Pain was the first thing that returned.
Not the tearing, heart-shattering agony of the infarction, but a dull, pervasive ache radiating from his neck to his shoulder blades, the stiffness of a body held too long in one position. Then came smell—the burnt bitterness of instant coffee, the dust of an old carpet, a faint, underlying note of damp.
These things should not exist.
Alexander Vance's last clear memory was the floor-to-ceiling window of his Central Park West penthouse, the Hudson River glowing dully in the dusk. The sound of Scotch whiskey melting over a single ice sphere. The endless, flatline drone of the heart monitor.
Not this.
He opened his eyes.
A fluorescent light buzzed overhead, its sickly glow leaching color from a low, stained ceiling. Before him sat a battered plywood desk, its edge peeling upward to reveal dark, grainy wood. Textbooks were piled in a lopsided tower: *Principles of Microeconomics, Introductory Statistics, Fundamentals of Financial Derivatives*. An open notebook showed his handwriting—or rather, the handwriting of his twenty-year-old self—a frantic scrawl of notes around the Black-Scholes formula.
*I'm dreaming.*
An impossibly vivid near-death hallucination. His brain, in its final twelve seconds, weaving an absurd comfort.
He tried to lift a hand. His fingertips brushed the coarse paper of the notebook. The sensation was terrifyingly real. There was a smear of black ink under a fingernail, a small callus on the web of his right thumb—from writing, not from signing billion-dollar deals with Montblanc pens.
A cold, liquid dread began to pool in his stomach.
His gaze drifted from the desk. The room was small, barely ten feet by twelve. One window, its glass streaked with grime, looked out onto a brick wall barely an arm's length away. A fire escape ladder cut a grim diagonal across the view. A twin-size mattress lay directly on the floor, sheets rumpled. A mini-fridge hummed a discordant tune in the corner. Books and papers were stacked against every wall like precarious barricades.
He knew this place.
The Brooklyn apartment on Bergen Street. His first place after… after his undergraduate years at Baruch College. The "financial district studio" he'd described to his few friends from Queens, omitting the damp, the roaches, the window that wouldn't fully close.
He pushed back from the desk, the cheap office chair groaning in protest. His body felt wrong. Lighter, yet clumsier. The suit he wore—or should be wearing—the Brioni wool suit tailored to his fifty-three-year-old frame, was gone. In its place were faded jeans and a gray NYU sweatshirt, the cuffs frayed.
He stood, his knees popping. Too easily. No chronic ache from too many hours on the treadmill, no stiffness in the lower back. He stumbled toward the single, closet-sized bathroom, his movements uncoordinated, as if he'd forgotten how to pilot this younger vessel.
The face in the speckled mirror stopped him dead.
A stranger stared back.
Dark hair, thick and unruly, falling across a forehead too smooth. Eyes—his mother's eyes, a sharp, unsettling hazel—wide with a confusion that hadn't touched them in decades. The angles of his face were there, but softer, unhardened by thirty years of boardroom wars and silent, solitary dinners. No lines of permanent calculation etched beside the eyes, no furrow of relentless pressure between the brows. Just the pale, shadowed face of a sleep-deprived student. A boy playing at being a man.
Alexander "Alex" Vance, aged fifty-three, was gone.
In the mirror was Alex Vance, aged twenty-two.
A sound escaped him—a choked gasp that held no air. He braced his hands on the sink, the porcelain cold and slick. The world tilted, the buzzing of the light intensifying into a roar. This was not a dream. The granular detail was too immense, too pointless. The water stain shaped like Italy on the ceiling. The specific chip on the sink's edge. The smell of his own youthful sweat, tinged with adrenaline and cheap soap.
His mind, the mind that had navigated IPO roadshows and hostile takeovers, fractured. One part began to scream, a silent, primal wail of wrongness. The other, the cold, analytical engine that had built Vance Capital, kicked in with brutal, surgical precision.
*Hypothesis: You have experienced a catastrophic neurological event. The memories of a future life are a fabrication, a complex paranoid delusion.*
But the delusion was perfect. He could remember the closing price of Google stock on its first day of trading—$100.34. He could recall the exact wording of the Fed's statement on September 18, 2007. He could feel the phantom weight of his father's hand on his shoulder at the old man's funeral in the spring of 2011, a memory that had not yet happened.
*Alternative hypothesis: The memories are real. You have, through a mechanism beyond comprehension, been returned to a prior point in your timeline.*
The implications detonated in his mind like a string of grenades.
He looked away from the mirror, his breathing ragged but slowing. He turned, his back against the cold bathroom door, and slid down to sit on the linoleum floor. He needed data. Corroboration.
His eyes scanned the cluttered room, hunting for a calendar, a newspaper, anything with a date. On the floor, near the mattress, lay a crumpled copy of the *New York Post*. He crawled over, his movements jerky, and smoothed the front page.
The headline was in familiar, bold tabloid font: "ECONOMY STUMBLES, BUT TECH SECTOR SHINES." Below it, a smaller headline: "City Braces for Transit Strike Vote."
And in the corner, the date.
**October 3, 2005.**
The air left his lungs in a rush.
2005.
He had just turned twenty-two. He was in his final year at Baruch, scrambling for internships, buried under student debt, and living in this $800-a-month coffin. His mother was still alive, working double shifts at the hospital in Queens. His father was still drinking himself to sleep in front of Yankees reruns. The Great Financial Crisis was a storm cloud three years beyond the horizon. Facebook was a yearling confined to college campuses. The iPhone was a secret project in Cupertino. Lehman Brothers was still a titan.
And he… he was a ghost. A ghost with a blueprint.
A hysterical laugh bubbled in his throat, sharp and broken. He choked it back. This wasn't joy. It was vertigo. The sheer, staggering scale of the opportunity was immediately crushed under the weight of its isolation. He was the only person on Earth carrying this impossible knowledge. A prophet with no scripture, a traveler with no map home.
What were the rules? Was this a second chance, or a more elaborate punishment? Could he change things? *Should* he?
He thought of his mother, dying tired and proud in 2014, never seeing him truly succeed. He thought of Eleanor, her laughter like light on water, lost to a different life path he'd been too cowardly to fight for. He thought of the empty penthouse, the silent phone, the mountain of wealth that meant nothing in the echoing dark.
The cold analytical engine in his mind whirred louder, drowning out the scream. Sentiment was a luxury. First, survive. Then, assess. Then, act.
He had fifteen years of foresight. It was the ultimate asymmetric information. But he was also a twenty-two-year-old with no capital, no connections, and a transcript full of B-minuses. The gulf between knowledge and power was a chasm he had to cross, and he had to start now. Today.
He pushed himself up from the floor. His legs held. He walked back to the desk and looked down at the notebook, at the frantic, youthful scribbles trying to capture the future. A future he had already lived.
With a slow, deliberate motion, he tore out the page. He crumpled it into a tight ball. The Black-Scholes model. Options pricing. It was arithmetic. Child's play compared to what he needed to plan.
He needed a new ledger. Not for theoretical formulas, but for concrete, actionable facts. Dates. Names. Catalytic events. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper and picked up a pen. His hand trembled for a second, then steadied.
At the top of the page, he wrote a single line, the ink dark and decisive:
**What I Know. October 3, 2005.**
Outside, on the grimy fire escape, a pigeon cooed. In the distance, the faint, constant rumble of a city that had no idea time had just bent. A city whose skyline he would learn to read all over again, this time knowing exactly where the cracks would form, and where the new pillars would rise.
Alexander Vance began to write. The twelve seconds were over. The second life had begun.