The acne was what got me.
Not the impossible age regression. Not the temporal paradox. Not the complete violation of every physical law I'd spent seventy-two years understanding.
The acne.
I had three zits on my forehead arranged in a perfect triangle, like some kind of adolescent Pythagorean nightmare. And a monster brewing on my chin that looked ready to achieve sentience.
I'd forgotten about the acne. You forget about things like that when you get old. Your body stops being a chaotic hormone factory and settles into a different kind of chaos—the slow decay kind. But at seventeen, my body was apparently still figuring out basic oil production management.
"Mr. Rowe, I really need you to lie back down."
Dr. Morrison was using his "I'm trying to be patient with a difficult patient" voice. I recognized it. I'd been on the other end of that voice many times. Usually right before I ignored whatever the doctor said and did what I wanted anyway.
I put the mirror down.
"I need to make a phone call," I said.
"You can make calls once we've stabilized you and moved you to a room."
"I need to make a call now."
"Mr. Rowe—"
"Do you know who I am?" The words came out harder than I intended.
Dr. Morrison's expression shifted slightly. "According to your ID, you're a student at—"
"No. Do you know who I am?"
He looked genuinely confused. "You're Alexis Rowe. You collapsed at a McDonald's and were brought here with cardiac symptoms."
Right. Because in 2012, I was nobody. Just another broke teenager with a library card and delusions of grandeur. No empire. No billions. No recognition.
The realization hit me like cold water: I had no leverage here. No influence. No money. Nothing.
In my timeline—my previous timeline? original timeline? whatever—I could have made one call and had this entire hospital bending over backward. I employed more people than Mount Sinai had on staff. I had senators on speed dial. I'd had lunch with the last three presidents.
Here, I was just some kid having a medical emergency.
The powerlessness of it was almost funny.
"Okay," I said, forcing my voice to stay level. "Okay. I'll calm down. But I need to understand what happened. Walk me through it."
Dr. Morrison relaxed slightly. "You collapsed at approximately 3:47 PM. Witnesses said you grabbed your chest and went down. The McDonald's staff called 911. Paramedics arrived within six minutes, found you unconscious with weak pulse and labored breathing. They administered oxygen and transported you here."
3:47 PM. I tried to remember what I'd been doing at that time, in this timeline, in 2012. Should have been... what, Tuesday? School didn't start until next week. I would have been at home probably. Messing around on my computer. Working on some doomed project that would never go anywhere because I didn't know what I was doing yet.
Except I wasn't at home. I was at a McDonald's on Broadway.
Why?
"What was I doing there?" I asked.
"I'm sorry?"
"At the McDonald's. Was I eating? Did they find a receipt? What was I doing?"
Dr. Morrison flipped through papers on his tablet. "According to the paramedic report, you were seated at a table alone. No food visible. You had a backpack with you containing a laptop computer and some personal items."
Laptop. I had a laptop in 2012. Some garbage Dell that ran hot enough to cook eggs on and had a battery life measured in minutes. I'd used it until it literally died—something fried on the motherboard—and then I'd scavenged parts from it to build something equally terrible.
But why was I at McDonald's with it?
The free wifi. Right. I'd forgotten about that too. In 2012, having reliable internet at home wasn't a given, especially not in a cheapass Queens apartment. I used to go places with free wifi just to download stuff or work on projects that needed decent connection speeds.
But what project?
I tried to remember what I'd been working on in August 2012. Nothing important. Definitely nothing that mattered. I was just starting to teach myself real programming, beyond the baby stuff. Still doing tutorials. Still making programs that didn't do anything useful.
I didn't start making anything that mattered until 2013, when I built that first chatbot that could barely string sentences together. And that didn't turn into anything real until years later.
My actual trajectory went like this: struggled through high school, barely graduated, got into a second-tier state college on partial scholarship, struggled through that, graduated with mediocre grades and student debt, spent my twenties bouncing between garbage jobs at startups that went nowhere, finally caught a break in my early thirties when I joined a company that got acquired, used that money to start my own thing, failed twice, succeeded on the third try, and spent the next forty years building from there.
It was a slow grind. Lot of failure. Lot of luck. Lot of right-place-right-time situations that I couldn't have engineered if I tried.
And now I was back at the beginning with all the knowledge and none of the resources.
Actually, worse than the beginning. Because the beginning didn't involve cardiac events.
"Why did my heart stop?" I asked. "I'm seventeen. Healthy seventeen-year-olds don't have heart attacks."
Dr. Morrison's expression went carefully neutral, which meant the answer was something I wouldn't like.
"We're running tests to determine the exact cause. Your EKG shows some irregularities that we need to investigate further."
"What kind of irregularities?"
"Arrhythmia. Your heart rhythm is unstable. It could be congenital—something you've had since birth that's only now manifesting. Or it could be caused by a number of other factors. Drug use, for instance."
I almost laughed. "I don't do drugs."
"Mr. Rowe, this is a judgment-free environment. If you've taken anything—prescription medications, recreational substances, even supplements—I need to know."
"I didn't take anything."
He didn't look convinced. Fair enough. How many seventeen-year-olds collapsing with heart problems claimed they weren't on something?
But I wasn't lying. I knew exactly what was wrong with my heart because I'd lived with it for fifty-five years.
Congenital long QT syndrome. Type 2. Genetic disorder affecting the electrical signals in your heart. Makes you prone to dangerous irregular heartbeats that can cause sudden fainting or cardiac arrest. Usually diagnosed in childhood, but mild cases can go undetected until something triggers it.
In my original timeline, I didn't get diagnosed until I was twenty-four. Collapsed during a coding marathon at a startup, similar situation to this. ER doctor recognized the EKG pattern, ran genetic tests, confirmed it. Put me on beta-blockers and told me to avoid stress and stimulants and to never, ever pull all-nighters again.
I'd followed that advice for about six months before deciding I knew better. Spent the next forty years pushing my heart way past its limits, suffering the consequences, patching myself up with increasingly sophisticated medical interventions until there was more artificial material than original tissue.
And apparently, this was the first time it had manifested. The first of many episodes that would define my medical life. The defect had been there all along, a ticking time bomb in my chest since the day I was born, and it had just chosen today to go off.
Which raised an interesting question: if I knew this was going to happen, could I have prevented it?
Should I have prevented it?
Because the cardiac arrest at twenty-four changed my life. It scared me enough to start taking my health seriously. Made me think about mortality. Led indirectly to a bunch of decisions that shaped who I became.
But I couldn't have known, because I hadn't lived through it yet. Hadn't regressed yet. This was the first time through 2012 with full knowledge of what came after.
My head hurt trying to parse the causality.
"We'd like to keep you for observation," Dr. Morrison said. "Run a full cardiac workup. Make sure we understand what happened and how to prevent it from happening again."
"How long?"
"At least twenty-four hours. Possibly longer depending on test results."
Twenty-four hours. I had things to do. Except I didn't know what those things were yet. I hadn't figured out my plan. Hadn't figured out if this was real or some dying hallucination or what.
"Can I have my laptop?" I asked.
Dr. Morrison frowned. "Your personal effects are in a locker. I'd prefer you rest rather than work."
"I'll rest better if I can check something."
Another one of those glances with the nurse. This one said "this patient is going to be difficult but probably harmless."
"I'll see what I can do," he said, which was doctor-speak for "probably not but I'll say yes to make you stop asking."
They left. Both of them. Probably to discuss my case and decide whether I needed a psych consult.
I was alone with my thoughts, which was dangerous.
Because I was starting to believe this was real.
Time travel wasn't possible. I knew that. Spent enough years understanding physics to know that backwards causality violated everything. Even the theoretical models that allowed for closed timelike curves required exotic matter and energy conditions that probably couldn't exist in our universe.
But consciousness transfer? That was different.
I'd backed up my neural state every night for thirty years. Complete pattern mapping of every neuron, every synapse, every electrical and chemical state. Petabytes of data compressed into quantum storage matrices. The technology existed. Lots of people did it. Insurance against death, against brain damage, against the inevitable decay of biological substrate.
The plan—my plan, the one I'd funded and researched for decades—was eventually to transfer that pattern into a new substrate. Synthetic neurons. Quantum processors. Something that wouldn't decay and die.
But the technology wasn't there yet. Not in 2067. We were close. Maybe another decade. Maybe two.
What if I'd been wrong about the timeline? What if someone figured it out? What if in those last moments of cardiac arrest, when my brain was dying, someone—something—grabbed my neural pattern and shoved it... where?
Into a backup?
Into a simulation?
Into my own past self?
That last one made no sense. My seventeen-year-old brain didn't have the capacity to hold seventy-two years of memories. The storage capacity alone would be impossible. Human brains were incredibly dense information processors, but they had limits.
Unless the memories weren't all there. Maybe just the important stuff. The core identity. The knowledge. The skills.
I tried to remember something specific from my twenties. The name of my roommate sophomore year of college.
Nothing. Blank.
The name of the first girl I dated?
Nothing.
But I could remember the fundamental architecture of transformer neural networks. Could recall the exact sequence of algorithmic improvements that led from GPT-2 to GPT-3. Could remember the trading patterns that preceded the 2031 market crash.
Useful information had made the transfer. Useless personal trivia hadn't.
Which meant this wasn't a complete transfer. This was selective. Curated.
And if it was curated, someone had done the curating.
A cold feeling settled into my stomach.
What if this wasn't an accident?
What if someone deliberately sent me back?