The first thing he noticed was the cold.
Not the clean, sterile cold of an air-conditioned office or a hospital hallway, but the uneven chill of early spring leaking through thin walls. It crawled up his spine from the mattress, seeped into his bones, and carried with it the smell of dust, old fabric, and something faintly metallic—like pennies rubbed together.
Ethan opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was cracked, painted an off-white that had yellowed with age. A slow-spinning fan rattled overhead, its blades wobbling slightly as if debating whether today was the day it would finally give up.
He didn't move.
For a few seconds—maybe longer—he simply lay there, staring, waiting for pain that didn't come. No crushing weight in his chest. No burning lungs. No vertigo. Just the hum of the fan and the distant sound of traffic outside, muted and real.
This isn't right.
The last thing he remembered was the bathroom. The locked door. The mirror that reflected a man who looked ten years older than he felt, eyes ringed with exhaustion, jaw clenched not in fear but in resignation. The note he didn't bother finishing because he was tired of explaining himself to people who never listened.
He sat up abruptly.
The room tilted, then steadied. Sunlight filtered through cheap blinds, slicing the air into pale stripes. A desk stood against the far wall—particleboard, scarred by years of neglect—with a laptop perched on top. Not his sleek, fingerprint-smudged ultrabook from 2025, but a thick, matte-black machine with a faded logo and a dented corner.
A ThinkPad.
Old. Early 2000s old.
His breath hitched.
Ethan swung his legs over the side of the bed. His feet touched threadbare carpet. He looked down at his hands.
They were younger.
Not dramatically so—no baby fat, no awkward angles—but the veins weren't as pronounced, the skin smoother. His knuckles lacked the faint scars he'd accumulated over years of nervous habits and careless accidents. When he flexed his fingers, the joints moved easily, without the familiar stiffness that had become his constant companion after thirty.
He stood and crossed the room in three long steps, heart pounding harder with each one.
The mirror above the dresser was narrow and slightly warped. The face that stared back at him was unmistakably his—and not.
Same sharp cheekbones. Same dark eyes. Same perpetually furrowed brow, as if his thoughts were always one step ahead of his expression.
But younger. Early twenties, maybe. No gray at the temples. No lines carved by years of sleepless nights and stress.
"No," he whispered, his voice cracking. "No, no, no…"
His knees buckled. He caught himself on the edge of the dresser, knuckles whitening as memories slammed into him all at once.
The failures. The deals that almost closed. The investors who smiled politely while pulling out their phones. The late nights fueled by caffeine and denial. The creeping realization that no matter how hard he worked, he was always reacting, never ahead.
And then the end.
This isn't heaven, he thought distantly. And it's not hell.
He turned away from the mirror, scanning the room with renewed urgency. A duffel bag lay half-open near the door, clothes spilling out. Jeans. Hoodies. A wrinkled button-down shirt that looked like it had been worn one too many times without ironing.
On the desk, next to the laptop, was a folded piece of mail.
He picked it up with trembling fingers.
Bank statement. Regional credit union. Balance: $2,431.17.
The date printed in the corner made his stomach drop.
March 17, 2009.
He sank into the chair.
Two thousand nine. The numbers echoed in his skull, rearranging everything he thought he knew about reality. The global financial system had just survived its closest brush with collapse since the Great Depression. Lehman Brothers was gone. Bear Stearns was a cautionary tale. People were still losing homes, jobs, futures.
And Bitcoin—
Ethan laughed, a short, breathless sound that bordered on hysteria.
Bitcoin didn't exist yet. Not to the world. Not really.
Somewhere, right now, a pseudonymous programmer named Satoshi Nakamoto was exchanging emails with a handful of cryptography enthusiasts. A whitepaper had been published months earlier, ignored by almost everyone. The genesis block had been mined in January, embedding a quiet protest against bank bailouts into its code.
Magic internet money, they'd call it later.
He leaned back, staring at the ceiling again, this time with a different weight pressing on his chest.
This wasn't a gift.
Not yet.
A knock sounded at the door, sharp and unexpected. Ethan flinched.
"Cole?" a male voice called out. "You alive in there?"
He swallowed. "Yeah."
The door creaked open, revealing a tall, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair and a Red Sox hoodie. Early twenties. Familiar in the vague way roommates often were—shared space without shared depth.
"You're gonna be late again," the man said, glancing at his phone. "Manager already pissed."
"Late for what?" The question slipped out before Ethan could stop himself.
The man frowned. "Your shift? Copy shop? Jesus, man, did you get wasted last night or something?"
Copy shop.
Memory flickered—faint, hazy. This body had a life before he arrived in it. A routine. Obligations. A version of Ethan Cole who had grown up in this timeline, made different choices, ended up here.
"I'm good," Ethan said carefully. "Just… rough sleep."
"Figures." The man shrugged. "I'm Noah, by the way. In case you forgot."
Noah.
The name stuck.
"I'll see you later," Noah added, already turning away. "Try not to get fired. Rent's due."
The door closed.
Ethan exhaled slowly.
So this was his starting line. Twenty years old. Minimal savings. A dead-end job. No reputation. No connections. No safety net.
And a mind filled with fifteen years of future knowledge.
He stood, pulled on jeans and the hoodie hanging from the back of the chair, and grabbed his phone from the desk. It was heavier than he expected, thicker. He pressed the power button.
A dated startup screen glowed to life.
The signal bars were full. The time matched the bank statement.
He opened the browser, fingers moving automatically, and typed in a familiar address.
Google loaded slowly.
Different logo. Simpler. Cleaner.
He swallowed and typed again.
Bitcoin.org.
The page appeared, stark and unassuming. No price chart. No hype. Just text explaining a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, written in precise, almost academic language.
This is real.
The realization didn't bring joy. It brought a strange, creeping dread.
Because he knew what came next.
He knew about the first bubble in 2011, when Bitcoin would surge from pennies to thirty dollars and then crash just as spectacularly. He knew about Mt. Gox—the magic and the horror of a Japanese exchange that would process the majority of Bitcoin trades before collapsing under the weight of its own incompetence and fraud.
He knew about Silk Road. About the headlines that would paint the entire ecosystem as criminal. About the years of ridicule before institutional money finally took notice.
He knew how easy it was to get wiped out.
Ethan closed the laptop.
Knowledge wasn't enough. He'd learned that the hard way in his previous life. Timing mattered. Discipline mattered. Psychology mattered most of all.
And there was another problem—one that made his throat tighten.
He'd killed himself.
Not this version of him, not yet, but the man he had been. The man who had carried ambition like a burden until it crushed him. The man who had run out of reasons to keep going.
This life didn't erase that truth.
If anything, it made it heavier.
He went through the motions that morning on autopilot—brushed his teeth with a frayed toothbrush, splashed water on his face, tied his shoes. Outside, the air was crisp, tinged with the smell of wet asphalt and budding trees. The city felt smaller than he remembered, less polished. Storefronts bore FOR LEASE signs. A newspaper headline screamed about bailouts and bonuses.
On the bus to work, he watched people with the detached curiosity of an anthropologist. A woman in a worn blazer scanning job listings. A man arguing into a flip phone about interest rates. Teenagers laughing too loudly, blissfully unaware of how fragile the world really was.
This was the backdrop of his second chance.
At the copy shop, the hours crawled. Ethan fed paper into machines, smiled at customers, nodded through a lecture from his manager about punctuality. All the while, his mind churned.
No big moves. Not yet.
He couldn't just buy Bitcoin—not easily, not safely. Exchanges were primitive. Security was laughable. One mistake and everything would be gone.
And there were laws. Or rather, the lack of them. Taxation was a gray fog. Regulators didn't know what they were dealing with yet, but that wouldn't last forever.
The temptation whispered to him anyway.
Just a little. Enough to matter later.
When his shift ended, he didn't go home right away. He stopped at a public library, the kind with outdated computers and the faint smell of old books. He logged on, pulled up forums, and started reading.
Cypherpunks. Cryptography mailing lists. Threads arguing about decentralization, trust, and whether this whole thing was a joke.
Ethan felt a strange sense of déjà vu—not from memory, but from emotion. The same cautious optimism. The same undercurrent of desperation.
People wanted an out.
So did he.
By the time he left the library, the sun was setting, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and orange. He walked home slowly, hands in his pockets, the weight of possibility pressing down on him.
This life would not be easy.
He would lose money. He would make enemies. He would doubt himself again and again.
But as he unlocked the door to the apartment and stepped inside, one thought anchored him, steady and unyielding.
He was still here.
And this time, he intended to find out why.