Chapter 1: A Second Chance
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The smell hit him first—stale coffee, cheap air freshener, and something vaguely metallic. Michael's eyes cracked open to blinding sunlight streaming through a windshield, and his neck screamed in protest. He'd fallen asleep sitting up.
*Where the hell am I?*
He blinked hard, trying to shake off the grogginess. The world came into focus slowly: a steering wheel inches from his face, a cracked dashboard, fast food wrappers on the passenger seat. His mouth tasted like something had died in it.
Then the memories crashed in like a wave.
The hospital. Dad's pale face. The flatline. The funeral—small, pitiful, just him and a handful of Dad's work buddies who looked uncomfortable in their ill-fitting suits. The bank representative with her fake-sympathetic smile, handing him papers that said the house was gone. Everything was gone.
Everything except this car.
Michael pushed himself upright, his spine crackling like bubble wrap. He was in a parking lot—some strip mall in the Valley, by the look of it. A 7-Eleven, a nail salon with a flickering neon sign, a laundromat. His Honda Civic looked exactly as pathetic as he felt, a 1998 model with primer spots on the hood and a dent in the rear quarter panel that Dad had always meant to fix.
*Had meant to fix.*
Past tense. Everything was past tense now.
He was thirty-eight, no—wait. Something felt wrong. Michael fumbled for his wallet, hands shaking slightly. California driver's license, issued... 2005. His photo stared back at him, baby-faced, eighteen years old.
"What the fuck?"
His voice came out hoarse, cracking. He looked down at his hands. Smooth. No calluses from decades of restaurant piano work. No scar on his thumb from that stupid kitchen accident in 2019. No wedding ring—wait, he'd gotten divorced in 2022. These hands looked like they belonged to a kid.
Michael flipped down the sun visor, and the small mirror confirmed what his hands were telling him. The face staring back wasn't the one he'd seen this morning—*yesterday morning? When the hell was yesterday?*—tired and hollowed out by thirty-eight years of struggling. This face was younger. Unlined. Eighteen.
His heart started hammering.
"Okay. Okay, just... think." He pressed his palms against his eyes. "Bad dream. Stress. Maybe I'm in a coma. Maybe—"
His phone buzzed.
Except it wasn't his phone—not the smartphone he'd upgraded to years ago. It was that brick of a Motorola he'd owned back in high school, the one that could barely text and definitely couldn't connect to the internet. The one he'd used to call Dad from parties, back when Dad was still around to worry about him coming home safe.
Michael stared at it like it was a live grenade.
The date on the tiny screen read: **October 15, 2005**
"No. No fucking way."
He twisted around, looking at the back seat. Plastic garbage bags stuffed with clothes. A cardboard box with his old CD collection—albums he'd gotten rid of years ago. Another box with textbooks, a few framed photos he'd grabbed before the bank changed the locks. And there, wedged between two bags, his old laptop.
The chunky Dell that weighed about seven pounds and took five minutes to boot up. The one with a cracked screen corner and a battery that lasted maybe forty-five minutes. The one he'd had when he was *eighteen*.
2005.
He was eighteen years old.
Dad had just died. The house was gone.
But somehow, he remembered *everything*.
Not just 2005. He remembered 2010. 2015. 2020. 2025. He remembered being thirty-eight years old, still grinding out piano gigs at restaurants, still taking bit parts in commercials, still wondering when his break would come. He remembered the pandemic, the lockdowns, watching what little work he had dry up completely. He remembered his marriage falling apart. He remembered Dad's *second* death—the one in 2018, when he'd had another thirteen years with the old man.
Wait.
Dad died in 2018 in his original timeline. Heart attack, sudden but not unexpected given his smoking habit.
But here—*now*—Dad had just died. In 2005. Different circumstances. Car accident, the cops had said.
Michael's breath caught.
This wasn't just his past.
He remembered all of it. Thirty-eight years of life, compressed into the brain of an eighteen-year-old.
"Holy shit," he whispered. "Holy *shit*."
Time travel. Reincarnation. Transmigration. Whatever the fantasy novels called it. It was happening to him.
His hands were shaking—whether from excitement or terror, he couldn't tell. The grief was still there, sharp and raw, but underneath it something else was bubbling up. Something that felt dangerously like *hope*.
He knew what was coming. He knew *everything* that was coming.
Michael grabbed the Motorola and dialed the one number he'd memorized.
"Time and temperature," the robotic voice announced. "Saturday, October fifteenth, two thousand five. The time is nine forty-seven AM. Current temperature is seventy-two degrees."
Saturday. 2005.
Real.
His mind was already racing. YouTube had just launched—February 2005, he remembered reading about it years later, some startup nobody thought would amount to anything. Facebook was still college-only. The iPhone didn't exist yet. Netflix was still mailing DVDs.
And he remembered *everything*. Every movie. Every song. Every—
Wait.
Michael fumbled for the laptop, yanking it out from between the bags. His hands were definitely shaking now. He popped it open, pressed the power button, and waited through the agonizingly slow boot sequence. The Windows XP logo had never looked so beautiful.
The strip mall had free WiFi—he could see the network. The connection was glacially slow, but it worked.
Google loaded. That clean, simple interface from before they added all the clutter.
He needed to test something. Something that should already exist by now.
He typed: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
His finger hovered over Enter.
That movie had come out in 2004. He'd seen it in theaters—well, in his original timeline he had. That beautiful, heartbreaking story about erasing memories. He could see every frame, hear every line of dialogue. Jim Carrey's best dramatic performance. Kate Winslet's blue hair.
He pressed Enter.
The results loaded slowly.
Nothing.
No movie. No IMDB listing. Just some unrelated results about sunshine and memory.
Michael's frown deepened. He tried another.
"Million Dollar Baby"
That won Best Picture in 2005, just a few months ago. Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank. The gut-punch ending.
Nothing. Well, there was a boxer mentioned in some article, but no movie.
"Sideways"
The wine-country comedy-drama from 2004 that everyone talked about. Paul Giamatti's career-best performance.
Nothing.
His heart was pounding now. He tried more, fingers flying over the mushy keyboard.
"Garden State"
"The Notebook"
"Crash" – the Paul Haggis one that would win Best Picture
"Hotel Rwanda"
"Ray" – the Jamie Foxx biopic
All missing. Just... gone. These were movies that should exist RIGHT NOW in October 2005. Movies that had been released in 2004 and early 2005.
But here? Nothing.
Michael sat back, the laptop nearly sliding off his knees.
This wasn't just time travel.
This was something else entirely.
He searched for music next. Songs that should already be hits.
"Green Day American Idiot"
The album existed—it came out in 2004—but when he found the track listing on their website, it was different. "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" wasn't there. The song that had been everywhere, that he'd played at piano bars a thousand times because people always requested it.
Gone.
"Maroon 5 Songs About Jane"
The album was there, from 2002, but... he scanned the tracks. "This Love" existed. But "She Will Be Loved"—the massive hit from 2004—wasn't listed.
"Usher Yeah"
Different track. Different song. Not the megahit he remembered.
"Los Lonely Boys Heaven"
The band existed, but not that song. Not the one that had dominated radio in 2004.
Michael closed the laptop carefully, like it might explode.
His breathing was coming faster now. This wasn't his world. This was somewhere else. Somewhen else. A parallel universe where things had gone differently. Where certain films never got made, certain songs never got written, certain cultural moments never happened.
But he remembered them.
*All* of them.
Every movie he'd watched over thirty-eight years. Every song he'd learned to play across two decades of piano gigs. Every script he'd read, every performance he'd seen, every album he'd memorized. Not just the future from 2005 to 2025—but the *past* too, the movies and music that should already exist but somehow didn't.
And none of it existed here.
The grief was still there. Dad was still dead, the house was still gone, and he was still eighteen years old sleeping in his car with everything he owned stuffed in garbage bags.
But underneath that grief, something was igniting.
Michael thought about the next twenty years. The endless piano bar gigs, the auditions that went nowhere, the bit parts and commercial work. The slow realization that he was talented but not quite talented enough, that he'd end up as a footnote, a session musician, a guy who almost made it.
He thought about being thirty-eight, divorced, broke, wondering where it all went wrong.
He thought about all those songs he'd played, those movies he'd watched, those stories that had moved him.
And nobody here had ever heard them.
He looked around the car. At the bags of clothes. At the old laptop. At the brick phone. At the parking lot stretching out in the morning sun, ordinary and mundane and completely unaware that the world had just tilted on its axis.
Michael's hands had stopped shaking.
He knew *exactly* what to do.
The confusion was fading. The grief was still there—it would always be there, probably—but it was making room for something else now. Something fierce and hungry and absolutely certain.
He was eighteen years old. He had nothing. He was sleeping in his car.
But he had something nobody else in this entire world had.
He had every hit song from two decades memorized note-for-note. Songs that should already exist but didn't. Songs that wouldn't exist for years. He had the plots of films that would gross billions. He had the scripts that would win Oscars, the series that would dominate streaming, the cultural touchstones that would define generations.
And in this world? They didn't exist. They weren't stolen. They weren't plagiarized.
They were just... *his*.
A laugh bubbled up, half-hysterical.
He could write "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" right now. Today. Copyright it. It would be *his* song, because Green Day had never written it here. He could write "Eternal Sunshine" because Charlie Kaufman apparently never had. He could create "The Notebook" because it simply didn't exist.
This wasn't theft. This was... what? Divine intervention? Cosmic gift?
Did it matter?
Michael started the car. The engine coughed, sputtered, then caught. The gas tank was a quarter full. He had maybe seventy bucks in his wallet and whatever change was scattered around the car.
It wasn't much.
But it was enough to start.
He pulled out his phone and scrolled through the short contact list. Most of the numbers were Dad's friends, people he'd never call again. But there were a few others. Tommy from high school, who'd moved to LA and was trying to make it as a sound engineer. Sarah, who'd talked about film school but probably couldn't afford it.
People who might help. People who might understand.
Michael sat there for a long moment, engine idling, watching the world wake up around him. A mom herding two kids into the 7-Eleven. An old man shuffling toward the laundromat with a bag of quarters. Normal people living normal lives, completely unaware that everything was about to change.
He thought about Dad. About the small funeral. About the bank woman's fake sympathy.
*I'm going to make something of this*, he thought. *I'm going to take this second chance and I'm going to do something that matters. Something that would make you proud.*
Even if he couldn't tell anyone how he was doing it.
Even if he'd be lying, in a way, taking credit for other people's work.
Except... it wasn't other people's work here, was it? Those people existed—some of them, anyway—but they'd never created these things. These songs were never written. These films were never made. In his original world, yes. But not here.
In this world, they were his to create.
The weight of it settled over him. Not just opportunity. Responsibility. He had twenty years of culture locked in his head. Beautiful things. Important things. Stories that had changed people's lives, songs that had gotten people through dark times, films that had sparked movements.
And this world had none of it.
Michael shifted into drive, aiming the Honda toward Hollywood.
He had a laptop, a phone, seventy dollars, and the entire future—and past—of entertainment stored in his head.
Time to get started.
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Please give me some POWER STONES
**END CHAPTER 1**