Beeping.
Somewhere behind his ears.
A rhythmic, shallow series of digital pulses, soft and meaningless like the last notes of a song whose melody he'd already forgotten.
It was cold. Not air-conditioning cold, but mechanical cold. A filtered, impersonal chill that made even the inside of his lungs feel refrigerated.
"James?"A voice distant, gentle, breaking apart like paper under water.
Female. Middle-aged, probably.
"James, squeeze my hand if you can hear me."
He didn't.
Not because he couldn't.
But because he wasn't sure if it was worth it.
His eyelids didn't open. Couldn't.
But behind them, light shimmered hazy hospital fluorescents. Shadow shapes of nurses, wires. Machines with screens. A clipboard.
He'd been here a while.
ICU.
COVID ward.
Last wave of it, when no one even posted about the deaths anymore.
He remembered the mask. The dizziness. The dry ache in his throat.
He remembered falling sideways in his hallway. No dramatic final words. No hands to hold.
He was twenty-six.
And now...Now his brain was playing back the wrong movie.
Not his childhood, not his happiest memories. Just scenes from a career that hadn't gone anywhere.
A stack of rejected pitches at Disney.
A tiny team of animators who'd believed in him and then moved on.
Storyboards no one ever saw. Meetings where executives smiled, nodded, and ignored him.
Seven years chasing one dream: an animated film that would change everything.
No funding. No greenlight. No second chance.
And outside that dream? Nothing.
No marriage. No kids. No long friendships left.
He'd sacrificed everything for an industry that forgot him.
And now, dying in a sterile ward surrounded by machines, it struck him as funny.
The thing he regretted most wasn't death.
It was the silence.
"James," the voice repeated, closer now, firmer.
"James, I need you to try. Just move a finger. Anything. Okay?"
He wanted to say, I would if I thought it mattered.
But the beeping changed.
A soft tone rising, a gentle alarm and then the silence came in, not regretful, but total.
There was a flatline.And then darkness.
But even as the light went out, the thought flickered in one final time:
I never made my movie.
He woke with a sharp breath, like surfacing from a black ocean.
No beeping.
No monitors.
No tubes in his nose.
Just the faint ticking of a wall clock and the stillness of dry air.
Not sterile hospital air, but the musty scent of carpet and film canisters.
He blinked, twice, and the ceiling came into focus off-white, paneled with wood, a sun-stained leak spreading from one corner like an old scar.
Sitting up slowly, James felt the unease immediately.
His body moved too easily.
There was no ache in his joints, no rasp in his chest.
His arms looked too lean, too young.
The skin was smooth, unfamiliar.
He touched his face and found no stubble, no remnants of a ventilator mask.
When he stood, there was a slight wobble in his knees, not from illness, but disorientation.
The room around him was unfamiliar.
A metal desk sat by the window, barren except for a battered rotary phone on the floor.
Posters were pinned unevenly to the walls Jaws, The Exorcist, Star wars.
A stack of newspapers and empty soda cans cluttered the corner.
The air smelled faintly of old books, burnt dust, and something acidic, like chili reheated too many times.
Then the memories hit him.
Not his.
A car accident.
A closed-casket funeral.
An aunt's cramped house in Pasadena.
High school hallways, silent classrooms, midnight movies at the Rialto.
Long nights spent watching The Godfather on repeat.
The sensation was like being pulled into a dream someone else had lived a complete, detailed life unfolding inside his mind with terrifying clarity.
He sat down again, hard, on the edge of the bed.
His hands trembled slightly.
These weren't hallucinations or fantasies.
They were embedded. Deep. Organized. Emotional.
Whoever this boy had been, this eighteen-year-old named James Alexander Rowan.
He had a real life, quiet and ordinary and unfinished. And now that boy was gone.
James rose again and walked to the mirror above the sink.
The face that stared back was unfamiliar in detail, but not in shape. It was a younger reflection of a man he'd never been.
His, but not his.
He studied it carefully. A few freckles. Clear eyes. No scars. No baggage.
The James Rowan who died in 2020 , the one who'd pitched and failed, who'd chased animated dreams until the world shut down was gone from the world.
And somehow, completely, utterly alive again in someone else's place.
He leaned forward, resting both hands on the chipped sink, and exhaled.
"Alright," he said softly to the mirror. "Let's make your name mean something."
The next morning, James sat at the desk, sipping a glass of tap water and staring at the rotary phone as if it might start talking.
Sleep had come in fits, broken by bursts of remembered dialogue and flashes of unfamiliar childhood.
The longer he remained awake, the clearer the internal divide became.
He could feel the two timelines pulling at each other.
His own adult memories crisp and analytical, and the inherited ones soft and faded, like sunbleached snapshots.
There were no contradictions.
Just... detachment.
He remembered things he never lived.
He could walk through that aunt's house in his mind, recall the smell of her hairspray, but it all felt like watching a film shot on someone else's set.
Now, he needed proof. Something real. Something verifiable.
He got dressed button-up flannel, jeans, sneakers that squeaked on the worn linoleum floor.
The wallet on the nightstand was cheap brown leather, filled with neatly folded bills, a bus pass, and a driver's license bearing his new no, current face.
James Alexander Rowan.
Birthdate: August 7, 1959.
Address: this very apartment.
Outside, the morning was crisp, sun climbing slowly over the Burbank rooftops.
The sidewalk felt like it belonged in a photograph vintage cars parked at odd angles, cigarette ads in windows, people in wide collars and denim bell-bottoms walking by like it was all perfectly normal.
He walked three blocks to a corner drugstore.
The bell above the door jingled when he stepped inside, and the smell of floor wax and tobacco rolled over him like a tide.
A rack of newspapers stood near the entrance.
He grabbed a copy of the Los Angeles Times, dated January 3, 1978.
President Carter.
Energy crisis.
Elvis had died just five months ago.
Star Wars was still dominating the box office.
James searched past newspapers, his breath catching as he scanned the names.
No mention of Pixar.
No hint of Disney Renaissance.
Don Bluth was still at Disney.
The Rescuers was the last big hit film released.
He bought the paper with exact change and headed further down the street to the Burbank Central Library.
It was quiet inside, the kind of quiet that hummed beneath the surface.
Card catalogs stretched across one wall like a filing system from another planet.
James made his way to the microfilm station.
The machine was massive, humming faintly, the smell of warm plastic rising from its vents.
He loaded in a reel marked World Events: 20th Century – USA and began scrolling. World War I. The Treaty of Versailles. Hitler. Hiroshima. The Kennedy assassination. Nixon. Watergate.
It was all here exactly as he remembered.
He switched to music.
The Beatles broke up in 1970.
Sgt. Pepper released in '67.
Everything aligned.
Not close. Not "off by one year." Exact.
This wasn't a parallel Earth.
Not a simulation.
No alternate timeline where the Rolling Stones were a jazz band or Nixon won a third term.
This was the same world. His world. Just decades earlier.
James sat back from the machine and exhaled slowly.
His hands were cold, gripping the arms of the wooden chair as if the wood might give him balance.
He wasn't lost.
He wasn't in a new reality.
He was home.
Just... early.
The library lights buzzed softly overhead.
A kid at the next table scribbled on lined paper.
James watched him for a moment. Teenagers, mid-70s, waiting for something to happen. They had no idea what was coming.
He folded the newspaper under one arm and walked back out into the sunlight.
As he crossed Magnolia Boulevard, the thought came to him clearly, almost warmly, like a line he hadn't been able to write until now.
"All right, Walt," he murmured, eyes narrowing toward the distance. "Let's try this again."