Chapter 1: Christmas of 1988
Los Angeles, Koreatown
Christmas lights blinked in shop windows, their colors smearing across wet asphalt. Somewhere a radio crackled out "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" through a propped-open door, competing with the hiss of a bus pulling away from the curb. Families hurried past with shopping bags, breath fogging in the cold, laughing about nothing in particular. One street over, none of that laughter reached the alley.
Three men blocked the narrow passage, grinning, their teeth catching the neon spill from the street. The biggest of them stepped forward first.
"Hand over the money, kid. Nice and easy."
The young man in front of them didn't move right away. His eyes flicked from face to face, then down — to their hands, their jackets, the way they stood. For a few seconds his pulse hammered. *Guns. They said guns.* He set the paper shopping bag down slowly — a few new clothes inside, bought at a post-Christmas discount from the secondhand store — and raised both palms.
"Come on, man. Look at me. I shop at thrift stores for the sales. Where exactly do you think the money is?"
He peeled a thin stack of bills from his jacket pocket, then another from his pants. "Eighty-something bucks. That's it. Take it."
"Why do this the hard way?" He kept his voice light, almost apologetic, while his eyes stayed on their hands. When all three finally spread their palms — empty — something in his chest loosened. No weapons. Just three big guys betting on being scary enough on their own.
"Hah! Told you he'd fold." The lead robber stepped up and turned his palms out mockingly, showing off the bluff.
"Eighty-six bucks?" He snatched the bills, shoved the young man toward the brick wall. "That's cute. Turn around."
"James, man, you're not about to do something stupid, are you?" one of the others said, eyes going wide.
"Relax. I'm checking his pockets. Kid's got shopping bags, he's got more on him somewhere."
He crouched to paper through the bag on the ground.
That was when the fear in the young man's chest finished draining out — replaced by something colder, more amused.
*Robbery. Without a single weapon between the three of them. Amateurs.*
"You said—"
He never finished the sentence. A boot caught him under the jaw before the words made it out, and he went down hard enough to crack his head against a dumpster, more surprised than hurt, screaming anyway.
The second man lunged — an elbow met his throat first, folding him over gasping. The third barely got a fist raised before a knee drove into his gut and dropped him to his knees; a follow-up choke hold from behind put him flat on the pavement, wheezing.
Less than two minutes. Three grown men on the ground.
*Even I'm a little surprised how easy that was,* the young man thought, flexing his fingers once. He'd expected to take a hit or two. He hadn't expected his body to move like that — fast, certain, like it had done this a hundred times before. He filed the thought away for later and crouched to collect his money from James's slack hand.
"Cheap thugs can't even scrape a hundred dollars between the three of you, and you wanted mine?" He tucked the bills back into his coat, picked up his shopping bag, and stepped over one of the groaning men on his way out.
"Merry Christmas," he added, without looking back.
---
He walked six blocks to a tired three-story apartment building on Sixth Street, up to the third floor, into a rented room with peeling wallpaper and a radiator that clanked more than it heated. Someone two doors down was arguing in Korean through the thin walls. A stack of unpacked moving boxes still sat against one wall, four months after the move.
*Home. For now.*
He didn't turn on the light right away. He stood in the doorway a moment, letting the room settle around him — the shape of the secondhand couch, the calendar tacked crookedly to the wall, **December 25, 1988** circled in someone else's handwriting.
His name was Aaron Anderson. Eighteen years old. Nineteen in a few weeks.
He went to the bathroom and studied the face in the mirror, the way he had every morning for the past week — brown-green eyes, gold hair, a jaw that still surprised him. Taller than he used to be, too. Nearly ten centimeters taller, if his sense of his old height still meant anything.
*Still getting used to this face,* he thought. *Still getting used to being nineteen again.*
Because the man looking back out of the mirror wasn't really eighteen at all. He was fifty-three, or had been, until a week ago — until the night that ended his old life and started this one.
He let himself remember it in pieces, the way you'd sort a box of photographs.
*Aaron Anderson, the original one.* A kid whose father, John Anderson, had run a small chain of theaters and arcades that grew, over two generations, into a modest film-and-television investment company. A kid who should have started at Cal State Long Beach this fall. A kid whose father lost everything in the crash of October '87, moved them both from East Hollywood into this cramped Koreatown apartment, and then — three months ago, not long after Aaron's high school graduation — walked onto the Golden Gate Bridge and didn't walk back. Aaron had taken the only work he could find afterward: mailroom assistant at a Hollywood talent agency, one rung below the assistant-agent job that started tomorrow.
*My old life.* Fifty-three years, a production company he'd built from nothing, chain theaters, a slate of TV and film investments — and one bad night in a car with a man who wanted him to take the fall for laundered money alone. He remembered the offer with perfect, cold clarity: sign the confession, lose everything, maybe lose his freedom too, while the real culprit walked. He remembered deciding, in about four seconds, that he wasn't going to do that. He remembered his arms locking around the driver's shoulders as the car went over the guardrail.
He wasn't sure, even now, whether what he felt about that decision was regret or something closer to grim satisfaction. Maybe both. He hadn't had a chance to feel much of anything before he woke up in this body a week later.
*My current situation.* Eighteen-year-old body. Fifty-three-year-old mind. A week to get used to it, and — as far as he could tell — a body considerably stronger than the one he remembered owning at this age, and a memory that had gone from ordinary to nearly total. He could recall, without trying, the license plate of a car he'd glanced at years ago, a conversation he'd half-listened to at a dinner party, the exact date a movie had opened. He'd tested it twice already this week, just to be sure it wasn't wishful thinking. It wasn't.
He flexed his hand, remembering the fight in the alley. *That would explain tonight.*
Lying back on the bed, he stared at the water-stained ceiling and let himself think, properly, about what all of this meant.
*Hollywood. 1988.* Spielberg was two years from *Hook*, deep into building an empire that hadn't peaked yet. Cameron was still known mostly for *Aliens* and *The Terminator*, with far bigger things ahead. Disney's animation renaissance hadn't started. An entire generation of franchises — and stars nobody had heard of yet — was sitting there, unclaimed, like money on the sidewalk.
He'd already started, in the past few days, writing down everything he remembered of a novel that wouldn't hit shelves for another two years. *Jurassic Park.* Michael Crichton. Published November 1990. He ran the details through his memory twice more, checking them against himself the way he'd check a contract for typos, and was satisfied both times. Almost two years' head start, if his memory held.
*That's the cheat code,* he thought. *Now I just need capital, and I need to not waste it.*
The capital problem had solved itself three days ago, almost by accident. Cleaning out the apartment's cramped attic space — more out of boredom than purpose — he'd found a dusty envelope tucked into his father's old portfolio case, a Post-it stuck to the front in his father's handwriting: *MetLife — policy #47823. For my son.*
It had taken most of a morning at the MetLife branch downtown to sort it out — waiting in a line that wound past a rack of Christmas cards, filling out forms in triplicate, a clerk cross-checking his father's death certificate against his own birth certificate line by line. The policy, it turned out, had been purchased back when Anderson Entertainment was still solvent and growing — an investment-linked plan, not a bare-bones payout, which was the only reason the number on the form made his eyebrows go up: half a million dollars, pending final verification, four to six weeks out.
*Not that I need it to survive. But it's a foundation.*
He thought it through the way he used to think through a term sheet. A reserve, untouched, in case Hollywood chewed him up before he found footing. A slice for the writing project, for the day *Jurassic Park* actually needed a manuscript instead of a memory. And the rest — patience, mostly, until he understood the landscape of a town he only knew from thirty-five years in the future.
*Entertainment. Hollywood. Same industry I ran into the ground once, from a different door.*
Aaron let himself smile at the ceiling. There was something almost funny about it — a fifty-three-year-old dead man's ambition, dropped into a nineteen-year-old's body, walking into the belly of an industry that had no idea what it was about to deal with. Rival agencies, jealous coworkers, the copyright fights and market swings still years off — none of that worried him yet. Not tonight.
Outside, the Christmas noise on the street didn't so much as dent his sleep. If Santa Claus himself had come down the chimney, Aaron privately decided, he'd have put the man in a headlock until he called him *sir*.
---
The next morning, Aaron dressed in the suit he'd bought secondhand the night before — Italian cut, slim through the shoulders, only a little worn at the cuffs if you looked closely. He combed his hair back and checked the mirror one more time. Close enough to a young man on the rise.
He called a cab instead of taking the bus, mostly for the occasion. "Beverly Hills. CAA headquarters."
The driver — an old Chevrolet, ashtray overflowing, a payphone number scrawled on a card taped to the dash — glanced back in the mirror. "Damn, kid, somebody dressed you up nice. CAA, huh? You get scouted or something?"
"Something like that," Aaron said.
"Smart move. Economy's garbage right now, but Hollywood just keeps getting bigger. My cousin says CAA's the place to be if you want to make it in this town."
Aaron let the man talk, watching Koreatown slide past the window — newspaper boxes, a VHS rental store with its lights already on, a cigarette machine outside a diner. No smartphones anywhere. No one on this whole street knew what was coming.
He did.
By the time the cab pulled up outside the CAA building, Aaron had stopped listening to the driver altogether. He was just an assistant agent today — a nobody, technically, one step above the mailroom.
He looked up at the glass and steel in front of him anyway, and thought: *Hollywood has no idea what just walked in the door.*
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