On the operating table, off to the left, Doc kept a cage with several large rats. He removed one by the tail, set down the head of Marty’s watch, and from under the table removed a roll of black cloth. “My incipient curiosities by the end of the second film went beyond my expectations of mere ‘time travel’ inspiration,” he said while unraveling the black cloth, revealing several scalpels in varying size and a soldering iron. He plugged in the iron, then set it down carefully with the tip off of the table. “I proceeded to satisfy them, and ran into him,” he jerked a thumb toward the scull. Inside the black cloth was a Velcro pocket, and from within , he removed a syringe of unknown content and stuck the rat absently. He removed the needle, watched the rat fall under the spell of the drug he injected, then laid it down beside the animal. As he continued, he reached an arm through the neck of his sweater and proceeded to struggle with something out of reach. “And after obliterating close to 79 hard drives, as well as numerous processors and so forth, I cracked his programming and now know more then necessary to put an end to their global domination,” he finished as he removed a digital stopwatch from beneath his clothing.
“Doc… their just movi --”
“Please Marty, please! No further interruption.” Doc picked up Marty’s watch, held it next to his own, and synchronized them. “Not just movies Marty, far from it,” he showed him the watches, both set at 5:35 pm and 33 seconds. “Over on my desk is the head of a model 303, originally rubber skinned like the ones before it, but updated as a cybernetic organism sometime around 2122 to be sent back as a ‘watcher/instigator’ for the machine army. I captured it using a large magnet and a pocket sized EMP of my own design. Next, I found a way to hack into it through its learning program,” he let out a bark of laughter, then continued. “The little bastard thinks its been learning from me while I used it to find a way to exterminate its entire race.”
The voice of a U.S. governor came to them from beyond the drawing boards. “Fuck you asshole,” was it’s monotone proclamation.
“My apologies for that Marty,” Doc said in surprise. “I thought I erased that program after it lost its humor. It should be saying, ‘I’ll be around,’ or something along those lines.” His head tilted in concentration.
“Cute Doc, but you have to stop thi --”
“No Marty, I cant,” he paused and turned back to the rat. “Once you have seen this rodent travel through time, I’m sure you’ll understand.” Doc picked a scalpel from the bunch, and slit open the rat’s belly. Marty jumped with an audible gasp as he watched his friend insert the head of his watch into the rat’s newly acquired cavity, and then seal it shut with the iron.
“Jesus Doc,” Marty whispered.
Doc picked the rat up by the tail, inspected it closely, and nodded in approval. “Follow me,” he said, scooting his chair to the opposite side of his computers. He laid down the distended rat carefully inside the oversized upright coffin thing then closed the door.
“Doc?” Marty called as he approached, running over the random rubble with a new curiosity behind his eyes. “Where’s Einst --”
“Please!” he snapped with hurt in his eyes. He looked at his friend solemnly and said, “You know the rules Marty, only living tissue survives the time displacement process. Testing could not be achieved with anything inorganic”
He inspected the cabinet, deemed it ready, and went to the black keyboard on his desk. After inserting several quick fingered commands into the computer, he turned to his friend, “I want you to pay close attention to the following activities Marty. You are about to witness a history that will never be,” said Doc as he depressed the enter key. A loud static crunch came from the cabinet/coffin, followed by a snap.
Marty froze.
Doc clapped his hands together and rubbed them. “This is it Marty,” he said. “This is were science pays off for the benefit of mankind.” He pointed a finger across the room to the large glass box, then pushed his feet hard against the floor sending his chair gliding over in that direction. He knocked on the box, “My own design!” he yelled. He put his hands at the top of the structure, and pushed the lid upward. He picked something up from inside before closing it tight and gliding back to his friend. Once there he said, “Put these on,” and handed Marty a pair of dark goggles from somewhere in that large white lab coat of his.
Marty took the glasses, held them out, but did not put them on. He was staring at the item in Doc’s hands. Is that a pooper-scooper? he thought. Doc had his own goggles on and was speaking rapidly, but Marty had missed most of the blather in all the confusion.
“-- very hard to aim,” Doc was saying, “and keeping things from landing half in the ground is tough, but possible.” Something sparked inside the box. “Ah,” he said, “thirty seconds goes so fast when your having fun.”
Purple forks of lightning spread throughout the glass container in all directions sending Marty to one knee, covering his face and head with his forearms. Doc grabbed the boy by the shoulder. “Don’t worry, its fine. I told you its my own design. Pyrex and aluminum,” he was starting to yell as the snaps, cracks, and crunch’s came to a crescendo, “ mixture that’s tougher then nails!” A sphere of light was forming the size of a basketball just off of the containers center, and apparently embedding itself a good three inches into the floor. “Damn,” he grumbled, skittering his chair closer. The sphere had taken on a checker pattern of grey blocks, then began washing them away with a flush of white static that left it a smooth, grey blob, that looked like a drop of liquid medal. Marty’s bottom lip quivered as the sphere gave way to a hovering rat with a bloated appearance, then dropped it to the ground were another divot had burned into Doc‘s basement.
“Damn, damn!” Doc growled again, lifting the heavy glass lid and raising the pooper-scooper. “Never got it quite right Marty,” he yelled as he scrapped the rat from the searing red ditch, “but I plan on sending myself to a spot of water, like a lake.” he held up the smoking animal like a trophy and added, “Just incase.” He let the lid fall sending a crisp clack through his laboratory making both he and Marty cringe. He tilted his head in apology, then scooted over to his operating area.
Dumping the smoldering beast onto the table, Doc held up the business end of the scooper and said, “Don’t hate me Marty, but if I don’t do this the animal will suffer one hell of a headache when he wakes up,” before crushing the rats scull. Marty flinched, but never looked away as he stood to his feet. He wrapped his arms over his chest, and watched his friend reopen the animal with the same scalpel and remove the head of his watch. Doc held it up, wiped it off, then compared it to his own.
Doc’s read 5:37:07, Marty’s, 5:36:37. “Heavy,” Marty whispered.
“It gets better old friend,” Doc smacked him on the shoulder, swung his chair around his drawing boards, and when he came back into Marty’s view, he was holding that odd looking gun at chest height. It looked light weight despite the fact that it was apparently constructed entirely out of metal, and resembled a pistol grip pump action shotgun. “Watch,” Doc said, sliding the pump grip toward him and holding. A green light illuminated at the barrels tip, and the weapon began to whine like a Polaroid camera spiting out photos. “It just needs a few seconds to warm up.”
The light turned red. Doc turned in his chair, the weapon now at shoulder height. He took aim at the ballistics dummy, and fired. A white, fist sized ball of light, left the barrel of the gun.
The dummy disappeared.
“Rock ’n’ Roll!” Marty said, the wind in his voice distant.
Doc rested the gun on his left shoulder, then cocked his head to the side and thumbed his nose like a true gun slinger of the old west, before putting the weapon back in its place. “I made it the same way I made the ‘time displacement equipment’, with our tech, and the machines data… well…” Doc pointed at the gun, “I had to use the machines power supply to properly construct a phased plasma shot gun with a 32 watt range, but that doesn’t really matter at this juncture.”
“Phased Pla… wha -- ?”
“Marty… please?” Doc replied holding up a hand. “Lower models like our friend here were built with plasma cells rather then hydrogen. Once captured, I removed and recycled all that was left. Just like the machines did with it.”
“Are you trying to tell me… that you made a laser gun… out of a Termina --”
“-- Yes Marty, try to contain yourself. We don’t have much time. At midnight tonight, the W/I‘s are supposed to link up for the monthly report. I‘ve been sending them a ‘no new data’ message for the past nine months, but the time of year for them to get together will be scheduled in just a few hours. That means the time to act is now.” Doc got out of his seat, pointed at it, nodded his head, and turned his attention to his drawing boards. Marty, taking a hint, sat in Doc’s chair ready for another lesson in the fourth dimension. Doc cleaned the white board with a rag, then took from its ledge one black and one red dry-ease marker.
He turned to address Marty, “The war between man and machine has been going on long enough for the timeline to be unrecognizably mangled, making it nearly impossible to trace it to the truth. But as far back as we can see, in the beginning the machines took over without a problematic somebody raising a rebellion. But, humans did still exist. Some fought back, but never as a collective. Others hid, and just as in nature began procreating. The rest became slaves to the machines in a near useless fashion because of their fragility. Soon after, we were deemed the new roaches of the universe, and a schedule for our destruction was formulated.
“The machines constructed a time travel device, and began testing it by sending themselves a few seconds into the future just as I did your watch. The problem they ran into was them. They found the rule on inorganic material after five tries, give or take. And that’s as far back as records go.
“Next, the machines found a new use for the human infestation, and a few hours after the first human time traveler jumped thirty seconds ahead, he was implanted with a tracking device to gage his distance and prepped for a journey in the opposite direction. Several seconds before the Father of mankind’s only hope was sent back in time, the machines picked up two separate signals from the same device at the same time. A ripple effect had been created.
“Two anomalies are created. Anomaly one is the time child. The second is the machines created a time loop. The tracking device sent back with the human host was only made to be traced, and record time. And with those limitations, the machines could not identify the changes after every revolution through the loop. If they had implanted a CPU processor in the human, we would have a better trail, but we are talking about an AI that forgot to program their assassins with the ability to count their ammunition as it spends.
“So… they traveled to the tracking device location and discovered it was without host. The father had dug it out of himself at some point and ditched it after leaving behind a trail for his son to follow. That location was were the first battle of man and machine took place.
“The machines left the battlefield with the tracking device after proving to the humans that they were not undefeatable. All of the available information was extracted from the tracking device, but the human they implanted was not designated with identification which left them with only a date and time. The point of arrival in the past was March first, nineteen eighty- four, at one fifteen am.
“Then, the machines had no clue the human leader was an anomaly of time travel. They only found that out recently with the W‘ I‘s, and the new information has yet to be assimilated into the grand scheme. The time child always knew because of his mother. But, even their history changed from time to time creating the first films scenario where the father is sent back not knowing he is the father.
“This brings me to how I found all of this data through the films. I remembered a story about an unknown man attacking a police station, and then a decade latter the same man attacked a mental health hospital. All true, and not hard to follow,” he said with a wink as he leaned forward.
To Be Concluded…
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