REAL WORLD: PART THREE Homeward Bound ... - Whoa is (Not)

“Right,” Neo said. He dried off his hair, threw his towel onto the other bed, then went through the adjoining
door into the other room. The lights were mostly off that side, and from the small extra bed came the gentle
sounds of Verne breathing in his sleep.
At the other end of the room, Doc and Marty were sitting at a table talking, a single lamp lighting up the area
with a warm glow. They looked up as he arrived.
“You wanted to see me”
“Yes,” Doc said. “We’ve got to discuss how you’re going to go home.”
Neo pulled up a chair and sat down.
“Verne told me you lived on a hovercraft, and you don’t know where it may be.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Do you know any way to contact it”
Neo shook his head. “Someone at Zion should be able to,” he said after some hesitation. “But there would
definitely be a lot of questions…”
“That doesn’t matter,” Doc said. He took out a small device from his pocket that bore some resemblance to
the sleep-inducing alpha rhythm generator he had used on his first trip to the future. “I got this just now from
the hospital. It can erase the recent memory of any individual by identifying and destroying any neural
connections made in the selected timeframe. They use it in hospitals here to help some patients forget
traumatic incidents. Usually it’s not available to outsiders, but I know someone at the hospital and she sold
me one. If people have to know the whole story in order to help us, we’ll tell them everything then wipe their
memories when it’s over.”
“Does it work” Neo asked.
Emmett looked faintly offended. “Of course!”
“We can test it on you if you want,” Marty said. He grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and passed them
over to Neo. Marty glanced at his watch. “Write something,” he said. “Something only you would know.”
Warily, Neo picked up the pen, thought a moment, then scribbled down his parents’ names: John Anderson
and Michelle McGahey.
Marty took the paper and glanced at his watch again. “Ten sec… make it fifteen seconds, Doc.”
Emmett set the timer on his device, and then brought it up and flashed it in Neo’s eyes.
Neo’s first thought was that something was off in the movie music coming faintly through the adjoining door.
One moment there had been something about wanting a tasty fish, then all of a sudden the words had come
back in mid-sentence:
“…ome one and all… man and mammal...”
Neo blinked, then remembered the question he had been going to ask. “Does it work”
Marty grinned. “We just showed you.”
“What”
Marty pushed the paper over to him, and Neo stared down at his own handwriting. For a brief moment he
thought that Ted might have written it, but he realised that wasn’t possible; he doubted that the teen knew
what his parents’ names were.
“Are you convinced now”