When the Libyans came for Dr. Scott, Marty had no choice but
to jump in the DeLorean, open it up to 88mph and thrust himself back, into Hill
Valley’s past, seeking refuge from the dangers of the present in the relative
safety of history.
What he hadn’t known, in that moment, was that he wasn’t
alone in the car…
Musca Domestica,
one of the most common insects in the world, and not the sort of thing anyone, in the heat of the moment, running
for his life from terrorists who’d inexplicably brought along a rocket
launcher, would notice inside the car with him, but there it was, tagging along
without his knowledge, for the ride and its horrible aftermath.
Because the time
machine, you see, had only been built for one, and Doc Brown had had no idea
what, if anything, would happen if two living creatures were shunted back in
time simultaneously, if he’d known he’d have taken some provision, that such a
thing might be prevented ever happening.
Of course, at that
point Marty would only have been shot by a Libyan terrorist with a rocket
launcher, so there’s every chance that even if he had been warned of what was
to come he’d still have made the choice he did, assuming that with life comes
hope, however slim, and as such assuming that more life, even a little bit,
would be the preferable option.
And, at first, that
seemed to be the case.
Although he had
changed, had been changed, by what had happen to him, at first the results of
this change were universally positive. He found himself stronger, faster, his
senses heightened by what he’d been through, in ways he couldn’t begin, even
with the assistance of a much younger Doc Brown, to explain. He’d become a superman
and, stretching his now much more powerful legs in a version of Hill Valley 30
years previous to the one he’d known, he reveled in the power he’d been
granted.
Biff something, the
bully who’d so tormented his father in their time together at school, was found
dead, his arm broken in two places, his neck snapped similarly. And you don’t
even WANT to know what he got up to with his then high school aged future
mother…
But things
inevitably went wrong, horribly wrong, as they had always had to do. Primate
and inectoid DNA, after all, are not designed to blend, and by the time Marty dragged
his tumored, bloated, disfigured wreck of what once had been a body, now
completely unrecognizable as what it once had been, toward his unknowing
mother, pulled the barrel of her shotgun into where his mouth had been and
gargled “Please” up at her, it never even crossed her mind that what she was
shooting was human anymore, let alone her son.
Not that she’d known
who he was; it was Calvin she would mourn. Marty died alone and afraid, killed
by a mother who never even knew her son, much as Doc Brown would die alone and
afraid, thirty years later, at the hands of Libyan terrorists, unwarned. A
shame, that such a tiny thing could cause matters to go so horribly wrong, but
the moment Marty and the insect travelled through time together his fate was
set, the mutation had already begun, and there was nothing he could do, no step
he could take, to save himself.
And, by the end, he
knew it.
By the end, he had
truly become: The McFly.
