Chapter 1: Cold Wake
The cough ripped through me like broken glass dragging across raw meat.
My eyes shot open. Wrong ceiling. Wrong light. Wrong everything.
I jackknifed upright on a couch that stank of stale beer and something chemical—bitter, acrid, coating the back of my throat. The room spun. My stomach heaved. Hands grabbed at the cushions beneath me, and those hands—
Not mine.
Track marks. Scabbed-over needle scars running up the inside of forearms so thin the veins stood out like blue worms under yellowed skin. I turned them over. More marks. Faded bruises. Fingernails bitten to the quick.
What the fuck.
A groan from across the room. Someone sprawled on another couch—young guy, mid-twenties maybe, wearing a beanie and a oversized t-shirt. Another body slumped in a recliner. Both breathing. Both out cold.
I stood. My legs nearly buckled. Every muscle screamed. Every joint ached like I'd been beaten with pipes. My skin crawled with a thousand invisible insects, and my mouth tasted like I'd been licking a battery.
Withdrawal. I knew the feeling from documentaries, from articles, from—
No. I know because this body knows.
The thought hit like ice water. This body. Not my body. This body.
I stumbled toward a hallway, found a bathroom, slammed the door. The mirror above the sink showed a stranger.
Gaunt face. Hollow cheeks. Eyes sunk into dark sockets. Hair stringy and unwashed. A patchy attempt at facial hair that just made the skeletal features worse. I was maybe five-ten but the slouch made me look shorter, and the clothes—a stained tank top, jeans that sagged off nonexistent hips—hung like rags on a scarecrow.
I knew this face.
Skinny Pete.
The name rose up from somewhere deep, carrying a flood of memories that weren't mine. Pete Schwartz. Twenty-six years old. High school dropout. Meth user since seventeen. Jesse Pinkman's friend. Jesse Pinkman who was passed out on that couch. Jesse Pinkman who would, in a few months, meet his old chemistry teacher Walter White and—
I gripped the sink. The porcelain was cold and real under palms that weren't supposed to be mine.
Breaking Bad. The television show. I'd watched every episode twice, back when I was... when I was...
Marcus Gilbert. Hedge fund analyst. Thirty-four years old. Heart attack at my desk at 2:47 AM, September something, reviewing quarterly reports that didn't matter because I was dead before the ambulance arrived.
The memories existed in parallel. Marcus Gilbert's life—college, MBA, fourteen-hour days, a studio apartment I never spent time in, a girlfriend who left because I was married to the job, parents disappointed I never visited, and then chest pain like a fist closing around my heart and—
And now I was here. In a junkie's body. In a fictional world that was apparently very, very real.
I dry-heaved over the toilet. Nothing came up except bile.
When the spasms stopped, I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub and tried to think. The withdrawal symptoms made it hard. My skin felt too tight. My thoughts scattered like roaches in sudden light.
I need something.
The craving rose from Pete's body like hunger, like thirst, like the need to breathe. Something to take the edge off. Something to make the crawling stop. Something to—
My hand reached into empty air.
And touched something solid.
I looked down. My fingers had closed around a small blue pill. Where there had been nothing, now there was a tablet resting in my palm. Oval. Light blue. Unmarked.
NZT-48.
I knew what it was before my mind caught up. The drug from Limitless—the movie, the TV show. Perfect cognitive enhancement. Turn a normal brain into a supercomputer. Recall everything. Process everything. Understand everything.
The pill hadn't existed a second ago. It had appeared in my hand when I needed something.
I looked at my other hand. Concentrated on wanting more.
A weight settled into my palm. Another pill.
I focused harder. A whole bottle?
A prescription-style container materialized. Orange plastic. No label. I popped the cap. Inside: neat rows of blue pills. I counted. Exactly one hundred.
What the fuck is this?
The container vanished when I stopped thinking about it. But when I reached for the pills again, they returned. An invisible storage space. A magic bag. A—
A power.
I sat there on that filthy bathroom floor, junkie body screaming for a fix, holding a pill that shouldn't exist, and laughed. The sound came out wrong—cracked and rough through a throat damaged by years of smoking.
Marcus Gilbert died at his desk from working too hard. Now I was Skinny Pete, two years before Walter White became Heisenberg, with access to cognitive enhancement drugs that existed only in fiction.
The universe had either given me a gift or a cosmic joke.
I looked at the pill.
What's the worst that could happen?
I swallowed it dry.
The change didn't come slowly.
Sixty seconds. That's how long it took for the NZT to hit.
First, the withdrawal symptoms—gone. Not masked, not dulled. Gone. Like someone had flipped a switch and turned off the static in my nervous system.
Then my thoughts stopped scattering and started organizing. Pete's memories, Marcus's memories, everything I knew about Breaking Bad—it all arranged itself into accessible files. I could pull any detail on demand. Dates. Names. Events. The exact episode where this happened, the scene where that was revealed.
I stood up. Looked in the mirror again.
Same face. Same ruined body. But the eyes looking back were different. Alert. Calculating.
I catalogued my assets:
Pete's body: twenty-six, severely malnourished, recovering addict, criminal record (petty theft, possession), no education beyond tenth grade.Pete's network: Jesse Pinkman (friend), Christian "Combo" Ortega (acquaintance), Brandon "Badger" Mayhew (acquaintance), various low-level dealers and users.Pete's resources: wallet in back pocket ($12), cracked prepaid phone, clothes on my back.My meta-knowledge: complete timeline of Breaking Bad events from September 2008 to September 2010.My abilities: NZT-48 supply (99 pills remaining), mysterious storage power.
I catalogued my liabilities:
Current date. I needed to know the current date.
I found Pete's phone charging in the corner of the bathroom. Cracked screen, outdated model. The date read March 15, 2008.
Six months before Walter White's fiftieth birthday. Six months before the pilot episode. Six months before everything went to hell.
Which meant Jesse Pinkman was still cooking meth with Emilio Koyama. Which meant Krazy-8 was still alive and dealing in Albuquerque. Which meant the entire powder keg of Breaking Bad hadn't been lit yet.
I had a window.
But first—survival. This body was a wreck. NZT cleared my mind but couldn't rebuild muscle mass or repair years of malnutrition. I needed food. Exercise. Money. A plan.
I stripped off Pete's rank clothes and stepped into the shower. The water took forever to heat up, and when it finally did, the pressure was barely a trickle. I didn't care. Hot water sluiced off layers of grime and sweat, and I stood there for twenty minutes watching the grey water spiral down the drain.
Small pleasures. Marcus Gilbert used to shower in ninety seconds, efficient, always rushing to the next meeting. Pete apparently hadn't showered in a week.
I was neither of them now. I was something new.
When I stepped out, I caught myself in the mirror again. Wet hair plastered to my skull. Ribs visible. Arms like sticks. But the eyes—the eyes were sharp.
First: establish baseline. Don't let anyone know anything has changed.
Second: test what I can do. This power—whatever it is—there might be more to it than just NZT.
Third: make money. Real money. Enough to disappear from this life and build something new.
Fourth: stay alive long enough to become someone else.
I found cleaner clothes in what I assumed was Pete's room—band t-shirt, jeans that actually fit, a hoodie. The improvement was marginal but measurable.
Jesse was still passed out when I walked back through the living room. Combo hadn't moved either. Dawn light was starting to filter through the grimy windows.
I sat in a chair and watched them sleep. Jesse Pinkman. The kid who would suffer more than anyone in this story. Beaten by Tuco. Manipulated by Walter. Lost Jane. Lost Andrea. Enslaved by Nazis. In canon, he survived, barely, but the scars ran deeper than skin.
He didn't have to go through all that. Not if I changed things.
But that was a long-term problem. Right now, I needed to figure out what I was working with.
I reached into my storage space. Pulled out the NZT container. Put it back. Tried to summon something else—a gun, money, a car—
Nothing. Only the pills appeared.
Interesting. The power was specific. Either limited to NZT or limited to what I'd already accessed.
I spent the next hour testing edges while Jesse and Combo slept. The storage seemed infinite for NZT specifically. I could pull pills one at a time or in containers. But I couldn't summon anything else. And when I tried to give a pill to an imaginary person, nothing happened. The NZT was mine alone.
As the sun climbed higher, Jesse stirred on the couch. Groaned. Rubbed his eyes.
"Yo, Pete. You up already?"
I shifted my posture. Slouched. Let my voice carry that particular slur Pete used—casual, scattered, perpetually agreeable.
"Yeah, man. Couldn't sleep."
Jesse sat up, scratching the back of his head. "Dude, I feel like death. What'd we even do last night?"
I didn't know. Pete's memories of the previous evening were hazy—typical for someone who'd been high. "Same old, man. Same old."
"Right." Jesse swung his legs off the couch. "I'm thinking breakfast. You down?"
Behind Pete's familiar face, my NZT-enhanced mind was already calculating. Food meant observing Jesse's patterns. Observing meant information. Information meant opportunity.
"Yeah," I said. "I could eat."
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