From the Doc As A Vet Reality -- I typed this out for three pages before I changed my mind about the direction I wanted the chapter to go. Ironically, writing Marty’s thought question at the very end of this made me go “Hmmmm, good point!” myself! It sucks when I invest this much prose into something, and then nip it out. But I don’t have regrets. I used a lot of this scene later in the world where Doc and Marty crashed the first time.

Doc set his counterpart down on the couch and leaned back with a sigh. “Neither,” he said, rubbing the shoulder that had borne the brunt of the vet’s weight. “I want to talk to him before we leave -- and I’m so exhausted now I’d rather just wait out his spell. A little sleep might be the best thing I could do in hopes of solving the problem.”

“Amen,” Marty said, glad that his friend was finally seeing a bit of the light.

The inventor glanced at the other couch in the room, a bit smaller than the one Emmett had been settled on. “Did you want to stay in here? It might be a good idea to have someone in here with him, when he wakes up, and I think I’m a bit too tall for that couch. There’s also the matter that if he woke up and saw me lying there... I’m not sure how he would react.”

“Sure,” the musician said. “Where are you gonna crash?”

Doc shrugged and sighed. “I’m not sure.... I still have one thing I’d like to do before I try and sleep.”

Marty wondered what that was, but he was too tired to ask or really care. The inventor headed off down the hall again, leaving Marty alone with the unconscious Emmett. After shutting off most of the lights -- leaving a lamp burning next to the local’s head, so when he woke he wouldn’t be completely disoriented -- the musician found a throw hanging over one of the armchairs and took to the second couch with it. He was still sort of half asleep from his nap earlier, so it took him only a minute to get comfortable enough to fall asleep again.

And, about an hour later, he was awake again. Marty thought, at first, it was some kind of noise that had woken him, like the door closing had done so earlier. He cracked his eyes open and raised his head enough to take a quick glance around. The lamp was still on. Emmett was still on the couch, in the same sprawled position that Doc had set him down in. The only sound he could hear was the vet’s deep, regular breathing. Marty yawned and closed his eyes again, rolling onto his back, waiting for the fatigue still dogging him to drag him back under.

But, for some inexplicable reason, he remained awake, his mind the one part of him that apparently had any energy at all. He kept remembering, against his will, the strange realities that he’d seen, the memories echoing on a loop. There was the jackass Marty who was the rock star in the weird world, and that strange, almost surreal, performance on stage; the depressed Doc and the Marty who never got home from ‘55; that frightening world where they were simply made up characters in some series of movies; the place where Marty and Jennifer had had a divorce.... The images would replay with a vivid intensity every time he closed his eyes. He finally opened them and sat up, annoyed.

What’s wrong with me? he wondered, irritated. A second later the idea hit him, and made his blood run cold.

What if that incompatibility shit is happening already?

Insomnia was supposed to be one of the first signs, Marty remembered. He hadn’t noticed it that first time last year because of the fight that he and Jennifer were going through, which was making it hard for him to sleep well at night before that trip to a new dimension. Maybe he was already deteriorating now. Maybe this was the first smidge of a sign. They’d only been in this reality for a few hours, but they’d been bouncing around for about twenty hours. Maybe going from different parallel reality to different parallel reality didn’t do anything to reset the system.

His heart started skipping a little with the first bit of real panic. Marty untangled himself from the throw on the couch, then headed off in search of Doc to let the inventor know the grim news. He checked the living room, first, and when that proved to be empty, started a quick search on all the downstairs rooms. The scientist wasn’t in any of them. Marty hesitated when he got to the bottom of the stairs, looking up, feeling uncomfortable for reasons he couldn’t quite pinpoint at the idea of going up them. Maybe because the upper portions of homes seemed so much more private than the main floors. That’s where bedrooms, bathrooms, and sometimes home offices were. But, unless Doc was outside, that was really the only other place he could really be. The musician mentally cursed himself for not asking the inventor what he planned on doing before crashing, but that was water under the bridge now. Anyway, with Emmett still out cold, it wasn’t like he’d get in trouble if he took a quick look upstairs....

Marty heard sounds once he reached the top of the front staircase, and followed them to a room that he recalled was a kind of second floor office for Doc -- at least in 1955, when the inventor still worked at the university as a professor. The door was partially ajar, and as he pushed it open, he realized with a series of shivers that he recognized the sounds coming from within. There was his voice -- his voice and Doc’s.

“One point twenty one jiggowatts?! One point twenty one jiggowatt’s....”

“What... what the hell is a jiggowatt?”

The musician stepped into the room, in spite of the cold feeling now lurking in his blood from the overly familiar voices and dialogue. Doc was sitting almost on the edge of his seat, in an armchair, his eyes locked on the small TV screen where Marty saw what seemed to be himself and the inventor in the study downstairs -- the way it appeared in 1955 -- reliving the moment where Marty showed his friend the fateful flyer with Jennifer’s phone number on it. He realized, at once, that this was one of the videotapes from that last alternate reality where they were just movie characters. It didn’t make him feel better in the least that the actors on screen could’ve been their identical twins -- and that the filmmakers had completely nailed the sets to look just like the reality.

“Doc, why are you watching this?” Marty asked, interrupting his “twin” on screen, who was lamenting the possible fate of being stuck in ‘55 for good.

The inventor’s head snapped around at the sound of the real Marty’s voice, and an almost guilty look crossed his friend’s face. Like he had been caught red handed doing something that he wasn’t supposed to do. “I thought you were sleeping,” he said. “Did my other self wake up already?”

“No,” Marty said. He tried not to look at the TV screen, and yet his eyes were powerfully drawn to it. “Can you pause that or shut it off? I need to tell you something important.”

His tone made it clear that it was a serious matter. Doc reached for the remote on the seat next to him and stopped the video. The room filled with a blue glow from the TV screen. “What is it?” the scientist asked, giving the musician his full attention.

Marty wasn’t sure how to begin, so he just blurted it out. “I think we should go right now -- I’m starting to fall apart.”

The inventor’s mouth twitched at this solemn statement. Marty got the idea that he found the whole thing kind of funny. “How so?” he asked patiently. “Are you feeling ill?”

“I can’t sleep,” Marty said. “I mean, I caught an hour or two, but I just woke up on my own and I can’t go back to sleep. And I’m still dead tired, Doc. And, remember, last year when we were in that other reality, your other self said that insomnia was one of those early warning signs.”

“But we haven’t been stopped long enough for any of those effects to accumulate, Marty--”

“But maybe all bets are off if we’re going from one different reality to another! Maybe it only works when you’re traveling in time in one reality.”

Doc frowned, thoughtful. Marty wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad sign. “We should go, Doc,” he said again.

The scientist paused a moment, then said, “No.” Before the words could really sink in to Marty, he hastened to explain. “If that’s the case, then leaving won’t do a bit of good.”

“Yeah it will -- we’ll get home sooner. This place isn’t gonna do it, Doc. This guy’s a vet, not a scientist or inventor.... And didn’t you say he was in denial or something?”

“All of this may be true, Marty, but if you are having the beginning of the... effect, then there’s really nothing we can do about it. Yes, finding a solution to getting home would be about the only thing we can do but... I don’t think you should be panicking about this just yet.”

“No?” Marty asked. Doc’s calmness was bothering him more than if the scientist had decided to completely freak out. “What am I supposed to do, then, while my body turns against me?”

Doc sighed, the sound one of exhaustion. Marty guessed he hadn’t yet tried sleeping himself, not if he was engaged with those videotapes. “You’re probably suffering from nothing more deadly than overstimulation,” he said. “It’s been an unusual day, and I can imagine that it’s not very easy to relax. Try doing something that normally helps you sleep.”

Marty rolled his eyes at the advice. “Being at home would probably be the only thing to work,” he muttered. “Everything about this place is uncomfortable.”

The inventor shrugged. “Then try watching TV, or reading something. Unless you want to try alcohol or sedatives, none of which I’d really actively suggest. Those can have some long lasting side effects.”

The suggestions didn’t sit well with the fidgety musician. “Why don’t we just wake your other self here and go somewhere else?” he said. “You’re not trying to rest yourself, watching those movies.”

Another sigh from the inventor. “Marty....”

“We might as well move on if we’re not resting,” Marty pointed out as logically as he could.

This, above all, seemed to have some sway on the scientist. Doc shook his head, then got up and headed for the door. Marty followed him, unsure of what his friend’s destination or intent was. He went into one of the bathrooms, opening the medicine cabinet and rummaging around inside. The musician wondered if Doc was searching for something to give him in order to shut him up and put him out, but a moment later he pulled out not a pill bottle but a small cylinder, no bigger than lipstick. For a second, Marty thought it was lipstick, and that this world’s Emmett had some secret kind of life.

“What’s that?” he couldn’t stop from asking as Doc left the bathroom.

“Smelling salts,” the inventor answered wearily. He stopped suddenly and handed them to Marty. “If you want to go so badly now, you go ahead and wake him up. I need to collect the videos. And by all means, try to keep him calm.... We don’t want to scar him for life.”

Then why are we even sticking around to wake him up? Marty wondered.

From the Doc Died and Marty Found Him Reality -- This was cut out because I decided later on in the chapter that I wanted this Marty to be single as an example that he didn’t always end up with Jennifer/Suzy. I still like the dialogue conversation that follows.

Marty headed over to his friend’s side, curious in spite of everything. “Where do I live?” he asked. “Anywhere you recognize?”

Doc shook his head. “No -- but you are married to a Susan, again. Interesting how Jennifer’s name keeps coming up with that specific alternative.... Makes me wonder if there’s some sort of pull to having certain things happen in everyone’s life -- a weight to certain events or possible events that increases the likelihood, or lack thereof....”

The musician tuned out his friend’s musing as he took the phonebook pages from Doc’s hand and looked at the address of his local self. “2115 northwest Ivy Glenn,” he muttered under his breath. “I dunno where that is, either. Did you find a map?”

The inventor nodded as he started for the train, disguised as a big rig truck. “I’ve got one from the back of the book,” he said. “Do you suppose we should stop by my house, first?”

“Hell, yes. I doubt any version of me would be able to help us out. We’d be wasting our time -- and any curiosity I’ve got about what came of me all of these worlds is long, long gone.”

Doc turned to look at him as he was about to step back into the train. “Are you all right?” he asked. “You seem a little upset....”

“I’m fine,” Marty said, though he was unable to keep the edge from his voice. “I just wanna get back home before I’m completely out of synch with the times.”

The inventor swallowed that without further question. Since it was about half of the truth, Marty didn’t feel bad for not telling him the real deal. It was neither the time nor the place for any sort of confrontation about a matter that Doc likely felt was settled. Anyway, maybe later, whenever he got to sleep again without any dreams, he’d feel better....

It took a bit of circling around in the air before Doc got a vague idea as to the location of his current counterpart’s home. As he piloted the machine, Marty couldn’t help remembering Doc’s words of several minutes before, about how there were some strange consistent patterns emerging to some of the stuff they were running into.

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” he finally asked aloud.

“What do you mean by that?” Doc asked, the bulk of his attention directed out one of the windows, eyes cast down on the earth below.

“How some of the things we keep seeing don’t seem to change across these realities. You know. Like, you’re never married to anyone but Clara, if you’re married. And I’m always married to a Jennifer or Susan Parker....”

“I’m sure that there are some variations to those,” Doc said. “But I think it almost proves the idea about there being one person out there for you....”

In spite of his mood, Marty couldn’t help smiling a little. “I still remember when you thought the idea of love at first sight was full of shit,” he said. “So now you’re believing in soul mates, too?”

“If you’re asking me whether or not I believe that there is one person that is apparently destined to be with another person, I would have to say... I have no idea. It could very well depend on the individual. I can’t entertain the idea of ever being married to anyone other than Clara, and I suspect she feels the same way. But we’ve seen a lot of strange things already, so it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to find some deviation where she or I married other people -- and you, too, for that matter. We’ve probably simply scratched the surface of potential worlds out there....”

From the Plague Reality -- I thought it would be more dramatic if Doc collapsed before Marty, rather than having him already on the floor. Fortunately, I wasn’t committed to more than a paragraph of previous writing in this case, and it was easy to cut and paste some of it around. I think I was able to salvage almost all of this with a bit of rewriting.

Until he opened up the train’s door and found Doc lying on the floor of the cab, face down.

“Doc!” Marty cried, immediately horrified. His first thought was that the inventor had fallen victim to the mysterious local plague. His next, and far more realistic, idea was that he had given his friend a stroke or some horrible fatal attack from his bitching and complaining. Whatever it was, he suddenly forgot all about his problems and discomforts.

Marty leapt over the stairs into the cab and knelt down next to the inventor, his hand first going to Doc’s neck in search of a pulse. He found one, and it seemed strong. Marty then rolled the scientist onto his back, half fearing that he would find him foaming at the mouth with his eyes wide open or something terrible like that. Doc’s eyes were closed, though, and his face slack. He appeared to be simply asleep -- or unconscious. There was a faint bruise he could see near the arch of the inventor’s left eyebrow. It told Marty one of three things -- his friend had fallen and hit his head; his friend had hit his head and then fallen; or someone was still alive here and beaned him for some reason. The last one sounded really implausible, though, if nothing more than the idea of someone behind attacked and struck on the head from the front was kind of weird.

“Doc?” Marty called again, shaking him hard. That earned him no reaction whatsoever. The musician bit his lower lip, frustrated and scared. He had the horrible sensation that he was about to start crying, and if that happened, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop or calm down anytime soon. There was too much pressure in him that....