Carl's presence had evaporated from the living room like cologne after a party. Adrian washed his face, cracked open a bottle of mineral water, and let the cool, faintly sweet taste rinse the last metallic echo of the morning from his mouth.
He crossed to the study, woke the laptop on the sleek desk, and sank into the chair that fit his back a little too perfectly. While the machine booted—slow, like it had hangover protocols—he pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer, uncapped the Montblanc, and started a list. Not a manifesto. A scavenger hunt.
Movies. TV. Songs. Stories.
He wrote the titles that lived in Michael Carter's memory, the ones that hadn't happened yet—at least not here, not now, not in April 2006.
He sat back, scanning the page, and exhaled.
"Half of this is unusable," he muttered. "Already out, already owned, or ethically radioactive."
The Bourne Supremacy—already a thing in one timeline; maybe not in this one. Prometheus—a prequel idea to a classic monster; a studio machine, not a novel he could slip into the world. Inception—now there was an idea with angles. Not a theft, but a way of thinking: time, dreams, heists of memory.
He tapped the pen against the paper, thinking not in titles but in shapes.
"Kingsman," he said, slow, tasting the word for its swagger. "Not the name—the energy. A gentleman-spy myth turned sideways, something that nods to Bond and then punches him in the tie." That could be an IP, not a copy. A whole world, tailored and deadly.
Frozen and The Huntsman—not those exact films, but the dark fairy-tale current beneath them. He could build a collection of modern fables with teeth. Not Disney. Not sanitized. Myth through a cracked mirror.
National Treasure, Now You See Me, The Hangover, Ted. He scratched notes beside each. He wasn't going to shoplift plots; he was going to study engines. Treasure-hunt momentum. Con games as choreography. Male chaos spiraling into confession. The way irreverence bounces off heart.
The novels were the ones that made his pulse pick up: The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Walking Dead. Strip out the brand names and you still had pressure-cooker societies: survival arenas, factioned cities, plague corridors where morality gets hazard pay. He didn't want to translate; he wanted to rebuild from the deep structure.
TV? Under the Dome—a town trapped, a snow globe of secrets. Person of Interest—surveillance gods whispering in human ears. He wrote: small canvas, big consequence. And underlined it.
Music? He glanced at the section he'd jotted, then drew a line through most of it. A novelistsuddenly writing hit singles was the kind of pivot that made tabloids lick their chops. Maybe later. After he'd earned breath.
He opened the browser and typed a search for Bourne. The results page blinked back with something that felt like a dare: articles on the original novel, scattered chatter, a rumor that hadn't crystallized into fact. No Matt Damon on a motorcycle tearing through Europe.
He tried National Treasure. Quiet. He tried Alien. There it was, the cathedral of sci-fi terror, seated and immovable.
He found himself grinning. "Butterflies," he whispered. "You beautiful, chaotic things."
He searched for The Hunger Games. Nothing. The grin widened into something almost feral, then faded as his chest tightened with adrenaline. He made himself breathe. This wasn't a candy store. It was a minefield with snacks.
He clicked through news—domestic, international, entertainment, finance—and felt the relief of a timeline that hadn't noticed him. The big river still ran in its riverbed. The currents he could alter were eddies, not the tide.
You can't reverse gravity, he told himself. But you can jump higher if you time it right.
His mind slid to 2008 like a bead along a wire. Housing. Mortgages. The way bad paper turned into a bonfire. He knew just enough to be dangerous. The trick would be not to be.
He rubbed his face hard, as if scrubbing away the temptation to sprint. "The future belongs to me," he said, then winced at how melodramatic it sounded in an empty room. Still, the electricity under his skin didn't go away.
He pulled a fresh sheet of paper, closed his eyes, and let memory do what it does when you get out of its way. It wasn't a tunnel; it was a stack. He slid out the folders labeled MARKET, TECH, CULTURE and leafed through them with care. Sentence fragments surfaced. Dates. The shape of the crash, the echo that became opportunity if you knew where to stand.
He opened his eyes to find he'd leaned too hard into the moment—the faint tickle under his nose told the story. He dabbed the blood away with a tissue and laughed once, soft. "Body says: pace yourself."
He wrote clean, sparse lines:
2007 (spring): cracks show in subprime.
2008 (late summer): major mortgage institutions wobble → global contagion.
Implication: liquidity crisis → assets on fire sale → cash is king.
Finance wasn't his language. But teams spoke it. If he had timing and they had machinery, they could build a bridge between now and later out of money he didn't yet have.
"Cash," he said to the empty room. "Not paper. Not promises. Dollars."
He memorized the notes, fed them to the shredder, then took the confetti to a metal bowl on the patio and burned it, watching gray curl into nothing.
Back in the study, he put a line under the word CAPITAL. If he sold the villa, added the cash in his accounts, called in a couple of liquid favors, he might reach a few million. Enough to matter, not enough to break the world. The Dow would push past 12,000 before gravity did what gravity does. He didn't need to be a genius. He needed to be present.
Apple. The thought arrived with its own chime. He looked up the stock—just over fifty dollars. The chart sketched a story even a poet could read. He knew how the story turned out. He also knew that knowing endings makes people reckless. He wrote two words under the ticker: position slowly.
He added another note, separate from the rest: fan economies. Not just gadgets—tribes. Devotion that converts to revenue. Artists and influencers before that word meant what it would. He lived in the temple of film, where fame was a revolving door and forgetfulness a sport. If he wanted to matter here, he'd need a voice and a platform that weren't rented from other people's goodwill.
He opened his old blog on Blogger. Username recovered from a corner of memory. Last post: three months old, equal parts bravado and apology. Tens of thousands of followers—not nothing, not enough. The comments were a cocktail—mockery with ice, encouragement with pulp, envy with a twist. Before Twitter finished becoming a verb and Facebook colonized every living room, blogs were where you placed your flag.
He smiled, not unkindly, at the chaos of the coming years: feeds that replaced homepages, timelines that replaced diaries, virality that replaced community. He would use it, not be used by it. That was the difference between having a career and being content.
"What do I write?" he asked the room.
The answer arrived the way good lines do: sideways. Not "think pieces," not diary entries—signals. Short, true, repeatable. The kind of lines that would look good on a fridge magnet and better in a mind at 2 a.m. Not syrupy "inspiration," not bile for clicks. Clarity.
His fingers found the keys.
Another day passed. Did your dream get closer, or did your excuses get better?
He kept going.
A stone doesn't shine because of where it sits. It shines because someone cuts it brave.
You're not behind. You're on your path. Walk it.
If the chorus is all you hear, maybe it's time to write your own verse.
He felt a grin creep over his face—not manic, but earned. He could give the magazine column this voice. He could give the blog his pulse. Small, repeatable truths that made people feel less alone and more accountable.
He opened a new document for the column. Seventeen didn't want his diary; they wanted his voice in their readers' heads—witty, a little sharp, never cruel. He wrote an opener:
You don't need a new year to start over. You just need a Tuesday you didn't spend apologizing to yourself.
He looked at the line and didn't hate it. He wrote the next paragraph, and the next. The keys clicked like a metronome. When he surfaced, he had nine hundred words that felt like they belonged to someone who had actually woken up.
He checked his watch. Noon crept close, a polite trespasser. He queued the post for the blog—three short entries, scheduled through the afternoon—and attached the column to an email addressed to Carl with a subject line that didn't scream. Draft—Column 1.
Before sending, he took one more breath and asked himself the question that used to break him: Is this honest?
Yes.
He hit send.
He stood, stretched, and looked out at the pool. The water was still, pretending to be a mirror. He thumbed his phone and, on impulse, opened a new contact group labeled Team Tomorrow. He added Carl (because hustle still needed a handler), a manager he trusted at the bank, the smartest STEM kid he remembered from college who'd once built a game loop over a weekend, and a lawyer whose ethics matched his invoice.
One miracle at a time. One team at a time.
He turned back to the desk and wrote three lists on a fresh page.
WRITING
Column twice weekly (voice = crisp, kind, no whining)
Book pages daily (1,000+; accept ugly drafts)
Blog signals (short, true, scheduled)
HEALTH
Water > coffee
Walk 3 miles (no excuses)
Sleep before midnight (pretend adulthood is a thing)
CAPITAL
Audit assets; liquid where possible
Build position in AAPL slowly
Research risk team for 2008 play (no heroics)
He pinned the page to the cork board behind the desk with a thumbtack the color of a traffic light. He chose green without overthinking it.
At the kitchen island, he poured another glass of water. The refrigerator door still wore Marta's lemon-slice magnet and the note about calling his mother. He tapped it with a fingertip. "Soon," he promised, and meant within the hour, not some airy future.
On a whim, he opened the blog's stats. The numbers were already climbing. Someone had screenshotted his first line and pasted it on a forum. Comments were appearing in real time, a braid of cynicism and gratitude that felt, for once, like proof of life.
He typed one more post, quick and clean:
I don't have answers. I have a promise: to show up, write, and not lie to you or to me.
He clicked publish and closed the laptop, the way you close a book you plan to open again soon.
By early afternoon, the house had that ship-at-sea hum. He laced his shoes and walked the neighborhood—down the hill and back, past hedges trimmed to military precision, past a lemon tree that threw shade like beneficence. Sun on his neck, breath steadying, the city murmuring around him.
He wasn't a genius smuggling stories from the future. He was a man carrying boxes labeled discipline, timing, voice. A porter for a world that hadn't quite arrived, strong enough to shoulder a few loads without breaking.
Back at the villa, he stepped into the cool and picked up the phone. He called his mother first. Then he called Carl.
"I sent you something," he said when Carl answered.
A beat. "I'm reading it." Paper rustled, a breath. "Adrian… this is good."
"Tomorrow gets another," Adrian said.
Carl laughed, the kind of sound that knows what it owes relief. "Keep walking whatever road you found this morning."
"I plan to."
He hung up, returned to the study, and faced the blank part of the day that waited like fresh paper.
"Time to carry," he said, and sat down to write.