"Outatime" - Chapter Four

 

            Tired as she was, Marty could practically skateboard in her sleep. Her father, George McFly, didn’t even notice her leave the house – he was too busy crunching the numbers for his accounting job. The poor guy carried the weight of the company he worked on his shoulders. He deserved more in life than working a boring old desk job. He used to manage for Linda Flynn-Fletcher, back during her short stint as “Lindana,” until she decided to become a mother; ever since then, George had been stuck with one dead-end accounting job after another.

            Marty stopped when she noticed the lit entrance sign to Twin Pines Mall through her hazy vision – that recognizable pair of green pine trees adjacent to the “TWIN PINES MALL” wording and the digital clock that read the time of 1:16am. It was a harsh reminder of how early in the morning it was for Marty to be doing this.

            In the middle of the empty mall parking lot was a lone multi-step truck that had “DR. E. BROWN ENTERPRISES – 24 HR. SCIENTIFIC SERVICE” printed on the side. E. Brown Enterprises…that the Doc’s company, Marty deduced in her head as she skateboarded towards the truck.

            There was only one individual watching over it: deGrasse, Doc’s loyal dog, a larger-than-life black Great Dane. “What up, D.G.,” Marty sweetly greeted him with gentle strokes and scratches on his head. “How you doin’? Are Doc and the boys with ya? Huh?”

            VROOM!

            Marty heard what sounded like an engine revving, among other bizarre sounds, coming from the truck. Her eyes focused on its rear door, just as it lowered along with the connected ramp. Smoke billowed out from the opened space inside. A pair of red lights shined through the fog, as if there were some sort of dragon living in it. Marty backed a little, just in case.

            Fortunately, it wasn’t a dragon. It was a car.

            A sleek, stainless steel DeLorean sports car. It had been modified with some crazy-looking units on its rear engine, giving a particularly dangerous feel. There were coils along the front and rear decks. To Marty, it reminded her a lot of the Ectomobile that the Ghostbusters up in New York drove, which they had fashioned from an old Cadillac ambulance.

            The gull wing doors of the DeLorean opened, permitting three of its occupants to step out of the vehicle. Marty recognized two of them as Phineas and Ferb. With them was a 52-year-old man with spiky blond hair and rounded glasses; Marty knew him as Cornelius Brown, the adopted son of Doc Brown herself. “Engine’s a little rusty on the start-up,” he said in his sophisticated tone of voice that made him sound like Tom Selleck. “Otherwise, systems are looking good.”

            “We’ll have to look into that engine issue,” Phineas noted. “It could have to do with the fusion generator.”

            “That is the affirmative action to take, Phineas,” the voice of an elderly woman spoke from the driver’s seat. Marty watched from that side of the DeLorean as the Doc herself, Emma Brown, clambered out in a hunched posture. She straightened her back out to an audible crack. “Oh! Great Scott! We might wanna add some padding to the seats.”

            Phineas was about to make note of it on the clipboard he had in hand, until he noticed Marty standing across from them with deGrasse. “Oh, hey, Marty! What’re you doing here?” All attention centered on Marty upon Phineas’s friendly greeting.

            “Candace sent me here,” Marty replied, her eyes not once leaving the DeLorean. “I didn’t think they still made this thing. What did you guys do to it?”

            “Please hold all your questions for later, Marty,” Doc requested. “You wouldn’t happen to have brought a camera along with you, would you?”

            “As a matter of fact…” Marty took her phone out from her back jeans pocket. “Candace wanted me to record everything for evidence.”

            “Wow! She really knows when to think ahead,” Phineas said, legitimately astounded. “We need the documentation for the experiment.”

            Before Marty could ask what the experiment was, Doc yelled to her, “Roll tape!”

            Marty didn’t exactly know what she meant by that, so she just figured it was her cue to aim her camera phone at Doc and the DeLorean and press record.

            “Good evening, my name is Doctor Emma L. Brown. We’re here standing at the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. It’s Saturday morning, June 21, 2025, at exactly…” She checked her wristwatch for the precise hour and minutes. “1:20am.” She then beckoned for deGrasse to jump into the DeLorean and sit obediently in the driver’s seat. Doc buckled him in with the shoulder harness and placed a battery-operated digital clock around his neck.

            “This is Temporal Experiment #1. Please note that deGrasse’s clock here is in exact synchronization with my control watch.” She held up a digital watch next to deGrasse’s clock to show that the two were indeed in perfect sync with each other. Looking to her loyal Great Dane, she gingerly told him, “Good luck, boy!” She then lowered the gull wing door, sealing deGrasse inside.

            “Too bad Perry couldn’t be the one at the driver’s seat,” Phineas lamented.

            “Perhaps next time,” Ferb said, to which Phineas chuckled a bit.

            Hearing him snicker, Marty wondered what was so funny about what Ferb said. Her attention was brought back on Doc as she stood with them, holding a remote-control unit, similar to one for a radio-controlled toy car. There were buttons labeled “Accelerator” and “Brake,” a joystick, and an LED readout labeled “Miles Per Hour.”

            The device amused Marty. “You got that thing hooked up to the…?”

            VROOM!

            Doc flipped the power switch on the controller; the DeLorean’s engines revved up and the headlights switched on in correlation. Using the accelerator button and joystick for steering, she sent the DeLorean down to the furthest end of the parking lot. She then turned the car around, so that it was pointing toward them.

            “So, what now?” Marty inquired. “We about to race Mario?”

            Phineas giggled at her jesting. “You laugh now, but if our calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re gonna see some serious…”

            “PHINEAS!” Doc snapped.

            “What?” Phineas shrugged. “I was gonna say ‘serious stuff’.”

            “Oh,” Doc blushed.

            She took a deep breath and pushed the accelerator button.

            The DeLorean took off, shifting gears automatically.

            The LED speedometer passed 30.

            The stainless-steel vehicle zoomed faster, passing 40.

            Marty’s grip on her phone became moist, her fingers sweating in watching the vehicle speed dangerously closer to where she, Doc, Cornelius, and the Flynn-Fletcher brothers stood. None of them looked as terrified as she felt, which only made her question their sanity.

            Doc kept her finger on the accelerator button.

            The meter passed 75.

            The DeLorean kept accelerating, approaching the spectators. The coils mounted around the car began glowing.

            The speedometer hit 85…86…87…88…

            Marty felt a sharp blast of air, her field of vision engulfed by a blinding white glow. Initially, she believed it was the heavenly gates calling her on, pulling her soul away from her mortal body before it was struck by the speeding DeLorean, sparing her the agony of dying.

            And then…BOOM!

            The DeLorean was gone, a trail of fire left in its wake.

            Her crotch felt hot, and she realized why when she looked down, noticing the flames from the fire running right in-between her legs, missing her groin by an inch. She instinctively looked behind her to see how far the flames went, spotting the car’s license plate that was left spinning until it clattered to the scorched asphalt.

            On the vanity plate was printed “OUTATIME.”

            Marty blinked in disbelief, unable to properly process what just happened. Her arms went limp, along with the camera phone she recorded everything on. In her daze, she heard Doc, Cornelius, and the boys wildly cheering in celebration of their successful experiment.

            “Y-You…You…You disintegrated him,” Marty muttered.

            “What did you say, Marty?” Phineas asked amid the cheers. “I couldn’t hear you.”

            “YOU DISINTEGRATED deGRASSE!!!!”

            Her frantic behavior ceased the innovators’ revelries. “Calm down, Marty,” Cornelius told her. “We didn’t disintegrate anything.”

            “That’s right,” Phineas supported his reassurance. “The molecular structure of both deGrasse and the DeLorean are completely intact.”

            “Then where are they?!” Marty exclaimed.

            “I believe the appropriate question is: when are they?” Doc said. “Marty, deGrasse has just become the world’s first time traveler!” She heard Phineas and Ferb give a slight intentional cough, as if to correct Doc on her claim. “Oops. Sorry. I meant to say…deGrasse has just become the world’s third time traveler.” It didn’t sound as awe-inspiring as her original claim, but she accepted the honor nonetheless.

            “So…what?” Marty said. “You’re telling me that you guys built another time machine?”

            “Yeah,” Phineas verified. “Only this time, it’s out of a DeLorean!”

            “Doesn’t that seem a little…I dunno…repetitive for you guys?” Marty asked.

            “Maybe,” Phineas admitted. “But, it’s Dr. Brown that gave us the idea of doing it from scratch with a car this time.”

            “The way I see it, if you’re gonna build a time machine, why not do it with some style?” Doc pitched. “Besides, the stainless-steel construction made the flux dispersal—” She stopped when her digital watch beeped. “Ten seconds! Marty, roll tape! Everyone, brace for a sudden displacement of air!”

            Marty aimed her camera phone right where the DeLorean disappeared, while Doc gripped the controller tightly. After five seconds, everyone’s hair stood up on end, charged with static electricity. Suddenly, a sharp blast of wind came out of nowhere, accompanied by a deafening sonic boom.

            The DeLorean reappeared right where it vanished, still going 88mph.

            Doc hit the brake button, locking up the wheels. The vehicle came to a screeching halt, smoke seeping off its frozen body. They rushed to the car and Doc reached for the door handle, only to recoil in pain. “It’s ice cold,” she cried.

            “How is that possible?” Marty asked.

            “Could be the brief period in which it passed between dimensions in space and time,” Phineas surmised. “Kinda like traveling in outer space.”

            Doc used the tip of her foot to open the driver’s side door, revealing a completely tranquil deGrasse. “There you are, boy! How did you enjoy your trip?” After her sweet-natured greeting, she again compared their watches: deGrasse’s read 1:21:10 while Doc’s read 1:22:10. “Exactly one minute in difference – and it’s still ticking!”

            Cornelius, Phineas, and Ferb exchanged high fives, whereas Marty was more concerned for deGrasse. “Is he alright?” she asked Doc.

            “He’s fine,” Doc confirmed, unbuckling deGrasse’s shoulder harness and allowing him to roam free, happy and playful. Doc gave him a Milk Bone treat as a reward. “He’s completely unaware of what just happened. As far as he’s concerned, the trip was instantaneous. That’s why his watch is a minute behind mine – he ‘skipped over’ that minute to arrive at this moment in time.”

            “Let’s show her how it works,” Phineas suggested, already sitting in the driver’s seat. “First, you switch on the time circuits…” He flipped the labeled switch and an array of indicator lights flashed on inside. Phineas then pointed to three readouts respectively labeled “Destination Time,” “Present Time,” and “Last Time Departed.” “This one tells you where you’re going, this one tells you where you are, and this one tells you where you were.”

            “You input your destination on that keypad below the readouts,” Doc indicated. “For instance, you want to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Lincoln Memorial.”

            Phineas dialed 8-28-1963 and the “Destination Time” readout lit up with the date.

            “Or what if you want to visit Disneyland on its opening day?” Phineas suggested, dialing in 7-17-1955.

            Cornelius hopped in from the passenger side and dialed in another date. “Here’s one Mom will recognize,” he said with a smirk.

            Doc looked on the readout and gasped with her hand to her mouth, delicately touching her wrinkled, peach-blossomed lips. Marty gazed on the date Cornelius entered: “November 5, 1985? What happened?”

            “That was the day I invented time travel,” Doc answered, staring off into space.

            “Wait, now I’m really confused,” Marty professed. “I thought Phineas and Ferb were the ones who invented time travel.”

            “We can’t take total credit for it, Marty,” Phineas said. “After all, it was Doc’s first time machine that we found in the Danville museum.”

            Marty’s eyes sparked at this surprising revelation. “You guys never told me that!”

            “We didn’t know it at the time when we started converting the DeLorean,” Phineas clarified. “Doc donated her first time machine to the curator.”

            “Only as an art piece,” Doc stated. “But it was really just a broken heap of junk. It wasn’t until that day – November 5, 1985 – when I finally got the answer. I was standing on the toilet, hanging my clock, when I fell and hit my head. When I came to, Cornelius found me lying there, staring up at the ceiling and mumbling to myself.”

            “What did you say?” Marty asked.

            “I said, ‘I got it!’ And, boy, did I get it!” She rubbed at one corner of her forehead where Marty did see a faint scar, aged over time and hidden beneath a few wrinkles. “It was a revelation – a vision – a picture in my head! A picture of this…” She pointed to a particular centerpiece unit mounted inside the DeLorean. “This is what makes time travel possible: the Flux Capacitor!”

            Marty aimed her camera phone and got the footage of the unit, even snapping a few pictures for posterity.

            “I can’t believe it took me 40 years to fulfill that vision.” In her reminiscing, Doc gazed around the parking lot. “Things sure have changed around here. All this was once farmland as far as the eye could see. My old mentor, Professor Von Drake, owned all of this. The poor man had a crazy obsession for breeding pine trees.”

            Marty was overwhelmed. “Man, Candace would have a field day with all this heavy-duty stuff you guys dropped on me. Does it run on regular unleaded gasoline or hydrogen fuel?”

            “Unfortunately, no,” Doc replied. “It requires something with more kick. My colleague, Dr. Sean Spengler, gave me the idea of generating 1.21 jigowatts of electricity needed through a nuclear reaction.”

            “Nuclear?” Marty felt the blood drain from her face. “This sucker is nuclear?!”

            “It’s electrical, Marty,” Phineas elaborated.

            “But what do you use to create that kind of reaction?” Marty inquired.

            “Plutonium,” Doc said.

            “Plutoni—” Marty’s voice drifted on that last syllable, finding the very term itself difficult to say. “Doc, you just don’t walk in someplace and buy plutonium!”

            “Actually, you can,” Doc contradicted. “Last week, I attended a black market auction for a group of lab coats bidding on various equipment and supplies. I won two full cases of plutonium when I outbid this one fella who bragged about using for something that ended with ‘-inator’. Who knows what he would’ve used it for, but it’s all mine now.” She gleefully went to her multi-step truck to retrieve a yellow radiation suit that she tossed to Marty. “Make sure your hood’s on when we reload the DeLorean with a fresh supply.”

            Marty held the radiation suit in a state of disbelief.

            Before they proceeded any further, Cornelius delivered some unfortunate news: “Uh, Mom? We have a problem. You know that one case we brought along for the experiment? It only has one canister left.”

            “How in blazes did that happen?!” Doc bellowed. “There were twelve whole canisters in there when we arrived!”

            “I think that’s how it was sold to us,” Cornelius gathered.

            Doc angrily kicked the yellow plutonium container with the black radioactive symbols on it – though she regretted doing so, as she managed to hurt her foot. “We’ll have to drive back home to retrieve the other container.”

            “No prob, Dr. Brown,” Phineas said. “Ferb and I brought along our tele-portable pod with us.” He pulled out a small metal device from his pocket that he threw to the ground. It transformed on impact, mechanically unfolding itself into a large, round teleportation pad. “It’s still preset to your place, Dr. B.”

            Doc smiled approvingly on the boys’ nifty invention. “You boys are angels!”

            “I’ll say,” Cornelius approved just as much so. “I’ll have that other container back before you know it, Mom.” He stepped onto the pad and was instantly teleported from the Twin Pines Mall parking lot back to Doc’s garage, a remnant of the luxurious mansion she and Cornelius once lived in before it burned down. The garage served primarily as a laboratory. But, after the fire in 1992, it was converted into a free-standing structure and served as the home of Emma and Cornelius from that point forward.

            When Cornelius arrived, he anticipated the area to be vacant, but there was a man in a lab coat there, rummaging through the place. “Hey! Stop!” Cornelius shouted, prompting the intruder to freeze in place. “Turn around very slowly.”

            The man did so, turning his slouched figure to face Cornelius.

            “You!” He recognized the man. “You’re the guy we outbid for the plutonium!”

            “That’s right!” the man spoke with a rather screechy voice that had a Drusselsteinian accent. “I, Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, am here to collect what I’m rightfully owed!”

            “Rightfully owed?” Cornelius repeated in annoyance. “We won that plutonium, fair and square!” He pulled out his phone and dialed 9-1-1. “You’re going to jail, buddy. I hope it was wor—”

            BANG!

            A hard object slammed against the back of Cornelius’s head, rendering him unconscious.

            Doofenshmirtz merely watched in bewilderment as a tall, dark ominous figure emerged from the shadows, brandishing the blunt object that it used to knock out Cornelius. Heinz saw that the object was made from nanobot technology, dispersing beneath the figure’s black trench coat afterwards.

            The most striking feature of this figure was its kabuki mask, which was mostly colored in white with red markings; its eyes were colored a piercing yellow.

            “With an entrance like that, you’re definitely evil,” Doofenshmirtz collected.

            “It’s not the plutonium you should be after,” the masked figure stated in a deep, automated voice. “It’s the woman – Doctor Emma L. Brown.”

            “Why?” Heinz questioned. “She’s not important to me.”

            “No. But she is important to me.”

            “Then why don’t you go after her and I’ll go after the plutonium!”

            “I need your brilliant mind to do what I must for the space-time continuum: erase Doctor Brown from existence.”

            Heinz was both flattered and spooked. “Wow. Smooth and sinister. I could learn quite a lot from you, Mr. Mystery Man.”

            “Call me ‘Yokai’.”