Chapter 1 — New Neighbors
Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter trudged up the stairs of their apartment building, both wearing the same look of quiet defeat.
As PhDs in theoretical and experimental physics respectively, they'd always considered their intellect something of a superpower. So naturally, when they discovered a high-IQ sperm bank in Pasadena — correction, Manhattan — they'd marched right in, convinced they were doing humanity a favor. They got all the way to the intake forms before the wheels came off.
"This is genetic fraud," Sheldon announced flatly.
Leonard had been thinking the same thing. One glance at his own reflection in the clinic's glass door had done it. He clicked his pen closed and said nothing.
They rode the subway home in silence.
Back at the apartment building, Leonard was fishing around for his keys when he noticed the door across the hall was propped open. Inside, a strikingly attractive blonde was unpacking boxes — cutoff shorts, a fitted t-shirt, the kind of effortless good looks that made Leonard immediately forget what he was doing.
"New neighbor," he said.
Sheldon glanced over. "Obviously."
"Major upgrade from the last guy." The previous tenant had been a retired accordion player who practiced at 11 p.m.
Leonard straightened up and put on his most confident smile, which still looked like a man bracing for a dentist appointment.
"Hi! I'm Leonard, this is Sheldon. We live right across the hall."
Sheldon offered a small wave, the way someone waves at a smoke detector they're trying not to set off. Women ranked somewhere below Star Wars and The Flash on his list of compelling topics.
"Hey! I'm Penny. Just moved in today." She smiled warmly, and in half a second had silently categorized them: total nerds, completely harmless, perfect.
At that moment, the door to 4B swung open behind them and a young man stepped into the hallway.
He had the kind of clean-cut, sharp-featured look you associated with someone who'd spent three years on a law review and four years before that rowing crew. His dark hair was neatly styled, his posture easy and confident. He was wearing a charcoal three-piece suit — clearly bespoke, clearly not off any rack — which was a slightly surreal sight in a walkup building where the elevator had been "temporarily out of service" since the Obama administration.
He looked momentarily puzzled. "Sheldon, Leonard — weren't you two going to—"
"So, Martin!" Leonard said loudly, cutting him off. "Big day in court, huh? Shouldn't you already be heading downtown?"
Martin blinked, clocked Penny staring at him from the doorway, and quietly connected the dots. The corner of his mouth twitched with amusement.
"That's exactly where I'm headed." He turned to Penny. "New neighbor? I'm Martin Scott. Good to meet you."
Penny's smile went up about three voltage levels. She reached out and shook his hand — and kept holding it. "Hi. I'm Penny. I just moved in from Nebraska."
Leonard leaned toward Sheldon and murmured, "Living next door to this guy, we're going to die alone."
Sheldon watched Penny with the detached interest of a field researcher. "While I take no particular interest in the social dynamics of mating rituals, from a purely biological standpoint, Martin does present a more favorable set of indicators. Symmetrical features, physical fitness, and the social status signal of professional attire all—"
"Thank you, Sheldon."
Martin glanced at the Patek Philippe on his wrist and his expression shifted to apologetic. "Penny, I'm really sorry — I've got a case going to argument this morning. I have to run."
Penny blinked. "Court? Like — are you a lawyer?"
"Just passed the bar," he said, with the modesty of someone who'd graduated top of his class at Harvard Law and was already being called a prodigy at his firm. He gently and diplomatically extracted his hand from Penny's, straightened his jacket, and nodded to the guys. "Leonard, Sheldon. Tonight?"
"New episode of Battlestar," Leonard confirmed. "We'll order from Szechuan Palace." He paused. "The Thai place. We'll order Thai."
"Done." Martin grabbed his briefcase from inside his door and headed for the stairs at a brisk clip.
Penny watched him go, then turned back to Leonard with wide eyes. "He's a lawyer and he lives here?"
Leonard deflated slightly. "Yeah."
"Why? I mean — don't lawyers make like, a lot of money?"
"An obscene amount," Leonard confirmed. "First-year associates at his firm start around two hundred thousand. With bonuses."
Penny stared at the stairwell. "So why is he in a building where the elevator doesn't work?"
Sheldon answered with complete sincerity. "Martin maintains that he works upwards of eighty hours a week, rendering his living situation largely irrelevant. He also expressed a desire to be intellectually stimulated by proximity to practicing scientists." A pause. "I found the reasoning acceptable."
Penny turned back to them. "Wait — you two are scientists?"
And just like that, Leonard's ego stitched itself back together a little.
"I have a PhD in experimental physics from Princeton," he said, standing slightly straighter. "And Sheldon has a PhD in theoretical physics, plus a second doctorate in—"
"I also hold master's degrees in physics, mathematics, and—" Sheldon began.
"The point is we're doctors," Leonard said. "Of science."
Penny looked between them like she'd just found out her neighbors were secretly astronauts. She'd grown up in Omaha, graduated high school, packed a bag, and driven to New York to become an actress. Her most academically demanding recent experience had been a callback for an antacid commercial.
"And Martin?" she asked.
"JSD from Harvard Law," Sheldon said. "Juris Science Doctor — the research doctorate, not merely the professional degree. Technically the legal equivalent of my own academic standing, though I maintain that the hard sciences represent a categorically superior contribution to human civilization. However," he added, in a tone that suggested he was being very generous, "law does provide the structural scaffolding upon which said civilization operates. So I allow it."
Penny stared at the hallway again, in the direction Martin had disappeared.
"I moved to New York to be discovered," she said, mostly to herself.
"How's that going?" Leonard asked.
She looked at him.
"Great," she said. "Really great."
On the street below, Martin Scott stepped out of the building, paused on the sidewalk, and raised two fingers to his lips. A sharp, carrying whistle cut through the midtown noise. Within thirty seconds a cab had pulled over — a skill that took most people their entire first year in the city to develop.
He settled into the back seat. "Foley Square. The federal courthouse."
"You got it."
Martin leaned back and watched the city scroll past the window. His mind drifted briefly back to the hallway — to the new neighbor, Penny, unmistakably the Penny he'd been half-expecting to show up ever since Sheldon moved in across the hall.
So the timeline's intact after all.
He almost smiled.
Twenty-three years. That's how long Martin had been living in what he'd eventually accepted was not quite the world he'd been born into the first time. He'd been three years old when he started noticing the seams — small things at first. His neighbors down the street, the Coopers, had a boy named Sheldon who could apparently do differential calculus before he could ride a bike. His high school chemistry teacher had been a quietly intense man named Walter White who coached the debate team and seemed like he was slowly losing a war against something internal. A girl in his freshman English class once handed in a creative writing piece about being pregnant at sixteen and named her narrator Juno.
It had taken him until college to fully accept it: this wasn't a world. It was a crossover.
He'd spent the better part of his twenties doing a mental inventory. No Stark Industries on the NYSE. No S.H.I.E.L.D. badge numbers showing up in government procurement records. No Dunder Mifflin branches in Scranton that made the news for inexplicable reasons every other week. Those were fine — he could live without caped billionaires and regional paper company chaos.
What he couldn't entirely shake was the background hum of awareness. Somewhere out in New Mexico, he suspected, there was a DEA case about to crack open something very bad in the Albuquerque meth trade. Somewhere in New Jersey, an abrasive, pill-popping diagnostician was making his department head's life a living hell and occasionally saving lives that no one else could.
The world, in other words, had texture. And Martin had learned to read it.
For now, though, his world was 4B, a firm in Midtown, and the court date he was about to walk into.
The cab rolled to a stop in front of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan courthouse. Martin paid, stepped out onto the plaza, and immediately spotted his supervising partner: mid-fifties, silver-templed, wearing the expression of a man who had opinions about punctuality that bordered on the theological.
"Scott."
"Hammond." Martin checked his watch. "Eight twenty-two. Eight minutes early."
"A lawyer arrives ten minutes early," Hammond said.
"You're my supervising partner," Martin replied pleasantly, falling into step beside him. "Whatever you say."
Hammond gave him a look that said you're going to be either the best associate I've ever had or an absolute menace. Possibly both.
They walked through the courthouse doors together.
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