I woke up sometime in the dark hours when hospitals are at their worst—that dead zone between midnight and dawn when everything feels liminal and wrong. The room was dim except for the glow of monitors and the strip of light coming under the door from the hallway.
My mom was asleep in the converted chair-bed, curled up under a thin hospital blanket, still wearing her work clothes. She'd kicked off her shoes at some point. One arm hung off the edge of the makeshift bed.
I watched her sleep for a moment. She looked uncomfortable. The chair-bed was not designed for actual sleeping, just for the appearance of providing a place to sleep. But she was out cold anyway, exhausted from the stress.
I needed to piss.
Carefully, I extracted myself from the tangle of monitor wires and IV lines. I had to carefully unplug the telemetry leads from the bedside monitor, the electrodes still stuck to my chest. The IV pole had wheels, at least. I could drag it to the bathroom without setting off a "lead disconnect" alarm at the nurses' station.
The bathroom was three steps away. I made it without incident, did my business, washed my hands with the industrial soap that smelled like chemicals and false lemon.
Looked at myself in the mirror.
Still seventeen. Still unfamiliar. The face was mine but not-mine. Younger version. Unfinished version. Like looking at concept art for a character that would eventually look different in the final release.
The acne was still there. The bad hair. The look in my eyes that was all wrong for someone this age—too tired, too knowing, too old.
If anyone looked closely, they'd see the disconnect. A seventeen-year-old with seventy-two-year-old eyes.
I splashed water on my face. Cold water. Trying to shock myself into some kind of clarity.
When I came out, my mom was still asleep. I sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to make noise.
The room's TV remote was clipped to the bed rail. I unclipped it, turned the TV on with the volume muted, just for something to look at besides the walls.
CNN. Still existed in 2012, still had its classic layout. The ticker at the bottom scrolling headlines. Something about the Olympics—those had been in London this summer. Something about Syria. Something about the presidential race—Obama versus Romney, that would end with Obama's reelection.
I flipped channels. Late night infomercials. Old sitcom reruns. More news. A nature documentary about ocean life.
Stopped on the nature documentary. Watched fish swim around coral reefs in high definition. The narrator explained symbiotic relationships between species. How the whole ecosystem relied on balance. How small changes cascaded into big effects.
Butterfly effects.
That's what I'd be causing, right? Every action I took that was different from my original timeline would ripple outward. Change things. Maybe in small ways, maybe in big ways.
I'd been so focused on what I could build, what I could achieve, that I hadn't really thought about the consequences of changing things.
In my original timeline, I'd built an empire. But I'd also seen that empire have effects—good and bad. The AI systems I'd created had displaced workers. The platforms I'd built had been used for misinformation. The technology I'd pioneered had concentrated wealth and power.
I'd spent my sixties trying to use that wealth for good—funding research, supporting causes, trying to offset the damage. But it was like bailing water from a sinking ship. The problems I'd helped create were bigger than any one person's philanthropy could fix.
If I did it all again, would it be different? Or would I make the same mistakes, just faster?
The fish swam in their ecosystem, oblivious to the camera watching them. Living their small lives in a world they didn't understand.
I turned the TV off.
Sat in the dark.
My chest felt tight but not in the cardiac way. In the anxiety way. The "too many thoughts and no way to process them" way.
I'd spent hours lying here trying to figure out my next move, my strategy, my plan. Treating this like a game where I knew all the cheat codes. But it wasn't a game. These were real years, real people, real consequences.
And I didn't actually know what I was doing.
The future I remembered wasn't a guarantee. It was just one possible path. I'd already changed things just by being here, by having this cardiac event at seventeen instead of twenty-four. Who knows what that would butterfly into?
Maybe the smart move was to not try to rebuild my empire. To just live a normal life this time. Get a regular job. Have relationships. Not push myself into an early grave chasing success.
The thought lasted about five seconds before I dismissed it.
Who was I kidding? I couldn't do normal. Even in my original timeline, before all the success, I was obsessed. Driven. Couldn't stop tinkering, building, trying to make things better.
That was my nature. The seventy-two-year-old version and the seventeen-year-old version were the same person in that respect.
I was going to try to build something. The only question was what and how.
A nurse came in to check vitals. Young guy, looked barely older than me, though he was probably in his twenties. He nodded at me, checked the monitors, made notes on a tablet.
"Can't sleep?" he asked quietly, glancing at my mom.
"Slept earlier. Now I'm awake."
"That's normal. Hospital schedules mess with your circadian rhythm. Plus all the adrenaline from earlier is probably still working through your system."
"How long do I have to stay here?"
"That's up to the doctor. Probably at least through tomorrow so they can complete the full cardiac workup. Maybe longer depending on results."
Tomorrow. Another day of lying here doing nothing while the world moved on without me. My laptop was gone, taken home by my mom. I was trapped here with nothing but my thoughts and this terrible hospital TV.
He finished his notes. "Try to get some sleep. Your body needs it more than your brain needs stimulation."
He left.
I lay back down. Stared at the ceiling. Counted the dots in the acoustic tiles.
Sleep didn't come.
My brain kept churning. Thinking through problems, possibilities, plans. It was like having fifty-five years of compressed experience trying to decompress all at once. Every memory triggered another memory triggered another realization triggered another question.
I thought about the people I'd worked with. The engineers who'd built Chorus AI alongside me. Most of them I'd recruited in my thirties and forties, when I had resources and reputation. But some had been students or junior developers when I found them. Young talent that nobody else had recognized yet.
There was that one woman, brilliant with reinforcement learning, I'd poached from Google in '33. What was her name? It started with an 'J'... Jade? Julia? The memory was frustratingly gauzy. But I could instantly recall the exact title and authors of the "Chain-of-Thought" paper from 2022. Useful. Always the useful stuff.
Could I find them now? Reach out somehow? Build relationships before they were established?
That felt weird. Predatory almost. Like I'd be exploiting future knowledge to manipulate people into working with me.
But wasn't that the whole point? Wasn't that the advantage of regression?
I didn't know. The ethics were murky.
I thought about the research that mattered. The papers that changed everything. Most were published by teams at big institutions—Google, OpenAI, DeepMind, universities with massive funding. I couldn't compete with that directly. But I could read those papers as they came out and implement them faster than anyone else. Be the first to build products on top of new breakthroughs.
That was how I'd done it originally. Not by inventing new algorithms myself—I was good but not groundbreaking—but by being quick to recognize what mattered and aggressive about implementation.
I could do that again. Better this time.
I thought about money. How to get it. Where it would come from. In my original timeline, I'd bootstrapped everything—lived cheap, worked multiple jobs, slowly saved enough to fund my first real startup. Took years.
This time, I could try to accelerate that. Find freelance work. Build tools that people would pay for. Maybe create apps or games and sell them. The mobile app ecosystem was just ramping up—App Store was only four years old, Play Store even younger. Lots of opportunity for solo developers to make money if they hit on the right idea.
But what was the right idea?
I thought about Bitcoin again. Eleven dollars per coin. If I could scrape together a few hundred dollars, buy coins, hold them...
But that required believing they'd actually appreciate like they did in my timeline. Required trusting that the butterfly effects wouldn't change cryptocurrency's trajectory. And even if it worked, it wouldn't pay off for years. Bitcoin didn't hit $1,000 until late 2013. And I'd need to figure out how to cash out eventually, which was its own problem.
Still, maybe worth doing if I could scrape together any money at all. Worst case, I'd lose a few hundred dollars. Best case, I'd have a small fortune by 2017.
The thought of dealing with cryptocurrency exchanges in 2012 made my head hurt. The infrastructure was primitive. Most exchanges were run by sketchy characters operating out of countries with loose financial regulations. Mt. Gox was the biggest exchange and it would eventually collapse in spectacular fashion, taking everyone's coins with it.
I'd need to be careful. Buy coins and immediately transfer them to a wallet I controlled. Never leave them on an exchange. Wait for the right moment to sell.
Doable, if I could get the initial capital.
Which brought me back to the same problem: I had no money.
My thoughts went in circles. Money required work. Work required time. Time required staying alive and healthy. Staying healthy required following doctor's orders and not stressing myself. Not stressing required not thinking about all of this.
Catch-22.
I must have fallen asleep eventually because the next thing I knew, sunlight was coming through the window and my mom was awake, looking at her phone with a frown.
"Morning," I said.
She looked up. "Morning. How do you feel?"
"Okay. Tired. Bored."
"The doctor should be by soon to discuss test results." She checked her phone again. "I need to go home at some point to shower and change. Will you be okay for a few hours?"
"I'm in a hospital. If I'm not okay, I'm in literally the best place to not be okay."
"Don't be smart."
"Still my only skill."
She smiled despite herself. "I'll go after the doctor comes by. Bring you some real food and your laptop."
My ears perked up. "You'll bring my laptop?" The one you confiscated yesterday?
"If the doctor says it's okay for you to have it, yes."
Good enough.
We waited. Hospital time moved differently—simultaneously too fast and too slow. Minutes stretched into hours but you couldn't remember what you'd done with them.
Dr. Morrison showed up around nine, looking slightly less tired than yesterday. He had papers—actual printed papers, remember those?—and tablet in hand.
"Morning, Alexis. Mrs. Rowe. How are we feeling today?"
"Like I want to leave," I said.
"I understand. Let's talk about what we found and what the plan is."
He pulled up a chair, arranged his papers. My mom leaned forward, tense.
"The good news is we have a clear diagnosis," Dr. Morrison said. "You were correct about the Long QT syndrome. Genetic testing confirmed a mutation in the KCNH2 gene—type 2 LQTS. It's a condition you were born with, but it's only now becoming symptomatic."
My mom looked at me with surprise. "You were right?"
"Lucky guess," I said.
Dr. Morrison continued. "The condition affects the electrical signals in your heart, making you vulnerable to dangerous arrhythmias. The event yesterday was triggered by something—we're not sure what. Stress, dehydration, possibly a combination of factors."
"What does this mean for treatment?" my mom asked.
"We'll start him on a beta-blocker—likely nadolol or propranolol. This will help regulate his heart rhythm. He'll need to avoid certain medications, manage stress, stay hydrated, avoid intense physical activity. We'll need regular checkups and EKGs to monitor the condition."
"What about long term?" I asked. "What's the prognosis?"
Dr. Morrison chose his words carefully. "With proper management, many LQTS patients live normal lifespans. But there is an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest, especially during physical exertion or emotional stress. We'll monitor you closely. If the medication isn't sufficient, there are other interventions—implanted defibrillators, for instance."
My mom's face had gone pale. "Sudden cardiac arrest. You mean he could just... die?"
"The risk is manageable with proper treatment," Dr. Morrison said gently. "The medication significantly reduces the danger. But yes, it's something we take seriously."
I watched my mom process this. Watched her realize that her son had a potentially fatal condition. Watched the fear settle in.
"I'll be careful," I told her. "I'll take the medication. Follow the rules. Do everything right."
She nodded but didn't look convinced.
Dr. Morrison went through the details—dosage, side effects, lifestyle modifications. Most of it I already knew, but I pretended to listen carefully, asked appropriate questions, played the role of concerned but not panicked patient.
"When can I leave?" I asked when he finished.
"We'll keep you one more night for observation. Make sure the medication is working and there are no adverse reactions. If everything looks good, you can go home tomorrow morning."
One more night. I could handle that.
After Dr. Morrison left, my mom sat quietly for a long moment.
"I need to go home and process this," she said finally. "And shower. And get you that laptop. Will you be okay?"
"I'll be fine. Go. Take your time."
She gathered her things, gave me a long look that communicated about seventeen different emotions simultaneously, then left.
I was alone again.
Free to think, to plan, to obsess without anyone watching.
I thought about what Dr. Morrison had said. The risk of sudden cardiac arrest. The need for careful management.
In my original timeline, I'd ignored most of that advice. Pushed myself constantly. Treated my body like it was disposable.
And it killed me at seventy-two.
If I was careful this time—really careful—could I make it to eighty? Ninety?
Or was seventy-two written in stone, some fixed point I couldn't change no matter what I did?
No way to know.
All I could do was try to be smarter about it.
And that meant actually following doctor's orders, even when it was inconvenient. Even when it slowed me down.
A different kind of optimization problem: maximize output while staying within the constraints of a faulty heart.
I'd architected systems with tighter constraints and higher failure costs. This was just another engineering problem, albeit with my own body as the substrate.