The box arrived on a Tuesday. It was a plain, brown cardboard cube.
Inside, nestled in tissue paper, were ten copies of his novel.
The cover was stark, brilliant white, with the title JAWS rendered in massive, jagged, blood-red letters. Below, in the lower third, a minimalist illustration of a great white shark, mouth agape, surged from the deep blue toward an unsuspecting swimmer. It was aggressive. It was terrifying. It was perfect.
Duke picked one up. The weight of it, the smell of the fresh ink and glue, was more real than any memory of the future.
This was a physical object that now existed in the world. He was Connor Hauser, author.
The silence that followed the book's release was the most profound he had ever experienced. For two weeks, nothing.
The advance copies were out, the advertising had begun, but the world had yet to speak. He found himself haunting the local bookstore, lurking in the fiction aisle, watching to see if anyone would pick it up.
He saw an elderly woman glance at the cover, shudder, and move on. He saw a teenager, a boy with long hair and a denim jacket, pick it up, read the flap, and carry it to the register. A single, furtive sale felt like a victory.
Then, the first review arrived. His agent, a perpetually flustered man named Jeffrey he had recently signed with as a screenwriter from an agency named CMA, called him, breathless. "The Times, Duke! The New York Times! They loved it!"
The review was a rave. It called the book "a masterpiece of sustained suspense" and "a chillingly plausible nightmare." It singled out Quint's Indianapolis monologue as "one of the most harrowing passages in modern American literature."
That was the crack in the dam.
Within days, other reviews poured in, a chorus of acclaim. Life magazine did a feature, photographing Duke, looking grim and capable, leaning on his cane in front of the Pacific Ocean. The headline read: "FROM THE DEPTHS: A VIETNAM VET'S LITERARY TERROR."
The book hit the New York Times bestseller list at number seven.
The next week, it was number three.
The week after that, it was number one. It didn't just top the list; it camped out there, a predator refusing to relinquish its kill.
The royalty statements began to arrive, the numbers so large they seemed like misprints.
Combined with the continued, explosive growth of his Coca-Cola stock, Duke was, quietly and suddenly, a very wealthy man.
He moved out of the Echo Park apartment. He rented a small, clean, modern house in the Hollywood Hills with a view that stretched to the sea.
The first thing he set up in the sparse living room was the same rickety table and his Royal typewriter, positioned before a large picture window. The success was gratifying, but it was also fuel. The world thought he had arrived. He knew he had only just begun.
He loaded a fresh piece of paper into the typewriter. The blank page was no longer intimidating; it was a command from his future self. He had proven he could sell a story about a shark now it wsa time for a new challenge.
His fingers settled on the keys. He closed his eyes, not in fear, but in focus. He let the memory flood him—not of a film, but of a book. A book about a farm boy, a dragon, and a destiny written in the stars. He saw the spine of the book in his mind's eye, the simple, elegant font of the title. He began to type.
ERAGON.
The story did not merely flow from him—it erupted, a seismic event of imagined history cracking open the sterile California air.
Each day, he would sit before the blank page like a prospector staring at a vein of pure, known gold, his task not to discover, but to extract with precision.
He began with the land itself, with the Spine. In his hands, it was not just a ragged mountain range, but a brooding, geological fist thrust up from the belly of the world, its peaks like broken teeth against the sky.
It was a place that dared men to enter and hid its secrets in shadows that seemed to breathe.
And from this land, he carved 'Eragon'. He was not merely a poor farm boy, but a soul stretched thin between duty to his uncle's hardscrabble farm and the restless, unnamable yearning the mountains stirred in him.
Duke gave him calloused hands and a quiet intelligence, making his innocence not naivete, but a clean slate upon which a terrible destiny would be written. The discovery of the blue stone was not luck; it was a cosmic collision, the moment the boy's small world was shattered by the arrival of a celestial secret.
Then came Saphira. Duke did not just describe her hatching; he choreographed a birth of myth. He wrote of the stone cracking not with a simple sound, but with a chime that seemed to fracture the very air in the room.
He described the first glint of a scale not as a simple color, but as if it wad captured piece of the deepest, most star-rich sector of the night sky. And when her mind touched Eragon's, Duke made it a visceral, terrifying, and glorious invasion—a cool, vast, ancient intelligence flowing into the boy's human consciousness, not as words, but as a flood of instinct, memory, and as an unbreakable bond.
He saved his most profound revision for Brom. The old storyteller shed his benign, grandfatherly skin to reveal the man Duke knew he must have been a soldier, his soul scarred by the cataclysm that killed the Riders.
His stories were not mere entertainment; they were lessons, warnings, and a ghost's confession. His eyes held the weight of a fallen kingdom, and his training methods were forged in the fires of a war he had lost. He was not just a guide; he was a drill instructor for the apocalypse, and every lesson was a matter of life and death.
And lurking at the edge of this burgeoning epic, Duke crafted the Ra'zac. He stripped them of its previous fantasy cliché.
They were not monsters; they were hunters. He gave them a chilling, insectile economy of movement, their hooded heads twitching on long necks, their silence more threatening than any roar.
They smelled of dust and decayed things, and their pursuit was not a chase, but a systematic, patient eradication. They were the embodiment of the Empire's cold, suffocating reach, and their very presence poisoned the air around them.
The phone, a sleek, new touch-tone model, became his nemesis. It rang incessantly. It was always Jeffrey, and he was always breathless.
"Duke! Universal called again. They're upping their offer!"
"MGM is desperate. The head of production himself wants to have lunch."
"Fox says to name your price. Just name it!"
Duke's answer never varied. He would listen, thank Jeffrey for the information, and deliver the same, calm verdict. "The rights aren't for sale."
"You're killing me, Duke! They're offering real money! Life-changing money!"
"Jeffret just tell them no."
He knew he was becoming a paradox in Hollywood: a successful author who refused to even meet with producers. This, perversely, made him more interesting.
He started receiving invitations—to film premieres, to parties in Bel Air, to industry gatherings where the powerful gathered to measure each other.
He attended one, a poolside cocktail party at a producer's gargantuan estate. He wore a simple blazer, leaning on his cane, a quiet island in a sea of boisterous, sun-tanned ambition.
He didn't seek anyone out. He stood near the bar, observing.
A man with a shock of white hair and the energy of a neutron bomb detached himself from a group and approached.
"Connor Hauser," the man said, extending a hand laden with a heavy gold ring. "I'm Alan Ladd, Jr. maybe you'll know me from representing Warren Beaty. Quite a stir did your book caused."
Duke shook his hand. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Ladd. Thanks for the compliment."
"So have you ever considered selling? Im starting my own production company as a producer and this would be a perfect project." Ladd gave a polite smile.
"I'm not planning on selling the rights anytime soon." Duke shook his head.
"What are you holding out for?" Alan Ladd mentioned still keeping the polite smile on his face.
"A partnership at the very least." Duke said simply. "Not a sale."
Ladd studied him, the professional smile fading into genuine curiosity. "It seems the rumours about you being different were true after all. I read Jaws. Terrifying premise. What are you working on now?"
Duke sipped his Dr. Pepper. "Something bigger. A fantasy. Dragons, empires, a farm boy with a destiny."
Ladd's face, for a split second, was a mask of polite incomprehension. Fantasy wasn't the genre in 1967.
Westerns, war pictures, gritty dramas that's what sold.
"Ambitious," he said, noncommittally. "Well, when you're ready to talk about that shark, you know where to find me."
As Ladd moved away, a younger man, sharp-eyed and intense, took his place.
He introduced himself as Gary Kurtz, a producer. "I heard you talking about fantasy," Kurtz said.
"This friend I know, a filmmaker, obsessed with that stuff. Flash Gordon, Kurosawa, Dune , the pulps. He's a fan of your book too."
Duke just nodded. "Oh cool, You work on the industry?"
The man had introduced himself as a producer but... most of the unemployed people in hollywood say they're producers.
Kurtz seemed a little nervous for a moment before saying. "Yeah, i'm a producer in Queen of Blood, a Roger Corman production"
"Oh is it like a explotation film? Those normally make money, specially if it is a Corman production."
"Hey man, I hope you're right," Kurtz smiled while saying, and handed him a card before dissapearing back into the crowd.
The next day, he went to a lawyer. The paperwork was drawn up quickly. He was the sole owner, the sole shareholder. He named it with a nod to the epic journey he was now chronicling, a name that spoke of a long, arduous, and ultimately triumphant voyage.
Ithaca Productions.
Its corporate charter was a statement of intent.
Its first asset was not a physical property, but a stack of paper: the completed, pristine manuscript for Eragon, a novel that would not see publication for another couple of decades in the timeline he remembered. Its second asset was the most sought-after film property in town: the one hundred percent, unencumbered, iron-clad film rights to Jaws.
Its third asset was a bank account, swollen with bestseller royalties and the staggering returns from his prescient stock market plays.
He sat in the lawyer's office, in a chair far more expensive than the one in his old apartment, and signed the documents that brought his company to life.
He wasn't just an author anymore. He was a producer. He was a rights holder. He was a studio, of one but i mean a man has to start somewhere.
He looked out the window of the high-rise office, over the sprawling, sun-drenched city of Los Angeles. He started humming a La la land song while observing the street
..............
Eragon: It's a fantasy novel about a farm boy who finds a dragon egg, setting him on a epic path to become a Dragon Rider. It was a massive hit, selling over 40 million copies worldwide and basically being the biggest fantasy debut for a new author.
The encounter with Alan Ladd Jr. and Gary Kutz are both part of the plot not filler.