The thing about having seventy-two years of memories crammed into a seventeen-year-old brain is that you can't actually trust any of them.
I kept testing myself. Little things. What was the name of the café near my apartment in 2031? Blank. What did my office look like in 2045? Vague impression of glass and steel, nothing specific. Who gave the keynote at the Neural Interface Conference in 2052? No idea.
But ask me about the technical specifications of the A100 GPU that came out in 2020? I could list them. The architectural differences between CUDA cores and tensor cores. The memory bandwidth. Why it mattered for training large models.
Ask me about the drama at OpenAI in 2023 when Sam Altman got fired and then rehired? I remembered that. The timeline of events. The board composition. The employee letter.
Useful information was there. Personal information was gone.
Which meant whatever this was—hallucination, psychotic break, actual impossible time travel—it was selective. Curated. The memories I needed to rebuild my empire versus the memories that made me human.
I wondered if that was a fair trade.
The door opened again. Dr. Morrison, looking slightly less harried.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Like I have existential questions I can't answer," I said.
He smiled thinly. "That's fairly normal after a cardiac event. Confronting mortality often leads to philosophical reflection."
Philosophical reflection. Sure. That's what this was.
"I need to call my mom," I said.
His expression shifted to something more sympathetic. "Of course. We tried to reach her earlier but there was no answer. Do you have another number we should try?"
My mom. Right. She existed. Was alive. In 2012 she would have been... what, forty-three? Still working as a paralegal at that firm in Midtown. Still living in the same apartment. Still dealing with the aftermath of my dad leaving when I was twelve.
I tried to remember her phone number and couldn't. Another blank spot. But her work number was in my contacts on the flip phone.
"Let me call her," I said.
He handed me the phone from the belongings bin. I flipped it open—actual physical flip, with the satisfying snap—and scrolled through contacts. The interface was painful. No predictive text. No voice commands. Just T9 number pad typing and patience.
Found "Mom Work" and dialed.
It rang four times. Then: "Brennan & Associates, how may I direct your call?"
Receptionist. Professional voice. I'd forgotten people still answered phones at offices in 2012.
"Diane Rowe, please."
"May I ask who's calling?"
"Her son."
"One moment."
Hold music. Acoustic guitar playing something that might have been a Beatles cover. I waited.
Then: "Alexis? What's wrong?"
Her voice hit me harder than I expected. I hadn't heard it in years. She'd died in 2058, complications from cancer. I'd been at her bedside, holding her hand, watching the monitors. She'd been seventy-nine and tired and ready to go.
But right now she was forty-three and alive and worried because her son was calling her work line in the middle of the afternoon.
"I'm okay," I said, and my voice came out rougher than intended. "I'm at Mount Sinai. Had some kind of cardiac thing. They're keeping me for observation but I'm stable."
Silence on the other end. Then: "What do you mean cardiac thing? What happened?"
"I collapsed. At McDonald's." Whatever project I'd been working on there was gone from my mind, another casualty of the curated transfer. It didn't matter. It was probably trash anyway. "They brought me in, ran some tests, heart rhythm is wonky but they're handling it."
"I'm coming there right now."
"Mom, you don't have to—"
"I'm coming there right now. Which room?"
Dr. Morrison was watching me. I put my hand over the phone. "Which room am I in?"
"Emergency Department, Bay 7. But we'll be moving him to a room upstairs shortly."
I relayed the information. My mom said she'd be there in thirty minutes and hung up without saying goodbye.
I closed the phone.
"She's on her way," I told Dr. Morrison unnecessarily.
"Good. We'll need to discuss your treatment plan with her anyway, since you're a minor."
Minor. Right. Legally, I was a child. Couldn't sign my own medical documents. Couldn't make my own decisions. Needed parental consent for treatment.
Another constraint I'd forgotten about.
"What's the treatment plan?" I asked.
"We'll need the full workup results first, but based on initial findings, likely beta-blockers to manage the arrhythmia. Possibly other medications depending on what we find. Lifestyle modifications. Regular monitoring. We'll also want to do genetic testing to see if there's an underlying hereditary condition."
I already knew the answer to that. Long QT syndrome, type 2, caused by a mutation in the KCNH2 gene. They'd find it eventually. Might as well save them the trouble.
"It's LQTS," I said. "Long QT syndrome. Type 2 if I had to guess. Check for KCNH2 mutations."
Dr. Morrison's eyebrows went up. "That's... very specific. What makes you think that?"
"My dad had something similar before he left. Fainting spells. I looked it up." The lie came smoothly. It had the advantage of being partially true—my father did have some health issues, though I had no idea if they were cardiac-related. But it provided a plausible enough reason for a teenager to have done specific research.
"We'll certainly test for that," he said carefully. "But let's not jump to conclusions before we have results."
He didn't believe me. Fair enough. I wouldn't have believed me either.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Of course."
"If it is LQTS, what's the treatment timeline? How long before I can go back to normal life?"
"That depends on severity and how well you respond to medication. Some patients manage it well with beta-blockers and lifestyle changes. Others need more aggressive intervention—implanted defibrillators, for instance. But we're getting ahead of ourselves."
Implanted defibrillator. I'd gotten one of those eventually, in my forties, after beta-blockers stopped being enough. A little device under the skin near my collarbone, wired directly to my heart, ready to shock me back to life if things went wrong.
It had saved me twice. Once during a presentation to investors, which was embarrassing as hell. Once while I was sleeping, which I only knew about because the device logged it.
I'd need one again eventually, probably. But not yet. Not if I was careful.
"What lifestyle changes?" I asked.
"Avoiding stimulants—caffeine, energy drinks, certain medications. Managing stress. Getting adequate sleep. Avoiding intense physical exertion. Staying hydrated. The specifics will depend on your case."
No caffeine. I'd run on coffee for fifty years. The idea of giving it up now, when I needed to be sharp and focused and productive, was almost funny.
But I also remembered what happened when I didn't listen to those warnings. The hospitalizations. The close calls. The progressive damage to my heart that eventually killed me.
Maybe this time I'd actually follow the advice.
"Okay," I said.
Dr. Morrison looked mildly surprised that I wasn't arguing. "We'll know more after the tests. Try to rest. Your mother will be here soon."
He left.
I was alone again with the laptop and my thoughts.
I opened it back up. Stared at the document I'd been writing. The list of future events and technologies and opportunities.
All of it was useless without a plan. Without a starting point. Without something I could do right now, today, with zero resources.
Think. What did I have?
Knowledge. That was the only asset. Everything else—money, connections, credibility, infrastructure—I lacked completely.
But knowledge was valuable if you could apply it. If you could turn it into something people wanted before anyone else could.
In 2012, what did people want?
Better phones. Apple had just released the iPhone 5 a couple months ago—no, wait, that was September. Still the 4S right now. Android was growing fast. The smartphone revolution was in full swing.
Better social media. Facebook was dominant but people were starting to complain about privacy and ads. Twitter was big but chaotic. Instagram existed but was just photos—Facebook would buy it in September (I remembered that because it seemed insane at the time, a billion dollars for a photo app).
Better games. Mobile gaming was exploding. Console gaming was transitioning to the next generation. PC gaming was having a renaissance with digital distribution through Steam.
Better everything, basically. Every technology was in an awkward adolescent phase. Smartphones that were smart but not that smart. Social networks that connected people but badly. Games that were fun but limited by hardware.
The 2010s were when everything got good. When the infrastructure caught up to the ideas. When processors got fast enough, networks got reliable enough, storage got cheap enough that all the sci-fi concepts people had been dreaming about became actually feasible.
I'd lived through that transition once. Watched it happen. Contributed to it, eventually.
Could I accelerate it?
Take something that succeeded in 2015 or 2016 and build it in 2012? Get a few years head start, establish myself as the pioneer?
Maybe. But the problem was that most successful technologies succeeded because the infrastructure was ready. Because all the pieces finally existed at the right time. Try to build them too early and you'd slam into walls—either technical walls where the hardware just couldn't do what you needed, or market walls where people weren't ready to adopt yet.
The really successful products weren't just good ideas. They were good ideas at the right moment.
So what was the right moment in 2012?
I pulled up YouTube. The site was different—older UI, fewer features, no autoplay recommendations sidebar. I searched for "most popular videos 2012."
Gangnam Style. Kony 2012. That Carly Rae Jepsen song that everyone hated-but-loved. Random viral nonsense.
YouTube was huge but it was still figuring out what it wanted to be. It was amateur hour. Most content was garbage. Production quality was low. The good stuff was rare.
I searched for tech channels. Found a few—people reviewing gadgets, explaining concepts, doing tutorials. The production quality was rough. Webcam footage. Poor audio. No editing to speak of.
But they had audiences. Tens of thousands of subscribers. Hundreds of thousands of views.
An idea started forming.
What if I didn't try to build a product yet? What if I just... shared what I knew?
Not predictions, exactly. That would be too suspicious. But analysis. Breakdowns of current technology. Explanations of where it was going based on "analysis of trends and technical constraints."
I could make videos. Explain complicated technical concepts in simple terms. Be the person who helps people understand why things work the way they do.
Build an audience. Establish credibility. Become the guy people listened to when he talked about technology.
And then, later, when I actually launched products, I'd already have attention. Have trust. Have a platform.
It was a slow play. No immediate money. No quick wins. But it was something I could do right now, with just a laptop and an internet connection.
I opened a new document. Started writing.
Video Ideas:
1. Why the iPhone is actually a computer (and why that matters)
2. How Facebook makes money (and why your privacy is the product)
3. What is "the cloud" actually? (explained without buzzwords)
4. Why video games look the way they do (graphics pipeline breakdown)
5. Bitcoin: magic internet money or pyramid scheme? (explain the actual technology)
The list grew. Every topic I knew deeply. Every concept I could explain better than the garbage tutorials currently available.
I wouldn't be creating new knowledge. Just organizing existing knowledge in ways that made sense. Teaching. Making the complex simple.
I was good at that. Had been good at it. Spent decades giving talks, writing documentation, explaining technical decisions to non-technical people.
I could do this.
It wasn't building an empire. It wasn't becoming the next tech icon. It was just making YouTube videos.
But it was a start.