Mrs. Delacroix's office smelled like carpet cleaner and Pringles. The Pringles were a permanent fixture — an open can of Sour Cream & Onion on her desk at all times, replenished from a drawer that Mike suspected contained nothing else. She was a stocky woman in her late fifties with reading glasses that hung from a beaded chain around her neck and a manner that communicated deep institutional concern for your future while simultaneously suggesting she'd seen a thousand kids just like you and none of them had listened either.
"Michael," she said, folding her hands on her desk. "You're missing school again."
"Just three days, Mrs. Delacroix. Thursday, Friday, and Monday."
"For another trip."
"A gaming conference. In Korea."
She looked at him over her glasses the way a judge looks at a defendant who's just said something technically true but spiritually questionable. "A gaming conference. In Korea. This is the second international trip you've taken this semester. The first was Japan."
"That's correct."
"For games."
"For games."
Mrs. Delacroix reached for a Pringle, bit it in half, and chewed slowly while pulling up Mike's file on her monitor. He could see the spreadsheet from where he sat — rows of grades, test scores, attendance records.
"Your GPA is a 3.94. Your SAT is a 1560. You have straight As in every core subject including AP English and AP Calculus." She swiveled the monitor slightly toward him as if presenting evidence. "You are, by every measurable standard, one of the strongest students in this school."
"Thank you."
"I'm not complimenting you. I'm frustrated." She set down the remaining half of the Pringle. "Michael, a student with your scores could be competitive at Berkeley, UCLA, even some of the Ivies with the right application. But you haven't taken more than two AP exams. You have virtually no extracurricular record outside of this — " she glanced at her notes, "Pixel Dungeon gaming club. And now you're asking to miss school for a video game convention in Asia while your classmates are finalizing their college applications."
Mike said nothing. She wasn't wrong.
"Have you even started your applications?"
"I've started the Common App."
"Started."
"I'll finish it."
"When? Between flights?" She softened slightly, the frustration giving way to something more genuine. "Mike, I know you're bright. I've known it since you walked into this school. But brightness without direction is just — it's light going everywhere and illuminating nothing. You need to focus. You need a plan that a college admissions committee can look at and say, yes, this young man has a future that we want to invest in."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because right now, if I'm reading your file as an admissions officer, I see a very smart kid who appears to be obsessed with video games and has no clear academic trajectory. That's not a scholarship application. That's a hobby."
The word landed harder than she probably intended. Mike thought about his mother — the Anita of his past life, not the headstone in Colma — sitting across from him at the kitchen table in her apartment on Geary Street, saying something not entirely different. She'd worried about him too, back in that other timeline. Worried that his crypto trading and his coding and his general refusal to map out a conventional path would leave him stranded. But Anita had never been closed-minded about it — she'd pushed back gently, asked questions, tried to understand what he was building even when it made no sense to her. She'd wanted him to succeed on his own terms, not hers.
Mrs. Delacroix wanted him to succeed on the institution's terms. He couldn't blame her for that. It was literally her job.
"Mrs. Delacroix, I appreciate the concern. I really do. And I promise I'll get the applications done. But this trip — it's not just games. It's business. I have investors, I have partnerships, I have meetings set up with major companies. This is real."
She studied him for a long moment, the way adults study teenagers who are saying adult things and might actually mean them. Then she reached for another Pringle.
"You know I've reviewed your family's financial situation," she said, more quietly now. "You'll need a full ride. Tuition and board. There are very few schools that offer that, and they're all extremely competitive. You can't afford to be casual about this, Michael. Not with your circumstances."
"I know." And he did. In his past life, money was why he'd ended up at San Jose State — a full scholarship had been the only option. He'd been a strong student in that life, but apparently his other self in this universe had been even stronger. A 1560 SAT, a near-perfect GPA. Whatever version of Mike Friedrich had been living this life before he took over had been quietly, diligently excellent — the kind of student who did the work without anyone noticing because nobody was watching. Mike felt a strange gratitude toward that ghost of himself, the boy who'd built a foundation he would now use for purposes that kid could never have imagined.
"I'll get it done," Mike said. "The applications, the essays, everything. I just need to take this trip first."
Mrs. Delacroix sighed — the long, practiced sigh of a high school counselor who knew she'd lost the argument but wanted the record to show she'd tried. "Three days. No more. And I want to see a completed Common App on my desk by December 1st."
"Deal."
The cafeteria was louder than usual. Some kind of spirit week activity had half the junior class wearing face paint, which gave the room the energy of a county fair crossed with a food court. Mike found Derek and Kevin at their usual table and sat down with a tray of whatever the kitchen was calling chicken teriyaki.
"Delacroix?" Kevin guessed, reading Mike's expression.
"Delacroix."
"She gave me the same speech last week," Kevin said. "Minus the part about international trips. She told me my Common App essay about game design was, quote, not serious enough for a university-level personal statement."
"What did you write about?"
"How designing a UI for a health bar system taught me about empathy. Like, you have to understand what the player is feeling at every moment to know what information they need on screen. I thought it was pretty good."
"That's actually great."
"Delacroix said it was about video games."
Derek, who had been quietly demolishing a bag of Hot Cheetos, looked up. "You guys are so screwed. I submitted my Stanford early action app a couple weeks ago. Done. Sealed. Off my plate."
"Stanford," Kevin said flatly. "Derek, you applied to Stanford."
"Yeah."
"With what extracurriculars?"
"Pixel Dungeon president, Math Olympiad alternate, and I volunteer at the Oakland Zoo on Saturdays."
"You volunteer at the zoo?"
"Since sophomore year. Reptile house. I'm basically the iguana whisperer."
Kevin turned to Mike. "He's going to get into Stanford on iguana credentials."
"Laugh all you want. Iguanas are extremely underrepresented in personal essays." Derek crunched a Cheeto. "What about you, Mike? Where are you applying?"
Mike hesitated. The honest answer was that he had no idea. Not because he didn't have options — with a 1560 SAT and a 3.94 GPA, he could aim high. But because the world as everyone at this table understood it was about to fundamentally change. In four months, COVID would shut everything down. Universities would go remote. Campus life would cease to exist. And a few years after that, AI would become so advanced that majoring in CS — exactly what he had done at SJSU because that was the smartest thing to do at that time — would become the worst move for a job-seeking college graduate. Keith Adams and his rivals in the AI landscape would be dictating the world and firing tens of thousands of people like it was nothing. The entire framework of "go to college, get a degree, get a job" was about to be disrupted in ways that Mrs. Delacroix and her Pringles couldn't begin to fathom.
And beyond that — Mike had too much in motion. Fury. Frontier. The $SHIB project with Ryota. The slow, patient surveillance of Keith Adams. The path from a high school senior's bedroom in Oakland to the inner circle of the man who'd murdered him and his mother in another universe. None of that fit on a college application, and none of it could wait four years while he attended lectures and wrote papers about things he didn't care about.
"I'm still figuring it out," he said.
"Dude, applications are due in two months," Derek said.
"I know."
"You should at least apply to Cal. You'd get in easy."
"Maybe."
Kevin, who understood more than Derek did about where Mike's head was at, changed the subject. "Anyway — Derek, you need to get a life outside of iguanas. What's your plan for college socially?"
Derek's face reddened slightly. "I'm going to get a girlfriend."
Kevin almost choked on his sandwich. "You're going to — at Stanford? With the iguana thing as your opener?"
"Girls like animals, Kevin."
"Girls like dogs. And horses. Nobody has ever been attracted to a man because of his relationship with an iguana."
"You don't know that."
Mike laughed — a real laugh, the kind that cut through the noise in his head and reminded him that he was, in fact, seventeen, sitting in a high school cafeteria with his friends, arguing about iguanas and college applications. For a moment, just a moment, the weight of everything he was carrying felt lighter.
Kevin steered the conversation back to himself. "I'm applying wherever I can get in. Somewhere with a good CS and design program. And then summers, I'll intern at my dad's gaming company. He's been saying he'd bring me on since I was fifteen, so I might as well take him up on it. I want to be a game designer — like, for real. Not as a hobby. As a career."
Derek pointed a Cheeto at him. "See? Kevin has a plan. Mike has a plane ticket."
"Mike has a plan," Mike said. "It just doesn't fit on a Common App."
The next morning, Tom pulled the Prius up to the SFO departures curb for the second time in six weeks. The routine was becoming familiar — the pine air freshener, the talk radio Tom never changed, the moment at the curb where Tom put the car in park and turned to look at his son with an expression that was equal parts pride and anxiety.
"Business class this time," Tom said, eyeing the boarding pass Mike had printed. "Your blockchain friends are spoiling you."
"They believe in the project, Dad."
"I believe in the project too. I just can't afford business class." He smiled. "Call me when you land. Every day."
"Every day."
They hugged across the center console — awkward, constrained by seatbelts and gear shifts, but real. Mike was beginning to think that the excruciating loss he felt after losing Mom in his past world was becoming compensated by the warm, loving happiness he felt by having Tom as his Dad in this world. He really appreciated and cared for Tom — it was clear that Tom had so much love for Mike and it helped Mike live through each day with purpose. Remembering that purpose, however, Mike pulled himself out of the emotional zone and grabbed his backpack. Smiling confidently so as to not worry Tom, he walked headfirst into the terminal.
The ticket was business class on Korean Air, paid for by Anatoly through the Solana Foundation's developer relations budget. Raj had made it happen, citing Mike as a "strategic ecosystem developer" whose presence at G-STAR would strengthen Solana's position in the Korean gaming market. The bureaucratic language masked something simpler: Raj and Anatoly were betting on a seventeen-year-old kid who had stood in front of fifty people at a SoMa warehouse and made them believe in a game that didn't fully exist yet.
Mike found seat 7A, a window seat with more legroom than he'd ever experienced on an aircraft. A Korean Air stewardess appeared almost immediately — young, elegant, with the kind of practiced warmth that made you feel like you were the only passenger on the plane.
"Would you like any refreshments before takeoff?"
The word champagne formed in his mouth entirely on its own. His twenty-three-year-old brain, conditioned by Magic Eden and Glenmorangie Signet and Krug, reached for it reflexively. He mentally slapped himself back to reality.
"A cold glass of milk, please."
The stewardess smiled — warmly, maybe even a little flirtatiously, though that was almost certainly his imagination — and disappeared behind the curtain.
Mike settled into the seat and pulled out his phone. One bar of 4G remaining. He opened Gmail for a final check before takeoff, scrolling past newsletters and Solana developer updates. Outside, the engines were building toward the low roar that preceded pushback.
A text from Ryota: Get ready for some more magical nights. Korea knows how to party. I'll make sure of it. 🍾
Mike shook his head, but the twenty-three-year-old inside him — the one who'd woken up in a Roppongi hostess bar twice in three days — couldn't entirely suppress a grin. He worried about it, though. Worried that the looseness, the nightlife, the intoxicating velocity of Ryota's world would pull him off course. His mission in this life wasn't champagne and hostess bars. His mission was vengeance. Everything else — the parties, the connections, the money — was infrastructure. Means to an end. The moment he forgot that was the moment Keith Adams won.
The plane lurched forward, taxiing toward the runway. The 4G signal weakened — three bars, two bars, one. Mike refreshed his inbox one final time as the aircraft's nose tilted upward and the engines surged beneath him.
The inbox loaded. One new email, arrived forty seconds ago.
From: m.toyota@frontier-bio.co.jp Subject: Re: Blockchain Infrastructure for Regenerative Medicine Distribution
The preview text showed three words before the signal died and the phone lost its connection to the ground.
Dear Mr. Friedrich,
Then the clouds swallowed the plane, and Mike was airborne over the Pacific with a reply from Mitsutaka Toyota sitting unread in his inbox.