The thought was a ghost in the machine of my mind. A cold, logical fault line in the warm, messy reality of a hospital room.
What if someone deliberately sent me back?
The implications were universe-ending. It meant I wasn't the architect of my own destiny here; I was a pawn. It meant my knowledge wasn't a gift; it was a tool for someone else's purpose. It meant the timeline wasn't clay to be shaped, but a maze I was being run through.
My seventy-two-year-old architect's brain, the part that built empires on foreseeing every variable, latched onto the idea with terrifying certainty. It fit. The curated knowledge. The useful, empire-building facts retained while the personal dross was filtered out. This wasn't an accident; it was a transfer. A deployment.
But my seventeen-year-old heart, currently doing its best to flutter its way out of my chest, rebelled. That was insane. That was the kind of paranoia that came from oxygen deprivation or a psychotic break.
I was spiraling. I needed to stop thinking in abstracts and start dealing with concretes. Speculation about gods or time-traveling cabals was a luxury for when I wasn't strapped to a heart monitor.
Test it. I needed to test something. I needed to touch the world outside this room and see if it was real.
The door opened. A different nurse this time, an older woman with the tired eyes of someone who'd seen every kind of crazy. She was carrying a small plastic bin.
"Your belongings," she said, setting it on the rolling table. "Doctor said you could have them. Don't overdo it."
She left before I could thank her.
I pulled the bin closer, my hands—his hands—almost trembling. Inside was the Rosetta Stone to my old new life: a ratty backpack, a duct-taped wallet, keys, a flip phone (a flip phone, Jesus), and my laptop.
The laptop was a relic. A Dell Inspiron, ancient even by 2012 standards, its cover a collage of peeling stickers—The National, a Linux penguin, the marks of a teenage identity I'd shed decades ago.
I opened it. The hinges groaned. The screen flickered to life, showing Ubuntu 12.04 and a password prompt.
What was my password in 2012?
I tried a few combinations from muscle memory. Nothing. Each failed attempt felt like a door slamming. How could I remember the fine details of transformer architecture but not my own password from—
Wait.
It wasn't my password. It was his password. Seventeen-year-old Alexis's password. Different person. Different life.
I opened a terminal. Typed history | grep pass but got nothing. Then I looked through the documents on the desktop. Buried in a folder called "important" was a text file named "readme.txt". Inside, between song lyrics and ideas for projects, was a single line: pass: hopethisworks.
Of course. The most on-the-nose, desperate password possible. Teenage me had no confidence anything would actually work, so he named his password after the hope that it might.
I typed it. The desktop loaded.
The desktop was chaos. Icons everywhere. No organization. Folders named things like "stuff" and "important maybe" and "DO NOT DELETE." A wallpaper showing some sci-fi landscape that was probably from a video game. The taskbar cluttered with programs I'd forgotten existed.
And a wifi connection.
I opened Firefox (version 14, according to the title bar—ancient history) and went to Google.
The Google homepage looked wrong. Too simple. Too clean. No integrated services bar. No account switcher. No AI overview panel. Just the logo, the search box, and two buttons.
I searched for "current date"
August 7, 2012.
Searched for "Barack Obama"
Still president. That was right. He wouldn't leave office until 2017.
Searched for "OpenAI"
Nothing. The company didn't exist yet. It wouldn't be founded until 2015.
Searched for "GPT"
Results about medical stuff. Glutamic-pyruvic transaminase. Enzyme tests. Nothing about language models.
Searched for "transformer neural networks"
Academic papers about electrical transformers. Power grids. Nothing about attention mechanisms or sequence-to-sequence models.
The paper wouldn't be published until June 2017. "Attention Is All You Need" by Vaswani et al. The paper that changed everything. I could still remember the first time I read it, in my mid-thirties, thinking "this is clever but probably won't scale." I was wrong. It scaled beyond anyone's wildest predictions.
I searched for "Minecraft"
Tons of results. The game existed. Had existed since 2011. Already huge. I'd missed that boat entirely.
Searched for "Bitcoin"
$11.37 per coin.
I stared at that number for longer than I should have.
In 2067, Bitcoin was effectively dead. Had crashed in the 2040s when quantum computing broke the cryptography. But before that, it had hit peaks of over $200,000 per coin. I'd never bought any in my original timeline—by the time I had money to invest, it was already too expensive, and by the time it crashed, I was rich enough that it didn't matter.
But right now, it was eleven dollars.
If I had money—which I didn't—I could buy Bitcoins. Lots of them. Wait a few years. Sell at the peak. Become obscenely wealthy.
Except I had no money. And even if I did, how would I buy cryptocurrency as a broke seventeen-year-old? Exchanges barely existed. The infrastructure was primitive. And I'd need a way to cash out eventually, which meant banking relationships, tax documentation, all the boring machinery of legitimate wealth.
The get-rich-quick fantasy collapsed before it fully formed.
I searched for "Alexis Rowe"
A few results. None about me. Some lawyer in California. A wedding photographer in Vermont. A high school athlete in Texas.
I was nobody.
Complete nobody.
The realization should have been depressing, but instead it felt almost liberating. No reputation to uphold. No expectations to meet. No board members or shareholders or journalists watching every move.
Just a blank slate.
I opened my email. Gmail, because that's what everyone used. The password was another variation of "hopethisworks" because teenage me had even worse security practices than I thought.
Inbox: mostly spam. Some emails from my mom about grocery shopping and taking out the trash. One from the school district about schedule changes. A newsletter from some coding tutorial site I'd signed up for.
Nothing important.
I checked the sent folder. Last email sent was three days ago, to a classmate about borrowing notes. Before that, an application to a video game beta test. Before that, more nothing.
Checked my calendar. Empty except for "school starts" on September 5th.
Checked my documents folder. Essay drafts for English class. Some code snippets. A half-written story about robots that made me cringe just looking at the filename.
This was my life in August 2012. Small. Constrained. Unremarkable.
I'd forgotten how much nothing I'd been.
A thought occurred to me: what if this seventeen-year-old version of me had his own memories? What if I'd overwritten them? Displaced them? Killed them?
That was a disturbing line of thinking. I pushed it away.
I opened a terminal window. Typed some commands. Checked the system specs.
4GB RAM. Dual-core processor. 320GB hard drive. These specs were laughable. My phone in 2067 had more computing power than this laptop by several orders of magnitude.
But it was what I had.
I started typing. Creating a document. Writing down everything I could remember that might be useful:
· Major tech developments 2012-2067
· Companies that succeeded
· Companies that failed
· Economic crashes and recoveries
· Which research directions were dead ends
· Which research directions led to breakthroughs
The list grew. And grew. And kept growing.
Patent dates. Product launches. Acquisition deals. Which startups got funded and which didn't. Which technologies became standards and which became cautionary tales.
I had fifty-five years of insider knowledge about how the tech industry evolved.
That should be enough, right? Just knowing what worked and what didn't should be enough to avoid the mistakes, double down on the successes, build something massive.
Except.
Except I'd lived through those fifty-five years the normal way. Slowly. With everyone else. We all learned together, built on each other's work, shared ideas in papers and conferences and late-night coding sessions. Progress wasn't one genius having revelations—it was thousands of people incrementally improving things, making small breakthroughs that enabled other small breakthroughs that eventually accumulated into revolutions.
I had the map, but I didn't have the territory.
I knew transformer networks were the key to modern AI, but could I implement one from scratch right now, in 2012, with 2012 tools? Maybe. The math wasn't impossibly hard. But the training infrastructure, the datasets, the compute required—that was all stuff that had been built up over years by teams of people with resources I didn't have.
I knew Forge (my game-making platform) would succeed, but I'd built that with a team of thirty engineers over three years. Could I do it alone? Faster?
I knew which companies to invest in, but I had no money to invest.
I knew which people to recruit, but I had no credibility to recruit them.
I knew the future, but I was stuck in a hospital bed with a malfunctioning heart and a laptop that could barely run a web browser.
The gap between knowledge and capability felt crushing.
I needed a plan. A real plan. Not fantasy bullshit about getting rich quick or becoming the next whoever. A actual, concrete, step-by-step plan that accounted for the fact that I was seventeen, broke, and had no resources.
Step one: don't die.
My heart was trying to kill me. That needed to be addressed. I knew what the condition was, knew what the treatment was. Beta-blockers, lifestyle changes, regular monitoring. I could handle that.
Step two: get resources.
Money. Equipment. Credibility. In that order, probably.
How?
In my original timeline, I'd scraped by with scholarships, part-time jobs, student loans. Took me years to get any real capital. Years I didn't want to waste this time.
But what were the alternatives? I couldn't just walk into a venture capital firm and pitch them on ideas that required infrastructure that didn't exist yet. Couldn't apply for grants for research in fields that weren't established yet.
I needed something I could do now, with what I had now, that would generate value fast.
The cursor blinked in my document, waiting for me to write something brilliant.
I had nothing.
My head hurt. The hospital room felt too small, too bright, too loud with the beeping of monitors and the hum of air conditioning and the distant sounds of other patients and staff moving through hallways.
I closed the laptop.
Lay back against the pillows.
Stared at the ceiling.
And tried very hard not to think about the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.