"The Future Ain't What It Used to Be"

Synopsis: Less than a week before his wedding to Jennifer, Marty comes down with a case of mono and panics. Since the illness doesn't have a fast cure, there's no way he can be rid of it before his wedding... can he? Doc, seeing his situation, decides to help him out and takes him to the year 2030, where a simple shot will make him better in a matter of hours. Unfortunately, a serious accident delays their trip home, and while they're in the future, they see that it ain't what it used to be....

Length: Approximately 62,000 words

Written: December 2000 - February 2001

Revised: February 2001

Author's Notes: The story came to me in the spring of 2000, when my Muse seemed to be psychotically busy with pumping out inspiration or something. Anyhoo, I was sitting with my roommates in a lecture hall during a weekend of one credit seminars that I was taking to make up for the fact my current classes were thin on credits (lousy, upper division journalism classes...) and noticing with a touch of amusement how half the 500 people there were sacked out in the hard as metal chairs, dozing their way through the lecture. (The seminars ran from 8 A.M. to about 5 P.M.) For some reason, this made me think of that dread disease that too many college students seem to get, mono, and then that somehow induced a picture of Marty with mono, and what if he got that at a real bad time? I can only try to explain the strange, random connections my brain makes; I don't expect anyone to understand my thought process. :-) For those thinking I torture poor Marty too much, you may notice that I turned the tables a bit on this story, and I think it worked better with the tale. People may find this little tidbit bizarre, and maybe it's just me, but when I see Jules, now 15, as a teenager, I just picture the guy who played Finch in American Pie. So great was the resemblance (I thought) to the kid who played Jules in BTTFIII that I was all but sure it was the same actor. (See for yourself.) It wasn't (this guy is named Eddie Kaye Thomas; Jules in BTTFIII was Todd Cameron Brown), but I still just picture Jules looking like that. FYI. Okay, read no further unless you want to be surprised by certain twists in the story. That's right, scroll to the bottom, go to the story, and save this for last, unless you want to have surprises spoiled.... Okay, you've been warned! I think some people might want to slaughter me over what I do to the DeLorean, but I felt it was time for a change.... And, hey, the replacement I think looks a lot like a DeLorean, to the point some of my friends pegged it as one before I corrected them. In fact, when I saw this car in person, at Walt Disney World's EPCOT, outside the "Test Track" attraction, I squealed with delight, thinking it was a DMC at first glance, too. I think Doc would make just this selection when confronted with autos of the Twenty-First Century. Marty and Jennifer's wedding date -- May 18, 1991 -- was selected as a homage to my parents, who were married on May 20, 1972. In 1991, May 20th was a Monday, so I went with the closest Saturday to it. What the heck. And since I'm nowhere near to being married, I needed to tie it with something as an in joke.... I had never had the dubious experiance of being in a car accident -- until, oddly enough, six days after I began this story. Two days before Christmas, I had been riding with one of my friends and her sister on a shopping expedition, and the sister's car's breaks went out. We smashed into the back of a black Toyota truck (no, the irony that the vehicle looked like Marty's did not escape me!) at thirty miles an hour, completely crumpled the front of the car... but the three of us were all right and unhurt. (The other guy's car got a crooked bumper, nothing worse.) We had also all been wearing seat belts, which I'm sure saved our necks; my stomach was still sore the next day from the force that the belt snapped me back with. It was a very weird little experiance, considering the timing of it. But we were very, very lucky. Minutes later we would've been on the freeway and I doubt that I'd be here writing this right now if we had crashed into something in that car at 60 miles an hour. I've also had the "fun" experience of being soaked by nasty sprinkler water from a fire. In November 2000 I got to call 911 at work when the restarant above our portion of the store had a grease fire, which triggered the sprinkler system, which then proceeded to flood the entire computer and electronic's section as we frantically tried to move and unplug things. I think we had about $20,000 damage from the water with merchandise alone, not counting the remodeling they had to do with replacing the carpet and the entire ceiling.... I've also almost had my house burn down when, in the middle of the night in July '99, we had a short in a wire, which power surged the surge protectors in my dad's office and actually melted the thing. The entire basement reeked of nasty plastic/electronic smell for a week, and my whole family was shaken up by the fact that our smoke detector down there never went off, although the entire basement had been filled with smoke when my mother had risen for work and noticed half our circuit breakers had been tripped. If the fire had melted more than just the plug strip, it would've been very, very bad. Unusually enough, I came up with two titles for this story -- "Looking to the Future" and the one above. I felt the final selection worked better with the story's events. This tale also marks my second forray into the future, and takes a decidedly different twist than "Future Shock." I wasn't quite sure where I was going to go with the story until I chatted one day with Mary Jean Holmes, who helped me see some possibilities I hadn't yet, and then everything came to me in a great, gushing rush. It also played havoc with my own brain, trying to keep some of this stuff logistically correct in my poor young'un head. For the first time since 1997, I got to write Marty at the same age where I am. Uh, sort of.... There is a surprise hidden at the end. Have fun finding it. ;-)

CHAPTERS 1 - 8 CHAPTERS 9 - 16