Real world

Written by Anakin McFly

« Contents Page + Prologue
« Chapters 1.1–1.11
« Chapters 1.12–1.16
« Chapters 1.17–1.21
« Chapters 2.1–2.6
« Chapters 2.7–2.14

15. The Mysterious Old Man
16. Little Green Men, Flying Sheep and Flying Pillows
17. You Have to See it for Yourself
18. Down the Streets of L.A.
19. Moving In
20. No One Can Hear You Scream
21. Hope Remains
22. To Tame the Unknown
23. Four Past Midnight
24. Those Who Still Believe

Chapters 2.25 onwards »

Chapter Fifteen: The Mysterious Old Man

May 1990
The Real World

Keith knew that he was probably going to receive the biggest scolding ever for this, but he didn’t want to be inside watching his father get married to some woman Keith knew next to nothing about. Hazel Chiew was apparently one of Nathan’s old classmates from the National University of Singapore; by a remarkable twist of events the two of them had met again in L.A. several months ago. They’d hit it off, and now they were getting married – partly because she was over a month pregnant, and partly because they’d intended to get married eventually anyway.

Keith stood by the side of the church, hands in pockets as he watched the traffic go by, blinking away angry tears. He didn’t want a stepmother, evil or otherwise. He’d had one mother, and she was all he needed for life. He didn’t want some stranger trying to take her place.

He found some comfort in the fact that in five months he would be eighteen and could legally leave his family. But, well, he doubted he’d be able to survive on his own so soon. And he’d need money for university fees…

“Hello there.”

Keith jumped in fright at the sudden voice. He turned and saw a strange-looking old man standing not far from him.

“Shouldn’t you be inside?” the old man asked.

Keith blinked. “I… who are you?”

The stranger chuckled. “Just a mysterious old man. That’s what they call me, anyway. Others know me as Dem, but some prefer not to call me that because it sounds as if they’re swearing.”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Keith said warily.

Dem smiled. “You’re 6431 days, seven hours and sixteen minutes old. Surely that’s old enough to talk to strangers?”

Keith gave a start, then realised that it wouldn’t have been that hard for the old guy to just rattle off a string of numbers to freak him out. “You know my age, but you don’t know my name?” he asked instead.

“Age is easy,” Dem replied.

“Okay, so what’s my birth date?”

Dem shrugged. “I’m not good at maths.”

“What do you want with me?” Keith asked.

“Oh, nothing much. I just thought you were looking a little lonely and depressed. Is that your father getting married in there?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She died,” Keith said with forced casualness. “Dad doesn’t care about her any more.”

“What makes you think so?”

Keith hesitated, thoughts of parallel universes and movies and the eleventh dimension floating through his mind. He shrugged.

Dem smiled. He opened his coat and extracted a notebook from the inside coat pocket, then handed it to Keith, who regarded it quizzically.

“Here you go,” Dem said.

Uncertainly, Keith received the notebook and flipped through its pages. They were filled with strange diagrams and numbers and symbols… “What’s this?” he asked.

“A present,” came the answer. “You may not understand the things in there now, but I believe you’ll find them very useful in future. So keep it safe. There is information this world will not allow to be known.”

Keith was about to ask just what that meant, but when he looked up from the papers, the mysterious old man was gone.

Chapter Sixteen: The Mysterious Old Man

21^st December 1985, Saturday
Hill Valley, California

“Maybe the aliens got him,” Dave suggested as the McFlys scoured Hill Valley in their car, looking for Marty. “Hill Valley’s such a small place. Where else could he have gone?”

“So you’re saying it’s the little green men’s fault?” Linda asked.

“No way!” Dave exclaimed. “Yoda wouldn’t dosomething like that. I was thinking more of the big green men… like Jabba the Hutt or someone.”

In the front of the car, George and Lorraine McFly were becoming increasingly annoyed by the conversation between their two older children in the backseat.

“There’re no such thing as aliens,” Lorraine said with a somewhat pointed look at her husband, which succeeded in stopping him from saying that, yes, aliens did exist, and for a matter of fact he’d actually been visited by one once back in good ol’ 1955.

Dave slumped back in his seat. “We’re never going to find him this way,” he said. “If Marty left on his own accord, he’d be in hiding, not exposed out in the streets. If someone took him, they’d put him in hiding, not out on the streets.”

“So what do you expect us to do?” Lorraine asked with a touch of hysteria. “Just sit at home and wait for Marty to show up?”

“This isn’t much better,” Linda commented. “At least if we wait at home we’ll save on the gas.”

“Yeah, and what if Marty goes home and there’s no one there?” Dave added.

They turned the car and went back home.

When they opened the door, the sheep trotted out, baaing. Lorraine was about to make it go back in, when Dave put a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.

“Mom, that’s not Marty,” he said. “It’s just a sheep.”

#

1^st April 2004, Thursday
Room 437, Kenselton Hotel

Baaaa, said the sheep as it hopped over the fence and landed gently back down on the lush green grass. It had a towel draped over its back and secured at its neck like a cape, and Frank watched interestedly as it flapped in the breeze – the towel, that is, not the sheep.

This was a sheep who knew where its towel was.

Now, it came over to them, and Lucy Lynskey reached out a hand to stroke it. She smiled, and Frank put an arm around her. Behind them stood their home: he had designed it himself, and it was much more sturdy than before. It was complete, for one, two storeys high and overlooking the beautiful New Zealand countryside…

“Frank, open up!”

Had someone called? Frank looked vaguely around for the source of the voice, but he couldn’t see one. Must have been his imagination…

Lucy took his hand, and they ran together through the grass, happy and carefree with all the time in the world… There seemed to be loud banging sounds coming from somewhere, but maybe it was just that sheep – the silly little thing was sailing through the air, the wind in its towel-cape as it baaed in blissful contentment…

“OI! FRANK!”

“I think he’s still asleep, dude.”

“Oh, for crying out loud…”

There were clouds in the sky. White fluffy things in the blueness of the… um, sky. One was shaped like a sheep, too… And mountains, huge purplish mountains in the distance, rising out of the Earth’s crust because of tectonic plate action and all that… plates collided and stuff, you learnt about it in Geography, only Frank never took Geography, but if he did, that would be the sort of thing he learnt about…

“BANNISTER, IF YOU DON’T WAKE UP RIGHT NOW AND OPEN THIS F****** DOOR, I’M GOING TO BASH IT IN!”

Frank jolted up in bed, eyes flicking wildly around and feeling very disoriented. “Wha’?” he asked the air.

“…” the air said back.

His conscious memory suddenly came rushing back to him, and Frank remembered where he was. He sighed. That had been a nice dream he was having… didn’t make much sense, in retrospect, but a nice dream all the same…

Voices were coming through the door.

“Did you really have to swear, dude?”

“Shut up.”

“Think he heard you?”

Frank stumbled out of bed towards the door. “I’m comin’,” he mumbled sleepily, not really loud enough for anyone to hear. “Leav’ the door ‘lone, it ne’er did an’thing to you…”

Bleary-eyed and still half-asleep, Frank fumbled with the door handle and let them in.

“Hi!” Ted greeted cheerfully. Frank stared hazily back at the teen, trying to register his presence in his still far-from-awake mind.

“Yeah… hi to you too,” he finally said, before trudging back to the bed and lying down once more. Frank shut his eyes, sinking slowly back into Dreamland… until Marty poked him to check if he was still alive.

Frank grimaced and duly responded by grabbing a nearby pillow and throwing it at Marty, all without opening his eyes. The main consequence of this was that the pillow completely missed its intended target and hit Neo instead.

Neo was a person who did not take too kindly to having pillows thrown at him. Annoyed, he dumped the pillow back onto the bed and glared at Frank. “Are you going to wake up, or are you planning to sleep through everything?” he asked.

“Prob’ly the latter,” Frank mumbled after some consideration. “Got a prob’em with that?”

“Yeah,” Neo said. “I do. You can’t just fall asleep on us. We’ve got to do something about what’s going on here before…”

Frank had just about had all he could take. Sitting suddenly up in bed with what must have been a considerable effort, he glared back at Neo. “Look, pal. It’s TWO IN THE MORNING where I come from, and I’m TIRED, and…”

“It’s three in the morning where I come from,” Neo stated matter-of-factly, not taking his eyes off Frank.

Frank opened his mouth to say something, closed it when nothing came to mind, then opened it again when something did. “Yeah… well, you were probably fast asleep last night, so that doesn’t mean anyt…”

Neo folded his arms. “I say it’s your own fault if you decided to spend the night surfing online, as Marty told me you were.”

“I was… researching,” Frank said in a strained voice. “Well, fine. So while I was busy checking out stuff about this place we’ve been dumped in, you had the wonderful self-control to stay away from the computer and go to bed, even though it was probably only around late afternoon where you came from…”

“There’s no computer in our room,” Ted cut in.

Neo turned on him. “Ted, SHUT UP!”

The teen winced and obeyed. Frank smirked.

“I see,” he said. “Well, I bet that if there had been a computer in your room, you would have been on it all night. Great computer hacker, aren’t you?”

Neo’s left hand tightened into a fist. He swallowed. “Peeking into my private life, were you?”

“Didn’t seem too private to me,” Frank commented. “It’s splashed all over the Internet. Blockbuster movie of 1999, one of the greatest science-fiction franchises ever… d’you know that they even have action figures?” Frank grinned at the look on Neo’s face. “’Private life’, huh?”

Neo lunged out furiously at him, his fist about to contact with Frank’s head when Marty and Ted simultaneously grabbed Neo and held him off.

“WILL YOU TWO CUT IT OUT?” Marty yelled.

“Let go of me,” Neo hissed.

Ted shook his head. “And let you kill him? No way, dude.”

“So now you’re on his side, huh?” Neo asked him through gritted teeth.

“I…”

Neo yanked his left arm free of Marty’s grip and shoved Ted to the ground. The teen yelled as his head hit the bed frame, then he raised his hands to protect his head as Neo’s fists came down on him.

Frank swore and leapt out of bed. “Neo, get off him!”

Neo grabbed Ted and slammed him against the side of the bed.

Don’t look at his eyes, Neo thought furiously to himself, shaking away the attempts of Marty and Frank to pull him away. Don’t look at his eyes…

“Neo…”

Don’t listen to his voice, Neo thought, dodging Ted’s leg as the teen tried to kick out, and delivering a punch in return.

“Don’t hit me…”

Don’t listen to his voice…

Then Frank’s fist contacted squarely with Neo’s jaw, and Neo fell back, dazed and his head spinning as he stumbled to his feet, breathing heavily.

Frank stepped between Neo and Ted, his arms folded. For a moment, he and Neo just stood there, staring at each other.

“You’re the closest thing he has to family in this place,” Frank said softly.

Neo looked away, shook his head, then stalked out the open door.

Out in the corridor, Neo pounded furiously at the wall.

It’s this place, he thought savagely, angry tears forming in his eyes. It’s this whole universe, this whole ‘real world’…

Action figures, Frank had said, and the words made his stomach turn. They even have action figures… His life… his whole life, his trials and successes and everything, all just a movie here… people watched it for entertainment… action figures… And Ted. Why? Neo demanded silently of the wall. Why?

Then a name came to him: Keith.

He was behind all this. It was all his fault.

Back inside the room, Frank helped Ted to his feet. “Anything broken?” he asked.

Ted shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he replied in a somewhat subdued voice. He looked towards the door where Neo had left. “Do you think I should go after him?” he asked.

Frank and Marty looked at him but didn’t reply. Frank went over to the door and closed it.

Marty glanced at Frank. “What did you start all that for?”

“I’m tired, okay?” Frank retaliated, though in a softer tone than previous. “I didn’t even mean to throw that pillow at him. I was aiming for you, but I guess I missed.” Frank went back to the bed, snuggled back under the covers and didn’t say any more.

Ted slumped down into a chair. “I wanna go home,” he said softly.

“Yeah,” Marty replied some time later, sitting down on another chair. “Me too.”

Chapter Seventeen: You Have to See it for Yourself

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World

Returning to the control room after lunch, Keith did a double-take when he glanced at the closed-circuit television screens and found one of the rooms empty with all four experimental subjects in the other.

He suddenly realised without a doubt that it had to be his brother’s doing. Grimacing, Keith sat himself down on his swivel chair and turned the volume up. The voices came through clearly.

Fighting now, are they? Keith thought, shaking his head. He’d split them up for a reason, but it looked as though Adwin hadn’t appreciated it.

Keith was about to go find his brother and give him a piece of his mind, when the television screens showed Neo leaving the room. Might as well wait to see if he was coming. Keith pushed himself in the chair over to the door, unlocked it and opened it slightly, then went back to watch the screens.

#

The door to the control room was ajar. Neo pushed it open and entered, turning right around the L-bend in the small room to see Keith seated at his desk. The television screens on the wall opposite showed the goings on in Room 437 and 436.

“Hi Neo,” Keith greeted without looking up. “I saw you coming.”

“What do you want with us?”

Keith smiled. “Want to change the subject, huh? What do I want with you? Nothing much. Just to watch you, mostly. You don’t know how fascinating it’s been – bring a few movie characters into the real world, then watch their reactions…”

“And waiting to see if we die?”

“Look, you have to admit that I’ve been kind to you. You’re getting free lodging in a hotel that would otherwise cost you over a hundred a night. And it’s not as though I’ve been bothering you…”

“Doesn’t anyone know what you’re doing?”

Keith shrugged. “Don’t think so.”

“Send us back, Keith,” Neo said.

The scientist turned in his swivel chair to face him. “I can’t,” he said simply.

“What?”

“The machine was designed to bring you here. It can’t send you back. Technically, ‘back’ doesn’t even exist. And besides, if you could go back, would you really want to? Think about it.”

Neo didn’t reply.

“Have you ever seen the sky, Neo?” Keith asked. “Before this, I mean. In you world, the skies were blackened, weren’t they? It’s always dark. So you’ve never seen the sun either, have you? Except as a fake construct of the Matrix, which you know doesn’t count. I gave you the chance to see all that, Neo. I gave you a chance to experience the world you used to know, only this time it’s real. Do you really want to go back? Do you know what’s going to happen to you if you go back?

“You’re going to die, Neo. That’s what’s going to happen, just because the writers thought it would make a good ending. You defeat Smith, the war ends, but you still die in the end. Trinity too. She gets pierced right thr-“

“No…”

“Sorry for spoiling the plot, Mr. Anderson, but that’s what’s going to happen. Are you sure that’s how you want to end your life? For the sake of some movie? I mean, your life is kind of pathetic, isn’t it? You spent your first thirty-seven years of life trapped in the Matrix, get freed, and from then you only have six months to the end. I gave you a break from that. I gave you a taste of freedom, of what your life could be instead. If you just run out of this place now, I’m not going to stop you. Go run loose in the streets of L.A. here and see what happens. It’s your life.”

Neo just stood there.

Keith went back to his work. “And if you’re thinking of killing me, there’s not much point in that. If I die, nothing would have changed. You’ll still be stuck here. And there’d be no one left in this world who believes the four of you are who you say you are. Except for my brother, but he doesn’t count much…”

A thought suddenly occurred to Neo. “You mentioned something about some… averager device. What’s that?”

A smile spread across Keith’s face. “Oh, that. The sub-meson averager can… alter the sub-atomic components of items or people from another universe. Without it, as I said, sooner or later the dimensional incompatibility will probably catch up with you and you’ll die. I’m pretty sure of that. Some time ago I tried transporting objects over: a lightsaber, firstly. It worked for about a day, but eventually it died out and couldn’t come on. After several more days, the metal casing started to break down. Then I repeated the experiment, but this time I stuck it in the sub-meson averager. After a long time, the lightsaber still worked. At least, it did until my brother decided to take it apart to see what made it tick.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is that the four of you don’t really have to die. Maybe three of you; I still want at least one control to see how long the dimensional incompatibility takes to catch up with living things. But I can stick the other three of you in the averager and this universe will, essentially, become your true universe. You can continue to live here as long as you normally would and nothing will happen. If you really want to live that long, in the first place. More likely than not you’ll end up driven to suicide. The truth still remains: you have nowhere to go.”

Keith grinned and sat back in his chair. “Funny, isn’t it, Neo? After all this, the question still remains the same. I think you know what that question is.”

“What is the Matrix?” Neo asked sceptically.

Keith nodded. “Precisely. On one hand, the Matrix is a system designed to keep humans from knowing the truth about what their world is really like. But on the other hand, The Matrix is a movie. It was released in the year 1999, the creation of two brothers from Chicago named Laurence and Andrew Paul Wachowski – born 21st June 1965 and 29th December 1967 respectively. It was a movie that revolutionised the movie special effects industry, made a lot of people in Hollywood a great deal richer than they had any right to be, and then spawned two sequels which were widely regarded as crap… though personally I kind of liked the third one.”

Keith opened a drawer in his desk and took out an unlabelled DVD in a clear case. He waved it in the air. “Want to know what The Matrix is? There’s only one way to find out.” He handed the case over to Neo and grinned. “You have to see it for yourself.”

#

21^st December 1985, Saturday
Hill Valley, California

“I don’t know what this means,” Jennifer murmured, her face paler than usual. On the computer, BTTF.com had been closed and the screen just showed the Windows 98 desktop.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Bill agreed. “So they’re saying that all those things that happened to Marty were all just part of some movie?”

“It looks like it. But… I don’t think it’s just that. Doctor Brown’s inter-time-period communication device must have triggered off… something… maybe a portal, or… I don’t know.”

“But how is this linked to the disappearances? So what if it was all some movie, why’d Marty just vanish like that?” Bill paused. “And what about Ted?”

Jennifer gave a stressed sigh. “I don’t know. Maybe Marty did turn into a sheep after all, and we’re just searching for answers in the wrong place. But I don’t know about your friend; maybe he turned into a llama or…” Reluctantly, the teen sat back up in the chair. “What’s his last name?”

“Logan.”

Jennifer accessed Yahoo.com the way Marty had showed her almost two weeks ago, and typed Ted’s name into the search bar. She hit ‘Enter’, a lot of results scrolled down, and Bill’s mouth fell open.

”Whoa.” The computer was turned off after some exploring of the links. There was not much point in searching any further, for whatever they found simply reinforced what they already knew – that in another universe, they and their missing friends were fictional.

“I just don’t see what all that has to do with the disappearances,” Jennifer said.

“Maybe someone didn’t want them finding out all that and kidnapped them or something. But Ted didn’t know anything about this, so why would they take him too?”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

Bill shook his head. “I can’t. The band’s going back to San Dimas tomorrow, and if we get back without Ted, his dad will totally kill me.”

“Maybe you should just tell him what happened.”

“No way. He’ll never believe me.”

“Well, he’ll have to find out sooner or later.”

#

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World

He was curious, that much he had to admit, and curiosity was the main reason why Neo had taken the DVD from Keith in the first place. There were questions he wanted answered, and besides, he needed an idea of how much everyone knew about him – an area in which his increasingly paranoid imagination wasn’t helping very much.

He locked the door to Room 436 from inside, then crouched by the DVD player beneath the television set. Turning it on, he put the disc in, then took the two remote controls and sat down on the bed.

He turned on the set and changed the channel to the one Keith had specified. The screen turned blue, and Neo picked up the other remote control. Heart thumping, he pressed the ‘Play’ button.

The lit words on the DVD player’s LCD screen changed to ‘PLAY’. A green light flickered on the player, the television screen went static-y black, and then loud sound blared out of the speakers as the ending of some commercial started.

Neo lowered the volume as the commercial informed him why Detergent A was better than Detergent B, and then the screen went black again save for the small TV-station logo on the top right-hand corner.

Then the movie started. Neon green numbers ran down the screen, merging and separating, as in the background came two voices Neo knew only too well – that of Trinity and Cypher.

Neo was vaguely aware of the fact that he was shaking as he sat on the edge of the bed, hands gripping tightly onto the mattress. Something told him that he shouldn’t be watching what he was, because some things are just never meant to be seen by some people.

At the first commercial break, he went to the bathroom and threw up violently in the toilet, head swimming. If watching the movie was a trying enough ordeal for him, the commercial breaks only served to make it worse. What with the television announcer’s cheery ‘Don’t go away, we’ll be right back!’ followed by the commercials for various products, it all just seemed to forcibly drive home the fact that this was a movie.

One moment someone he knew might be dying on screen, and the next moment there would be some happy family romping through some bright sunny field with music to match in order to prove that kids who drink Brand A milk would grow up to be active, smart, loving and well-adjusted children of society.

The strong feeling of insecurity that had plagued Neo that morning came back full force, coupled with an unexplainable desire to break down and cry as he saw the private events of his life played out on screen. Who knew how many people had watched the movie? Who knew how many people knew all about him…

It was only at the third commercial break that Neo realised with a sinking heart that Keith had very likely been watching him all this time through the cameras, no doubt revelling in his agony.

He found the camera at a corner of the ceiling. Pulling a chair over, Neo climbed up and stared into the lens. He hoped that there was a microphone attached, which there was.

“F*** YOU, KEITH!” he yelled.

Neo gave the lens a good view of his middle finger, then he ripped the camera off the ceiling and thrashed it onto the floor.

In the background, the television announced why Shampoo X would result in smoother, stronger hair that would make you the centre of everyone’s attention, so buy it now.

#

“What do you mean, he’s really missing?” Lewis demanded.

“I mean I really can’t find him anywhere,” Bill explained.

Lewis rolled his eyes. “I know what the word ‘missing’ means. But the two of you were supposed to stay together all the time!”

“Yeah, but then he disappeared.”

“Bill, people don’t ‘disappear’.”

“Ted did,” Bill retorted. “And Elvis did too,” he added as an afterthought.

“Elvis is dead, Bill.”

The younger teen’s eyes widened in horror. “No way!”

Lewis sighed.

“Elvis is totally not dead, dude! Me and Ted saw him last month at…”

“LOOK HERE!” Lewis shouted, shocking Bill into silence. “I don’t know why we’re even talking about Elvis; he’s dead, okay? DEAD. No one cares. The main issue here is the fact that your friend doesn’t seem to be anywhere around, and we have to leave.”

Chapter Eighteen: Down the Streets of L.A.

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World
About forty-five minutes earlier

“It’s locked from the inside,” Marty said, after trying the door handle of Room 436.

“What’s he watching in there?” Ted asked curiously, staring at the locked door.

Marty shrugged. “Whatever it is, looks like he doesn’t want to be interrupted.”

Ted pressed his ear against the door and listened, but the volume was too low for him to make out much.

“Neo?” Marty called, but there was no response.

Ted stepped back from the door. “What do we do now?”

“I guess we can just explore around a little.”

“Yeah. Which way do you want to start?”

Marty pointed right. “I went down the other way just now,” he said as they started walking. “Nothing much there.”

They eventually reached the room they had first arrived in, and Marty tried the door. It opened, and the two of them went in. There was another door in the room, but it was locked; it led out to the control room next door.

There seemed to be nothing different here from the last time they’d seen it, and the teens had almost decided to leave when Marty saw something on one of the walls. He stared at it and moved closer.

“What’s that?” Marty asked, pointing at the short black streak across the otherwise completely white wall.

Ted came up to his side and ran his fingers along the streak. It was a slight depression in the wall, and it looked burnt. Ted took his hand away and saw bits of ash on his fingers. He flicked them off and shrugged. “I don’t think this was here before,” he said.

Marty was staring thoughtfully at the streak, and he suddenly gave a short laugh. “It looks like something out of Star Wars,” he said. “Like the kind of mark a lightsaber would make…” Marty hesitated. “Maybe it was a lightsaber,” he murmured.

“So you’re saying that maybe Luke Skywalker’s around here or something?” Ted asked. Excellent! he added silently, and grinned.

“No… I… I don’t know. Maybe it’s just some… mark made by something else.” Marty turned and headed for the door, followed by Ted. “Wanna go downstairs?”

“Sure.”

They took an empty lift car down to the hotel lobby. Walking out of the lift, they got a couple of quizzical glances, but nothing more.

“Pretty strange place to carry out interdimensional experiments,” Marty commented. “I never knew such things happened in hotels.”

“Maybe they do, only no one knows about it because they think such things don’t happen.”

“Uh-huh.”

They strolled out the automated glass front doors and breathed in the fresh air outside. Two people looked at them curiously before walking on.

“Four,” Ted said.

Marty looked at him. “What?”

“That’s the number of people who’ve stared at us so far. It’s becoming most annoying. Five,” he added as a man gave them a strange look before going on into the hotel, face screwed up in concentration as though trying to remember where he’d seen them before.

“Maybe we should stop blocking the door, then,” Marty suggested.

“Good observation, dude.” Ted stuck his hands into his pockets and they started down the pavement.

“So this is the future,” Marty mused. “2004. I kinda thought there would’ve been flying cars by now, seeing how many there were in 2015.”

“Maybe it’s different here.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Six,” Marty said some time later.

“Where are we going, dude?”

“You know, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Seven,” said Ted.

“Is that Luke Skywalker?” asked Marty.

They stopped and stared. Some confused-looking guy in strange clothes was walking around looking confused.

“Dude, if we stare at other people, we’re going to have to start minusing from our count.”

“Is that Luke Skywalker?” Marty asked again.

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“Uh…”

Ted went up to the man before Marty could say any more. “Excuse me, are you Luke Skywalker?” he asked.

Luke stared. “How’d you know my name?”

Ted turned to Marty and gave him a triumphant grin. “See? You’ve just got to ask him.”

Luke was getting even more confused. “How… wha… whe… who are you?”

Ted smiled at him. “I’m Ted, and that’s Marty over there. Is that a real lightsaber?” he asked, pointing.

Luke blinked. “Yeah, it is, but wh…”

Ted’s face lit up. “Whoa! Can I try it?”

“Wha… No, you can’t…”

Ted looked woefully at Luke, who tried to ignore the teen and get a proper sentence out.

“Look here,” Luke started again. “I… uh…” He trailed pathetically off.

Marty grasped Ted’s shoulder and steered him away, giving Luke an apologetic look.

“What did you think you were doing?” Marty demanded when they were out of Luke’s hearing distance.

Ted shrugged. “You wanted to know if he was Luke Skywalker, so I…”

“You can’t just… It’s not him, okay? He doesn’t… he doesn’t exist…”

Ted raised an eyebrow. “Neither do we, then. You said so yourself that you thought the thing we saw was made by a lightsaber.”

“Yeah, but if Keith really brought Luke over, he would be locked up, not out here…”

“We’re out here,” Ted stated matter-of-factly.

“It’s not… it’s not the same, okay?” Marty said. “We’re talking about Luke Skywalker here. The guy from Star Wars. He’s just some… some movie character… fictional…”

Marty kicked at the ground and fell silent.

“Eight,” Ted said pointedly.

#

When they looked back, Luke had already wandered off, now even more confused than before. Marty and Ted continued walking around the streets and heading nowhere.

“I guess we can’t just go home, can we?” Ted asked.

Marty shook his head.

Ted kicked at an empty drink can lying on the ground. It rolled off and came to a stop further down the pavement, where it caused a great deal of inconvenience to a trail of ants heading that way. It also made Ted’s left shoe’s shoelaces come untied, but unlike the ants, they weren’t complaining. Ted kicked them around as he walked, and they still didn’t protest. These were very agreeable shoelaces.

“Nine,” said Marty in a defeated sort of tone.

“I still believe that was Luke Skywalker.”

Marty shrugged.

“He looked like he needed help, dude.”

“You looked like you just wanted to try his lightsaber.”

Ted thought a while, then nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted. “That too.”

“Ten and eleven,” Marty stated, giving a sideways look at the couple gaping at them.

The younger teen had meanwhile come to the conclusion that it might be much less of a bother and possible life hazard if he just stopped for a moment to tie his shoelaces. “Hold on,” he said, and dropped down to do so.

Marty glanced casually at the shop window to his left. It was a movie rental place; new releases filled the display window, and Marty gave them a quick look-over. He hadn’t heard of most of the titles, though one or two sounded vaguely familiar.

That was when his gaze landed on a blue and silver box set standing among the rest of them. A box set whose title was, unlike the rest, very, very familiar.

‘Back to the Future’

Marty’s heart stood still.

Well, nearly stood still, anyway. If it had really stood still, he would have died on the spot, which might have made things rather complicated and caused Ted a lot more trouble than was worth.

Shoelaces dealt with, Ted stood up again and roughly followed Marty’s gaze. “Hey, a movie store!” he said happily. “Want to go in?”

Feeling nauseated but nonetheless unable to take his eyes off the box set, Marty shook his head slowly. “I think… this is the last place we should be,” he said. He swallowed and finally managed to look away, his stomach still doing figurative somersaults inside him.

Inside the shop, the girl behind the counter looked up and saw them. She stared. Her eyes narrowed, and she continued staring. Ted smiled at her.

Marty tugged at Ted’s jacket. “Let’s go,” he muttered.

“Go where?”

“Back.”

“Which way’s that?”

Marty hesitated and looked around. “Uh…”

Ted looked around. “We’re lost, aren’t we?” he asked. Marty didn’t reply, and he took that for a yes. “Bogus,” he sighed.

#

Lewis fumed as he left the police centre, inside of which Steven Dent was busy enjoying his fifth cup of tea for that morning.

“Twenty-four hours,” Lewis announced. “They can’t lodge a report until then.”

“There’s no way we’re going to wait here another day just because his idiot friend went missing,” Ivan said, with a sideways glare at Bill.

“The rest of you don’t have to stay here, all right?” Lewis said. “One of you can just take the van and drive back like we planned, and I’ll just… stay here with Bill. I’ll call up Ted’s dad, tell him his son has gone missing, and we’ll just see what… what happens then.”

“Thanks, dude,” Bill said to him.

“I’m only doing this because you two were my responsibility, okay?” Lewis said. “Believe me, I’d much rather be leaving for home now.” Lewis paced around in circles and threw a last glare at the police station. “Twenty-four hours,” he muttered darkly. “People can die in that time.”

Bill tried hard not to think about that.

#

Room 439 of Kenselton Hotel had been Keith’s home for a good number of years, yet it had still managed to retain some semblance of hotel room -ness. Keith stuck his key card into the slot beneath the door handle. The light turned green with a friendly beep. He pushed the door open and entered.

With one glance he took in his brother sprawled out on the bed with the empty cans of beer on the carpet next to him. He put two and two together, got four, and then wondered why he was bothering with elementary mathematics at a time like this.

“There you are,” Keith said in a rather redundant sort of way.

Adwin was out for the count.

Keith sighed. He went over to the kitchen area, filled a cup with water, put it down, then searched around for a large pot. He found one and placed it by the bed, then dragged his brother’s still form until his head was situated just above the pot. Keith then proceeded to pour the cold water over Adwin’s face, trying his best to get all the runoff into the pot and not onto the carpet.

Adwin spluttered into consciousness as water went up his nose. Yelling, he fell off the bed and Keith put down the empty cup with satisfaction.

“You unbolted the doors,” he stated.

Adwin gazed blearily at him. “What? Oh… that. Yeah, I did…”

“Why?”

“I dunno… it was fun… and it’s not like they have anywhere to go…”

“What’re you doing here, anyway?” Keith asked, emptying the pot of water into the sink.

“I had to,” Adwin said with a laugh. “I mean, Luke Skywalker’s out there, wandering the streets of L.A. looking for a spacep…”

Keith stared at his brother, completely stunned. “What?”

“Huh?”

“You brought Luke Skywalker over.”

“Uh, yeah, kinda…”

“And you let him out.”

“Well, not really… he sorta had a lightsaber at my neck here, see, and I guess he… he wanted to leave, and I couldn’t stop him…”

Keith swore. “What the h*** did you do that for?” he demanded.

“I told you he had a lightsaber and…”

“Get up,” Keith ordered.

“What?”

“I’m going to look for him, and you’re coming with me whether or not you can walk straight.”

“What about the others?”

“It’s not like they have anywhere to go. Come on.”

#

Not quite knowing where to go, Luke just walked, when suddenly angry horns sounded around him and a car screeched to a stop centimetres away from him. The car behind the first crashed straight into it, creating a chain reaction all the way down the street.

Windows were wound down, angry yells and middle fingers filled the air, and Luke tried to apologise, realised no one was accepting his apology, and thought it might be a better idea to get out of the way when suddenly one of the drivers came out of his car and grabbed hold of Luke.

“WHAT THE **** WERE YOU DOING ON THE STREET, *******?” the driver yelled in a PG-13 sort of way. “LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO MY CAR! YOU OWE ME BIG FOR THIS, YOU KNOW THAT, YOU LITTLE S…”

“I didn’t…” Luke started, interrupting the man.

“AND WHO THE **** DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, DRESSED LIKE THAT?” the caps-lock driver continued. “CAPTAIN KIRK?”

“Huh?”

More drivers and their passengers got out of their car and surrounded Luke, yelling at him. Some other drivers and passengers remained in their cars, some unconscious, some trapped, some engaged in wrestling matches with airbags.

Sirens sounded down the street as the police arrived, and before Luke knew it he found himself sitting in a police station facing a frustrated police officer who for some reason didn’t believe that Luke was who he said he was.

“Look, cut the crap, okay?” Officer Blair half-yelled. “We both know you’re not Luke Skywalker. The guy doesn’t exist, for cryin’ out loud. So why don’t you just cooperate here for a moment so we can all get this over and done with. For the fifth time, I want your real name.”

Luke just stared back. “But it is…”

Blair made an annoyed sound. “Fine,” he hissed. “Where do you live, Mr. Skywalker?”

“Well, I grew up on Tatooine, but now I…”

Luke broke off as Blair buried his head in his hands and counted slowly to ten. When he had sufficiently calmed down, he looked back up at Luke and sighed.

“You do know that you’re responsible for five hospital cases and one death, don’t you?” he asked. “Not to mention a lot of damaged cars? The insurance companies won’t be happy with you, that’s for sure. I don’t know what on earth you were doing on the road when there were moving cars on it, but you should be glad you’re still alive. But jaywalking is an offence, you know, and considering the results of your particular case…”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Luke said. “It’s just that I’m new to this planet, and I was trying to figure out what’s going on here. I’m not sure how I got her, but I think it may have been some sort of teleportation device…”

Officer Blair nodded in resigned sort of way.

Thirty minutes later, Luke found himself being led through the doors of the Traven Institute of Mental Health by the men in white.

#

Keith and Adwin moved somewhat frantically out the doors of the Kenselton Hotel and out onto the streets of L.A., looking for Luke.

At least, Keith was frantic. Adwin mostly strolled along in not-quite-straight lines, enjoying the afternoon.

Keith hadn’t expected it to be so hard to find Luke. Where did he have to go, anyway? Keith scrutinised the faces of the people around, hoping to see them staring a particular spot where Luke might be.

The people around were all minding their own business and not looking anywhere in particular, so they were understandably discomfited when they saw Keith staring at them.

“Where is he?” Keith asked.

Adwin shrugged.

“Why’d you even bring him here?” Keith asked.

Adwin shrugged.

Keith looked questioningly at the long line of damaged cars on one side of the road. Police had cordoned off the area, and were directing traffic to the other side. “What the…”

Keith went up to a policewoman taking notes by the side of one of the damaged cars.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“Accident,” the policewoman replied curtly. “Some jaywalker caused all this.” She shook her head and said no more.

“Where’s the jaywalker now?” Keith pressed on.

“At the station, I suppose. They’ll probably send him to hospital or something.”

“He’s injured, huh?”

“Not that kind of hospital. The guy’s crazy, from what I heard. Prancing around the streets dressed like someone out of Star Trek or something.”

“Ah,” Keith said.

”Luke’s at the funny farm,” he reported to Adwin a quarter of a minute later.

Adwin grinned. “Cool!”

“No,” Keith said. “Not cool. Why’d you bring him over for, you idiot?” he asked for the umpteenth time. “We can’t do anything now. I just sure hope that the men in white don’t find out that Luke’s connected to us. If we get in any sort of trouble, it’s all your fault.”

“I thought you said it was okay if they left, because they wouldn’t have anywhere to go.”

Keith gritted his teeth. “I was talking about the other four, who at least come from Earth and look like they come from Earth, and know basic accepted earthling behaviour, like not walking out onto a road when there are moving cars on it. Let’s get out of here.”

Chapter Nineteen: Moving In

July 1992
Room 439, Kenselton Hotel
The Real World

Keith surveyed his new home with satisfaction. Well, so perhaps it wasn’t exactly a home, just a hotel room; but then again, how many nineteen-year-olds had their very own hotel room that they could call home? It was just like an extra large bedroom with an attached kitchen area and bathroom.

Adwin had opted to stay put in their house after their father had started the hotel. It wasn’t really a bad choice, because it effectively meant that he got the whole place more or less to himself. Nathan Fong was rarely home; his wife Hazel and their one-and-a-half-year-old son Andrew were the only other somewhat regular occupants of the house, and they didn’t take up much space.

But Keith still preferred living in the hotel. It was a new experience, for one. It was also a lot quieter and more private. The rest of the fourth floor was empty, set aside for the family and special visitors.

Plus, he got a double bed with the room.

The three medium-sized boxes of his personal belongings stood by the doorway, and Keith scrutinised them for a while, regretting not having brought a penknife or scissors along with him because the taped up boxes looked fairly dauntingly un-open-able. He got down onto the carpet and fiddled with the tape on one of them before giving up. With a sigh – he’d been looking forward to the fun and excitement of unpacking in his new home – he left the room, wandered down to his father’s office and poked around until he found a nice pair of scissors.

Returning to Room 439, Keith slit the tape on the first box and carefully took out the books in there, placing them on the carpet. He glanced around the room, wondering where to put them. There didn’t seem to be any appropriate place… Keith made a mental note to get hold of a bookshelf or make one. He wondered what to do with the books in the meantime, and finally settled for stacking them neatly up on the desk.

Further unpacking revealed that he would probably need more furniture to store the various belongings he had, because one desk, one closet and two bedside tables just weren’t enough; especially since half the desk was taken up by his laptop and the books.

Keith sighed. He hung up his clothes in the closet and arranged his toiletries and towel in the bathroom, then went to see what was on television.

Ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Keith turned off the television and went to answer the door. He let Adwin and Andrew in. Andrew started toddling happily over to the bed as Adwin kicked the door shut, ignoring Keith’s protest at his treatment of said door.

“D’you get free room service?” Adwin asked.

“Yeah,” Keith said, crouching down by the door to make sure it was still in good condition.

Andrew lifted up the bed comforter, peeked under it, and giggled. He released it and toddled over to the open boxes of Keith’s belongings.

“Don’t kick the door again, okay?” Keith pleaded. “And tr… Andrew, put that down!” Keith swore under his breath and half-crawled over to his step-brother, who gazed at him in puzzlement, Dem’s notebook in his hand. “Give me that,” Keith said, prying open the toddler’s fingers and rescuing the precious document which the mysterious old man had given to him the previous year. He placed it safely back into the box, then closed the lid.

“What’s that?” Adwin asked curiously.

“Nothing.”

“School stuff?”

Keith made some non-committal noise and carried Andrew off to another part of the room. “What’re you doing here?” he asked, trying to change the subject.

“Box,” Andrew interrupted, pointing at the box.

“Yes, that’s a box,” Keith agreed. “I keep things in it, and you’re not supposed to touch them. Ever. If you do, weird jelly-like creatures from outer space will come down to Earth and eat you up.”

Unknown to all three of them, this particular statement would in future turn out to be the source of Andrew’s unusual phobia of boxes and jelly that no one could ever quite explain.

“I didn’t have anything to do,” Adwin said. “I thought I’d just drop by.”

“Get a summer job or something,” Keith suggested.

“You never did that.”

“Yeah, and I never went around complaining that I had nothing to do,” Keith retaliated, then realised that Andrew was currently trying to put the wastepaper basket over his head. “No… Andrew, stop that. This is not a hat.”

“Hat,” Andrew said happily. “This hat.”

“No, it’s not. Maybe it is in some exotic country out there, but over here in America, wastepaper baskets are not hats. Adwin, can you take him out of here before he burns the place down or something?”

“Fire!” Andrew said, and giggled.

“We have a future arsonist in our family,” Keith muttered.

“What’s ar-son-ist?” Andrew asked.

“Nothing you need to know about. Shoo.”

Adwin sighed. “All right. Andy, c’mon, let’s go downstairs.”

“Downstairs,” Andrew said. “Go downstairs.”

“There’re some nice matches down there that you can play with,” Adwin continued, picking up the toddler and leaving the room.

Keith watched them go with relief.

Chapter Twenty: No One Can Hear You Scream

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World

The two teenagers tried retracing their steps; they started by going down the road they had come, but it was not long after that that they realised that a lot of other directions looked familiar, and that they therefore had probably been walking through the same area multiple times in different ways.

Also, it just so happened that the time in Ted and Marty’s universe was more or less in sync with that of the real world, which basically meant that not only were they lost, they were also getting hungry for lunch.

According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, every major Galactic Civilization goes through three distinct stages that can be referred to as the How, Why and Where phases. The first is characterized by the question, “How do we eat?” the second by the question, “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question, “Where shall we have lunch?”

According to Marty McFly and Ted Logan, they couldn’t care less about what anyone else said. All that they knew was that there was only one major question currently bugging them – “When can we have lunch?”

Marty hammered on the door of Room 437. “Frank!”

From behind the door came the faint sounds of snoring. Marty sighed.

“Do you want to try next door?” Ted asked.

“You go ahead. I’m staying here ‘til he wakes up.” Marty whacked the door with his palms. “FRANK!”

The door to Room 436 was ajar. Ted pushed it open and entered the room.

Neo was sitting on the bed, glaring defiantly at the blank television screen.

“Neo?”

The man turned his head to glance at him, then looked back at the television.

Ted trooped over to the bedside and held out the almost empty packet of chips. “Want some?”

Neo looked back at the teen. He hesitated, then reached into the packet and took out half a handful of potato chips. Neo gazed at them in his hand.

“Thanks,” he said quietly.

Ted sat down beside him on the bed and tossed some chips into his own mouth.

They munched together in silence for a while.

#

Frank Bannister dearly wished that people would stop disturbing his sleep, because he valued it very much. He scowled at the ceiling as he lay on his back and vowed not to budge. The ceiling scowled back at him, but Frank didn’t notice.

Outside, Marty heard the snoring stop and gave himself a small grin of victory.

“I KNOW YOU’RE AWAKE!” he yelled, thumping on the locked door for the umpteenth time. The door went into depression and started contemplating suicide. It communicated its life-ending plans with the other doors via telepathy, but they all told it to hold on and not give up: something which was becoming increasingly harder to do with each blow Marty dealt to it.

Oh, just get up, won’t you? the door thought irately at Frank, who was then treated to a sudden unpleasant sensation of what it was like being an abused door. He blinked, the feeling went away, and he attributed it to his imagination.

The aggressive knocking on the door then came to an abrupt end.

Finally, Frank thought, settling back down.

Then an ear-splitting scream ripped through the air, and before Frank knew it, he was standing at the room’s open doorway looking uncomprehendingly at two grinning teenagers.

“I told you it would work, dude,” Ted said to Marty. “Wh…” Frank said. “Th… y… wha…”

Neo was standing off to the side, forehead against the wall and hands over his ears. He now took his hands away and moved over to the doorway. “Good morning,” he said, eyeing the half-asleep Frank with some displeasure. “May I use the computer?”

#

The four of them talked. Not much, but enough to assess the situation and get an idea of the options available.

Frank could have almost laughed at it all. Everything was so simple, and yet not. They could just walk out of the hotel right now – all four of them – and nobody would stop them, but then what? It wasn’t as if they could all just go walking along the streets without attracting too much attention and too many awkward questions they couldn’t answer. Escaping was the easy part. What they did after that was the hard part.

In an unlocked hotel room, Keith had them completely trapped and he knew it.

What was probably worst of all was how everything looked so normal. If they tried hard enough they could even imagine that they were just on some holiday somewhere and that this was the hotel they were staying in. Through the window could be seen parts of a completely normal looking city filled with normal buildings, normal roads, normal people. The kind of place no one would have paid them a second look in had they been back home. But here, all they had to do was walk out and who knew what would happen?

To put it simply, that would be a stupid thing to do. People would be sure to stare. It wasn’t everyday that you saw fictional characters walking down the street. They would have to split up, for sure, if they went out of the hotel – if ever. But even that didn’t eliminate the risk of being besieged by crazy rabid fans wanting autographs from who they wrongly supposed were their favourite movie stars.

Keith had them totally trapped.

After splashing cold water on his face, Frank had been able to feel somewhat more awake than before, but the effect was already wearing off and he could feel his exhaustion creeping up on him once again. Marty and Ted were hungrily digging into the last packet of potato chips in the room, and Neo was staring at the ceiling. At first, Frank thought that Neo was thinking, until he too noticed the lizard up there. The aforementioned lizard scampered its way across the ceiling, lost its grip, and scrabbled wildly in the air as it fell down dangerously close to the open bag of chips.

Frank was beginning to have doubts about the cleanliness of the hotel.

Across the room, the teens got up and went next door to look for more food to satisfy their hunger, as it didn’t look as if lunch would be served anytime soon. Neo followed them out but turned right instead towards the lift lobby on that floor. He wondered if there were other people staying in the hotel; the display numbers showing the lifts moving up and down proved that to be true.

Neo started to leave, when there was a ‘ding’ sound and a lift door opened next to him. Standing inside was a little boy of about five years old whom we shall call Rupert. He had been supposed to wait for his parents to enter the lift to go to their room on the seventeenth floor, but he had forgotten to hold the ‘open door’ button and the lift hadn’t waited. Scared, Rupert had hit all the numbered buttons in the lift, including the one for the fourth that had a sign saying ‘Closed for Refurbishment’ in big friendly letters next to it.

Neo stared at Rupert, and the boy’s eyes widened, his mouth falling open. Then the doors closed, and the lift happily made its way to the fifth floor, followed by the sixth, the seventh, and so on all the way to the seventeenth. When it finally arrived there, Rupert stumbled out into the arms of his parents who had been wondering exactly where their son had got to and if he had fallen into the toilet again like last time.

Rupert wasted no time in reporting his strange encounter. “Mum, Dad, I saw Neo!”

“Who?”

“Neo! Thomas A. Anderson! The guy from The Matrix! He was on the fourth floor, I saw him!”

Rupert’s mother muttered something about the unhealthy number of times he had seen that movie, which by the way wasn’t exactly suitable for someone of his age, and why didn’t he watch nice children’s shows such as Barney and Friends instead like every other kid did?

“The fourth floor?” his father asked. “Isn’t that the one that’s closed for refurbishment?”

Rupert shrugged. “I don’t know. But I saw Neo, I really did!”

His mother sighed. “You can’t have seen him, Rupert. He’s not real. It’s just a movie.”

“But…”

“I think we should cut down on the amount of television you’ve been watching lately.”

“But I SAW him!”

Rupert’s father shook his head, a small smile on his face. “Good April Fool’s joke. I just remembered it’s April 1^st today.”

“But…”

“And anyway, I think Keanu Reeves has better things to do than walk around a hotel on a floor that’s closed for refurbishment.”

“But…”

“Forget it, Rupert.”

“But…”

The boy cast a last look at the lift he had exited from, now merrily making its way from the twenty-second floor to stop at the twenty-third, and the twenty-fourth, and the twenty-fifth… Rupert scowled. He’d seen Neo, he knew he had.

Back in the room, Frank had fallen asleep again. Neo gave him one look, realised it meant that the computer was now available for use, and accessed the Internet.

Now to find out what he was in this world.

#

The Traven Institute of Mental Health was, on most days, a fairly quiet affair when viewed from the outside. Like most other mental hospitals, it had its share of crazy yelling madmen, but their cries rarely escaped the soundproofed walls of the institute.

The main building was a gleaming white and fronted by a neatly manicured lawn, all in all a picture of serenity.

This morning, however, screams suddenly broke out – not from the vocal cords of the resident crazy yelling madmen, but rather from that of the staff.

A young man suddenly ran out the building and down the steps, a blazing lightsaber in his hand.

Luke was feeling more and more confused by the second. Firstly the men in white had made him enter that building, and then they had shouted at him to get out after he demonstrated that his lightsaber was, in fact, a real weapon, and not a stick of dead metal as they claimed.

He deactivated his lightsaber and stuck it back into his utility belt.

Luke was hungry. He wondered if he should go back in and ask them where he could get some food, then he remembered the horrified looks with which they had regarded him and his lightsaber and decided that maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea after all.

Luke left the grounds of the institute and went towards the sound of traffic where there would probably be people.

He stopped a passer-by on the street. “Excuse me, but do you know where I can find some food?”

The passer-by blinked. “Uh, yeah,” she said with a questioning look at Luke’s clothes. “There’s a McDonald’s across that street…”

“What’s that?”

“Uh, McDonald’s?” she said. “You know, burgers and fries and stuff? Are you foreign or something?”

“Yes,” Luke said.

“Uh-huh… Okay, um, look, I’m really sorry, but I’m kind of in a rush here… Just go over there and check out the place, okay?”

“Okay,” Luke said.

The passer-by continued her passing by, and Luke set out to discover McDonald’s.

Chapter Twenty-One: Hope Remains

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World

Frank woke up one hour later and chased Neo off the computer. Neo would have protested if not for the fact that he was more in the mood to lie down on the bed and dwell on the fact that Keanu Reeves currently had a total fortune of about 350 million US dollars, whereas he, Neo, had spent the better half of his life trying to make do with his pathetic salary, dingy little apartment and cheap food.

It was probably the hardest e-mail message Frank had ever composed in his life, but he managed somehow, although when he read back through it again he had to admit that it didn’t sound very convincing. He just hoped it would have to do; at least there was still some hope, no matter how small, that Michael J. Fox would believe him and perhaps find some way to help the four of them. Perhaps. If he did, Frank would promise to leave his cash alone.

Marty and Ted entered the room, having just finished watching an episode of Sesame Street in the other room for lack of anything better to do.

“What’re you doing?” Marty asked.

“E-mail.”

“To?”

Frank hesitated, wondering if he should tell him. “Michael J. Fox,” he finally said.

Marty raised an eyebrow.

“Look, I know it’s not going to work, okay? But it couldn’t hurt to try…”

Ted glanced at the bottom right hand corner of the computer screen and nodded. “Yeah, it’s not going to work, dude.”

Frank sighed. “I KNOW. No one would ever believe…”

“Nope. Not that. Look at the date on the screen.”

They looked.

April 1^st, 2004, it said happily in big friendly letters.

“It’s April Fools’ Day, dude,” Ted said nonchalantly, turning to stare at a lizard crawling along the ceiling towards Neo.

It took a moment for the words to sink in… and when it did, Frank swore really, really loudly.

Neo started. Above him, a certain lizard was similarly affected, decided to fall off the ceiling, and landed on his head.

“AAAAAHHHH!”

Marty was suddenly struck with an idea. Heart thumping away and trying to ignore the sight of Neo trying to grab hold of Liz and get her off his head, Marty took over the computer and typed ‘www.hillvalley-online.com’ into the address bar.

He hit the ‘enter’ key and waited with bated breath… and then the page loaded.

It was there.

The main page of the Hill Valley Online website.

Marty almost cried at the familiarity of it all. The site existed. Which mean that Hill Valley and everyone in it still existed too… for the time being, at least, until the portal closed.

Why hadn’t he thought of trying this earlier? Marty wondered briefly about that, then realised that it was because Frank had been hogging the computer all the time. The teen gratefully logged onto his e-mail account and typed out an SOS to Doc:

From - futureboy85@hillvalley-online.com
To - julesvernefan@yahoo.com
Subject: SOS

Doc, I hope you can get this. There’s some psycho guy named Keith holding me and three others captive in a hotel somewhere in some other dimension. It’s the same one the BTTF.com website came from.

Get us out of here, please! I don’t know how much longer we have to live.

- Marty

#

Andrew Fong ran another search through his half-brother’s office, getting more and more frustrated by the second. Where on earth had Liz gone? His pet lizard – smuggled over from Singapore – had run away before, it was true, but never for this long… and in a huge hotel like this, who knew where she could be?

Andrew scowled. Adwin had promised to look after her for him, but if an open container marked ‘That Stupid Lizard’ located next to an empty food tray was any clue, Adwin hadn’t been doing a very good job. Didn’t he know that lizards could climb?

The fourteen-year-old sighed and swivelled around in Keith’s chair, finally turning to face the desk and switching on the computer. Logging onto BTTF.com, Andrew spent a nice time on the message boards, completely oblivious of the fact that the main character from his favourite movie was currently just three floors above him.

Chapter Twenty-Two: To Tame the Unknown

1^st April 2004, Thursday
The Real World

The issue of lunch was soon brought up, as well as how they didn’t seem to be getting the room service that Keith had promised.

Frank decided that he would be the one to go out to get the food; he was probably the least conspicuous of the four of them.

There was a McDonald’s across the road from the hotel, and Frank made that his destination. The four of them pooled their money together and discovered they had enough for several Big Macs with fries and Coke. Marty and Ted were still hungry, despite having finished off a lot of potato chips. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Think big.

“Uh… I don’t suppose any of you have sunglasses, right?” Frank asked, pocketing the cash. “So people won’t recognise me so easily…”

Neo hesitated, then reluctantly dug into his pocket and emerged with the sunglasses case. He opened it and took out the pair of really cool sunglasses. “Here. But you better not lose it… Are you listening to me?”

None of them were; all had been completely entranced by the sight of the really cool sunglasses.

Frank blinked. “Huh? Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” He reached out a hand to get them, put on the sunglasses, and grinned. “Cool.”

“If you break them, I’ll kill you,” Neo added casually as Frank headed out the door.

“Can you lend me the sunglasses later?” Ted asked.

“No.”

Marty picked up a pen that was lying on the table, looked at it, and put it down again for lack of anything better to do. “So what’re we going to do until he gets back?”

There were a few seconds of silence… and then Ted started singing.

“A hundred green bottles
Hanging on the wall
A hundred green bottles
Hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle were to accidentally fall
There’ll be ninety-nine green bottles
Hanging on the wall.
Ninety-nine green bottles
Hanging on the wall…”

Neo groaned and resigned himself to a long, long wait.

“And if one green bottle were to accidentally fall…”
Neo went over to the computer, still on, and decided to do some random Internet surfing.

“Ninety-seven green bottles
Hanging on the wall…”

Neo went to IMDB.com and typed random things into the search bar. This gave him a lot of negative results, so he decided to type more meaningful things into the search bar and learnt that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie was coming out in 2005, starring Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent, Mos Def as Ford Prefect and Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox. Neo typed more stuff into the search bar.

“There’ll be ninety-six green bottles
Hanging on the wall.”

Marty went over to the next room to see if there was anything he could do over there. There wasn’t, and he came back. The teen flipped open the cable TV guide and started to read.

“And if one green bottle were to accidentally fall…”

Neo went to Yahoo.com and typed not so random things into the search bar.

“Ninety-five green bottles
Hanging on the wall…”

Neo grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and got to work learning to forge Keanu Reeves’ signature; he never knew when it might come in handy.

“There’ll be ninety-four green bottles
Hanging on the wall.”

Marty spotted Michael J. Fox’s name somewhere in the TV guide, freaked out, and closed the book. He spent about two pointless minutes absent-mindedly drumming out the rhythm to the song against the bedside table, then joined in the singing.

“Eighty green bottles
Hanging on the wall
Eighty green bottles
Hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle were to accidentally fall
There’ll be seventy-nine green bottles
Hanging on the wall.”

#

Really cool sunglasses on, Frank entered the lift, then jabbed at the button for the first floor and waited in silence as the life slowly descended the four floors. Had it been a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter in the headquarters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the lift would have been delighted to go down. However, this lift was just a normal lift and couldn’t care less about which direction it was made to go in.

The lift lobby on the ground floor was near empty, and not many people paid much attention to Frank when he got out of the lift. People getting out of lifts happened all the time, after all. Only one person was staring at him any more than necessary.

His name was Rupert.

Mouth hanging open, the boy tugged at his father’s sleeve. “Dad…”

His father was busy filling up a form at the hotel counter, and was slightly irritated at being interrupted. “What?” he asked, not turning around.

“Is that…”

Richard Murdoch heaved an exasperated sigh at his son. “WHO? Neo again? Luke Skywalker? Mr. Spock? Marty McFly? I’m busy, Rupert!”

That guy did kind of look like Marty, but Rupert didn’t think it was a good idea to say so and shut his mouth.

Frank exited the hotel, trying to appear as inconspicuous as possible as he headed in the general direction of the McDonald’s building. He couldn’t help but notice several people starting to stare at him.

They made him nervous, and he looked away. Some of the people on the other side also started staring at him and whispering among themselves. They also made him nervous, and Frank was about to just run off somewhere else when someone tapped him on the shoulder from behind and made him jump.

The person was a teenage boy dressed all in black staring intently at him. “Sorry,” he started with a slight smile, “but… uh… can you tell me where you got those sunglasses? They look just like the ones from The Matrix, and I think they’re really cool!”

All around Frank, people were nodding in agreement, looks of awe on their faces as they stared spellbound at his really cool sunglasses.

Frank was so going to kill Neo when he got back.

“So… like, where’d you get them?” the youth asked again, hopefully.

“They cost me three million dollars, kid. I don’t think you can afford them.” The traffic lights chose that time to turn, and Frank thankfully ran across the road muttering darkly under his breath. He took off the really cool sunglasses and stuck them in a pocket. He’d probably attract less attention that way, ironic though it seemed.

The group of people who had been staring at him quit staring at him and started staring at his pocket instead where the really cool sunglasses were. Meanwhile, another group of people started staring at him instead.

Frank was getting really, really nervous. The McDonald’s was not that far away. He’d go in, get the food, and leave. That seemed like a good plan, and he was about to start carrying it out when another person tapped him on the shoulder and made him jump again.

A teenage girl smiled shyly at him. “Excuse me… are you Michael J. Fox?”

Frank ran.

#

“Thirty-two green bottles
Hanging on the wall
Thirty-two green bottles
Hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle were to accidentally fall
There’ll be thirty-one green bottles
Hanging on the wall.”

Marty had been watching the clock; they were singing at a rate of approximately six bottles per minute.

#

Frank leaned against the side of the McDonald’s building, happily licking away at the free chocolate ice cream one of the McDonald’s staff had given him in exchange for an autograph. He had tried putting on the really cool sunglasses again a while ago, and had been paid $20 by some crazy Matrix fan for letting him try them on.

Frank changed his mind. He was beginning to like this place.

#

Jessica Wiedlin had seen her fair share of weirdos. All sorts of people came to McDonald’s (heck, just a while ago Michael J. Fox had dropped by for a visit), some less normal than others. She was therefore not too perturbed when she saw Luke Skywalker come through the door and look around in a confused sort of way before joining the queue. She’d once taken orders for two Trekkies in full Klingon costume – they’d ordered four cheeseburgers, two large fries, Coke, and one Happy Meal – and she was more than prepared for this guy who evidently thought he was Luke Skywalker or something. Well, she could play along. They didn’t pay her for nothing.

“Hi,” said Luke when he reached the front of the queue. “Uh… you have food here?”

“Yeah, we do. What’ll it be?”

Luke scanned the menu above the counter and hesitated. “Uh… what do you recommend?”

People behind Luke started muttering darkly about idiots who joined McDonald’s queues without knowing what they wanted to order beforehand.

“Look, just get a cheeseburger or something, okay?” an irate fellow behind Luke decided for him.

“What’s that?” Luke asked.

“A burger with cheese in it,” Jessica dutifully supplied.

“Um, okay, I’ll have one of that…”

Jessica rang up the order on the counter. “That’ll be 89 cents, please.”

Luke hesitated. “Uh, I don’t have any money with me…”

Jessica inwardly groaned. At least the Klingon fellows had had cash on them.

“Oh, just get out of here,” the-guy-behind-Luke said.

Luke faltered a moment, then obeyed and left McDonald’s, his hunger unsatisfied.

All in a day’s work, Jessica thought drolly.

#

“One green bottle
Hanging on the wall
One green bottle
Hanging on the wall…”

Finally, Neo thought with relief. It was high time that stupid song was over.

“There’ll be no green bottles
Hanging on the wall.”

A few seconds of blissful silence followed. Neo reached out for a bottle of water on the table and drank. He was thirsty.

“A hundred green bottles
Lying on the floor,” Ted started.

Neo coughed on the water and turned round in incredulous indignation to face the singers. Marty grinned and joined in the second part of the song. He was bored.

“A hundred green bottles
Lying on the floor
And if…”

Marty and Ted looked at each other.

“And if…”

“And if one dumb person were to kick one out the door…”

“YEAH!”

“There’ll be ninety-nine green bottles
Lying on the floor.
Ninety-nine green bottles
Lying on the floor…”

Neo stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him. The teens grinned and high-fived each other.

#

Frank gleefully counted the money he’d managed to collect so far. He had a hundred dollars, just from letting people try on the sunglasses. He hoped that Neo wouldn’t mind, though… there weren’t that many fingerprints on the lenses after all.

#

Outside Room 436, Neo leaned against the closed door and shut his eyes, trying to block off everything. From the room, strains of a song about ninety-six bottles lying on the floor reached his ears and he tried to ignore it.

Neo didn’t know what to think. It didn’t seem that long ago when the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar had dragged him out of the world as he knew it, plunging him instead into some strange future place run by machines, which they claimed was the real world. And then, just as he was finally getting used to that and the fact that he’d never be able to eat another McDonald’s burger again, Keith had to drag him out of that world into another that he claimed was the real world, which despite having McDonald’s burgers, wasn’t that great otherwise.

Exactly how many ‘real world’s were there, anyway? How did he even know that this one was the real one? Why did he keep ending up in strange Twilight Zone-y situations like this? Why was he asking all these questions again?

Neo half-expected Rod Serling to walk out of nowhere and give the television viewers an introduction to the weird life of one Thomas ‘Neo’ Anderson and his nowhere-near-brief journey through that mysterious place known as The Twilight Zone.

But Rod Serling didn’t appear; he was dead, after all.

The song in the room had reached eighty-seven bottles and was showing no signs of stopping just yet. In fact, the rate had increased to seven bottles per minute.

And that was another thing. Ted scared him, scared him big-time, scared him like no one Neo had ever known or thought he would ever know. Ted Theodore Logan was, without a doubt, the freakiest person he had ever had the unfortunate chance to meet. He didn’t like what the teen implied that he too was capable of, of the potential he had to be as much of a clueless idiot as Ted was. Well, fine, so maybe he already was a clueless idiot, because if any word could describe how he currently felt, it was ‘clueless’. Here he was, grabbed out of the life he knew and dumped into some weird other dimension where – if he were to leave the hotel – he would most probably be mistaken for some actor whose name he couldn’t even pronounce.

Neo wanted so desperately to leave this place. Part of him wanted to just dash out of the hotel into the streets right now and just run… somewhere. Anywhere. But that would be an idiotic thing to do. He and Ted probably had more in common than he dared to dare imagine.

The teens were at eighty bottles and going strong.

There was a ‘ding’ sound, and Frank walked out of the lift, carrying a bag of McDonald’s food in his left hand and munching on French fries with the other. Seeing Neo, he moved the bag over to his right hand and used his clean one to take out the really cool sunglasses. “You could have warned me,” he said, returning the sunglasses.

“What?”

“I went out wearing those, and everyone within a five mile radius started staring at me because they thought the sunglasses were really cool. Kind of defeated the purpose, if you ask me.”

Neo stared down at his really cool sunglasses. “Why are there so many fingerprints on them?”

Frank decided that it was better not to answer that particular question and instead pushed open the door and entered the room.

“Seventy-five green bottles – oh, hi.” The singing stopped, and Frank gave the teens a strange look as he dumped the food onto the table. Neo walked in behind him, using the really cool sunglasses cloth to wipe away the fingerprints of uncertain origin on them. About two seconds later, he decided to forget it and go after the food instead. Neo didn’t know how long ago it had been since he had last eaten a McDonald’s burger. Come to think of it, he never had. Those hadn’t been real burgers, but ones created by the Matrix.

It didn’t matter. A Big Mac is a Big Mac is a Big Mac, and Neo happily devoured the two flame-grilled patties, lettuce, tomatoes and cheese on a sesame seed bun.

No, this fic was not sponsored by McDonald’s.

“So what took you so long?” Marty asked, going over to the table to grab a burger.

Frank gave a non-committal shrug. “That’s none of your business,” he said after a while, trying not to think too much of the hundred bucks in his wallet that he had earned.

“Is this Pepsi?” Marty asked, lifting up a cup.

“No, that’s Coke.”

“Oh.” Disappointed, Marty put the cup back down. “So where are we?”

“L.A.” Frank reached over a hand. “Pass the fries, Ted.”

The teen reluctantly passed them over. On the ceiling, Liz decided that Marty’s head would make a nice landing spot. The lizard mentally calculated the angle at which she should kick off the ceiling, taking into account wind speed and direction.

Liz adjusted her trajectory and jumped.

Marty moved.

Liz hit the ground and swore.

Wiping his hands clean on a serviette, Marty scooted over to the computer and logged onto his e-mail. To his disappointment, Doc hadn’t replied… but he supposed that chances of that happening in such a short time were minimal.

“Look, I’m leaving this on, okay?” he asked, swivelling around in his chair to face the others. “If Doc replies, just tell me.”

Random nods of assent met his request. Liz ran frantically around on the ground, wondering where her tail had gone.

Neo picked out the camera in the room, tucked away in a corner of the ceiling, and decided to put it out of action once he was done eating.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Four Past Midnight

16^th October 1997
Room 439, Kenselton Hotel

It was four in the morning, according to the clock. Keith realised with a slight jolt that he had been twenty-five years old for four hours.

He gazed into his computer screen with coffee-induced energy, his head hurting from thinking too much. He was almost on the verge of giving up, but he couldn’t; he had vowed to work this out before the break of dawn, and he intended to keep to that vow.

Yet his father’s words of years before had an annoying tendency to pop up in his mind, and try as he might to ignore them, he couldn’t.

You can’t just throw reality out the window like that. This is the real world.

A part of him told him it was true. This was, after all, the real world, not some science-fiction story where wondrous things could happen. In this world, people led horribly normal lives that followed all the laws of physics. If you jumped into the air, gravity would pull you back down. If you jumped into the air and then tried to fall to the ground and miss – which, according to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is the only way to fly – you would hit the ground anyway.

This was the real world. Santa Claus didn’t exist. There were no fairies at the bottom of the garden. If you stopped and smelled the roses, chances were that you’d find yourself in detention the next day for not finishing your homework. School buses did not take trips through someone’s digestive system. A purple dinosaur toy that comes to life and sings should be sent to an exorcist. If, on the off-chance aliens did exist and one visited Earth, phoning home would rack up a gigantic galactic phone bill that would in all probability force it to declare bankruptcy. If you fell into a pool of toxic waste you’d probably just get cancer and die. If you sliced up the head of an airhead, you would, unbelievable as it might seem, find brains.

This was the real world.

And the real world had certain rules of normality, and zapping things over from other universes just didn’t fit into the definition of ‘normal’. It might be theoretically possible, but then again, it is also theoretically possible for a penguin to get up in drag and dance the hula, and that’s not been happening. Not in this world, anyway.

This world…

Keith gave a start. He clambered clumsily out of his standard-shaped chair and stumbled over to the safe in his room. With fingers trembling from too much caffeine, he keyed in the access code and opened the safe, reaching inside and taking out the notebook that Dem had given him seven years ago.

There is information this world will not allow to be known…

Reading quickly through the first few pages, a chill crept up his spine. It found creeping tiring business, and decided to just run up Keith’s spine and get it over and done with.

The diagrams, notes, equations, everything… Keith knew he’d found just the information he needed, and not only that, but the means to it.

In this world, some things can never happen. Some machines can never be built, even if you knew how to, because the laws of this world that govern normality wouldn’t allow it, and would come up with ways to stop it from happening – either by a lack of information, or resources…

Keith turned the book over and lifted the back cover as he had done several times before. It was a pocket, slotted in which was a thin sheet of a deep turquoise metalloid, the likes of which had never before been seen in the real world.

Forbidden resources, needed to build a forbidden machine.

And at the bottom right hand corner of the folder lay the unfamiliar address stamp of the book’s origins:

Asirot Research Facility
39-C Cilamir Road
Aquintos, 561413
Aquintos, Xavarin, Nexus

The chill made a return journey down Keith’s spine.

Reality got defenestrated.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Those Who Still Believe

1^st April 2004, Thursday
Room 1721, Kenselton Hotel

The television was on in front of him, but Rupert Murdoch had his mind on other things. He was sure that there was something going on on the fourth floor other than refurbishment work. Something weird. He’d seen Neo with his own two eyes, and furthermore, he bet that Neo was still there. If only he had the chance to prove it…

His father was out on business, and his mother was sleeping in the hotel room’s second bedroom, the door closed.

Leaving the television on, Rupert quietly checked to see if his mother was still sound asleep. She was.

Heart pounding, Rupert headed for the door. He was about to go out, when he remembered the key card; he’d nearly just run the risk of locking himself out.

Rupert rummaged around in his mother’s handbag until he found the key card. He took it out and stuck it into his pocket. Going over to the door, he reached for the door lock and turned the catch as he had seen his parents do; then with some effort he pushed the door open and stepped out.

A wave of exhilaration swept over him, along with an underlying feeling of guilt. This probably constituted running away, but he wouldn’t take long… he just had to know…

Entering the lift lobby, Rupert smacked the ‘down’ button and waited with growing excitement as the lift car slowly descended to his floor. Eventually, the lift doors opened and he got in.

Rupert looked for the button with a ‘4’ on it and pressed it.

Seconds later, the boy stepped out onto the fourth floor of Kenselton Hotel. There was a strip of tape blocking off the lifts, but Rupert easily ducked under it.

He’d made it...

The five-year-old looked around the deserted floor in awe. He could stay here forever, he thought, walking soundlessly out to the corridor. Every forbidden step sent a thrill running down his back… no one knew he was here, no one…

Now to find Neo.

Rupert paused momentarily to listen, eyes closed. His mind filtered off the soft music in the corridor, and behind that he could make out the faint sounds of voices…

They were coming from the door just several metres away from him. Rupert went over and pressed his ear against the door of Room 437. There were definitely people there, he thought feverishly.

Rupert glanced at the doorbell, high above his reach. He couldn’t reach it, so he settled for the next best. Raising his right fist, he knocked.

Almost immediately the voices fell silent. Then one spoke: “Who’s that?”

Rupert wasn’t too sure as to how he should answer. “Me,” he said.

There was a pause, then the door opened slightly and a face peeked out. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Rupert, and…“ He caught sight then of Neo further inside the room, and his face lit up. “Neo!” he shouted jubilantly. “I knew you were here, I saw you…”

Marty looked doubtfully back into the room. “Do you know him?” he asked Neo.

“I… saw him just now, but…”

“My dad said you weren’t real, but I knew you were ‘cause I saw you and no one believed me…”

Marty opened the door a little more and let Rupert in. The boy’s face was flushed, his eyes shining with the joy that can only be attained upon the discovery that one of your favourite fictional characters is real and sitting dumbfounded at a computer only several metres away from you.

Neo suddenly realised that everyone in the room was staring at him.

“Um,” he said intelligently.

“You are real!” Rupert enthused in a painfully Walt Disney -esque way.

“Uh… Rupert, right?” Marty cut in. “Do you parents know you’re here?”

Rupert smiled, a look of triumph on his young face. “No,” he said. “My mother’s supposed to be looking after me now, but she went to sleep so I came up here.”

The others exchanged looks. Frank shook his head and wandered off to gaze out the windows.

Neo contemplated getting out of his chair, then decided he would be more comfortable sitting and so stayed there. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to be here without anyone knowing…”

“I could tell my mom and dad,” Rupert said eagerly, “then they’ll have to come here and they can see you and they’ll know I’m telling the truth…”

“And then they’ll get the press over and we’ll be shipped off to some freak show,” Frank muttered to the windowsill. He sighed and turned around to face Rupert. “Look here, kid. You can’t tell people about us, okay? You’re not supposed to be here. We’re not supposed to be here. Your parents probably won’t believe you even if they saw us, because… because most people just can’t accept things that aren’t normal and that don’t fit into their idea of what’s possible and real, even if it’s right there in their faces…”

“But I believe you,” Rupert said.

“You’ll grow out of it eventually, trust me,” Frank said somewhat fiercely. “And you’ll remember all the weird unexplainable stuff that happened to you as a kid, and you’ll find ways of explaining them, and you’ll laugh over it with your friends and wonder how you could’ve ever thought it possible that you met a bunch of movie characters in a hotel room. It’s the stuff of fantasies. Childish dreams. We’re all dreams here, not you. Go back to the real world where you belong, and be happy at the fact that your whole existence isn’t due to some bearded guy from New Zealand.”

Rupert blinked. Frank turned back to the window and glared at it. Sleep deprivation never put him in a good mood.

“I brought cookies,” Rupert finally said, reaching into his pocket. “I thought you might be hungry.”

No one else moved or said anything, so Ted took it upon himself to accept the proffered cookies.

“Thanks, little dude,” he said. “But you shouldn’t keep your mom and dad waiting. They would be most worried about you.”

“You look like Neo,” Rupert said.

Neo buried his head in his hands and heaped figurative dirt over it.

Ted smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

“Can I come see you guys again?” Rupert asked hopefully.

“Perhaps you’d better not,” Marty said. “Keep this all a secret, okay?”

Rupert nodded after some hesitation. “Sure.” He paused. “I guess I’ll go, then.”

“One departure from the Twilight Zone,” Frank murmured to the windowpane.

Marty saw Rupert out the door and closed it, then plopped himself down on a bed.

“Anybody want cookies?” Ted asked.

Eyes still on the computer, Neo reached out a hand. “Give me one.”

Ted extracted two cookie halves from the packet, then went over and placed them in Neo’s hand. He glanced at the screen. “What are you doing?”

“Research,” Neo said vaguely, although it looked more like he was hacking into a Matrix fansite to make it display the words ‘NEO WAS HERE’ whenever someone logged in.

Frank left the windowside and went into the adjoining bathroom to take a shower.

Chapter 2.25 »

#