[dkstories] Fan Fic Thingy

[Colebph]

I couldn't find a way to contact Mr. Kirk directly so I guess I'm writing this here mostly for him, though of course others are certainly welcome to weigh in on it.

 

I wanted to ask Mr. Kirk for permission to post a fan fic sequel to the Do Over series that I started writing recently, or perhaps collaborate on it with him or just give him the idea if he would prefer not to have another author expounding on his work. The idea is sort of a "Do Over: The Next Generation". Here's a chunk of the prologue:

 

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I knew it worked long before I opened my eyes.

 

I was a heavy sleeper, something my parents had teased me about heavily all through my adolescent years, which was a good thing because my little brother snored heavily all night. He was actually suffering from obstructive sleep apnea, although no one in the family figured it out until he was twenty-three. He’d had to wear a CPAP breathing machine for almost ten years after he’d been diagnosed, until they were finally able to invent a medication that selectively expanded throat muscles during periods of unconsciousness and kept the airway open.

 

It was his snoring that I became aware of first, a lightly pitched, adorable little whimper that told me he was still a few years away from puberty yet. That made me aware of my own body, and I realized that my back didn’t hurt for the first time in almost twenty years. I wiggled my fingers and toes and my brain, newly altered as it was, registered that they seemed somehow too small compared to the way they were when I fell asleep.Technically not true – when this body had fallen asleep, a few hours ago, it was the same normal eleven year old body that it was now. But while it was sleeping, the brain had been overwritten by a transmission received from almost fifty years in the future, and those additional years of memories recalled a body much different from the one it inhabited now. The shock of it was almost enough to make my eyes shoot open, but I resisted. I wanted to savor my emergence into this timeline gradually, taking time out to reflect on every new sensation as it came.

 

I took a deep breath, and the first thing I smelled was the scent of my cat, Pinto. No, wait, that wasn’t right, was it? Pinto wasn’t this cat, Pinto would be its grandkitten, six years down the road. This was Modesto,the first cat we’d ever owned. My parents had named it after their childhood hometown, back when they were under the delusion that it would be THEIR cat.But of course Modesto made it very clear that he was MY cat, not theirs. That thought made me reach out with my left foot and, sure enough, I could feel the familiar feline fur of my beloved pet at the foot of my bed, and at my touch, I could hear him start softly purring. It bothered me for a moment that his smell was so strong to me, as I couldn’t remember him ever peeing on my bed during my childhood, but then I realized that my original brain had probably filtered out the smell long before today as a normal “background” smell and paid it no mind,whereas to my newly-altered sixty year old brain, the smell was new and different, since it had been quite some time since I’d owned a cat, much less shared a bed with one.

 

With a soft, contented sigh, I opened my eyes. My ever-close ceiling greeted me, reminding me that I was on the top bunk of the bunk beds my little brother and I shared. Across the room, an AM/FM radio clock with a laserlight was shining the time and date above my head:

 

Tuesday, July 13^th,2021. 04:43:21 AM.

 

Just as I expected it to be. The early hour was a bit of a surprise, but the date was exactly what I had aimed for. I took a moment to smile at the thought of it – in the span of a short nap, I had fallen asleep in 2068 and awakened in 2021, with forty-seven crystal clear years’ worth of memories of the future. If knowledge was power, I was now as close as any human being could get to being a God. At this exact moment, I knew everything, both on a personal family scale and a major world event scale, that would occur over the next five decades with 100% accuracy. I took a moment to bask in that power, and smirked as I reflected on the hard truth that with every change I made to this timeline, my accuracy rate would plummet until I reached a point where I knew the future no better than an ordinary person. It helps one wield power more wisely when they realize that such power has it’s limits. For a moment I reconsidered the first phase of my plan, but no, my parents were still my parents and I had already run my head through a hundred possible excuses for delaying telling them, and nothing would stick.

 

So, with a sigh, I swung my legs over the side of my bunk and dropped to the floor.

 

“Misha?” a groggy seven year old voice echoed into the darkness, and I turned to look at my little brother, grinning. Even in the dark I could see he still had all his hair, and he was wearing those ridiculous Vertigo pajamas that grandma Sandy had bought for him back in two tho..

 

No, not ‘back in’ anything, I realized. ‘Just last Christmas’. I sighed as I realized the Vertigo cartoon was probably going to be something I’d have to put up with again for the next three years, as my brother’s obsession with that show was something it took him far too long to grow out of. It was 2018’s answer to “Dora the Explorer”, and at seven my brother was already too damned old to still be interested in it. How grandma Sandy had managed to find a pair of PJ’s in his size, I didn’t know for sure.She probably had them special made; being the mother of a former US Senator definitely had its perks.

 

“Go back to sleep, Richie,” I mumbled into the darkness, and was rewarded with the sight of his mop of blond hair falling back onto his pillow. I resisted the urge to go over and tousle his hair affectionately,remarking on how much like his future nephew, my son, he looked, despite the lack of blood relation. I sighed at that memory, wondering what unlikely circumstances might still lead to his birth in the new timeline I intended to create. It wasn’t very likely.

 

I tip-toed through the hall, past my parents’ bedroom, and smirked to myself at the very feint noises I could make out coming from that room. “Rabbits,” I muttered to the darkness, increasing the mental tally in my head to fifty six. Fifty-six times I had encountered direct evidence that my parents were still like two horned up teenagers when it came to their love for each other. Or should the tally be reset to seven now? I’d have to ask them at the end of our upcoming time travel talk. They were both veteran time travelers themselves, they’d know what the protocol was for that sort of thing.

 

That was one nice thing about this situation, I wasn’t going to have any trouble convincing my parents that I’d come back in time. They already knew from their own experiences that time travel was more than just possible, it had been their reality. Which was one reason why it was me back in 2021 and not Uncle Sean.

 

“I’m already… let’s see,” Uncle Sean had complained.“Thirty-nine when I first went back to 1988, then I lived five years there before we all went back to 1981 the first time, and then… dammit, I’m a hundred and forty three. That’s gross.”

 

“No,” I had smirked wittily, “next year it would be gross.”

 

Uncle Sean swatted me, unwilling to indulge me in mathematics jokes. “And that’s just counting timelines I’ve personally experienced. Add the shit your parents went through and our little band of time travelers has technically been at this for almost three centuries of relative time. No, definitely time to pass the torch to the next generation.”

 

“Retroactively, as it were,” I joked, leaning back onto the biobed as the MRI encasing enclosed around me.

 

“Just keep punnin’,” Uncle Sean remarked. “Keep your parents focused on your horrible sense of humor and maybe they won’t kill me for this after all.”

 

Bringing my attention back to the here and now (the here and then?) of 2021, I made it into the living room without being detected and sat down at the EntCom center, pulling out the system’s wireless keyboard. In 2068 something like this would be embarrassingly obsolete, but in 2021 it was astate of the art system, with a 51 inch HDTV with 2160p resolution and a built-in webcam connected to a docked portable computer system wirelessly connected to the city’s internet backbone. The system functioned as a streaming video player, a picture gallery, an internet access terminal, and, most importantly in this case, a video phone system. I loaded up the video phone application, lowering the volume to minimal levels, and dialed Uncle Sean’s station in Chicago.

 

Of course it was three-thirty in the morning in Chicago, so I wasn’t surprised that it took almost a dozen rings before the image of the antique handheld phone receiver on the TV screen sending out communications waves was replaced by the image of a groggy human face that made me grin from ear to ear.

 

“Uncle Brandon,” I greeted eagerly, doing the quick math on his age in my head but being beaten by the computer system, which helpfully declared on the ticker scrolling on the bottom that he was fifty-four years old right now. The last time I had seen him before he died, he’d been in his late seventies, but there weren’t too many physical differences as he kept himself in pretty good shape over the years. It was the same brown hair, the same confident smile, that he had at any point in history that I’d ever known him.

 

Uncle Brandon wiped the sleep from his eyes, giving me a tired smile. “Misha, is that you? You look cute as ever.”

 

“If only you were a few years younger, right Uncle Brandon?”I teased.

 

“And suicidal,” Uncle Brandon replied with a chuckle. “My best hope would be your parents killing me before your Uncle Sean did.”

 

I sighed. The mention of Uncle Sean reminded me that this wasn’t just about the nostalgia of interacting with long dead relatives.“Actually, umm… not that I don’t love you, Uncle Brandon, but it’s actually Uncle Sean I was calling to talk to.”

 

A single brown eyebrow shot up on the video feed. “Oh? Is there something I need to kill him for?” Uncle Brandon teased, glancing somewhere off-camera where I presume Uncle Sean was lying in bed, fast asleep.

 

I snickered. “No. Or… well, yes, maybe. But not for awhile.”

 

“Ugh, now you sound like your parents.” Uncle Brandon put his hand on his forehead and rubbed at his temples. “I assume it’s important enough to wake him at three-thirty in the morning?” I nodded solemnly, and he nodded back in response. “Alright, hang on a sec.” I saw him reach to push a button and then the screen dimmed and a marker in front of it indicated that the call had been placed on hold. It took several minutes before the call went live again, which ordinarily I would have grinned at because Uncle Sean, like me, was a pretty heavy sleeper. But all I kept thinking about was how he’d react and whether I’d be able to carry out my mission and how I was going to work out my personal life at the same time. Waiting for him to appear on the screen made it all feel real in a way it hadn’t quite felt just a few minutes earlier.

 

I was still distracted by my thoughts when Uncle Sean unpaused the call, and it was his voice, younger and stronger than I’d last heard it, that brought me out of my thoughts. “Hi Tiger,” he greeted with a lopsided, tired grin. “You ruined a really good dream.”

 

I sighed. “Wish I could replace it with something other than a nightmare,” I replied sadly.

 

Suddenly Uncle Sean was wide awake and dropped all attempts at small talk. “What’s going on, Misha?” he asked, concerned. “What’s happened? Is it Davey or Brian? Are they okay?”

 

“For now,” I assured him. “I’ve got something I have to tell them that’s going to make them hit the roof, I think, but I wanted to tell you first.” I smiled slightly. “Kind of a ‘fair warning’ thing and all that.”

 

Uncle Sean gave me a hard look, a ‘you should already know what I’m going to tell you’ look. “Misha, your parents love you and believe me,they’ll accept you no matter what it is you have to tell them.”

 

I smiled briefly, figuring Uncle Brandon was assuming that I broke something valuable or that I was coming out to him. Of course, with my parents and my uncles being who they were, it would probably be more difficult to come out as straight rather than gay, but I had a coming out of a completely different sort to contend with, so I ignored his words and tried to cut to the heart of the matter. “How quickly can you get to New Hampshire?”

 

“You can’t just tell me over the phone?” Uncle Sean asked, a little less concern and a little more curiosity in his voice.

 

I shook my head, took a deep breath, looked directly at the webcam to make ‘eye contact’ with Uncle Sean and said the words that, in 2068,he had ensured me would tip his younger self off to the nature of the situation without saying it directly. “Never, ever, ever trust a mad scientist.”

 

Uncle Sean’s mouth dropped and he stared at me through the screen in absolute disbelief. It was a few solid seconds before he muttered,“f**k, they’re gonna kill me.”

 

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Hopefully Mr. Kirk sees this and lets me know if it's okay to proceed.

Edited May 23, 2011 by Colebph

[Trebs]

As a representative of Mr Kirk (ie, his husband), I'll see that Dan takes a look at this soon and gets back to you.

 

 

:-)

[mmike1969]

there was an earlier post from dan and he said it was cool with him as long as it was not posted (chaper by chapter) in his forum... Something like posting the story as a new GA story was fine with him since you are not the only fan of dan to come up with fan-fiction

 

And if it means anyting, I for one would love to read your interpertation of this Epic Story on Do Over...

[jor]

there was an earlier post from dan and he said it was cool with him as long as it was not posted (chaper by chapter) in his forum... Something like posting the story as a new GA story was fine with him since you are not the only fan of dan to come up with fan-fiction

 

And if it means anyting, I for one would love to read your interpertation of this Epic Story on Do Over...

 

If you are able to post more stories in the Do Over universe, please post links to them here in the forum. I am sure that I am not the only person who would enjoy reading more. It shows the power of the original stories when other writers want to play in the universe. :-)

[Trebs]

Colebph -

 

I talked to Dan. He's fine with you (or any one else) doing a fan-fic off of his work. Like most authors, he will not read your fanfic just so it doesn't influence any of his writings - I hope you understand.

 

He would prefer if you post your fanfic here in GA.Stories so those that love his stories can also enjoy your work. It would be fine (and actually a good idea) to post a link to your story here when you first start putting it up.

 

Thanks for asking, and good luck with your writing!

 

Trebs