Part One (633 KB) - Whoa is (Not)

REAL WORLD: PART ONE
Eddies in the Space-Time Continuum
“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real
What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo How
would you know the difference between the dreamworld… and the
real world”
- Morpheus, The Matrix
Chapter One
12 th December 1985, Thursday
One-and-a-half months after the Back to the Future trilogy
Hill Valley, California
It wasn’t a building that would normally have attracted much attention. An old, large, relatively run-down
garage, it was nothing very remarkable to look at. In truth, it would have remained largely ignored, had
it not been for the fact that it also happened to be the house-cum-laboratory of the town lunatic, Dr.
Emmett Lathrop Brown. That in itself was reason enough for the majority of Hill Valley citizens to stay
away from that garage, and stay away they did… fuelled in part by their fear of the unknown and the
many rumours surrounding its owner.
Had they got to know him better, however, they would have perhaps learnt that Emmett had departed
the late twentieth century more than a month ago and was currently living happily in the nineteenth with
his wife and two kids. As it was, only two people had any idea that he had left.
And just as few knew of the existence of a 2003 computer inside the garage, one which ran on a
Windows 2000 operating system and had a connection to the World Wide Web.
In 1985.
On that computer on the afternoon of December the twelfth, a seventeen-year-old teenager by the name
of Martin Seamus McFly was typing away. Beside him on the table was strewn a mass of wires that
showed some form of organisation only when one looked closely at them, and these were attached to a
strange, fluxing Y-shaped contraption – a flux capacitor – that was in turn hooked up to both a modemlike
device and the computer.
Behind Marty on the opposite end of the dimly lit garage was located the remains of a gigantic amplifier
that had blown up somewhere in the vicinity of late October that year, and next to it was now a much
smaller one that Marty had brought there to use in its stead.
Jennifer Jane Parker, Marty’s girlfriend and fellow time traveller, sat beside him and stared at the screen
in rapt fascination as he concluded his brief introduction to the Internet of 2004.
The brown-haired boy turned to her and smiled. “Cool huh” he asked, although her reaction was
already more than obvious. “And the whole thing’s connected to Doc’s computer, so when one day
passes for me and in 2004, one day passes for him too. That way everything’s kept in sync.”
Jennifer nodded slowly, eyes still fixated on the screen. “Doc just gave you the computer”
“Yeah. He said he got it cheap at a garage sale in 2009. But he didn’t exactly give it to me… I mean,
it’s not like I can just take it home or anyth…”
The entire collection of clocks in the garage chose that precise moment to chime loudly, cutting Marty off
in mid-sentence. The teen cringed slightly at the sound. Even after more than three years of dropping
by at Doc’s garage before and after school, he still hadn’t got used to it.
“You’ve gotta go now, right” he asked, when the noise had finally subsided to the usual quiet, relatively
unobtrusive ticking.
Jennifer sighed regretfully, getting up. “Yeah.”
Marty got off his own chair and walked towards the door to let her out.