Chapter 1: Second Life
The breathing tube came out wrong.
I choked, convulsed, hands clawing at something in my throat that shouldn't be there. Alarms screamed. Fluorescent lights stabbed my eyes. A woman in scrubs appeared—dark skin, exhaustion written in the lines around her mouth.
"Easy, Mr. Cole. Easy. You're safe."
"Mr. Cole?"
I didn't know that name. I knew another one, a name I'd carried for thirty-two years through three combat deployments and one very bad night in Kandahar. But when I tried to speak it, nothing came out but a wet, rattling cough.
The nurse worked fast. Tube extraction, vitals check, penlight in my eyes. Professional. Efficient. The kind of hands that had done this a thousand times.
"Do you know where you are?"
I croaked something that might have been a question.
"St. Vincent's Hospital. Hell's Kitchen." She noted something on a tablet. "You overdosed, Mr. Cole. Heroin. You've been unconscious for thirty-six hours."
Heroin. I'd never touched heroin in my life. The strongest thing I'd ever put in my body was the Percocet they gave me after the Kandahar blast—and I'd flushed those after three days because I didn't like how they made me feel.
The nurse left. The door swung shut behind her.
I looked at my hands.
Wrong. All wrong.
The calluses were in the wrong places. The scars didn't match. My left index finger was straight—but I'd broken that finger in training twelve years ago, and it had never sat right since.
I turned my hands over. Examined the palms. The lifelines. The slight yellowing around the fingernails that spoke of nicotine addiction.
I didn't smoke.
A plastic bag sat on the bedside table. Patient belongings. I grabbed it with hands that didn't feel like mine and dumped the contents.
A wallet. Cracked leather, worn thin. Inside: a New York State ID.
MARCUS COLE.
The photo showed a man in his mid-thirties. Angular features. Gray-green eyes. Five o'clock shadow that looked permanent.
I touched my face. The stubble was there. The cheekbones matched.
The eyes in the photo—those were my eyes. Looking out from a stranger's face.
"What the hell is this?"
A VA card. United States Army. Honorable discharge— no, wait. I looked closer. The designation was wrong. BCD. Bad Conduct Discharge.
Twenty-three dollars in crumpled bills. A cracked smartphone that didn't turn on.
No photos. No emergency contacts. No evidence that Marcus Cole had anyone in the world who gave a damn whether he lived or died.
I sat there for a long time, staring at a dead man's ID.
Then something flickered in my peripheral vision.
Blue light. Translucent. Like a projection hovering in the air beside my bed.
[AEGIS PROTOCOL — DORMANT STATE — HOST RECOGNIZED]
I blinked. The text remained.
[AWAKENING MISSION REQUIRED FOR FULL ACTIVATION]
[CURRENT STATUS: STANDBY]
My heart rate spiked. The monitor beside the bed started beeping faster. I forced myself to breathe, to control the panic clawing at my chest.
"A hallucination. Has to be. Oxygen deprivation from the overdose."
I reached out to touch the text. My fingers passed through it.
[PHYSICAL INTERACTION NOT AVAILABLE IN DORMANT STATE]
[AWAITING HOST ACTIVATION PARAMETERS]
The door opened. A different nurse, older, checked the monitors. Adjusted something on the IV drip.
"You shouldn't be moving around so much, Mr. Cole."
"The TV," I said. My voice sounded wrong too. Rougher. A smoker's rasp. "Can you turn it on?"
She clicked the remote without looking at me.
The screen flickered to life. Local news. A blonde anchor with perfect teeth was talking about a charity event at something called Avengers Tower.
My blood went cold.
"—three years since the Battle of New York, and the city continues to rebuild. Tony Stark's foundation has pledged another two billion—"
They cut to archival footage. A hole in the sky. Alien creatures pouring through. A man in red and gold armor flying between buildings.
Iron Man.
I knew that armor. I knew that face. I'd seen it a hundred times—on movie screens, on merchandise, on the covers of comic books.
"This isn't real. This can't be real."
But the news anchor kept talking. The footage kept playing. And the blue text still hovered at the edge of my vision.
[HOST ORIENTATION RECOMMENDED]
[CURRENT LOCATION: EARTH-199999]
[TEMPORAL COORDINATES: JANUARY 15, 2016]
[THE BATTLE OF NEW YORK: +3 YEARS, 8 MONTHS]
I was in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I was in a dead junkie's body.
And something called the AEGIS Protocol was waiting for me to do something.
The news droned on. Stock prices. Weather forecasts. A puff piece about some new hero called Daredevil cleaning up Hell's Kitchen.
My mind raced. January 2016. Three years after the Chitauri invasion. Which meant—what? Civil War was coming. Sokovia Accords. The Snap was still years away, but the dominoes were already falling.
"And I'm stuck in the body of a homeless veteran who overdosed in Hell's Kitchen."
I laughed. It came out wrong, too harsh, too ragged.
The nurse looked at me with professional concern. "Are you alright, Mr. Cole?"
"Fine." I forced the word out. "Just... processing."
She didn't seem convinced, but she left anyway.
I stared at the ceiling. Water stains formed patterns I didn't recognize. Everything was wrong. The weight of my limbs. The way my chest moved when I breathed. The ache in joints that had never been injured.
Thirty-two years of muscle memory, gone.
Whatever combat skills I'd earned in my previous life—two years in Afghanistan, specialized training, the kind of work that didn't appear in official records—none of it translated to these hands. This body had different reflexes. Different instincts. Different limitations.
I curled my fingers into a fist. Opened them. Repeated the motion.
Weak. Atrophied. The overdose had done a number on the original Marcus Cole, and I'd inherited the damage.
[HOST PHYSICAL ASSESSMENT]
[STRENGTH: 8 (BELOW AVERAGE)]
[AGILITY: 9 (BELOW AVERAGE)]
[VITALITY: 7 (POOR — RECOVERY IN PROGRESS)]
[NOTE: OVERDOSE DAMAGE TEMPORARY. FULL BASELINE EXPECTED IN 72 HOURS]
The system could read my stats. Like a video game. Like—
"Like those fanfics. The ones with system interfaces and transmigration and kingdom building."
I'd read hundreds of them. Stayed up too late on deployment, burning through web novels on my phone when I should have been sleeping. Power fantasies about ordinary people dropped into extraordinary worlds, given cheat powers, building empires from nothing.
I'd never expected to be living one.
The door opened again. A doctor this time, white coat, clipboard, the harried expression of someone with too many patients and not enough time.
"Mr. Cole. Good to see you awake." He didn't sound like it was good. He sounded like it was another box to check. "Your insurance situation is... complicated. We're going to need to discharge you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
"You're stable. No permanent damage that we can detect. And frankly, we need the bed." He looked at his clipboard, not at me. "Do you have someone who can pick you up? Family? Friends?"
I thought about the wallet. The cracked phone. The complete absence of any human connection in Marcus Cole's belongings.
"I'll figure something out."
The doctor nodded, already moving toward the door. "Social services will have some resources. Shelters. Job placement programs." He paused. "Stay clean, Mr. Cole. Next time, you might not be so lucky."
Then he was gone.
I looked at the blue text still hovering in my peripheral vision.
[AWAITING HOST ACTIVATION]
[DORMANT FUNCTIONS: 47]
[ACTIVE FUNCTIONS: 0]
[STARTING RESOURCES: 100 SYSTEM POINTS]
[NOTE: AWAKENING MISSION MUST BE COMPLETED WITHIN 30 DAYS OR SYSTEM WILL DEACTIVATE PERMANENTLY]
Thirty days. No job, no money, no home, no skills that worked in this body. In a world where aliens were real, where gods walked among men, where a purple titan was probably already planning to murder half the universe.
"No pressure."
A food tray arrived. Green Jell-O. Stale crackers. Something that might have been chicken broth if you squinted and believed hard enough.
I ate all of it.
It tasted like medicine and regret. My borrowed stomach growled for more anyway.
Outside the window, New York City glittered. Somewhere out there, Avengers Tower rose against the skyline. Somewhere, Matt Murdock was beating criminals bloody in alleyways. Somewhere, Frank Castle was probably still alive, still with his family, not yet the monster he'd become.
"Thirty days. Figure out this System. Figure out this body. Figure out how to survive."
The doctor had mentioned discharge tomorrow. Shelters. Job placement programs.
I thought about the timeline. About what was coming. About all the people who were going to die in the next few years while gods and monsters fought their wars.
Maybe I couldn't stop the Snap. Maybe I couldn't save the world.
But I could try to save some of it. One piece at a time.
[HOST RESOLUTION DETECTED]
[DORMANT STATE STABILIZED]
[AWAITING AWAKENING TRIGGER]
I stared at my new hands. Calluses in the wrong places. Strength not yet rebuilt.
Thirty-two years of muscle memory, gone.
I'd have to learn to fight all over again.
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