Ethan Cole was born into the quiet aftermath of something that had already burned out.
In his world, music had become clean. Efficient. Designed for headphones and short attention spans. Songs were built like software updates—optimized, tested, stripped of risk. The guitar still existed, sure, but mostly as decoration. A symbol. Something to hang on a wall or sample digitally.
Rock music survived only as a memory.
A museum exhibit.
Ethan first saw it in a documentary late one night, half-asleep on his couch. Grainy footage of a young man shaking his hips on a stage, crowd screaming like the world was ending. The narrator spoke reverently about Elvis Presley, about rebellion and fear and noise that once scared the hell out of parents.
Ethan sat up and rewound it.
Again.
And again.
Something in his chest tightened—not nostalgia, because he hadn't lived it, but grief. Like remembering a home he'd never been to.
He bought his first electric guitar with money saved from unloading trucks. It was cheap, chipped, and buzzed constantly through a secondhand amp that smelled like burned dust. He didn't care. The moment he wrapped his fingers around the neck, it felt right. Natural. Like his hands had been waiting.
He practiced in his parents' garage in Arizona, heat turning the air thick and unmoving. Sweat soaked his shirt. Strings cut into his fingertips until blood spotted the fretboard. He learned songs that no one cared about anymore—old blues progressions, primitive riffs, echoes of a sound that once meant danger.
People told him he was chasing a ghost.
"Rock's dead, man."
"You're born in the wrong century."
"Labels don't want that."
He tried adapting. Softer tones. Cleaner sounds. It felt like lying.
At night, he'd drive alone, windows down, desert stretching endlessly on either side of Route 66. He imagined what the road had once meant—escape, rebellion, motion. Now it was just asphalt leading nowhere.
At twenty-four, after another empty-bar gig where patrons talked over his set and the bartender asked him to turn it down, Ethan packed up in silence. No applause. No anger. Just indifference—the worst kind of rejection.
Rain fell as he drove home, neon signs blurring through the windshield. The radio played a perfect, hollow pop song. Polished. Meaningless.
The semi truck ran the light.
Metal screamed. Glass exploded.
And then—
Nothing.
When consciousness returned, it didn't come gently.
Smoke burned his lungs. Voices shouted. A woman cried out in panic and relief all at once.
"He's alive. Thank God, he's alive."
Ethan tried to move. Tried to speak.
What came out was a scream—high, weak, unfamiliar.
A baby's scream.
The world shrank to light and hands and noise. Then darkness again.
Time revealed itself slowly, cruelly.
There was no phone. No screens. No digital glow.
The house smelled like old wood, coffee, and cigarette smoke. A boxy television sat in the corner, black-and-white, flickering softly. A radio played constantly—warm voices, polite melodies, crooners singing about love without edge.
He grew, trapped inside a body that didn't match the weight of his memories.
The calendar on the kitchen wall said 1978.
At first, relief tried to surface. The seventies. The era of rock.
But something was wrong.
Very wrong.
There were no names whispered with awe.
No record stores stacked with loud album covers.
No leather jackets that meant something.
The radio never played distorted guitars. Never played anger. Never played danger.
There was no The Beatles changing culture.
No Led Zeppelin shaking stadiums.
No sound that told kids it was okay to be loud, broken, and real.
America was quieter here.
Safer.
Smaller.
As a child, Ethan sat on the floor inches from the radio, listening hard, waiting for something—anything—that felt like the sound he remembered.
It never came.
Folk songs. Easy listening. Clean melodies designed not to offend.
Rock music had never existed.
Not faded.
Not forgotten.
Never born.
The realization hit him one quiet afternoon as sunlight poured through the window and the radio hummed gently in the background. His small hands clenched into fists, heart pounding far too hard for a child.
He felt it then—not excitement, not hope.
Fear.
Because he understood the weight of it.
Music didn't just entertain. It changed people. It gave them language for anger, for rebellion, for freedom. Without it, the world moved forward—but something essential was missing.
He had been born too late once.
Now he was early.
Painfully early.
And if this world had never known rock music
If no one had ever taught world how to scream through a guitar—
Then that burden rested on him.
A child with memories of a sound that didn't exist yet.
A future that hadn't been written.
Ethan stared at the radio, its soft melody floating harmlessly through the room, and made a promise he couldn't explain and no one would understand.
Someday
This world would hear noise.