud thud. She opened it and pulled out a large rectangular device, slightly thicker than a tablet computer, with clear glass on one side. Three wires, each starting from a different corner and merging in the center, glowed brightly.
“GREAT SCOTT!” Doc yelled. “A miniaturized Flux Capacitor?”
“I saw the one in the Delorian,” Jennifer said as she drew her fingers on the backside of the tablet. “My engineers were able to extrapolate this one from my descriptions. It’s not to scale, but I’m sure it will do the job.”
A bright light launched from the tablet, encircling their booth. “Flat screens are coming down in price. I need new technology or my company will be gone in a year. So since I know two time travelers, I figure why not make the most of our relationship.”
“This is heavy!” Marty screamed. His body pressed into the booth, the cushioned bench groaning.
“Jennifer, what do you intend to do with that?” Doc asked, his hair flattening down like a windswept sheepdog.
“I learned two things when you two took me to the future. One… being married to Marty would have been the biggest mistake I could make.” She looked at him with unmistakable sympathy. “Sorry, but Biff and Needles and everyone that watched your American’s Got Talent 80’s power guitar tribute said, you are a butthead.”
She slid into the booth next to Doc. “Second… if you want to make the most of the present, steal from the future.”
She touched the tablet. There was a flash and the three were gone.
The Writin' Project 