Chapter 1 : Awakening
The fluorescent light above me buzzed like a dying insect.
That was the first thing. Not a thought, not a memory — just the cheap, institutional hum of a tube light that needed replacing. My eyes opened to a white ceiling marked with water stains, and
for three full seconds, I had no idea who I wThen the rest came flooding back — not gently, not like waking from a dream. More like being hit by a truck. Which, funny enough, was close to the truth.
Rain. Headlights cutting through a Virginia evening. The blare of a horn that came too late. My hands on the wheel, trying to correct, knowing with that sick animal certainty that it wasn't going to be enough. Then nothing. A gap. Like someone had taken scissors to the film reel of my life and cut out the ending.
And now this.
I tried to sit up. My body resisted — not from pain, exactly, but from wrongness. My arms were too thin. My hands too pale. I flexed my fingers and they moved, sure, but they moved like someone else's fingers. Like I was operating a puppet from inside.
A plastic water pitcher sat on the bedside table. I grabbed it, nearly knocked it over, and caught a warped reflection in its surface.
Wrong face.
The man staring back was late twenties, maybe. Brown hair, thinning a bit at the temples. Unremarkable jaw. Nose that had been broken at least once. This wasn't me. This wasn't my face, wasn't my body, wasn't my—
Breathe. Just breathe.
I set the pitcher down. My hands were shaking. No — his hands. This body's hands. Christ.
Okay. Okay okay okay. Think. I was in a hospital bed. An A&E ward, judging by the curtain partitions and the general atmosphere of controlled chaos. British accents drifting from beyond the curtain — a nurse on the phone, someone groaning two beds over. British hospital. So not Virginia anymore. Not anywhere close to Virginia.
Something flickered at the edge of my vision. A shimmer, like heat haze, except it wasn't heat. Blue-tinted text materialized in my peripheral — transparent, floating, impossible:
[CONSULTING DETECTIVE SYSTEM — BINDING IN PROGRESS]
[HOST DETECTED — CALIBRATION REQUIRED: 24 HOURS]
[PLEASE STAND BY]
I blinked. The text didn't go away. I blinked again, harder. Still there, hovering in the corner of my vision like a persistent notification I couldn't swipe away.
Great. I'm dead and hallucinating.
The curtain scraped open. A nurse — mid-fifties, dark skin, tired eyes, the kind of face that had seen everything twice — stepped through with a clipboard.
"Oh, you're awake." She pulled a penlight from her pocket. "Can you tell me your name, love?"
My name. Which name? The one that belonged to a dead man in Virginia, or the one that belonged to whatever body I was wearing?
"I..." My voice came out wrong. Different register, different resonance. An American accent, at least — that much carried over. "I don't know."
The nurse's expression shifted. Professional concern, practiced and immediate.
"That's alright. Do you know where you are?"
"Hospital." I glanced around, selling it. "I don't... I can't remember how I got here."
She made a note on the clipboard. "You were brought in by ambulance around midnight. Found unconscious near Waterloo Bridge. No identification on you. Do you remember anything before that?"
Nothing. Because whatever this body had been doing before midnight, that wasn't me. I shook my head.
"The doctor will want to see you. Just rest for now." She adjusted my IV drip — when had that gotten there? — and left.
I lay still and stared at the ceiling.
The blue text still hovered, patient and alien. Twenty-four hours of calibration. That sounded like a video game. That sounded like one of those web novels I used to read on lunch breaks at the Bureau, the ones about people getting transported into fictional worlds with RPG systems. Transmigration, they called it.
My gaze drifted to the bedside table. A folded newspaper sat there, left by a previous patient or a bored orderly. The date was visible above the fold.
April 15, 2010.
My stomach dropped.
A consulting detective system.
No. No way.
I knew this world. I knew it the way anyone who'd spent too many nights bingeing BBC dramas knew it. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, 221B Baker Street, Moriarty and the fall and all of it. The show had been — would be — one of my favorites. I'd watched every episode three times, read the fan theories, argued about the Reichenbach Fall on Reddit threads that went on for pages.
And now I was here. Inside it. Six months before the first episode, if the date was right. Six months before a cabbie started killing people with poison pills. Six months before Sherlock Holmes met John Watson and the whole game began.
The system text pulsed gently, like a heartbeat.
[CALIBRATION: 23:42:18 REMAINING]
I counted ceiling tiles. Fourteen across, eleven deep. My mind kept trying to race ahead — where to go, what to do, how to survive in a fictional universe with no identity and no money and a ghost in my head counting down to something — and I kept dragging it back.
One thing at a time. You're alive. You're breathing. Start there.
The on-call doctor arrived twenty minutes later. Young, harried, the kind of junior doctor who'd been awake for thirty hours and was running on caffeine and spite. He ran through neurological tests — follow the light, squeeze my hands, count backwards from twenty. Everything came back normal.
"Retrograde amnesia is possible without visible brain injury," he said, more to himself than to me, scribbling on my chart. "We'll schedule an MRI in the morning. For now, you're John Doe."
John Doe. Anonymous. A blank slate in a world that wasn't mine.
"Is there anyone we should contact?" he asked. "Family, friends?"
"I don't remember anyone."
He nodded, wrote something else, and left.
---
The hours crawled.
Night shift in an A&E ward had its own rhythm — the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum, hushed conversations, the occasional drunk being wheeled in cursing and bleeding. I listened to all of it and tried to think.
Facts. Stick to facts.
One: I was dead. The car crash had killed me — killed the person I used to be. That life was over.
Two: I was alive. Different body, different world, same consciousness. Transmigration, if the web novels had it right.
Three: I had some kind of system. Still calibrating, still unknown, but real enough to project text into my vision that didn't go away when I closed my eyes.
Four: This was the BBC Sherlock universe. 2010. Pre-canon. I had knowledge of events that hadn't happened yet — events that would shape the lives of everyone in London, from consulting detectives to cabbie serial killers.
Five: I had nothing. No identity, no money, no contacts, no legal status. Just a hospital gown and a body that didn't fit right.
The nurse came back around 4 AM with a cup of tea and two slices of cold toast. The tea was weak, barely colored. The toast was dry.
I ate every crumb. Drank every drop.
Here's the thing about dying and waking up in someone else's skin — food tastes different after. Not better, not worse. Just more. The warmth of bad tea spreading through my chest. The crunch of toast between teeth that weren't mine. Butter — actual butter, even if it was the cheap stuff — melting on my tongue.
Not bad for a dead man.
The nurse watched me eat with a small, satisfied nod. She refilled the tea without being asked.
"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than she'd ever know.
[CALIBRATION: 19:07:44 REMAINING]
I sipped the refill and let my mind work.
Twenty-three hours — nineteen now — until whatever this system was came online. Twenty-three hours to plan. I couldn't just lie here and wait for the NHS to process me through whatever bureaucratic maze handled undocumented amnesiacs. I needed to get ahead of it.
Priority one: a name. Something common, something untraceable, something that wouldn't flag any database.
Priority two: temporary housing. London was expensive even in 2010, and I had nothing.
Priority three: money. Legal, if possible. But money regardless.
Priority four — and this was the big one, the one that made my pulse kick — figure out what the hell the Consulting Detective System actually was, and what it wanted from me.
The blue text pulsed again. Patient. Waiting.
I set the empty teacup on the bedside table and pulled the thin hospital blanket up to my chin. The ward smelled like antiseptic and recycled air. Outside, London was doing what London did at 4 AM — existing, indifferent, enormous.
Somewhere out there, Sherlock Holmes was probably shooting his wall out of boredom. John Watson was sweating through nightmares in a bedsit, his therapist's number sitting untouched on his phone. Mrs. Hudson was making tea for one. Moriarty was doing whatever Moriarty did in the dark.
And I was here. Uninvited. Unplanned. A variable nobody had accounted for.
I needed a name. Something that fit this face, this voice, this body that wasn't mine but would have to become mine.
Nathan, I thought. Solid. American. Forgettable.
Cole. Short. Clean. Wouldn't stand out on any list.
Nathan Cole.
I turned the name over in my head, testing its weight. It didn't feel like me yet. But it would. It would have to.
The fluorescent light above kept buzzing. I closed my eyes, but the system text stayed, glowing faintly behind my eyelids.
Nineteen hours. Then the game — whatever game this was — would begin.
I started making a list.
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