The st thing I remembered was the smell—burnt silicon and stale energy drinks. The acrid tang of my keyboard frying as 120 volts surged through my veins. The sickly sweet undertones of three-day-old pizza boxes stacked beside my monitor.

  Now I was drowning in vender.

  I woke with a gasp, the scent of fabric softener clogging my throat. Golden morning light painted stripes across my bedroom wall, illuminating dust motes that swirled like zy pixels. My fingers clutched at sheets that felt both foreign and intimately familiar—the same rough cotton I'd slept in for years before upgrading to high-thread-count Egyptian linen.

  "Victor! Bus leaves in twenty-seven minutes!"

  Mom's voice, bright and unburdened, sliced through the haze. Not the weary tone of the woman working double shifts at St. Mary's, but the younger version who still believed I might turn out okay.

  I sat up too fast. The room spun, my vision tunneling as blood rushed from my head. The particleboard desk. The closet door that only tched if you hip-checked it just right. The cigarette burn near the corner from when Mom's ex-boyfriend Mark had visited—the one who smelled like menthols and disappointment.

  Everything was exactly where it should be. Except...

  My eyes darted to the walls. The empty spaces where my gaming posters should have been gaped like missing teeth. No Master Chief standing sentinel over my bed. No Kratos gring from beside the window. The faint outline of tape marked where my Gran Turismo poster had been—the one I'd saved six months' worth of lunch money to buy.

  A cold sweat broke across my back. I swung my legs over the bed and nearly cried out at how easily my body moved. No creaking joints. No knees protesting under 467 pounds of regret. Just smooth, effortless motion.

  The mirror showed me a stranger.

  Seventeen years old. 6'2" of nky potential. My face still soft with baby fat, my hair an untamed bck thicket. The faded Dragon Ball Z shirt clung to shoulders that hadn't yet slumped from years of hunching over keyboards.

  I pressed shaking hands to my stomach. Solid, but soft. No apron of fat. No stretch marks from rapid weight gain. Just... normal.

  "Vic? You alive in there?"

  The door creaked open before I could answer. Mom stood in the doorway, her nursing scrubs crisp and bright, a steaming mug of coffee in one hand. At thirty-five, she still had the dimples people always said I'd inherited. The dark circles under her eyes—the permanent souvenirs of single parenthood—were lighter than I remembered.

  "You're up early," she said, sipping her coffee. "Senior year jitters?"

  I opened my mouth, but my throat had sealed itself shut. How could I expin that the st thing I remembered was dying at thirty-two? That I'd watched my own obese body colpse onto a keyboard sticky with Cheeto dust?

  Mom frowned. "You okay, baby? You look like you've seen a ghost."

  The irony nearly made me ugh. Nearly.

  I followed her down the hall, my bare feet registering every familiar creak in the floorboards. The house smelled like pancakes and cheap coffee, with undertones of the lemon-scented cleaner Mom used every Sunday. The kitchen was a museum of my childhood—chipped yellow tiles, the fridge that groaned like an old man, the radio permanently tuned to the soft rock station Mom loved.

  Pancakes sizzled in the cast iron skillet she'd inherited from Grandma. She hummed as she flipped them, some Mariah Carey song from her college days. The scene was so painfully normal it made my chest ache.

  This wasn't déjà vu. This was something else entirely.

  I slid into my usual seat at the Formica table. My fingers traced a long-healed burn mark from when I'd tried making grilled cheese at age nine. Every detail perfect. Every memory intact.

  Except...

  I looked around, searching for the evidence of my obsession. The Game Informer magazines that used to pile up by the fridge. The notebook where I'd scribbled game ideas during css. The hand-drawn character sketches from my friend Kai—payment for the lunch money I'd given him every Friday.

  Nothing. Just... quiet.

  And yet, when I flexed my hands, the muscle memory was there. The precise arch of my fingers from years of typing. The C++ syntax floated behind my eyes like persistent UI elements.

  The knowledge was intact—pointers, polymorphism, the Unity tricks I'd painstakingly learned from YouTube tutorials. I could probably recreate Pong blindfolded. But when I tried to summon the excitement I'd felt discovering new game mechanics, the te-night euphoria of solving coding problems...

  Nothing. Just cold, clinical understanding.

  "Earth to Victor." Mom waved a hand in front of my face. "You're zoning out worse than when you binge those Japanese cartoons."

  I forced a smile. "Just thinking about... school."

  The lie tasted bitter. School was the least of my concerns. I was sitting across from a woman who, in my timeline, would develop carpal tunnel so severe she'd lose her nursing job. Who would cry herself to sleep when the medical bills piled up. Who would die believing her only son had wasted his life.

  And now? She was whole. Unbroken. Blissfully unaware.

  The fork shook in my hand. I knew things I shouldn't:

  Bitcoin would hit 19,000 by December 2017

  The Raspberry Pi would unch next year

  Fortnite would make billions while I sat in my apartment eating delivery pizza

  But when I reached for the passion that had defined me—the all-consuming love of games that got me through every disappointment—I found only emptiness.

  The fork cttered onto my pte. Mom turned from the stove, her smile fading as she took in my expression.

  "Vic? You're white as a sheet."

  "I—" My voice sounded alien to my ears. "I think I'm gonna be sick."

  I barely made it to the bathroom before my pancakes came back up. As I knelt on the cold tile, staring at my seventeen-year-old face in the medicine cabinet mirror, the truth settled over me like a shroud:

  I still knew how to build games.I just didn't remember why I'd ever wanted to.

  And that terrified me more than death ever could.