Categories > Movies > Back to the Future
Zombie Crush
0 ReviewsCan't resist the zombie crush!
ZOMBIE CRUSH
It had been almost a half hour since the last trick-or-treater and Marty was eyeing the bowl of bite sized Butterfingers with a growing proprietary interest.
No one would know he was to blame if there were no leftover candy. Dave was working late as usual, Linda had gone to a costume party with her current boyfriend, Mom volunteered to host the hospital children's ward trick-or-treating event, and Dad and some of his geeky sci-fi writer's group friends were running a haunted house based on "The Thing From Another World", complete with a mock-up Antarctic research station, fake dead malamute, an alien sealed in a block of ice and so on. He'd been talking about it all week, but Marty only half listened. Whatever.
So here he was, alone in the house, sort-of watching the local channel's "Mad Monster Mash Movie Marathon" but mostly concentrating on working out the chord progression for a new song. It wasn't the greatest flick anyways, something about a bunch of dumb kids getting bumped off one by one by a re-animated horror movie star whose corpse they had stolen. The gay kid had just been decapitated by the undead actor when the doorbell rang.
Marty tossed his Les Paul on the couch and hurried to the door. He'd been hoping Jennifer would show up, but things had been kind of weird with her since he'd gotten back, so he didn't hold out much hope for that. The little booger on the front porch was impatient, pressing the buzzer again and again.
He cracked the door open slowly so that it creaked, crawling his fingers around the doorframe like spider's legs as he chortled in his best sepulchral Vincent Price imitation, "Who dares enter my Chamber of Horrors . . . " He trailed off. "Oh, it's just you, Dad."
His father pushed past him into foyer, slamming the door and locking it behind him. Marty watched, slightly bemused. He'd thought Dad was playing the paleobotanist who cultivated carnivorous plants from alien seeds. George had borrowed a bloodstained white coat from the butcher and wore it around the house practicing his evil mad scientist laugh until the rest of the family threatened to gag him. But now he was dressed up exactly like a Victorian dandy in a pinstriped double-breasted frock coat and tight trousers, an elaborately brocaded waistcoat, and a bright blue cravat, his light blue lipstick and matching nail polish the only jarring elements.
Dad peered out the window as if expecting to see someone following him, then snapped off the porch light.
"Who are you supposed to be," Marty asked. "Someone from a previous expedition who froze to death or what?"
The man turned around, and Marty's confusion evaporated in a frisson of shock. This wasn't George.
The intruder did resemble his father to an alarming degree, although he only looked to be in his midtwenties. Marty would have realized it sooner, but he'd gotten used to thinking of George as a 17 year old, and even in the old 1985 he'd used dye, so the fact that this man wasn't gray haired didn't ring the mental bells as quickly as it should have. The nose was a slightly different shape, the jaw line heavier, the eyebrows too thick and the eyes themselves were brown, not blue, but ignoring those trivialities he could easily pass.
"So, you're the /heir presumptive/. Not terribly impressive, I have to say." The intruder grabbed a handful of Marty's hair and forced his head backwards. "You hardly look a thing like him. Must take after her, whoever she is."
"Th'hell you think you're doing?" Marty twisted free, leaving more than a few hairs clutched in the intruder's fist. "Who the fuck /are /you?"
He stumbled backwards into the kitchen area, grabbing for a steak knife or something to defend himself with.
"Ah, ah, ah," the intruder scolded. He reached behind his back and pulled out a gun, aiming it squarely at Marty's head.
The thing didn't look like a gun, not really. More like an oversized toy rocket ship with a grip stuck to the underside. The stubby oval main portion, bright red with chrome accents, was decorated with twin rows of blinking lights, one blue, one green. Little wedge shaped yellow fins jutted out from the top and sides. Paired nacelles housed clear globes inside which miniature bolts of pinkish-purple lightning danced. The muzzle end terminated in a pyramidal stack of glowing blue neon rings.
The intruder held it as if it could do some damage, though, and it was better to be safe than sorry. Marty flung his hands up and froze.
"To answer your question, I am a time traveler. The name is Jeoffry. You don't need to know my last name. It would be meaningless to you."
"Yeah, sure. A time traveler."
"Indeed. As are you."
Marty very slowly lowered his hands, watching Jeoffry warily. The guy gave off an almost palpable vibe of dangerous insanity. It wasn't just the make-up and the weird gun. He was whey faced, the whites of his eyes thickly mapped with broken veins and the sockets shadowed with bruises as if he hadn't slept in far too long. Up close it looked like he'd been wearing his finely tailored clothes for several days. They were rumpled, the collar stained and wilted, the cravat untucked, the tiny buttons on the brocaded vest fastened unevenly. Still, although his hand trembled slightly, the gun didn't waver from its bead on the center of Marty's forehead.
"So, when are you from, the 1880's?" Marty had the crazy idea that somehow, someone back then might have gotten hold of Doc's notes or found the spare DeLorean and figured out how to make it work.
"Feh." The intruder indicated his clothes with the gun. "I'm from your future. This is the style nowadays, retro-decadent. I rather like it. Flattering, wouldn't you say? You see, the country backlashed from societal repression in the early millennial years to . . . but I'm sure that doesn't interest a self absorbed little brat like yourself. I'm from 2010. What's more pertinent is that I was born in 1986, and conceived some time, well, right about now, as near as I can figure."
The gun suddenly snapped back up at his head, and Jeoffry's tone lowered to a threatening snarl. "That is, of course, if you haven't bollixed up the timelines beyond repair."
"Me?" The word came out as a mouse-squeak. Marty cleared his throat, forcing himself to sound casual. Somehow, his voice still managed to crack and slide an octave higher. "What did I do? I fixed things!"
A horrible expression of barely repressed rage shuddered over Jeoffry's too-familiar features. His finger tightened on the strange gun's trigger. "Oh, no," he drawled. "You didn't do anything wrong. You're the hero of the day."
"You don't know what it was like before." Marty said, suddenly defensive. "Okay, sure, I messed things up. I almost made it so Mom and Dad didn't meet."
Jeoffry stared at him intently now, as if he'd just noticed something remarkable about him. Marty had always liked brown eyes - he'd thought they looked warm and affectionate, puppy dog eyes. But Jeoffry's were cold and hard with an odd glittering within them, like candlelight shining through a beer bottle.
"Go on," he said, his voice soft. "Tell me everything you did."
Marty swallowed thickly, then began to pour out the whole story. As he did so, Jeoffry lowered the gun, although he did not re-holster it, and his expression seemed to change from fanatical lunacy to a calculating thoughtfulness. It was cathartic, in a way. Even Doc hadn't known the entire story . . .
"And when I got back here, everything had changed for the better. Dad was a writer like he always wanted to be, Mom's not an alcoholic anymore, and everything's just, you know, better."
"Better." Jeoffry let out a fortissimo sigh and rolled his eyes imploringly at the ceiling. "Do you know anything about Eigen values? Differential equations?"
"Is that like calculus?"
"No child left behind, eh? Hark now, I'll keep it simple. Dr. Brown had it wrong. The changes you deliberately and inadvertently made didn't cause a single time line to fork into different paths. Alternate universes have existed since the Big Bang, all running on parallel tracks, so to speak. In one track, George was my father. In another one, he was yours. Two mutually exclusive, simultaneously existing universes - until you doubled back on your own track and muddled events up so that he and your mother didn't meet, which is what happened in my track."
"But they did, eventually, or I wouldn't be here!"
"Tell me once more how you figured out that what you'd done had invalidated your own existence? The photograph, was it?"
"Yeah, the picture of me and my sister and brother. After I screwed things up in the first place, they started fading out."
Jeoffry laughed without humor. "Very cute. Well, did it ever occur to you that as they were fading out, another future was fading in? A future in which George and Lorraine did not marry each other but other people . . . had different families, with different offspring . . . and that as you wrenched events back into place to assure your birth, you were destroying the future of these other people?"
"No . . . "
"It's not that simple, of course," he said. "As I explained, normally alternate universes exist in parallel, never interacting. But when you fiddled with your track's events, you nudged it close enough to mine to tangle them up. So now we're both here, somehow."
Marty shook his head. That was a lot to assimilate. He'd barely been able to grasp what happened the first time. Not that he was stupid. He simply wasn't the sort of person who sat around and thought deeply about arcane matters. "Whoa. Heavy duty."
"Indeed. The events that allowed you to occur exist, and potentially so do the ones that will allow me to occur. Which isn't right," he continued. "You already exist here in 1985. As I mentioned, I myself am due to be conceived. My future is still possible, but it hangs in the balance. We're both possibilities. Competing possibilities."
"So what, are you gonna shoot me with your phaser or whatever that is?" He tried to make a joke out of it, but he could feel the tension in his shoulders as he shrugged, and he was sure his attempt at a smile looked more like a death's head grimace.
"It's a neural disruptor," Jeoffry said. "It emits a short range, high intensity, focused electro-magnetic pulse. My own design. This is the era of Star Wars, correct? I'm a little shaky on my mideighties history. Even back now, you fellows knew that a nuclear weapon detonated in the stratosphere could be more damaging than a direct bombing. The EMP would fry electronic gadgets and the fallout . . . but I'm getting off the subject. You're very distracting."
He shook his finger at Marty, a ridiculous, childish /naughty-naughty /gesture. "It's currently set to maximum strength on a narrow beam. Suffice it to say, one zap from this beauty would have the same effect on your thought processes that a blender has on a frog." He grinned wolfishly. "Of course, the seizures and violent hallucinations would only last for a few seconds. The recovery, if you did ever recover, would take years."
Suddenly, he sang in a weird falsetto, "He's got a brain scrambling device, you'll feel it in your head He's got a brain-scrambling device, power con-cen-trated He's got a brain scrambling device!".
"Oh . . . kay."
One thing was for certain. This Jeoffry guy was certifiable. If he'd been in this situation a few days ago, Marty would have known for sure he was a complete loony. Now, though, he might only be a fractional loony. The question was, was he a crazy time traveler with a toy gun, or a crazy time traveler with a real brain-scrambling device?
He weighed his odds at jumping Jeoffry and grabbing the neural disruptor. They didn't look great. Crazy Jeoffry might well be, but he was also highly alert and moved like greased quicksilver.
"So, ah . . . Jeoff. Do you have any proof?"
"Proof?"
"That you are who you say you are."
"I don't have to prove anything to you!"
"You don't have to, but it'd be polite. I just told you everything about me, y'know?"
"Very well, then. Proof." Jeoffry tapped the gun's muzzle against his teeth thoughtfully, then unsnapped what Marty had assumed was a watch hanging on a silver chain strung across his stomach. It was, in fact, a locket. Staying out of Marty's reach, Jeoffry held it up so he could see the pictures inside.
One was an unfamiliar woman, the other he recognized after a short moment of mystification as George, a very different George, scowling into the camera. He stood in front of a wintery landscape, surely nowhere near here, and wore a bomber jacket (an item of clothing which neither George that Marty was familiar with owned). This version had let his hair go naturally grey also, but had it in a long ponytail and sported a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke.
Marty leaned closer, squinting. The photograph could have been retouched, but it would have required a lot more skill and care than he would have attributed to the twitchy, impulsive impression he got of Jeoffry. "This looks kind of screwy. Is that a real photo?"
"I cut it out from a book jacket," he said brusquely, snapping the locket closed and almost taking off the tip of Marty's nose. "You want more proof that I'm not lying?"
He swiveled on his heel and aimed the gun at the TV. "This is your brain."
Jeoffry pulled the trigger. The neon rings flared, but the animated, visible laser beam Marty subconsciously expected didn't appear. The TV picture skewed wildly, then blanked out.
"Great. So that's the world's stupidest-looking remote control."
Almost as soon as Marty spoke, sparks flew out the back of the set, and a thin curl of blue smoke rose from the inner workings. The smell of fried electronics filled the room.
"And this is your brain on electromagnetic pulses," Jeoffry said with immense satisfaction. "Any questions?"
It was hard to sort out what to think, especially with that ridiculous but functional gun being waved around so casually in his face. Marty groped about for some common base, something to mellow Jeoffry out enough that he'd put that thing away.
"So, ah, you know Doc?"
"Everyone knows Dr. Brown." Jeoffry gestured with his free hand in a strange but evidently reverential gesture.
"He made it into the future okay, even without me?"
"Yes. October 26th, 2010. It's become a very big holiday. Before the fact, of course. You should have seen the party when he finally arrived."
"But what about the Libyans? I saw him get shot! If I hadn't warned him about them in the fifties he would've died."
Jeoffry frowned for a moment, thinking. "Oh yes, them. I suppose he was killed in your timeline because you existed and he had to hang around explaining things to you. I rather get the feeling that particular exercise in futility would have frittered away enough time to let the terrorists catch up to him. Of course we knew from historical documents how the situation stood, and the government sent back snipers to dispatch the Libyans. Dr. Brown is a national hero, our Einstein, or Edison, or Gates. We certainly couldn't allow a bunch of fanatics to gun him down now, could we?"
Marty was fascinated despite himself. Somehow, he'd never thought about the fact that, once discovered, time travel would inevitably become as common as the internal combustion engine. Trickle down technology.
"So, what, like there's a whole bunch of time travelers in the future? Are you in a kind of Time Squad or something?"
"I won't get into the specifics. Time travel is strictly government controlled, although, as I have said, we had to wait until he arrived to actually put the laws into effect. Let's just say that I was in a position to have access to the flux capacitor. This is personal, needless to say." Jeoffry rubbed his finger along the gun significantly. "Very personal. So, Marty, what do we do about this mess?"
"I don't know."
"Concentrate! You've been through this before. You said so yourself." Jeoffry poked him in the chest with the gun. "Think, man! You should have some idea."
"I can't think straight when you're threatening me!" Marty slapped the gun away. "You know, I didn't do anything to you on purpose! If you didn't come busting in here shooting up the TV and acting like a total nutcase, I might of wanted to help you. I mean, jeez, you're my brother after all."
He hadn't been planning anything when he said that, hadn't even thought about it. It just popped out.
The realization seemed to hit Jeoffry like a ball peen hammer between the eyes. He staggered back, going white as a sheet.
Marty decided to press the advantage. "Well, you are, aren't you? My brother?" Half brother, sure, he added to himself. Who doesn't even technically exist yet. But I'll keep that to myself.
Jeoffry wouldn't look directly at him. "I apologize."
Marty shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, not saying a word.
"You must understand, I've been under a great deal of stress." He took a deep breath, then pulled back the rear fin of the gun (a safety of some sort? It made a loud clicking noise) and set it carefully on the kitchen counter.
Jeoffry stared at him soberly, and for the first time something besides the desperation and near-insanity showed in his dark, vitreous eyes. "I want to live, Marty. I'll do anything, /anything/, to ensure my furthered existence. You should know what it is like, to find yourself staring into the abyss of oblivion. You, if no one else."
"Yeah. Kinda."
"It's all been slipping away from me," he said. "Little by little. I went into work that fateful morning and discovered I was no longer employed. At that point, I assumed I had been summarily dismissed, although I didn't know why. So I retired to a nearby cafe to settle my nerves with a cup of chamomile tea whilst I composed a very forceful letter to my former boss. But when I tried to pay with my credit card, the cashier informed me I did not register as having an account at my bank. I couldn't even log onto to my computer; the password didn't work. When I appealed to my friends for help, they did not recognize me, even the ones who had greeted me when I passed them earlier that day. The locks to my home had been changed, and someone else lived there. I became rather publicly frantic at this point, and the police were summoned. All my identification had gone blank by then, and who knows what would have happened if I hadn't escaped? My own parents . . . " he paused, gulped. "I was homeless, penniless, friendless. At least you had Dr. Brown to help you! I have nothing except the sure knowledge that my history had been changed, and soon I, too, would surely cease to exist."
"You never thought you might just be going crazy?"
Jeoffry glanced up at him sharply, then sighed again. "Of course. Do you know how many insane people have claimed that? And what is worse, that there is no sure way to tell they were not totally, absolutely sane and correct? I felt it could make no difference. Either I was insane and would soon be caught, or I could make the attempt to correct things. So perhaps you can understand why I felt this little schrecklichkeit was unavoidable. This is my only chance, and I had no idea how you would react."
"Hey, that's cool. Like I said, I don't have any beef with you as long as you promise not to scramble my brains. Peace?" He held out his hand.
Jeoffry eyed him, then extended his own hand, and they shook. "Copacetic."
"You know, Jeoff buddy, maybe we can figure this out together. I mean, I like how things are right now, but I don't wanna kill you just for it to be this way. Maybe there's a way we can both exist. What was different in your George's life?"
"What wasn't? Damn, I should have brought his autobiography. At the very least, I could have gotten an interesting autograph before I fade away." He let out a strange little laugh. "You said he never wrote anything in the first iteration of reality? And he's just published his first novel this year in yours? Well, to throw things into perspective, in my version of events he's a multi-Hugo award wining grandmaster, single handedly created one of the most popular science fiction television shows in history, had the first manned Mars exploration ship named after him, and published over one hundred novels and lord knows how many short stories before he died."
That took a moment to process. Somehow, Marty could only focus on the last word. "Dad's dead?"
"Yes. About five years ago. He wasn't even that old, really. It's a damn shame."
"Wow," Marty said quietly. "I'm sorry. I guess you really miss him, huh?"
"I wouldn't know," Jeoffry said. "He didn't raise me."
"He left your mom?" Marty was beginning to see how this could work. If Dad was cheating on Mom, as unpleasant as that was to contemplate . . . or worse . . . "Or did he, uh, force her?"
"Don't be ignorant. I'm not some botched abortion. I was /wanted/," Jeoffry said fiercely. "Very wanted, very well planned. I'm a test tube baby. A product of the Repository for Germinal Choice. They only accept genetic material from healthy men with genius-level intelligence who are proven high achievers. I've never even met George McFly."
Suddenly it all came clear, a feeling of relief like surfacing after being held underwater. "Great!"
"What's so great," he asked suspiciously, leveling the gun at him again.
"Don't /you /be ignorant. You don't need George to be your dad, you just need a, uh . . . a sperm sample. Right?"
"Give the little man a cigar," Jeoffry hollered, grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around a sort of crazy whirling dance step. "Maybe a few of George's genes didn't get totally suppressed after all!"
"Hah-hah." Marty squirmed out of his grip, and carefully nudged the gun so it was pointed away from his head. "Okay, so you're supposed to be the genius. What do we have to do to make sure Dad, you know, does the deed?"
"Not a clue." Jeoffry smoothed his vest, straightened his cravat, and brushed his bangs out of his face, suddenly all business. "He hasn't said anything to you about donating sperm, has he?"
Marty was striving to keep a straight face and compose and give Jeoffry an answer that wouldn't get him shot when he heard the click of a key in the front door lock.
Jeoffry's eyes widened in shock, then narrowed to black slits as he crouched and aimed at whoever was coming in.
"Stay out!" Marty screamed.
But the front door swung open and George came in, laughing as he shucked off his gory lab coat. "Yes, yes, beware the Chamber of Horrors. Oh, are there any Butterfingers left?"
He dug in the candy bowl and fished one out, unwrapping it and popping it in his mouth. He looked up, still chewing, and caught sight of Jeoffry. "Who's your fr - ?"
Marty tried to throw himself in front of Dad, but Jeoffry's trigger finger was too fast. The gun's neon tubes flickered, and George dropped as if he'd been pole-axed.
"Catch him," Jeoffry shouted.
Marty managed to grab him just before he hit the floor. One hundred and sixty five pounds of perfectly limp deadweight almost too much for him to lift, but Jeoffry wouldn't put the gun down to help him, so he dragged George over to the couch and wrestled him onto it. Jeoffry followed, keeping him covered.
As soon as George was safely stretched out on the couch, Marty turned on Jeoffry, grabbing him by the lapels. "What're you doing, you idiot? You killed him!"
He shook him off and said through gritted teeth, "Calm yourself. I dialed back the power, so he'll just be locked in his skull for an hour or so. Won't be able to respond logically to external stimuli, and when he wakes up, he'll have nothing worse than a slight headache and an indistinct recollection of some odd dreams."
Jeoffry knelt down beside the couch, tucked the gun under his arm, and started unbuttoning George's shirt. Marty knew vaguely that you were supposed to remove tight clothing from an unconscious person, but he couldn't think why you would also have to remove their belt, unzip their fly and start yanking their trousers down.
"Hey, hey, uh, Jeoff? What're you doing to Dad?"
He blinked, looking innocent and somewhat confused. "What does it look like I'm doing?"
"It looks like you're gonna . . . " The penny dropped in the slot. "Omigod, no! That's gross! Why can't we just explain things to him?"
"I can't chance it. Bootstrapping, Marty. I'm afraid there's no other alternative. I'll have to get that sample myself and deliver it to the lab."
Marty hopped in place, wringing his hands. "There's lots of alternatives, genius! You could, I dunno, leave pamphlets around the house, or something. Call him, pretend you're from the lab, and ask for a, um, donation. Trick him into it somehow?"
"What if he refused? Too risky, too risky. God, I can feel myself dissolving into probability!" That haunted, hunted look of his returned abruptly.
Marty struggled to get a grip. It wasn't that Jeoffry was some sort of sicko incestuous rapist. He was just trying to stay alive. Right? That was understandable. When it came down to the brass tacks, people would go to just about any disgusting lengths to survive. Like the Donner party. "I . . . okay. I understand, kind of. I had to do some things I'm not . . . not proud of, too. Just do what you have to do, do it quick, and then leave."
"I knew you'd understand."
Now that this had been settled, Jeoffry seemed to lighten up. He was actually whistling to himself as he rummaged around the McFly kitchen for something to transport the sample in.
Marty stared regretfully at his father, who still had a piece of candy stuck to his lips. The poor guy. He was at the center of a vast turbulent whirlpool of bizarre alternate universes and time travel tribulations, and he didn't have clue one. It was kind of too bad. He probably would have loved this, if he wasn't the fulcrum the universes hinged on. From that perspective, it would no doubt seem a lot less interesting.
"Ah, this should serve for a loving cup," Jeoffry said, emerging from the depths of the cabinet below the sink. Horrified, Marty recognized the thermos from the Groovie Ghoulies lunch box he'd had in 5th grade. Mom never threw anything away. There was one childhood memory irrevocably tarnished. He wonder how much bleach he'd need to pour over his brain after this sordid affair was concluded.
Jeoffry seemed in no great hurry to get it over with, instead making the most of his first opportunity to see his father close up. "I keep forgetting he'd be so young," he said. "Only in his late forties or so. Not at all bad looking either, is he? The satyr-whiskers didn't suit him at all. I like this much better."
"You look a lot like him," Marty offered.
"What's that, flattery?" Jeoffry eyed him with cold speculation, then picked up the gun. "Let's get down to business, shall we?"
"We?" Marty flung himself down in the reclining chair. "There is no 'we', dude. It's your life. I'm not getting involved."
"Moreso than you already are," he asked sardonically. "Why don't you go to your bedroom and listen to music, hmmm?"
And leave George to his tender mercies? Not likely. Marty crossed his arms and ground his chin into his collarbone, the illustration of stubbornness.
"Suit yourself." Jeoffry played with some recessed knobs on the gun, then set it on the coffee table upside down so that the fins acted as little legs. The blue neon tubes began brightening and dimming cyclically.
"No time for soupy seduction," he said, looking down at George, hands on hips, head tilted. "Sorry if this is a bit perfunctory, daddy dear, but my existence is at stake."
He knelt beside the couch again and pressed his mouth down on George's. Marty scrunched his eyes closed, and wished he had thought to get his Walkman. There was no way he could block out the sounds of Jeoffry's lips and tongue working on his father's flesh.
"Do you have to enjoy yourself so much," Marty asked, revolted.
"If it bothers you that much, petal, I'll nap-zap you. You can have a nice lie down while I 'do the deed', as you say."
"No thanks." The last thing he wanted was to be comatose while this creep was still in the room. No telling what Jeoffry would do to his unprotected body. Besides, once he was out cold Jeoffry might decide to scramble his brains with the neural disruptor set on high and be done with it.
"What do you care, anyways? He's not really your father, after all."
Marty slit one eye open. "Are you trying to be funny, or something? 'Cause if you are, you need to work on your act."
"Not a bit of it. That other man, that sad sack car salesman, he was your father. This fellow is - well, think of him as an identical twin. He's an amalgam of the blended timelines, partly your father and partly mine, but not really either. I'd have thought you'd have figured it out by now."
"Can you just get on with it, please?"
/Ok, /he tried to tell himself, /it's gross and weird, but only a little more gross and weird than what you did to Mom /(/or what Mom did to you, /a little mocking voice whispered in the back of his mind). At least all he had to do was sit here.
"Say, would you mind giving me a hand?"
Marty sat bolt upright. "WHAT?"
"Come over here and hold onto him," Jeoffry ordered. "He's awfully wriggly."
Marty skirted the couch, trying to look everywhere but down. Oh god, oh god. He could feel the image being burned ineradicably into his retina. Pitifully helpless George sprawled like a rag doll, Jeoffry looking mildly cross, his hands /there/.
He slid onto the couch underneath his father, supporting his upper body on his lap and pinioning his arms. George scowled in his sleep, fighting him weakly, then went limp and whimpered pathetically. Marty cringed.
"Can't you just crank the thing up?"
"It's bad enough the low intensity beam is affecting us, too," he argued. "I can't risk a higher setting or the next person home is going to find the three of us collapsed in a very interesting tableaux vivant."
He hadn't thought about that. Perfect. He could count on Linda not coming home til dawn, but Mom or Dave might walk in any time now. Only belatedly did he process exactly what Jeoffry had said.
"Wait, wait, that thing's scrambling my brains, too?"
"It's a low level setting." Jeoffry glanced up, absurdly positioned between George's legs. "I gave daddy here a short, higher intensity zap to knock him out, and the continued low intensity beam keeps him quiet. I have to set it on a wide spread so I don't need to stand there and hold the beam trained on him the entire time. Or I could hold it on him, and let you have the honors," he said, gesturing at George's crotch.
"No! Why don't you just narrow the beam and let me hold the gun?"
Jeoffry gave a him look that clearly communicated what he thought of that idea. "As I believe I explained, he won't remember anything because the EMP causes retrograde amnesia when - oh, never mind. Just trust me."
"Fine, whatever. But I don't like this."
"Suffer," he said shortly.
Marty tried not to think about the electro-magnetic pulses slithering through his brain, sneaking in among his neurons and twisting his thoughts in awful ways. He wished he could let go of Dad's arms and cover his ears, because the sounds Jeoffry was making conjured up vividly disturbing mental pictures. George writhed, grinding his bony shoulder blades painfully into Marty's lap, which was actually rather helpful. A boiling heaviness squirmed in his stomach, and he was horrified to feel the distinctive tingling, shivery anticipation that meant he was getting a hard on.
He closed his eyes and ducked his head, burying his face against George's comfortably solid shoulder. He tried to will it away, concentrating on everything else, the spiced, musky smell of his father's cologne, the bristle on the older man's jaw rasping against his cheek, the warmth and weight of him in his arms. It wasn't until he heard taunting laughter that he realized he was kissing Dad with just as much libidinous fervor as Jeoffry displayed.
Marty jerked back and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his arm. He couldn't get the taste of chocolate and toffee out of his mouth. "Omigod, what happened?"
Jeoffry laughed again. "Can't fight the Heinlein Effect."
"What?"
"Genetic Attraction Syndrome. The zombie crush. From that story/, All You Zombies . . ./" Jeoffry let out a very ungentlemanly snort of disbelief. "All these books he owns and you've never cracked one of them, have you? Dreadfully ignorant. George read that one in '59. He mentioned it in his autobiography, it was one of his favorite stories. How did /he /ever spawn /you? /Your mother must've contributed some really stupid dominant genes, Marty."
"Watch it!"
With exaggerated patience, Jeoffry asked, "Why do you think there have to be laws against incest?"
"So people don't marry their cousins and have two-headed babies. Duh."
"Read a book, smartass. Inbreeding increases the risk of doubling up on bad genes, but it also consolidates good genes. There have to be incest laws for the same reason there have to be laws against murdering, stealing, and raping. Because those are all natural human impulses. Maybe not very conducive to a peaceful society, but society is just what you call the training you give a bunch of really smart apes. We're still cavemen, Marty. We still have those impulses. And every caveman knows how to spread his genes around."
"That's sick."
"Sick? As in, immoral? Nature isn't moral." Jeoffry turned one hand palm-up, /oh well/. "So, if incest is a natural impulse, you can imagine how confused it gets once people start time traveling. It's almost impossible to resist seducing yourself. The ultimate narcissism, the zombie crush. And it's just as bad involving children and their parents, especially if mom and dad aren't geezers or infants when you meet them, but decidedly alluring adults."
Marty found he couldn't meet Jeoffry's frank, intense gaze. His own first kiss, real kiss, soul-deep kiss - was with his mother. Who at the time wasn't at all motherly. She was a young and very good looking girl, and aggressively interested in him, too. If he hadn't known she was his mother when they met, there was no telling what would have happened between them.
Jeoffry muttered something to himself and then chuckled, and a moment later the sounds started back up, loud, enthusiastic slurping, sucking and lip-smacking. Marty tightened his grip on Dad, who had begun to thrash about and breathe in strident gasps. It didn't sound like he was being tortured anymore. It sound like - oh god - Dad was enjoying himself, too.
He could feel his cheeks getting hot and swollen with a fierce blush. Everything was happening too fast, weirdness piling upon weirdness. His brain groaned under the weight of it. Some sort of freaky mass conversion event seemed imminent.
"All done." Jeoffry's voice hissed in his ear.
Marty jumped, startled. George rolled off his lap and slumped bonelessly to the floor in an undignified heap.
Jeoffry held up the thermos like someone admiring the body of a glass of fine wine. "Rather like Pandora's box, isn't it? All that's left in there is hope."
"Okay, you got what you came for. You can leave now."
"Just think. I hold myself in my hands. Right here. A self-made man if ever there was." he sounded slightly loopy, almost as if he were drunk, or stoned. The blue lipstick was smeared across his face, his perfectly groomed hair sticking up in tufts.
Marty doubled over and crossed his arms with studied casualness, hoping to disguise the bulge in his sweat-damp jeans. Why hadn't he worn underwear today? Stupid skin tight Jordasches. "You're amazing, yeah. Now will you please go?"
"Not going to escort me to the door? How rude." Jeoffry looked down at him and grinned slowly as Marty scrambled to cover his shame. "Awwwww, poor Marty," he crooned.
"Just go!"
"You can't even walk, can you, my little partner in crime? Poor, poor, poor Marty."
"It's that damn gun of yours," he snapped. Marty wished fervently he'd switch the damn thing OFF. He needed some privacy, like now, or he was gonna end up sterile. "I'll be fine. You go have a good life or whatever. Look me up in a quarter century."
"After you've been such a helpful sweetheart?" Jeoffry placed one hand on his chest as if pledging Allegiance, and declared, "On my honor as a gentleman, I'll not have my reputation besmirched by leaving you in such dire straits."
He hunkered down and stretched one eager hand towards Marty's aching groin. Marty tried to fend him off and cover himself at the same time, but every little movement hurt. He shoved Jeoffry, but the other man toppled forward, knocking Marty over and trapping him under his weight. He kicked and punched as hard as he could, but Jeoffry jabbed his elbows into his chest, then, when Marty paused to gasp for breath, thrust his hand down the front of his jeans.
Marty practically bit through his tongue.
"Feel good?" Jeoffry breathed, slipping his hand further in.
"Screw you," Marty gasped. "My balls are so blue it'd feel good getting groped by Sasquatch."
"Well," he sniffed. "I'd like to think I'm slightly preferable to an abominable ape-man, little mister." As he said this, his slim, cool fingers found Marty's hot, desperate flesh.
Whatever his brain was preaching in protest was drowned out by what his crotch was screaming. The sensation was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking as it shot up his spine and hit his brain like an electric shock. But it was peaceful, too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than hate. Jeoffry was doing things to him now, horrible, wonderful things. Things he thought about but was too hesitant to try on himself, things he'd wished Jennifer would do but had been too embarrassed to ask her for.
Warm waves of passion lapped over him, dragging him under, a sweet suffocation. That was supposed to be the kindest kind of death, he'd heard, a slow, seductive sinking into oblivion.
He came, groans stuttering and breathless. "God, god, god, god!"
"No, just me, but thanks." Jeoffry kissed him, the pervert, and now he was unbuttoning his own trousers. The inside of Marty's skull was a dial tone, and for some reason he didn't even care anymore. So Jeoffry was using him as a right hand. Whatever. As long as he left and never returned, right?
But Jeoffry didn't just start humping him like a horny poodle. He ardently nibbled Marty's ear, running his hands through his hair, acting tender and affectionate and all sorts of things Marty wouldn't have thought the arrogant, gun-wielding hyper loony was capable of. He forced his streaming eyes open. Jeoffry looked so happy, damn it.
Okay, it was ten different kinds of wrong and sick, but hell - it felt pretty good. And it wasn't like Marty was suddenly going to go skipping around in ruffled lavender shirts, mincing and lisping, interior decorating, sipping tiki drinks and walking a shih tzu. He'd never be able to ask another guy to do something like this. This would be the only time, ever . . . and soon enough Jeoffry would be out of his life forever. The thought actually made him a little sad.
Honestly, it was no weirder or sicker than being frenched by his own Mom. And that felt more than good, it had been great. She knew what she was doing, Lorraine did, and she wasn't just kissing him so hard he'd almost gagged on her tongue, she'd stuck her hand down the front of his pants and started massaging him before she broke their kiss. Every time he'd accidentally thought about that part, his mind had skipped away as if the very thought would have brought a lightning bolt down on him.
So it felt good. No big deal. Not his fault. It was just that he was wired this way, and it didn't matter who was pulling the switches, he would light up no matter what. Not his fault at all. After all, he could just blame it on the brain-scrambling device. Marty could almost imagine he felt the electromagnetic pulses thrumming in his head, urging him on, vibrating throughout his body. It seized him, made him want to move like some irresistible beat.
"You're lucky that thing's scrambling my brain, buddy," he muttered, as Jeoffry shuddered against him.
He lay there panting, then swept his hair out of his face and smiled evilly. "It's not on."
Marty sat up abruptly. The gun lay on the floor, the lights dim, one of the plastic fins cracked off. At some point they must have kicked it off the table. All that - all that wicked, shocking, fantastic perversion - it was all him. Marty groaned and curled up in the smallest ball he could, pulling his ripped shirt over his face.
"Don't feel too dreadfully wicked," Jeoffry murmured, solicitously stroking his back.
"This isn't me." He licked his lips. The syrupy candy flavor of George's mouth still lingered.
"Who are you, really? You're a flowing mosaic of different personas. You adjust yourself for each person you interact with, for each situation you're in. You're a different person at school, around your parents, in the band, by yourself . . . this is only wrong if you believe in a single self."
"But I am a single self. Except . . . " Marty thought about the person he'd watch jump into the time machine when he'd returned. Who was he?
Jeoffry waved one blue-nailed hand languidly, encompassing their shaking, sweaty, entangled bodies, the room, the world. "We are - reality is - Confucian, not Aristotelian. We are not this or that, black or white, positive or negative. There is no you in isolation. You're the sum totality of roles you live in relation to specific others. When one role changes, it rearranges the others, so the you of a moment ago becomes a subtly different you."
"So who are /you/," he challenged.
"I - I don't know." He frowned, taken aback. "I hate to admit it, but I'm not the same person who came in the door earlier. He had a different past. A past without you in it."
"That's a good thing, right?"
Jeoffry stroked his hair. "The thought of changing even slightly would have disgusted and terrified me before, but I'm another person now."
"You're still a sick bastard, if that helps," he said, holding his hand like a gun and miming a shot at Jeoffry's forehead.
He grinned, raising his hands as Marty had earlier. "Well, I'm still me, after all. The same solution from a different equation."
The doorbell rang. Both young men froze.
"Trick or treat?" A chorus of high-pitched voices sang out.
"Both," Marty muttered. They laughed, stifling it until the trick-or-treaters gave up and left.
Still, it was a reminder that even for time travelers, time was short. Jeoffry got dressed and fussed over the brain-scrambling gun, tweaking the dials and shaking it until the lights came back on, while Marty heaved George back onto the couch and tried to arrange him comfortably. Hopefully he'd remember nothing, or at the most, write it off as a particularly disturbing dream.
"I'm afraid this is /adieu/," Jeoffry said at last, when it became obvious there were no more delaying tactics. He cradled the thermos. "Parting is such something-something, but I have to introduce the boys to a lovely young ova and, you know, make sure I end up existing."
"Yeah. So, Any last words of wisdom from the future?"
"You know very well that Dr. Brown wouldn't approve." He stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Tell George when he wakes up that if he insists on publishing The Dragons of Syphilis he should at least consider changing the title."
"Will do." Marty hesitated. "Um, one more thing?"
"Of course, my dear brother." He said the last without a hint of irony or sarcasm.
"Can you zap me too, like you did him? If I can't ever see you again, I'm not sure if I want to remember . . . you know."
"Oh, dear. Well, the retrograde amnesia only covers events about 5 minutes up to the EMP blast. If I do zap you, as you so quaintly put it, there is a chance you'll just assume the entire evening was part of a long, continuous fever dream. Of course, there is also the possibility you'll remember everything, and dat ol' zombie crush will make you long for me unattainably for the rest of your life until you go quite, quite, quite mad."
Jeoffry pulled him into a last, forceful kiss - as it broke, Marty felt the cool tip of the EMP gun's barrel pressed against his temple.
"Brother, I wouldn't have it any other way."
end
author's notes: The "brain-scrambling" song is actually a pronoun shifted "She's Got a Brain-Scrambling Device" by the Groovie Ghoulies. EMPs do, in fact, damage the brain, but there's no such thing as a brain-scrambling gun. The Repository for Germinal Choice (the genius sperm bank) is real. The movie Marty's watching is "Frightmare". Everything else is made up.
It had been almost a half hour since the last trick-or-treater and Marty was eyeing the bowl of bite sized Butterfingers with a growing proprietary interest.
No one would know he was to blame if there were no leftover candy. Dave was working late as usual, Linda had gone to a costume party with her current boyfriend, Mom volunteered to host the hospital children's ward trick-or-treating event, and Dad and some of his geeky sci-fi writer's group friends were running a haunted house based on "The Thing From Another World", complete with a mock-up Antarctic research station, fake dead malamute, an alien sealed in a block of ice and so on. He'd been talking about it all week, but Marty only half listened. Whatever.
So here he was, alone in the house, sort-of watching the local channel's "Mad Monster Mash Movie Marathon" but mostly concentrating on working out the chord progression for a new song. It wasn't the greatest flick anyways, something about a bunch of dumb kids getting bumped off one by one by a re-animated horror movie star whose corpse they had stolen. The gay kid had just been decapitated by the undead actor when the doorbell rang.
Marty tossed his Les Paul on the couch and hurried to the door. He'd been hoping Jennifer would show up, but things had been kind of weird with her since he'd gotten back, so he didn't hold out much hope for that. The little booger on the front porch was impatient, pressing the buzzer again and again.
He cracked the door open slowly so that it creaked, crawling his fingers around the doorframe like spider's legs as he chortled in his best sepulchral Vincent Price imitation, "Who dares enter my Chamber of Horrors . . . " He trailed off. "Oh, it's just you, Dad."
His father pushed past him into foyer, slamming the door and locking it behind him. Marty watched, slightly bemused. He'd thought Dad was playing the paleobotanist who cultivated carnivorous plants from alien seeds. George had borrowed a bloodstained white coat from the butcher and wore it around the house practicing his evil mad scientist laugh until the rest of the family threatened to gag him. But now he was dressed up exactly like a Victorian dandy in a pinstriped double-breasted frock coat and tight trousers, an elaborately brocaded waistcoat, and a bright blue cravat, his light blue lipstick and matching nail polish the only jarring elements.
Dad peered out the window as if expecting to see someone following him, then snapped off the porch light.
"Who are you supposed to be," Marty asked. "Someone from a previous expedition who froze to death or what?"
The man turned around, and Marty's confusion evaporated in a frisson of shock. This wasn't George.
The intruder did resemble his father to an alarming degree, although he only looked to be in his midtwenties. Marty would have realized it sooner, but he'd gotten used to thinking of George as a 17 year old, and even in the old 1985 he'd used dye, so the fact that this man wasn't gray haired didn't ring the mental bells as quickly as it should have. The nose was a slightly different shape, the jaw line heavier, the eyebrows too thick and the eyes themselves were brown, not blue, but ignoring those trivialities he could easily pass.
"So, you're the /heir presumptive/. Not terribly impressive, I have to say." The intruder grabbed a handful of Marty's hair and forced his head backwards. "You hardly look a thing like him. Must take after her, whoever she is."
"Th'hell you think you're doing?" Marty twisted free, leaving more than a few hairs clutched in the intruder's fist. "Who the fuck /are /you?"
He stumbled backwards into the kitchen area, grabbing for a steak knife or something to defend himself with.
"Ah, ah, ah," the intruder scolded. He reached behind his back and pulled out a gun, aiming it squarely at Marty's head.
The thing didn't look like a gun, not really. More like an oversized toy rocket ship with a grip stuck to the underside. The stubby oval main portion, bright red with chrome accents, was decorated with twin rows of blinking lights, one blue, one green. Little wedge shaped yellow fins jutted out from the top and sides. Paired nacelles housed clear globes inside which miniature bolts of pinkish-purple lightning danced. The muzzle end terminated in a pyramidal stack of glowing blue neon rings.
The intruder held it as if it could do some damage, though, and it was better to be safe than sorry. Marty flung his hands up and froze.
"To answer your question, I am a time traveler. The name is Jeoffry. You don't need to know my last name. It would be meaningless to you."
"Yeah, sure. A time traveler."
"Indeed. As are you."
Marty very slowly lowered his hands, watching Jeoffry warily. The guy gave off an almost palpable vibe of dangerous insanity. It wasn't just the make-up and the weird gun. He was whey faced, the whites of his eyes thickly mapped with broken veins and the sockets shadowed with bruises as if he hadn't slept in far too long. Up close it looked like he'd been wearing his finely tailored clothes for several days. They were rumpled, the collar stained and wilted, the cravat untucked, the tiny buttons on the brocaded vest fastened unevenly. Still, although his hand trembled slightly, the gun didn't waver from its bead on the center of Marty's forehead.
"So, when are you from, the 1880's?" Marty had the crazy idea that somehow, someone back then might have gotten hold of Doc's notes or found the spare DeLorean and figured out how to make it work.
"Feh." The intruder indicated his clothes with the gun. "I'm from your future. This is the style nowadays, retro-decadent. I rather like it. Flattering, wouldn't you say? You see, the country backlashed from societal repression in the early millennial years to . . . but I'm sure that doesn't interest a self absorbed little brat like yourself. I'm from 2010. What's more pertinent is that I was born in 1986, and conceived some time, well, right about now, as near as I can figure."
The gun suddenly snapped back up at his head, and Jeoffry's tone lowered to a threatening snarl. "That is, of course, if you haven't bollixed up the timelines beyond repair."
"Me?" The word came out as a mouse-squeak. Marty cleared his throat, forcing himself to sound casual. Somehow, his voice still managed to crack and slide an octave higher. "What did I do? I fixed things!"
A horrible expression of barely repressed rage shuddered over Jeoffry's too-familiar features. His finger tightened on the strange gun's trigger. "Oh, no," he drawled. "You didn't do anything wrong. You're the hero of the day."
"You don't know what it was like before." Marty said, suddenly defensive. "Okay, sure, I messed things up. I almost made it so Mom and Dad didn't meet."
Jeoffry stared at him intently now, as if he'd just noticed something remarkable about him. Marty had always liked brown eyes - he'd thought they looked warm and affectionate, puppy dog eyes. But Jeoffry's were cold and hard with an odd glittering within them, like candlelight shining through a beer bottle.
"Go on," he said, his voice soft. "Tell me everything you did."
Marty swallowed thickly, then began to pour out the whole story. As he did so, Jeoffry lowered the gun, although he did not re-holster it, and his expression seemed to change from fanatical lunacy to a calculating thoughtfulness. It was cathartic, in a way. Even Doc hadn't known the entire story . . .
"And when I got back here, everything had changed for the better. Dad was a writer like he always wanted to be, Mom's not an alcoholic anymore, and everything's just, you know, better."
"Better." Jeoffry let out a fortissimo sigh and rolled his eyes imploringly at the ceiling. "Do you know anything about Eigen values? Differential equations?"
"Is that like calculus?"
"No child left behind, eh? Hark now, I'll keep it simple. Dr. Brown had it wrong. The changes you deliberately and inadvertently made didn't cause a single time line to fork into different paths. Alternate universes have existed since the Big Bang, all running on parallel tracks, so to speak. In one track, George was my father. In another one, he was yours. Two mutually exclusive, simultaneously existing universes - until you doubled back on your own track and muddled events up so that he and your mother didn't meet, which is what happened in my track."
"But they did, eventually, or I wouldn't be here!"
"Tell me once more how you figured out that what you'd done had invalidated your own existence? The photograph, was it?"
"Yeah, the picture of me and my sister and brother. After I screwed things up in the first place, they started fading out."
Jeoffry laughed without humor. "Very cute. Well, did it ever occur to you that as they were fading out, another future was fading in? A future in which George and Lorraine did not marry each other but other people . . . had different families, with different offspring . . . and that as you wrenched events back into place to assure your birth, you were destroying the future of these other people?"
"No . . . "
"It's not that simple, of course," he said. "As I explained, normally alternate universes exist in parallel, never interacting. But when you fiddled with your track's events, you nudged it close enough to mine to tangle them up. So now we're both here, somehow."
Marty shook his head. That was a lot to assimilate. He'd barely been able to grasp what happened the first time. Not that he was stupid. He simply wasn't the sort of person who sat around and thought deeply about arcane matters. "Whoa. Heavy duty."
"Indeed. The events that allowed you to occur exist, and potentially so do the ones that will allow me to occur. Which isn't right," he continued. "You already exist here in 1985. As I mentioned, I myself am due to be conceived. My future is still possible, but it hangs in the balance. We're both possibilities. Competing possibilities."
"So what, are you gonna shoot me with your phaser or whatever that is?" He tried to make a joke out of it, but he could feel the tension in his shoulders as he shrugged, and he was sure his attempt at a smile looked more like a death's head grimace.
"It's a neural disruptor," Jeoffry said. "It emits a short range, high intensity, focused electro-magnetic pulse. My own design. This is the era of Star Wars, correct? I'm a little shaky on my mideighties history. Even back now, you fellows knew that a nuclear weapon detonated in the stratosphere could be more damaging than a direct bombing. The EMP would fry electronic gadgets and the fallout . . . but I'm getting off the subject. You're very distracting."
He shook his finger at Marty, a ridiculous, childish /naughty-naughty /gesture. "It's currently set to maximum strength on a narrow beam. Suffice it to say, one zap from this beauty would have the same effect on your thought processes that a blender has on a frog." He grinned wolfishly. "Of course, the seizures and violent hallucinations would only last for a few seconds. The recovery, if you did ever recover, would take years."
Suddenly, he sang in a weird falsetto, "He's got a brain scrambling device, you'll feel it in your head He's got a brain-scrambling device, power con-cen-trated He's got a brain scrambling device!".
"Oh . . . kay."
One thing was for certain. This Jeoffry guy was certifiable. If he'd been in this situation a few days ago, Marty would have known for sure he was a complete loony. Now, though, he might only be a fractional loony. The question was, was he a crazy time traveler with a toy gun, or a crazy time traveler with a real brain-scrambling device?
He weighed his odds at jumping Jeoffry and grabbing the neural disruptor. They didn't look great. Crazy Jeoffry might well be, but he was also highly alert and moved like greased quicksilver.
"So, ah . . . Jeoff. Do you have any proof?"
"Proof?"
"That you are who you say you are."
"I don't have to prove anything to you!"
"You don't have to, but it'd be polite. I just told you everything about me, y'know?"
"Very well, then. Proof." Jeoffry tapped the gun's muzzle against his teeth thoughtfully, then unsnapped what Marty had assumed was a watch hanging on a silver chain strung across his stomach. It was, in fact, a locket. Staying out of Marty's reach, Jeoffry held it up so he could see the pictures inside.
One was an unfamiliar woman, the other he recognized after a short moment of mystification as George, a very different George, scowling into the camera. He stood in front of a wintery landscape, surely nowhere near here, and wore a bomber jacket (an item of clothing which neither George that Marty was familiar with owned). This version had let his hair go naturally grey also, but had it in a long ponytail and sported a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke.
Marty leaned closer, squinting. The photograph could have been retouched, but it would have required a lot more skill and care than he would have attributed to the twitchy, impulsive impression he got of Jeoffry. "This looks kind of screwy. Is that a real photo?"
"I cut it out from a book jacket," he said brusquely, snapping the locket closed and almost taking off the tip of Marty's nose. "You want more proof that I'm not lying?"
He swiveled on his heel and aimed the gun at the TV. "This is your brain."
Jeoffry pulled the trigger. The neon rings flared, but the animated, visible laser beam Marty subconsciously expected didn't appear. The TV picture skewed wildly, then blanked out.
"Great. So that's the world's stupidest-looking remote control."
Almost as soon as Marty spoke, sparks flew out the back of the set, and a thin curl of blue smoke rose from the inner workings. The smell of fried electronics filled the room.
"And this is your brain on electromagnetic pulses," Jeoffry said with immense satisfaction. "Any questions?"
It was hard to sort out what to think, especially with that ridiculous but functional gun being waved around so casually in his face. Marty groped about for some common base, something to mellow Jeoffry out enough that he'd put that thing away.
"So, ah, you know Doc?"
"Everyone knows Dr. Brown." Jeoffry gestured with his free hand in a strange but evidently reverential gesture.
"He made it into the future okay, even without me?"
"Yes. October 26th, 2010. It's become a very big holiday. Before the fact, of course. You should have seen the party when he finally arrived."
"But what about the Libyans? I saw him get shot! If I hadn't warned him about them in the fifties he would've died."
Jeoffry frowned for a moment, thinking. "Oh yes, them. I suppose he was killed in your timeline because you existed and he had to hang around explaining things to you. I rather get the feeling that particular exercise in futility would have frittered away enough time to let the terrorists catch up to him. Of course we knew from historical documents how the situation stood, and the government sent back snipers to dispatch the Libyans. Dr. Brown is a national hero, our Einstein, or Edison, or Gates. We certainly couldn't allow a bunch of fanatics to gun him down now, could we?"
Marty was fascinated despite himself. Somehow, he'd never thought about the fact that, once discovered, time travel would inevitably become as common as the internal combustion engine. Trickle down technology.
"So, what, like there's a whole bunch of time travelers in the future? Are you in a kind of Time Squad or something?"
"I won't get into the specifics. Time travel is strictly government controlled, although, as I have said, we had to wait until he arrived to actually put the laws into effect. Let's just say that I was in a position to have access to the flux capacitor. This is personal, needless to say." Jeoffry rubbed his finger along the gun significantly. "Very personal. So, Marty, what do we do about this mess?"
"I don't know."
"Concentrate! You've been through this before. You said so yourself." Jeoffry poked him in the chest with the gun. "Think, man! You should have some idea."
"I can't think straight when you're threatening me!" Marty slapped the gun away. "You know, I didn't do anything to you on purpose! If you didn't come busting in here shooting up the TV and acting like a total nutcase, I might of wanted to help you. I mean, jeez, you're my brother after all."
He hadn't been planning anything when he said that, hadn't even thought about it. It just popped out.
The realization seemed to hit Jeoffry like a ball peen hammer between the eyes. He staggered back, going white as a sheet.
Marty decided to press the advantage. "Well, you are, aren't you? My brother?" Half brother, sure, he added to himself. Who doesn't even technically exist yet. But I'll keep that to myself.
Jeoffry wouldn't look directly at him. "I apologize."
Marty shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, not saying a word.
"You must understand, I've been under a great deal of stress." He took a deep breath, then pulled back the rear fin of the gun (a safety of some sort? It made a loud clicking noise) and set it carefully on the kitchen counter.
Jeoffry stared at him soberly, and for the first time something besides the desperation and near-insanity showed in his dark, vitreous eyes. "I want to live, Marty. I'll do anything, /anything/, to ensure my furthered existence. You should know what it is like, to find yourself staring into the abyss of oblivion. You, if no one else."
"Yeah. Kinda."
"It's all been slipping away from me," he said. "Little by little. I went into work that fateful morning and discovered I was no longer employed. At that point, I assumed I had been summarily dismissed, although I didn't know why. So I retired to a nearby cafe to settle my nerves with a cup of chamomile tea whilst I composed a very forceful letter to my former boss. But when I tried to pay with my credit card, the cashier informed me I did not register as having an account at my bank. I couldn't even log onto to my computer; the password didn't work. When I appealed to my friends for help, they did not recognize me, even the ones who had greeted me when I passed them earlier that day. The locks to my home had been changed, and someone else lived there. I became rather publicly frantic at this point, and the police were summoned. All my identification had gone blank by then, and who knows what would have happened if I hadn't escaped? My own parents . . . " he paused, gulped. "I was homeless, penniless, friendless. At least you had Dr. Brown to help you! I have nothing except the sure knowledge that my history had been changed, and soon I, too, would surely cease to exist."
"You never thought you might just be going crazy?"
Jeoffry glanced up at him sharply, then sighed again. "Of course. Do you know how many insane people have claimed that? And what is worse, that there is no sure way to tell they were not totally, absolutely sane and correct? I felt it could make no difference. Either I was insane and would soon be caught, or I could make the attempt to correct things. So perhaps you can understand why I felt this little schrecklichkeit was unavoidable. This is my only chance, and I had no idea how you would react."
"Hey, that's cool. Like I said, I don't have any beef with you as long as you promise not to scramble my brains. Peace?" He held out his hand.
Jeoffry eyed him, then extended his own hand, and they shook. "Copacetic."
"You know, Jeoff buddy, maybe we can figure this out together. I mean, I like how things are right now, but I don't wanna kill you just for it to be this way. Maybe there's a way we can both exist. What was different in your George's life?"
"What wasn't? Damn, I should have brought his autobiography. At the very least, I could have gotten an interesting autograph before I fade away." He let out a strange little laugh. "You said he never wrote anything in the first iteration of reality? And he's just published his first novel this year in yours? Well, to throw things into perspective, in my version of events he's a multi-Hugo award wining grandmaster, single handedly created one of the most popular science fiction television shows in history, had the first manned Mars exploration ship named after him, and published over one hundred novels and lord knows how many short stories before he died."
That took a moment to process. Somehow, Marty could only focus on the last word. "Dad's dead?"
"Yes. About five years ago. He wasn't even that old, really. It's a damn shame."
"Wow," Marty said quietly. "I'm sorry. I guess you really miss him, huh?"
"I wouldn't know," Jeoffry said. "He didn't raise me."
"He left your mom?" Marty was beginning to see how this could work. If Dad was cheating on Mom, as unpleasant as that was to contemplate . . . or worse . . . "Or did he, uh, force her?"
"Don't be ignorant. I'm not some botched abortion. I was /wanted/," Jeoffry said fiercely. "Very wanted, very well planned. I'm a test tube baby. A product of the Repository for Germinal Choice. They only accept genetic material from healthy men with genius-level intelligence who are proven high achievers. I've never even met George McFly."
Suddenly it all came clear, a feeling of relief like surfacing after being held underwater. "Great!"
"What's so great," he asked suspiciously, leveling the gun at him again.
"Don't /you /be ignorant. You don't need George to be your dad, you just need a, uh . . . a sperm sample. Right?"
"Give the little man a cigar," Jeoffry hollered, grabbed him by the shoulders and spun him around a sort of crazy whirling dance step. "Maybe a few of George's genes didn't get totally suppressed after all!"
"Hah-hah." Marty squirmed out of his grip, and carefully nudged the gun so it was pointed away from his head. "Okay, so you're supposed to be the genius. What do we have to do to make sure Dad, you know, does the deed?"
"Not a clue." Jeoffry smoothed his vest, straightened his cravat, and brushed his bangs out of his face, suddenly all business. "He hasn't said anything to you about donating sperm, has he?"
Marty was striving to keep a straight face and compose and give Jeoffry an answer that wouldn't get him shot when he heard the click of a key in the front door lock.
Jeoffry's eyes widened in shock, then narrowed to black slits as he crouched and aimed at whoever was coming in.
"Stay out!" Marty screamed.
But the front door swung open and George came in, laughing as he shucked off his gory lab coat. "Yes, yes, beware the Chamber of Horrors. Oh, are there any Butterfingers left?"
He dug in the candy bowl and fished one out, unwrapping it and popping it in his mouth. He looked up, still chewing, and caught sight of Jeoffry. "Who's your fr - ?"
Marty tried to throw himself in front of Dad, but Jeoffry's trigger finger was too fast. The gun's neon tubes flickered, and George dropped as if he'd been pole-axed.
"Catch him," Jeoffry shouted.
Marty managed to grab him just before he hit the floor. One hundred and sixty five pounds of perfectly limp deadweight almost too much for him to lift, but Jeoffry wouldn't put the gun down to help him, so he dragged George over to the couch and wrestled him onto it. Jeoffry followed, keeping him covered.
As soon as George was safely stretched out on the couch, Marty turned on Jeoffry, grabbing him by the lapels. "What're you doing, you idiot? You killed him!"
He shook him off and said through gritted teeth, "Calm yourself. I dialed back the power, so he'll just be locked in his skull for an hour or so. Won't be able to respond logically to external stimuli, and when he wakes up, he'll have nothing worse than a slight headache and an indistinct recollection of some odd dreams."
Jeoffry knelt down beside the couch, tucked the gun under his arm, and started unbuttoning George's shirt. Marty knew vaguely that you were supposed to remove tight clothing from an unconscious person, but he couldn't think why you would also have to remove their belt, unzip their fly and start yanking their trousers down.
"Hey, hey, uh, Jeoff? What're you doing to Dad?"
He blinked, looking innocent and somewhat confused. "What does it look like I'm doing?"
"It looks like you're gonna . . . " The penny dropped in the slot. "Omigod, no! That's gross! Why can't we just explain things to him?"
"I can't chance it. Bootstrapping, Marty. I'm afraid there's no other alternative. I'll have to get that sample myself and deliver it to the lab."
Marty hopped in place, wringing his hands. "There's lots of alternatives, genius! You could, I dunno, leave pamphlets around the house, or something. Call him, pretend you're from the lab, and ask for a, um, donation. Trick him into it somehow?"
"What if he refused? Too risky, too risky. God, I can feel myself dissolving into probability!" That haunted, hunted look of his returned abruptly.
Marty struggled to get a grip. It wasn't that Jeoffry was some sort of sicko incestuous rapist. He was just trying to stay alive. Right? That was understandable. When it came down to the brass tacks, people would go to just about any disgusting lengths to survive. Like the Donner party. "I . . . okay. I understand, kind of. I had to do some things I'm not . . . not proud of, too. Just do what you have to do, do it quick, and then leave."
"I knew you'd understand."
Now that this had been settled, Jeoffry seemed to lighten up. He was actually whistling to himself as he rummaged around the McFly kitchen for something to transport the sample in.
Marty stared regretfully at his father, who still had a piece of candy stuck to his lips. The poor guy. He was at the center of a vast turbulent whirlpool of bizarre alternate universes and time travel tribulations, and he didn't have clue one. It was kind of too bad. He probably would have loved this, if he wasn't the fulcrum the universes hinged on. From that perspective, it would no doubt seem a lot less interesting.
"Ah, this should serve for a loving cup," Jeoffry said, emerging from the depths of the cabinet below the sink. Horrified, Marty recognized the thermos from the Groovie Ghoulies lunch box he'd had in 5th grade. Mom never threw anything away. There was one childhood memory irrevocably tarnished. He wonder how much bleach he'd need to pour over his brain after this sordid affair was concluded.
Jeoffry seemed in no great hurry to get it over with, instead making the most of his first opportunity to see his father close up. "I keep forgetting he'd be so young," he said. "Only in his late forties or so. Not at all bad looking either, is he? The satyr-whiskers didn't suit him at all. I like this much better."
"You look a lot like him," Marty offered.
"What's that, flattery?" Jeoffry eyed him with cold speculation, then picked up the gun. "Let's get down to business, shall we?"
"We?" Marty flung himself down in the reclining chair. "There is no 'we', dude. It's your life. I'm not getting involved."
"Moreso than you already are," he asked sardonically. "Why don't you go to your bedroom and listen to music, hmmm?"
And leave George to his tender mercies? Not likely. Marty crossed his arms and ground his chin into his collarbone, the illustration of stubbornness.
"Suit yourself." Jeoffry played with some recessed knobs on the gun, then set it on the coffee table upside down so that the fins acted as little legs. The blue neon tubes began brightening and dimming cyclically.
"No time for soupy seduction," he said, looking down at George, hands on hips, head tilted. "Sorry if this is a bit perfunctory, daddy dear, but my existence is at stake."
He knelt beside the couch again and pressed his mouth down on George's. Marty scrunched his eyes closed, and wished he had thought to get his Walkman. There was no way he could block out the sounds of Jeoffry's lips and tongue working on his father's flesh.
"Do you have to enjoy yourself so much," Marty asked, revolted.
"If it bothers you that much, petal, I'll nap-zap you. You can have a nice lie down while I 'do the deed', as you say."
"No thanks." The last thing he wanted was to be comatose while this creep was still in the room. No telling what Jeoffry would do to his unprotected body. Besides, once he was out cold Jeoffry might decide to scramble his brains with the neural disruptor set on high and be done with it.
"What do you care, anyways? He's not really your father, after all."
Marty slit one eye open. "Are you trying to be funny, or something? 'Cause if you are, you need to work on your act."
"Not a bit of it. That other man, that sad sack car salesman, he was your father. This fellow is - well, think of him as an identical twin. He's an amalgam of the blended timelines, partly your father and partly mine, but not really either. I'd have thought you'd have figured it out by now."
"Can you just get on with it, please?"
/Ok, /he tried to tell himself, /it's gross and weird, but only a little more gross and weird than what you did to Mom /(/or what Mom did to you, /a little mocking voice whispered in the back of his mind). At least all he had to do was sit here.
"Say, would you mind giving me a hand?"
Marty sat bolt upright. "WHAT?"
"Come over here and hold onto him," Jeoffry ordered. "He's awfully wriggly."
Marty skirted the couch, trying to look everywhere but down. Oh god, oh god. He could feel the image being burned ineradicably into his retina. Pitifully helpless George sprawled like a rag doll, Jeoffry looking mildly cross, his hands /there/.
He slid onto the couch underneath his father, supporting his upper body on his lap and pinioning his arms. George scowled in his sleep, fighting him weakly, then went limp and whimpered pathetically. Marty cringed.
"Can't you just crank the thing up?"
"It's bad enough the low intensity beam is affecting us, too," he argued. "I can't risk a higher setting or the next person home is going to find the three of us collapsed in a very interesting tableaux vivant."
He hadn't thought about that. Perfect. He could count on Linda not coming home til dawn, but Mom or Dave might walk in any time now. Only belatedly did he process exactly what Jeoffry had said.
"Wait, wait, that thing's scrambling my brains, too?"
"It's a low level setting." Jeoffry glanced up, absurdly positioned between George's legs. "I gave daddy here a short, higher intensity zap to knock him out, and the continued low intensity beam keeps him quiet. I have to set it on a wide spread so I don't need to stand there and hold the beam trained on him the entire time. Or I could hold it on him, and let you have the honors," he said, gesturing at George's crotch.
"No! Why don't you just narrow the beam and let me hold the gun?"
Jeoffry gave a him look that clearly communicated what he thought of that idea. "As I believe I explained, he won't remember anything because the EMP causes retrograde amnesia when - oh, never mind. Just trust me."
"Fine, whatever. But I don't like this."
"Suffer," he said shortly.
Marty tried not to think about the electro-magnetic pulses slithering through his brain, sneaking in among his neurons and twisting his thoughts in awful ways. He wished he could let go of Dad's arms and cover his ears, because the sounds Jeoffry was making conjured up vividly disturbing mental pictures. George writhed, grinding his bony shoulder blades painfully into Marty's lap, which was actually rather helpful. A boiling heaviness squirmed in his stomach, and he was horrified to feel the distinctive tingling, shivery anticipation that meant he was getting a hard on.
He closed his eyes and ducked his head, burying his face against George's comfortably solid shoulder. He tried to will it away, concentrating on everything else, the spiced, musky smell of his father's cologne, the bristle on the older man's jaw rasping against his cheek, the warmth and weight of him in his arms. It wasn't until he heard taunting laughter that he realized he was kissing Dad with just as much libidinous fervor as Jeoffry displayed.
Marty jerked back and scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his arm. He couldn't get the taste of chocolate and toffee out of his mouth. "Omigod, what happened?"
Jeoffry laughed again. "Can't fight the Heinlein Effect."
"What?"
"Genetic Attraction Syndrome. The zombie crush. From that story/, All You Zombies . . ./" Jeoffry let out a very ungentlemanly snort of disbelief. "All these books he owns and you've never cracked one of them, have you? Dreadfully ignorant. George read that one in '59. He mentioned it in his autobiography, it was one of his favorite stories. How did /he /ever spawn /you? /Your mother must've contributed some really stupid dominant genes, Marty."
"Watch it!"
With exaggerated patience, Jeoffry asked, "Why do you think there have to be laws against incest?"
"So people don't marry their cousins and have two-headed babies. Duh."
"Read a book, smartass. Inbreeding increases the risk of doubling up on bad genes, but it also consolidates good genes. There have to be incest laws for the same reason there have to be laws against murdering, stealing, and raping. Because those are all natural human impulses. Maybe not very conducive to a peaceful society, but society is just what you call the training you give a bunch of really smart apes. We're still cavemen, Marty. We still have those impulses. And every caveman knows how to spread his genes around."
"That's sick."
"Sick? As in, immoral? Nature isn't moral." Jeoffry turned one hand palm-up, /oh well/. "So, if incest is a natural impulse, you can imagine how confused it gets once people start time traveling. It's almost impossible to resist seducing yourself. The ultimate narcissism, the zombie crush. And it's just as bad involving children and their parents, especially if mom and dad aren't geezers or infants when you meet them, but decidedly alluring adults."
Marty found he couldn't meet Jeoffry's frank, intense gaze. His own first kiss, real kiss, soul-deep kiss - was with his mother. Who at the time wasn't at all motherly. She was a young and very good looking girl, and aggressively interested in him, too. If he hadn't known she was his mother when they met, there was no telling what would have happened between them.
Jeoffry muttered something to himself and then chuckled, and a moment later the sounds started back up, loud, enthusiastic slurping, sucking and lip-smacking. Marty tightened his grip on Dad, who had begun to thrash about and breathe in strident gasps. It didn't sound like he was being tortured anymore. It sound like - oh god - Dad was enjoying himself, too.
He could feel his cheeks getting hot and swollen with a fierce blush. Everything was happening too fast, weirdness piling upon weirdness. His brain groaned under the weight of it. Some sort of freaky mass conversion event seemed imminent.
"All done." Jeoffry's voice hissed in his ear.
Marty jumped, startled. George rolled off his lap and slumped bonelessly to the floor in an undignified heap.
Jeoffry held up the thermos like someone admiring the body of a glass of fine wine. "Rather like Pandora's box, isn't it? All that's left in there is hope."
"Okay, you got what you came for. You can leave now."
"Just think. I hold myself in my hands. Right here. A self-made man if ever there was." he sounded slightly loopy, almost as if he were drunk, or stoned. The blue lipstick was smeared across his face, his perfectly groomed hair sticking up in tufts.
Marty doubled over and crossed his arms with studied casualness, hoping to disguise the bulge in his sweat-damp jeans. Why hadn't he worn underwear today? Stupid skin tight Jordasches. "You're amazing, yeah. Now will you please go?"
"Not going to escort me to the door? How rude." Jeoffry looked down at him and grinned slowly as Marty scrambled to cover his shame. "Awwwww, poor Marty," he crooned.
"Just go!"
"You can't even walk, can you, my little partner in crime? Poor, poor, poor Marty."
"It's that damn gun of yours," he snapped. Marty wished fervently he'd switch the damn thing OFF. He needed some privacy, like now, or he was gonna end up sterile. "I'll be fine. You go have a good life or whatever. Look me up in a quarter century."
"After you've been such a helpful sweetheart?" Jeoffry placed one hand on his chest as if pledging Allegiance, and declared, "On my honor as a gentleman, I'll not have my reputation besmirched by leaving you in such dire straits."
He hunkered down and stretched one eager hand towards Marty's aching groin. Marty tried to fend him off and cover himself at the same time, but every little movement hurt. He shoved Jeoffry, but the other man toppled forward, knocking Marty over and trapping him under his weight. He kicked and punched as hard as he could, but Jeoffry jabbed his elbows into his chest, then, when Marty paused to gasp for breath, thrust his hand down the front of his jeans.
Marty practically bit through his tongue.
"Feel good?" Jeoffry breathed, slipping his hand further in.
"Screw you," Marty gasped. "My balls are so blue it'd feel good getting groped by Sasquatch."
"Well," he sniffed. "I'd like to think I'm slightly preferable to an abominable ape-man, little mister." As he said this, his slim, cool fingers found Marty's hot, desperate flesh.
Whatever his brain was preaching in protest was drowned out by what his crotch was screaming. The sensation was immense and awesome and intense, searing and blinding and choking as it shot up his spine and hit his brain like an electric shock. But it was peaceful, too, and gentle with a gentleness that was more violent than hate. Jeoffry was doing things to him now, horrible, wonderful things. Things he thought about but was too hesitant to try on himself, things he'd wished Jennifer would do but had been too embarrassed to ask her for.
Warm waves of passion lapped over him, dragging him under, a sweet suffocation. That was supposed to be the kindest kind of death, he'd heard, a slow, seductive sinking into oblivion.
He came, groans stuttering and breathless. "God, god, god, god!"
"No, just me, but thanks." Jeoffry kissed him, the pervert, and now he was unbuttoning his own trousers. The inside of Marty's skull was a dial tone, and for some reason he didn't even care anymore. So Jeoffry was using him as a right hand. Whatever. As long as he left and never returned, right?
But Jeoffry didn't just start humping him like a horny poodle. He ardently nibbled Marty's ear, running his hands through his hair, acting tender and affectionate and all sorts of things Marty wouldn't have thought the arrogant, gun-wielding hyper loony was capable of. He forced his streaming eyes open. Jeoffry looked so happy, damn it.
Okay, it was ten different kinds of wrong and sick, but hell - it felt pretty good. And it wasn't like Marty was suddenly going to go skipping around in ruffled lavender shirts, mincing and lisping, interior decorating, sipping tiki drinks and walking a shih tzu. He'd never be able to ask another guy to do something like this. This would be the only time, ever . . . and soon enough Jeoffry would be out of his life forever. The thought actually made him a little sad.
Honestly, it was no weirder or sicker than being frenched by his own Mom. And that felt more than good, it had been great. She knew what she was doing, Lorraine did, and she wasn't just kissing him so hard he'd almost gagged on her tongue, she'd stuck her hand down the front of his pants and started massaging him before she broke their kiss. Every time he'd accidentally thought about that part, his mind had skipped away as if the very thought would have brought a lightning bolt down on him.
So it felt good. No big deal. Not his fault. It was just that he was wired this way, and it didn't matter who was pulling the switches, he would light up no matter what. Not his fault at all. After all, he could just blame it on the brain-scrambling device. Marty could almost imagine he felt the electromagnetic pulses thrumming in his head, urging him on, vibrating throughout his body. It seized him, made him want to move like some irresistible beat.
"You're lucky that thing's scrambling my brain, buddy," he muttered, as Jeoffry shuddered against him.
He lay there panting, then swept his hair out of his face and smiled evilly. "It's not on."
Marty sat up abruptly. The gun lay on the floor, the lights dim, one of the plastic fins cracked off. At some point they must have kicked it off the table. All that - all that wicked, shocking, fantastic perversion - it was all him. Marty groaned and curled up in the smallest ball he could, pulling his ripped shirt over his face.
"Don't feel too dreadfully wicked," Jeoffry murmured, solicitously stroking his back.
"This isn't me." He licked his lips. The syrupy candy flavor of George's mouth still lingered.
"Who are you, really? You're a flowing mosaic of different personas. You adjust yourself for each person you interact with, for each situation you're in. You're a different person at school, around your parents, in the band, by yourself . . . this is only wrong if you believe in a single self."
"But I am a single self. Except . . . " Marty thought about the person he'd watch jump into the time machine when he'd returned. Who was he?
Jeoffry waved one blue-nailed hand languidly, encompassing their shaking, sweaty, entangled bodies, the room, the world. "We are - reality is - Confucian, not Aristotelian. We are not this or that, black or white, positive or negative. There is no you in isolation. You're the sum totality of roles you live in relation to specific others. When one role changes, it rearranges the others, so the you of a moment ago becomes a subtly different you."
"So who are /you/," he challenged.
"I - I don't know." He frowned, taken aback. "I hate to admit it, but I'm not the same person who came in the door earlier. He had a different past. A past without you in it."
"That's a good thing, right?"
Jeoffry stroked his hair. "The thought of changing even slightly would have disgusted and terrified me before, but I'm another person now."
"You're still a sick bastard, if that helps," he said, holding his hand like a gun and miming a shot at Jeoffry's forehead.
He grinned, raising his hands as Marty had earlier. "Well, I'm still me, after all. The same solution from a different equation."
The doorbell rang. Both young men froze.
"Trick or treat?" A chorus of high-pitched voices sang out.
"Both," Marty muttered. They laughed, stifling it until the trick-or-treaters gave up and left.
Still, it was a reminder that even for time travelers, time was short. Jeoffry got dressed and fussed over the brain-scrambling gun, tweaking the dials and shaking it until the lights came back on, while Marty heaved George back onto the couch and tried to arrange him comfortably. Hopefully he'd remember nothing, or at the most, write it off as a particularly disturbing dream.
"I'm afraid this is /adieu/," Jeoffry said at last, when it became obvious there were no more delaying tactics. He cradled the thermos. "Parting is such something-something, but I have to introduce the boys to a lovely young ova and, you know, make sure I end up existing."
"Yeah. So, Any last words of wisdom from the future?"
"You know very well that Dr. Brown wouldn't approve." He stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Tell George when he wakes up that if he insists on publishing The Dragons of Syphilis he should at least consider changing the title."
"Will do." Marty hesitated. "Um, one more thing?"
"Of course, my dear brother." He said the last without a hint of irony or sarcasm.
"Can you zap me too, like you did him? If I can't ever see you again, I'm not sure if I want to remember . . . you know."
"Oh, dear. Well, the retrograde amnesia only covers events about 5 minutes up to the EMP blast. If I do zap you, as you so quaintly put it, there is a chance you'll just assume the entire evening was part of a long, continuous fever dream. Of course, there is also the possibility you'll remember everything, and dat ol' zombie crush will make you long for me unattainably for the rest of your life until you go quite, quite, quite mad."
Jeoffry pulled him into a last, forceful kiss - as it broke, Marty felt the cool tip of the EMP gun's barrel pressed against his temple.
"Brother, I wouldn't have it any other way."
end
author's notes: The "brain-scrambling" song is actually a pronoun shifted "She's Got a Brain-Scrambling Device" by the Groovie Ghoulies. EMPs do, in fact, damage the brain, but there's no such thing as a brain-scrambling gun. The Repository for Germinal Choice (the genius sperm bank) is real. The movie Marty's watching is "Frightmare". Everything else is made up.
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