The thing about dying is that it tastes like pennies.
Metallic. Sharp. Wrong.
I'm lying on something cold, and my mouth is full of that taste, and somewhere far away a machine is beeping in a rhythm that's just slightly off from my heartbeat. Two percussionists who can't find the tempo. It's annoying. I want to tell them to sync up or shut up, but my throat feels like I've swallowed a cactus made of glass.
"Mr. Rowe, can you hear me?"
The voice is muffled, like someone's speaking through a pillow. I try to open my eyes but my eyelids weigh about forty pounds each. When did that happen? Last I checked, eyelids were supposed to be light. That's the whole point of eyelids.
"Pupillary response is sluggish. BP's dropping again."
Different voice. Younger. More panicked. I don't like panic in medical staff. Spent enough time in hospitals in my sixties to know that panic means they're seeing something on the monitors that they don't want to see.
I force my eyes open anyway.
White ceiling. LED lights in panels. The kind with the harsh, blue tint that made everything look sterile and dead. They felt... newer than they should be.
Wait.
I turn my head—feels like rotating a boulder—and see the monitor beside me. It's old. Not old like "a few years out of date" old. Old like "this-should-be-in-a-museum" old. The display is LCD, actual liquid crystal, with that characteristic motion blur when the numbers change. We stopped making these in the thirties. I remember because I bought the company that held the patents just to shut down the product line. Inefficient energy hogs.
"Mr. Rowe, stay still. You've had a significant cardiac event."
Cardiac event. Corporate speak for "your heart exploded." I'm seventy-two years old—was seventy-two years old?—and I've had three of these already. This is number four. Lucky number four. Except the doctors told me after number three that there wouldn't be a number four. The scar tissue was too extensive. The artificial valves were degrading. My heart was held together with medical zip ties and prayers.
I tried to speak but only managed a croak that sounded like a garbage disposal eating a fork.
The doctor leaned over me. Young guy. Maybe forty. Wearing old-style scrubs, the kind with the V-neck that everyone stopped wearing after they figured out the bacteria retention rate was through the roof. His badge says "Dr. Morrison, Cardiology."
I don't know a Dr. Morrison.
I knew every cardiologist at Columbia Presbyterian. Had to. When your heart is essentially a ticking time bomb, you memorize the names of everyone who might be defusing it at three in the morning. Dr. Yamazaki was my guy. Brilliant surgeon. Terrible bedside manner. Used to explain procedures in excruciating detail while I was conscious, like he was narrating a cooking show but with arteries.
"Where's Yamazaki?" I managed to rasp out.
Dr. Morrison frowned. "I'm sorry, who?"
"Dr. Yamazaki. My cardiologist. Where is he?"
"Mr. Rowe, I'm your attending physician. There's no one named Yamazaki on our cardiology staff."
That made no sense. Yamazaki had been at Columbia for twenty years. Won awards. Published papers. Had that weird obsession with growing bonsai trees in his office and talking about how arterial structures resembled root systems. You don't forget a guy like that.
Unless.
No. That's stupid. I'm disoriented. Post-cardiac-event delirium. That's a thing. I've had it before. After number two, I spent six hours convinced I was actually a German submarine captain from World War I. The brain does weird stuff when it's not getting enough oxygen.
"What hospital is this?" I asked.
"Mount Sinai. You were brought in by ambulance about forty minutes ago."
Mount Sinai. Manhattan. Okay. That's... wait, why Mount Sinai? I lived on the Upper West Side. Columbia was closer. Unless the ambulance had a reason to bypass Columbia. Sometimes they did that if the ER was full or if there was a specialist on call somewhere else.
I tried to sit up. Mistake. The room tilted sideways and my chest decided to inform me, in very clear terms, that sitting up was not on today's approved activities list.
"Easy, Mr. Rowe. You need to stay calm. Your heart is extremely unstable right now."
Extremely unstable. Got it. Add that to the list of things I already knew about my garbage heart.
But something was wrong. Not just the missing doctor or the old equipment. Something else. Something I couldn't quite pin down. Like when you walk into a room and forget why you came in, except the room is your entire life and you can't remember if you locked the door.
The nurse—different person, I hadn't noticed her before—was adjusting my IV. I watched her hands move, efficient and practiced, and saw she was wearing a watch. Analog. With an actual second hand that swept around the dial. Nobody wore analog watches anymore. Why would you? Neural interfaces gave you the time directly in your peripheral vision, accurate to the microsecond, adjusted for relativity if you were traveling at high speeds.
Except she wasn't wearing a neural interface.
No implant scar behind her ear. No telltale subdermal glow when the light hit her temple at the right angle.
I looked at Dr. Morrison. No interface.
Looked at the other nurse who'd just walked in. No interface.
Okay. Now I was officially freaked out.
"What year is it?" I asked.
Dr. Morrison exchanged a glance with the nurse. The kind of glance that said "patient is experiencing cognitive impairment."
"It's 2012, Mr. Rowe. August seventh."
The penny taste got stronger.
1.
That was... that was fifty-five years ago. I was seventeen in 2012. I was a junior in high school. I was broke, living with my mom in a apartment in Queens that smelled like the downstairs neighbor's cat, spending every free hour either coding or playing video games or both simultaneously.
I was not seventy-two years old having my fourth cardiac event in a Manhattan hospital.
"That's not right," I said.
"I assure you, it's August seventh, 2012. You were brought in after collapsing at—" he checked his tablet (tablet, actual separate device, not integrated, Jesus Christ) "—at a McDonald's on Broadway and 51st."
McDonald's.
I hadn't eaten at a McDonald's in forty years. They went bankrupt in the thirties after the synthetic meat scandals. The brand got bought by a Chinese conglomerate and reimagined as high-end automated restaurants. But in 2012, they were still selling actual dead-cow burgers and fries that tasted like salted cardboard.
Why would I be at a McDonald's?
I closed my eyes. Tried to think. But thinking felt like wading through concrete.
Last thing I remembered: sitting in my apartment. The penthouse at The Apex, the residential tower I'd designed myself. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park. Neural interface piping in my morning news brief while I drank coffee. Real coffee, not synthetic, because I was rich enough to afford the absurd tariffs on imported beans.
I was reading something. An email. From my lawyer.
About my will.
I'd been updating it. Again. I did that every few months. When you're worth 200 billion dollars and have no kids, deciding who gets your money when you die becomes a full-time philosophical exercise. Most of it was going to the Consciousness Preservation Foundation. The rest was split between climate remediation projects and a trust fund for maintaining my servers in perpetuity.
My servers. Where I'd backed up my neural state every night for the past thirty years.
And then...
And then my chest hurt. That familiar pain, except worse. Like someone had reached into my ribcage and started squeezing. I'd dropped the coffee mug. Heard it shatter. Tried to reach for my emergency medical alert but my arm wasn't working right.
And then the penny taste.
And then white ceiling with LED panels.
Except the LED panels were wrong and the year was wrong and I was in the wrong hospital with the wrong doctor and nobody had neural interfaces and—
"I need you to run a cognitive assessment," I told Dr. Morrison.
He blinked. "Mr. Rowe, that's not the priority right now. We need to stabilize your heart."
"My heart is seventy-two years old and held together with scar tissue and artificial valves. I'm not seventeen. I'm seventy-two. And either I'm having a psychotic break or something else is happening and I need to know which."
Another glance between doctor and nurse. This one said "patient is definitely experiencing cognitive impairment and possibly a psychiatric emergency."
"Mr. Rowe, according to your ID, you're seventeen years old. You're a high school student. You came in alone and the address on your license is in Queens."
No.
That was wrong.
Except...
I looked down at my hands. They were holding the edge of the hospital bed, knuckles white from gripping too hard. And my hands were wrong.
They weren't my hands.
My hands were old. Liver spots. Prominent veins. Arthritis in the left thumb from too many years of typing before we switched to neural input. Scar on the right index finger from that stupid kitchen accident in '38.
These hands were young. Smooth skin. No spots. No scars. The hands of someone who hadn't lived yet.
I pulled one arm free from the blanket, yanked up the sleeve of the hospital gown. No wrist interface. No subdural monitoring implants. No chronic medication pump.
Just smooth, unblemished skin.
Seventeen-year-old skin.
The beeping was getting faster. Took me a second to realize it was the heart monitor. My heart rate was spiking.
"Mr. Rowe, I need you to calm down. You're going into tachycardia."
Tachycardia. When your heart decides to do the hummingbird impression. Not good. Especially not good when your heart is already unstable from a cardiac event.
But I couldn't calm down because nothing made sense.
I was seventy-two. I died. I know I died because the penny taste was the same as the other times, except this time it didn't stop. This time the darkness came and there wasn't anything after the darkness, just this weird timeless void where I was aware of not being aware of anything, and then—
And then I woke up here.
In 2012.
In a seventeen-year-old body.
The eyes staring back from the mirror the nurse held up were mine, but the consciousness behind them... was I a squatter in this skull? Had I erased the boy who lived here?
"I need a mirror," I said.
"Mr. Rowe—"
"I need a mirror right now or I'm going to rip out this IV and find one myself."
Dr. Morrison sighed. Nodded at the nurse. She disappeared and came back thirty seconds later with a small handheld mirror, the kind they use to show dental work.
She held it up to my face.
I looked.
And staring back at me was Alexis Rowe, age seventeen, with bad skin and worse hair and eyes that were seventy-two years old.