By Liam Slade
Once the coast was clear – his old self and the DeLorean having disappeared and the terrorists driven off into the night – Marty sat by Doc’s lifeless body and wept.
“Doc, Doc…” he muttered, tears filling his eyes, “Why didn’t you read the note, Doc?”
He hung his head in grief, paying little attention to the strangeness he had already noted – the long tresses, the odd way his clothes fit. All of it was unimportant compared to the fact that he had failed to save the Doc. A tear of hot shame streaked down Marty’s cheek as he felt the defeat settle in his chest.
But just then he felt something shuffle behind him. He turned to see the face of Doc Brown, sitting up on the asphalt of the Lone Pine mall parking lot.
“Doc…!” Marty gasped, “You’re alive!”
Dr. Brown slowly unfastened his radiation suit to reveal a bullet-riddled Kevlar vest and offered a warm grin, colored with no small amount of surprise for his own sake. From his pocket, he pulled a faded and taped-together note written in Marty’s handwriting.
“What about all that stuff about, you know… the space-time continuum?”
“Well, I figured,” Brown said with an impish grin, “What the hell.”
Energized, Marty stood and jumped in the air to let out a triumphant whoop. “This is amazing, Doc! This is… wait… what’s going on with my voice?” He began pacing frantically, hands moving from his scalp to his now strangely rounded hips.
“Marty…” Doc slowly pushed himself to his feet, a little unsteady – he had, after all, just been shot several times.
“Doc, my hair…” the held the long chestnut locks out in front of him, “My voice, my… my everything!” he patted down his now alien-seeming body, marked by unusual curves under his denim ensemble, all of which was now impossible to ignore as he had been doing for the last several minutes spent in crisis mode.
In a grave, reticent voice, Doc began to approach his young friend, “Marty, I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain it to you… in part because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen. But now here you are…”
“Doc,” Marty breathed heavily, in and out two or three times as he tried to force himself to ask the all-important question, which he finally delivered with a massive gulp, “Am I… a girl?”
***
After a tense, quiet drive back to the garage that functioned as the lab space of Dr. Emmett L. Brown, the two arrived. The Doc unveiled a chalkboard and began to scrawl equations on it.
“To truly ascertain the parameters of the situation and formulate a hypothesis, I’m going to have to ask you a few questions about what you remember about the last few days, and indeed, your entire life.”
“That’s easy Doc,” Marty squeaked, “You’ve gotta remember. I went back in time to 1955 and I stopped my parents from meeting and almost erased myself from existence, but then dad punched out Biff and I played ‘Johnny B. Goode’ at the dance and now we’re here.”
“Yes, that’s what I remember too!” Doc said, eyes wild as he computed the situation, “Give or take certain events for which I was not present. Knowing that my future friend would be born in the late 1960’s, I made sure to keep tabs on George and Lorraine McFly. I recall the picture of your siblings, Dave and Linda…” he tapped his chin.
“Right, they were disappearing,” Marty said.
“Precisely. So I was unsurprised when in 1965, Lorraine and George welcomed a baby girl into the family and named her Linda.”
“But Doc, Linda’s the middle child!” Marty protested.
“Not anymore!” Doc continued to rant, marking up his chalkboard ever more energetically, this time with the names of Marty’s siblings and their dates of birth, “This is one thing I simply did not account for, Marty! Actually, it’s several! By disturbing the circumstances of your parents’ courtship, you changed the entire course of their lives from that point on! The unique genetic combination that resulted in your brother Dave never happened, and instead your parents had a daughter first! Then a few years later, they did have a son that they named Dave! Then at last, in 1968…”
Doc finished writing on the chalkboard and underlined the last name on the list – MARTINA MCFLY B. 1968.
Marti’s eyes bulged and her jaw dropped. “Doc…” she said in a steady, awed voice, “You’re tellin’ me… time travel gave me a sex change??”
“Not exactly, Marti,” Doc began to pace again as he explained, “For you see, it seems that by the same mechanism that you were to be erased from existence, the very nature of that existence was altered even once you completed your task. From what I can tell, the die was cast the moment your set foot in your parents’ life, perhaps the very second you arrived in 1955, who knows? As far as the world is concerned, Martina McFly has always existed!”
“But Doc, you remember me, right?! You called me Future Boy!”
“That I do remember, which is what makes this so fascinating!” Doc went back to the chalkboard and began to illustrate, starting with a line. “Here is your original timeline. We’ll call it Timeline-A, for lack of a better name although we have no assurance that it was truly the original timeline for all existence. From there you – that is, the male Marty McFly that existed in this timeline — traveled back to 1955 and met me. There the alterations happened and–” Doc drew a loop from the ‘1955’ point on the board back to a parallel line below the original 1985. “—Here in this iteration of 1985, Marti McFly is a girl of 17. Dutifully, I played my part, mentoring her as I presumably did you in the history that you remember, leading to the events of October 27, 1985 wherein you, now she, travels back to meet me. Of course I have no idea what she’ll find when she gets there, whether it’s the original you, or simply a blank slate like the one you found, from which an entirely new timeline will spin out, ad infinitum. The implications are staggering, and quite frankly I wish I were there to observe!”
“Doc! Doc!” Marti took the taller man by the shoulders to bring him back to the relevant part of the conversation. “But why am I in her body?”
“Well, that’s a question for the philosophers, Marti,” Brown shrugged rather casually, “Perhaps we’ve stumbled upon the secret of some immortal soul that will always bring you back as close as possible to the time and place of your intended birth. Perhaps the timestream has some kind of mechanism for course-correction. Maybe it’s just dumb luck.”
Marti looked down the neck hole of her top. “I wouldn’t call this lucky, Doc,” she whined.
“All this time working with the fourth dimension, and I may have stumbled into the fifth. Great Scott… I wonder what else has changed from what you remember.”
“I don’t think I can handle any other surprises, Doc,” Marti said flatly.
“At any rate, the sun will be up soon, we’d better get you home.”
“Doc, are you sure that’s a good idea? Going home like this?”
“Of course Marti,” Doc noted, “A girl your age shouldn’t be out to all hours of the night on her own like this!”