Chapter 1 : Wake-Up Call
The ceiling was wrong.
That was the first thing—white popcorn texture instead of the smooth gray of my apartment. My heart slammed against my ribs before my brain caught up. Different bed. Different sheets. Different body.
I sat up fast. Too fast. The room spun, and I caught myself on unfamiliar hands. Wrong calluses. A thin scar across the left palm I'd never earned.
"What the hell—"
My voice came out wrong too. Deeper. Rougher around the edges, like I'd been smoking for years. I stumbled out of bed, legs that weren't quite the right length tangling in sheets that smelled like a stranger's laundry detergent.
Bathroom. There had to be a bathroom.
I found it through a door I didn't recognize, in an apartment I'd never seen, and I gripped the edge of the sink hard enough to hurt. The mirror showed me a face I didn't know.
Late twenties. Dark brown hair, too long, falling into brown eyes that were definitely not blue like mine—like they used to be. Stubble on a jaw that was sharper than the one I'd shaved for twenty-nine years. A body that was leaner, a little shorter than the six-foot-two I'd grown used to.
Cold water. I needed cold water.
I turned the faucet and splashed my face. Once. Twice. Three times until the shock of it burned. The water was real. The cold was real. The stranger staring back at me was real.
My knuckles whitened on the porcelain.
"Okay. Okay, think. Last thing I remember—"
The hospital. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. My mother's hand in mine, papery and thin. Beeping machines and the chemical smell of antiseptic that never quite covered the underlying wrongness. Three years of treatment, and in the end, the cancer won anyway.
I remembered the morphine haze. The way the world got soft at the edges. My sister crying somewhere I couldn't see.
I remembered letting go.
But this wasn't the afterlife. This was a cramped Brooklyn apartment with water-stained ceilings and a bathroom that needed cleaning.
I backed out of the bathroom and started searching. The instinct was automatic—gather information, assess the situation. Years of IT work had taught me that panic solved nothing, but data solved everything.
The wallet was on a cluttered desk by the window. Marcus Daniel Cole. The name meant nothing. Brooklyn address, New York driver's license, debit card from a bank I'd never used. A hundred twenty-seven dollars in cash.
"Marcus Cole. Okay. That's me now, I guess."
The apartment told its own story. Small, functional, depressingly neat in the way that suggested no one cared enough to make a mess. Lease documents in a folder. Utility bills. Bank statements going back six months, all showing the same pattern—irregular deposits that matched the invoices I found next. Freelance IT work. System administration, network troubleshooting, the same boring corporate support I'd done in my old life.
The laptop on the desk was mid-grade, nothing special. I opened it and the password screen stared back at me. My fingers moved without thinking, trying the obvious combinations. Birthday. Address. Name backwards.
The fourth try worked: Sp3ctre_99.
Browser history pulled up first. News bookmarks. Tech forums. A few streaming sites. I clicked to a news page and the date in the corner made my stomach drop.
February 3, 2015.
"2015. That's—that's nine years ago. I died in 2024."
The headlines screamed about E Corp scandals. Economic anxiety. Growing wealth inequality. Political dysfunction that felt almost quaint compared to what I knew was coming.
E Corp.
The name stuck in my head like a splinter. I knew that name. Not from my life, from—
My fingers typed before I finished the thought. fsociety. The search returned nothing useful. Forums about society, random social media hits, nothing relevant.
Evil Corp meme.
Results flooded the screen. Articles about E Corp. Screenshots from tech blogs. A recurring joke about calling the megacorporation "Evil Corp" because of their labor practices, their environmental record, their general corporate sociopathy.
"No. No, no, no."
I typed faster. Elliot Alderson. A few hits—nothing major. Just a name in some Allsafe Cybersecurity employee listings.
Darlene Alderson. Even less.
Mr. Robot. Results for old TV shows, vintage advertisements, nothing that matched what was screaming in my memory.
Because it hadn't happened yet.
I pushed back from the desk, chair rolling across cheap carpet. My hands were shaking. The whole room felt like it was tilting, like reality had decided to stop following the rules I'd trusted my entire life.
"I'm in a TV show. I'm in a goddamn TV show, and it's before the main events, and I know what's coming."
Five/Nine. The hack that would crash the global economy. Fsociety. The Dark Army. Whiterose and her mysterious machine. Thousands dead in bombings. Angela, Shayla, Tyrell—names and faces and deaths I'd watched unfold on a screen in my other life.
May 2015. The hack happened in May.
I had three months.
The laptop screen blurred. I realized I was hyperventilating and forced myself to stop, to breathe, to think. Panic was a luxury I couldn't afford. Not anymore. Not when I knew what was coming for this world and everyone in it.
The fridge held almost nothing—half a carton of eggs, some questionable leftovers, a few beers. I grabbed a beer and drank it standing in the kitchen, trying to organize the chaos in my head.
Marcus Cole. Freelance IT guy. Brooklyn apartment. No apparent family—the absence was conspicuous. No photos on the walls, no emergency contacts in the phone, no evidence that anyone in the world would notice if this body disappeared.
The original Marcus was a ghost. Perfect.
I finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the counter. Outside the window, Brooklyn was waking up. Cars honking, people shouting, the endless machine of the city grinding forward.
Somewhere out there, Elliot Alderson was probably staring at his own computer screen, talking to an audience that didn't exist yet. Shayla Nico was alive, selling drugs to survive, with no idea how short her time was. Darlene was planning a revolution. The Dark Army was watching everything.
And I was standing in a dead man's apartment with nine years of future knowledge and no idea what to do with it.
The phone on the desk buzzed. A calendar notification: CLIENT CALL - 2PM - NETWORK ISSUE.
"Right. I still have to pretend to be him. Whoever he was."
I looked at my new hands again. The scar on the left palm. The calluses from typing. These hands could code. Could hack, probably, if the laptop's browser history was any indication. Could maybe change things, if I was smart enough. If I was careful enough.
The sun climbed higher over Brooklyn. Somewhere in this city, the dominoes were already starting to fall.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall.
"Three months. I have three months to figure out how to survive what's coming."
The laptop screen glowed in my peripheral vision, waiting.
I had work to do.
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