Chapter 1 : Woke Up This Morning
Saint Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston, NJ — January 12, 1999, 3:47 PM
The fluorescent tube above the bed hummed at a pitch designed to drive sane men crazy. Vinnie's eyes cracked open to water-stained ceiling tiles and a smell that coated everything — bleach layered over something biological, the unmistakable perfume of a place where people came to either get better or stop trying.
His hands lay flat on a thin blanket. Wrong hands. The fingers were longer than they should have been, the knuckles less swollen, and there was a scar cutting through the left eyebrow he'd never earned. He flexed them. They responded, but with a stranger's muscle memory, each tendon pulling at unfamiliar angles.
"I was on the Turnpike."
The memory tore through like a freight train. November 2024. Rain hammering the windshield of his Honda Civic. Wipers on full, barely keeping up. Headlights punching through the median barrier — wrong side, wrong lane, a pickup truck hydroplaning across three lanes of traffic at sixty miles an hour. The horn. His hands wrenching the wheel left. The guardrail coming up fast. Metal folding inward like paper, the seatbelt locking against his chest, and then a sound like the world splitting open.
Then nothing.
Then this.
Thirty-four years old. Financial analyst at a mid-tier firm in Hoboken. Single. No kids. A one-bedroom apartment with a view of a parking garage and a Netflix queue heavy on prestige television. Four complete rewatches of The Sopranos. A true crime podcast addiction he never mentioned at work functions.
Dead on the New Jersey Turnpike at thirty-four. And now awake in a body that was twenty-eight and belonged to someone named Vincent Michael Marchetti.
The door swung open. A nurse — Hispanic, mid-forties, dark hair pinned back, name tag reading RODRIGUEZ — crossed the room with a clipboard and the efficient stride of a woman checking boxes.
"Mr. Marchetti. You're awake."
She said it the way you'd note a package arriving on time.
"How are you feeling? Dizziness? Nausea?"
His mouth opened. His voice came out scraped raw, a stranger's baritone run through gravel.
"Where—"
"Saint Barnabas. Livingston. You were brought in three days ago after collapsing at your home. Dr. Patel diagnosed stress-induced syncope."
"Three days. Three days in someone else's body while the original owner—what? Left? Died? Got evicted from his own skull?"
The memories hit in waves. Not organized, not chronological — just raw fragments smashing through like storm surge. A thick-chested man pouring red wine at a kitchen table. Cigar smoke curling under a desk lamp. A woman pressing a rosary to her lips, eyes closed, mouth moving without sound. A casket. Flowers. Dirt.
Vinnie's stomach lurched. He grabbed the plastic basin from the bedside table and dry-heaved. Nothing came up. Three days empty.
Rodriguez's hand pressed flat against his shoulder blade.
"Slow breaths. In through the nose."
He breathed. The heaving passed. His ribs ached from the effort.
"Okay. Okay. What do we have. What do we need."
The financial analyst's reflex — the part of his brain that had spent a decade breaking quarterly reports into actionable data — kicked in before the panic could take root. Assess. Prioritize. Act.
Then something flickered at the edge of his vision.
Not in the room. Inside his head. A translucent overlay — pale blue, slightly unstable, like a monitor losing signal — materialized at the periphery of his awareness. Text scrolled across it, letter by letter.
[MADE MAN PATH SYSTEM — INITIALIZING]
[HOST DETECTED: VINCENT MICHAEL MARCHETTI]
[STATUS: CRITICAL — STABILIZE IDENTITY]
Vinnie blinked hard. The interface held. He blinked again. Still there — hovering at the edge of consciousness like a browser tab he couldn't close.
"A system."
He knew what this was. Not from experience — from fiction. Late nights after market analysis, scrolling through web novels on his phone. Transmigration stories. Protagonists dropped into fictional worlds with game-like interfaces tracking stats and skills and progression. He'd read dozens of them, a guilty pleasure filed under "things grown men don't discuss at dinner parties."
The interface pulsed and expanded. A progress bar crawled forward.
[SYSTEM CALIBRATION: 12% COMPLETE]
[FUNCTIONS AVAILABLE: BASIC INTERFACE ONLY]
[SYSTEM LEVEL: 1 | SP: 0]
So this was real. Or he was brain-dead on a gurney somewhere and his dying neurons were firing off the world's most elaborate hallucination. Either way, the system operated on a points economy — SP, whatever that stood for — and levels that gated access to functions. Level one meant almost nothing worked. The display was skeletal: his name, the level indicator, and that agonizing calibration bar. No stats. No map. No skill tree. A survival tool running on fumes.
The system, as far as he could parse it, was an analytical engine. It tracked his standing in the criminal world, monitored threats, identified opportunities. Not superpowers — information. A heads-up display for navigating a life where one wrong word at the wrong dinner table could get you buried in the Pine Barrens.
But at level one, it was a telescope with the lens cap still on.
He dismissed the interface with a mental push — instinctive, like swiping a notification — and it faded to a background hum.
The door opened again. Dr. Patel — Indian-American, mid-fifties, wire-rim glasses, the careful posture of a man delivering bad news — pulled the visitor's chair close.
"Vincent. Good to see you conscious."
He asked the standard questions. Memory, orientation, pain levels. Vinnie answered in half-sentences, enough to pass the assessment without revealing that the mind behind the eyes had changed tenants.
"Blood work is clean. No stroke indicators, no cardiac event. You collapsed from acute stress, which—" Patel removed his glasses and cleaned them on his coat. The universal doctor stall. "—given the circumstances, is understandable."
"What circumstances?"
The words came out before Vinnie could stop them. A test. Let the doctor fill the gap.
Patel's expression shifted. Clinical sympathy, practiced and precise.
"Your father's funeral was yesterday, Vincent. I'm sorry you weren't able to attend."
The sentence landed in the center of his chest like a fist.
Sal Marchetti. The man from the memory fragments — thick hands, wide grin, wine at the kitchen table. Boss of a small-time crime family in Jersey City. Waste management contracts, numbers running, loan sharking. Paid tribute to the DiMeo family — Tony Soprano's operation — for protection and breathing room.
Dead. Two weeks ago. Professional hit. And his son had collapsed from the weight of it and hadn't gotten back up.
Until now. With a dead financial analyst from the future riding shotgun in his nervous system.
The grief surprised him. It wasn't his — couldn't be his — but the body remembered what the borrowed mind couldn't claim. His throat constricted. His eyes burned. Twenty-eight years of love for a father he'd never met surged through muscles and nerve endings that didn't care about the change in management.
"Thank you, Doctor."
Patel nodded, stood, and left.
A tray arrived twenty minutes later. Green jello in a plastic cup, the color of something found in a nuclear facility. Vinnie stared at it for a full minute. His stomach was a fist. His hands trembled from three days without food.
He ate. It tasted like sugar dissolved in nothing. He scraped the cup clean because his body demanded fuel and his brain needed glucose to keep processing the impossible.
[HOST STATUS: MINOR STABILIZATION DETECTED]
[CALIBRATION: 18%]
"Eighteen percent from eating hospital jello. What a metric."
He reached for the wallet on the bedside table. Worn leather, smooth at the edges. Inside: New Jersey driver's license with his borrowed face. Two hundred dollars in twenties. A gas station receipt. Two photographs.
The first — a boy and his father on a fishing pier. Summer light, rods propped against the railing, the man's arm draped over the kid's shoulders. Sal's grin was enormous. The boy squinted into the sun.
A memory surfaced unbidden. Salt air. The reel clicking. Laughter bouncing off dock pilings. The original Vincent had been thirteen.
Vinnie touched the photo's edge with his thumb and set it face-down on the table.
The second photograph — a woman. Dark curls, tired eyes, rosary pressed between her palms. Maria Marchetti, née Calabrese. Died 1994. Cancer.
"Both parents gone. Twenty-eight and alone with a dead man's debts and a dead man's enemies."
The system pinged.
[MEMORY INTEGRATION: 22% — FRAGMENTS AVAILABLE]
[ADVISORY: VISIT KEY LOCATIONS TO ACCELERATE INTEGRATION]
Useful. The system could help him absorb the original Vincent's memories faster — but only if he moved through the spaces that mattered. The house. The office. The people who knew the face he now wore.
Footsteps in the hallway. Measured, deliberate. The kind of walk that belonged to a man who'd learned half a century ago that patience outlasted speed in every contest that mattered.
A figure appeared in the doorway.
Seventy, maybe older. Thin frame wrapped in a charcoal overcoat, fedora held against his chest with both hands. A face like old leather — every crease earned, every line a story he'd never tell voluntarily. Dark eyes swept the room, catalogued the exits, the monitoring equipment, the position of the bed relative to the window.
The original Vincent's memories supplied the name before the system could: Enzo Benedetto. "The Owl." Consigliere to the Marchetti family for twenty-three years. Three bosses served. Three bosses buried.
He stepped inside. Studied Vinnie for ten seconds. Twenty. His expression gave nothing.
"Vincent."
"Enzo."
The old man's chin dipped a fraction.
"When you're ready," he said, "we need to talk about what happens next."
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