The California sun came through the hospital windows and turned everything yellow and hopeful.
It was a nice trick, considering the whole place smelled like bleach and boiled carrots.
Screams ran out in the ward in the middle of the day, and nightmares among the patients were common.
Connor "Duke" Hauser was trapped.
His right leg hung from a pulley system, a sculpture of plaster and steel, and he had named it Gerald and he was not cooperating.
The white-hot pain from the crash had faded into a deep, stubborn ache.
It was like a roommate who never left and never said anything useful.
Duke had been trying very hard not to think about the helicopter, and the helicopter kept showing up anyway.
On the bedside table sat a cheap spiral notebook.
A volunteer had given it to him, a sweet girl with a ponytail, and he had tried to flirt with her from a hospital bed with his leg in the air.
It had not gone well. He had been, he realized afterward, about as smooth as a cheese grater.
The notebook was open to the first page. His handwriting wobbled, courtesy of whatever the nurses were putting in his veins.
Woke up in California, 1966. Leg is hurt. Mind is full. A little too full.
A few lines down, newer.
January 18. Physical therapy today. Therapist says I'm making progress. Doesn't feel like it. The world is out there going by and I'm stuck in here counting ceiling tiles.
At the nurse's station, the radio was fighting a war of its own.
The Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" was trading blows with The Mamas & the Papas' "California Dreamin'" for airtime.
Batman was a primetime sensation. Everyone was talking about the Gemini 8 mission, launching in a few months.
Inside the hospital, time was measured in pill cycles and the wait for the physical therapist.
So to pass time, Duke had a stack of comics beside him, because he was a grown man and he had priorities.
The chaos in his head had finally settled after three days.
Two lives' worth of memories had crashed into each other up there, and for a while it felt like someone had dumped two junk drawers into one.
Now, at least, the memories of the man from 2026 sat in neat rows.
Not that it helped his leg.
A familiar tap-tap and the squeak of sneakers on the floor announced Joe, the orderly.
Joe was a Korean War veteran with kind eyes and a face full of stress lines.
"How's the leg today, Hauser?"
"Still attached," Duke said, a small smile pulling at his mouth. He suddenly felt the urge to get himself a cigarrete. "Doctor says that's the important part."
"That it is." Joe chuckled and held out two envelopes. "Mail call. One's from home."
The first was from a friend back in Texas.
He wrote about the farm Duke used to work, about their neighbor Lyle finally getting the tractor running, about little brother Michael's ribbon from the county fair. It was a warm letter, a blanket of a letter.
But Duke could feel the worry underneath every cheerful line. These people thought he was his Connor. They had no idea the guy reading their letter wasn't entirely him.
The second envelope was official, stamped with the U.S. Marine Corps seal. More discharge paperwork.
Of course. Even the military had a form for losing your leg.
He read the friend's letter twice.
In his past life, he had been a 24-year-old petroleum engineer, sitting in a meeting about pipeline pressure, when the world blinked out. Then he woke up here, in the past, in a body that was 19.
Same name, completely different problems.
The Connor Hauser of this world was born in 1947.
He'd been a door gunner in Vietnam, and his aircraft was shot down in an ambush. The crash wrecked his right leg.
They flew him to Japan, then to California, and now he was being medically discharged.
And that was how Duke ended up here, in a bed, in 1966, with a leg pulley and bad rizz.
The boredom was heavy.
At one point he caught himself staring out the window, watching a palm tree sway, and he honestly considered that a high point of his day.
God, he missed things. His phone, League of Legends, tablet. Legs that bent the right way.
He had even just bought a pirated PSP, loaded with PSP games and half the PS1 library, just before the world changed.
He had been so proud of that deal.
It was currently sitting in 2026, probably in a drawer, probably forgotten, and he was probably going to think about it every night for the rest of his life.
'Hope my brother can find it.'
It was January 18, 1966. Just the 3 day in this body.
His reflection stared back at him from the window glass. 19 years old, black hair, blue eyes, a sharp-looking face he did not remember having.
Not bad, he thought. Whoever you were, you at least had good genetics.
"Hauser? You in there?" Joe's rough voice cut through the haze.
"I'm good, Joe. Just thinking."
"Uh-huh." Joe leaned a hip against the bedside table, fingering a pack of Lucky Strikes in his pocket. "Look, man. It's rough. But you gotta keep moving forward, don't let it anchor you. Stress is a killer it wrecks your chakras."
Duke nodded slowly. Even in 1966, California has its characters.
"Thanks, Joe. I mean it. For everything." Since he'd opened his eyes in this new-old skin, Joe had been his guide through a maze of paperwork and pain.
"Just take care of yourself for a while." Joe lowered his voice and gave him a knowing look. "I know a guy. Sells stuff to take the edge off. Ever heard of Mary Jane?"
Another nod. He was doing a lot of nodding lately.
But weed wasn't something he wanted to touch right now. His head was the only thing in this situation that still belonged entirely to him, and he wasn't about to hand it over.
Joe squeezed his shoulder and moved on, leaving the young soldier alone with his thoughts again.
Some cosmic joke of a god had dumped him in 1966, and Duke was still trying to find the punchline.
He thought about Hollywood.
This Hollywood, right now, was smaller.
There was no New Hollywood movement yet.
No blockbusters.
No superheroes ruling the box office.
Batman was a campy TV show, and nobody had any idea what was coming.
In his past life, he had spent years in the theater scene, trying to claw his way into the industry.
He burned through every dollar of his savings doing it.
Eventually giving up, finished a computer science degree, and wound up with a Master's in Petroleum Engineering, because apparently that was the life he deserved.
But now?
He looked at his reflection again and wondered if these looks could carry an actor.
Then he looked at his leg.
He would never dance. Hell, he might not walk normally again.
What kind of actor can't even walk?
His old drama teacher had once told him: "If you can't imagine yourself teaching in a small town, to people who just want to learn how to act, then this career isn't for you."
Duke had thought about that line a lot over the years. He had hated how much of it was true.
But sitting here with a metal leg and a second chance, he knew one thing for sure.
If he didn't do something with this, he deserved to rot in this beige room counting ceiling tiles.
That night, he cracked.
He was desperate to get out of the hospital's grip, so he spent a little of his Army pay, got himself into a wheelchair, and hailed a cab to Westwood.
He needed to see something that wasn't beige walls and somber faces.
Movies had always done that for him. They lit up the world.
And honestly, he remembered how depressing it was to watch movies in 2026.
Every film seemed to have a lecture baked into it, delivered with all the subtlety of a brick.
He didn't mind a movie having a message. Messages were fine.
But he wanted a movie, and somewhere along the line, most of them had stopped being that.
The theater marquee was a blaze of light, and the line stretched down the block, even though the film had been playing for months.
The Sound of Music.
The sheer, unapologetic joy of it was the opposite of everything he felt. Which was exactly why it pulled him in.
He bought a ticket and squeezed into a packed theater, wheelchair and all, to a chorus of polite sighs.
The lights dimmed. The screen filled with those breathtaking aerial shots of the Austrian Alps. The music swelled.
And as Julie Andrews spun on that hilltop, something clicked in his head.
It wasn't just the memory of having seen the film.
The entire movie was there, perfect and pristine.
Every sweeping shot. Every chord. Every line from the Captain and Maria, down to the mischief in little Gretl's face.
It was all there. All of it.
His heart slammed against his ribs. He closed his eyes, testing it.
He reached for another film, Jaws.
It came up instantly. The opening swim, the ominous score, Quint's speech about the USS Indianapolis, all of it in flawless high definition.
Then he tried something else. A movie he had only heard about but never actually watched.
Nothing. Just static.
But the ones he had seen? They were all there. A perfect, private cinema inside his skull.
This is it, he thought, almost dizzy. This is my tool. I can remember movies.
Excitement burned through him so hard that it drowned out the ache in his leg. His fist came down on the worn velvet armrest, and the sharp sting in his hand felt like proof that he was awake.
"Hell yeah," he breathed, a huge smile cracking across his face as the von Trapp children sang in harmony on screen.
The woman in the next seat shot him a disapproving look.
He did not care. Karens exist even in 1966. They just didn't have a name for it yet.
He sat through the rest of the movie in a daze.
When the credits rolled, he took a cab back to the hospital, his mind running like an engine with the throttle jammed open. Plans were forming. Real ones.
He had been handed a cheat code by some insane god. Or maybe a really generous one. At this point he wasn't picky.
In his past life, the industry had been fighting a losing war.
AI crept into every corner.
Scripts got rewritten to please algorithms.
Private equity ate everything it touched.
Bosses who'd never loved a movie in their lives decided what got made, and meaningless data told them to stop taking risks.
It had been exhausting. It had also been nobody's fault in particular, which was the worst part.
But this was different.
This time, if he failed, he'd have no one to blame but himself.
And honestly, he thought, staring up at the ceiling, that sounds kind of great.
...
I had already rewritten the first five chapters since a month ago.
As you know, this fanfic will strecht from 1966 to 2020s(if i'm able to)
The protagonist will become a tycoon mostly focused on movies, videogames, and themeparks(without buying Disney)
If you got any recommendations you can say it here.