I was sleeping soundly when rays of sunlight hit my face, dragging me out of whatever dream I was having. Groggy, I rolled over, annoyed—then froze.
I don't have a window in my room that lets sunlight fall directly on me.
My eyes snapped open. The ceiling above me was white. I remembered it being gray. What the hell?
I sat up, instinctively reaching for my phone, but it wasn't on the bedside table. Instead, there was a landline telephone. The room itself… it looked like a hotel.
Wait.
My hands. My body. They felt different—heavier, stronger, not mine. Panic began crawling up my spine. If something happened while I was asleep, shouldn't I be in a hospital bed?
Something was very, very wrong.
I stumbled into the bathroom. The mirror caught me first. The reflection staring back made my stomach drop.
"Holy… motherfu—John Wick?"
The man in the mirror moved when I moved. Same black hair. Same sharp jawline. Keanu Reeves himself stared back at me.
I slammed the bathroom door shut, heart racing, hands trembling, and dropped onto the bed. Was I terrified? Excited? Both. My pulse couldn't decide.
"Alright," I muttered, voice cracking. "This has to be one of three things: either I've been transmigrated into another world, or my brain got dumped into a clone body, or I drank something I shouldn't have and I'm in some insane dream-experiment."
None of it made sense. But my hands shook with something dangerously close to excitement.
I forced myself to scan the room again. Clues. There had to be something. My eyes landed on a desk calendar: April 2002.
I yanked the curtains back. The street below was full of old cars—boxy sedans, muscle cars. People dressed differently too. Baggy jeans. Leather jackets. No one holding smartphones.
USA, I thought. American flags on buildings, the hum of big engines. But I'd need confirmation.
Another detail hit me. I was in nothing but shorts. Would I really check into a hotel like this?
I tore open the wardrobe. Inside hung a black suit, neatly pressed, and a shoulder holster with a handgun. The kind of gun FBI agents carried in movies.
Hands shaking, I checked the pockets. Found a battered Nokia phone. Then—an ID card. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The photo? The same face from the mirror. Keanu Reeves.
I laughed, half hysterical. "This is so fucking awesome!" For a moment, freedom tasted like gun oil and adrenaline.
But when the rush faded, reality crept back in. The details were too sharp—the smell of the gunpowder, the stiffness of the suit, the weight of the holster. No dream was this precise.
I showered, water scalding my skin, trying to think. "Okay. What do I do? I don't have this guy's memories. Judging by this body—strong, athletic—he's highly trained. I feel like I could run a marathon. But am I actually trained? Or is it just muscle memory I can't touch?"
I stared at the gun. I'd never held one before. In my old life, coding was my world. Maybe I could still make money with that—use my knowledge of apps and tech that would blow up in the future. But I wasn't some coding legend. And it was 2002. The tools, the languages, the whole ecosystem would feel alien. Starting from scratch sounded exhausting.
Wrapped in a towel, I left the bathroom, pulled on the black suit, and kept searching the room. That's when I found it—my phone. Not the modern slab I expected, but another old keypad phone shoved under the bed.
I flipped it open. April 4th, 2002. Four missed calls. One from "Samantha." Another from someone saved as "Bull Head."
Before I could think it through, a sharp pain ripped through my skull. My knees buckled. I shoved a bedsheet into my mouth to muffle the scream clawing its way out. My whole body convulsed, twitching violently. My eyes rolled back as memories—foreign, jagged—poured into my brain.
When I came to, I was still on the floor, cheek pressed against the carpet, shirt plastered to me with sweat. My chest heaved like I'd sprinted a mile.
And then—like a projector flickering on—I started to see him. Not me. Him. His life unspooling inside my skull, raw and uninvited.
John Harland. Detroit, 1978. A father once a steelworker, then a drunk after the plant shut down. A mother who stitched broken people back together in an ER that never slept. No bedtime stories, just her shoes dragging in at 3 a.m.
He grew up in neighborhoods where gangs ruled the corners, where cars disappeared nightly, where sneakers were bought with drug money. He learned fists early—not to win, but to protect his little sister.
He wasn't a prodigy. Grades were average. But he could sit for hours, watching, noticing. Who came out of which house. Which car circled twice. The way a liar's hand twitched. Patterns became his weapon.
High school gave him boxing gloves and track meets. Wayne State University gave him Criminal Justice. He worked nights as a security guard, mornings as a half-asleep student. He pushed through. Stubborn. Always stubborn.
By twenty-two, he had a badge. The Bureau saw a quiet kid, not brilliant but relentless. Not the best shot, not the fastest, but on a stakeout he caught what others missed. That made him valuable.
And now here I was—in his body, with his memories forcing their way into me. His badge was real. His gun was real. And this old Nokia brick I'd dug out from under the bed? That was his lifeline.
Two missed calls."Bull Head" — his handler.And Samantha. His sister.
She must be worried.
And now, apparently, I was him.
I checked the clock. 9:30 a.m. I was supposed to meet a senior agent at 10:30 in this hotel lobby. Together we were supposed to move in on the Serrano crew.
But how the hell was I supposed to fight? These memories were vivid—like watching Bruce Lee films. But watching isn't doing. Knowing isn't being.
And one thing didn't add up. If John Harland had been so weak, so exhausted that he died in his sleep, why did I feel stronger than ever? Like I could run cross-country right now.
That's when the pain spiked again, blinding, brutal. I dropped to my knees, snarling through clenched teeth. "Not again, fuck—"
Then I heard it.
DING.