The bus ride was fifteen minutes. Mike sat in the back row, headphones in, music off, staring out the window at a version of the East Bay he didn’t recognize.
Not because the streets were different. Oakland in 2019 looked more or less like Oakland in 2026 — a little less construction, a few more empty lots on International Boulevard, but the bones were the same. What Mike didn’t recognize was the feeling. The tempo of it. Everything moved slower. The ads on the bus stops were for things that didn’t exist anymore. A billboard for a movie he’d already forgotten. A promo for a phone that would be obsolete in two years.
He was sixteen years old, riding a school bus, wearing clothes he’d found in a closet that belonged to him but didn’t.
Lincoln High School sat on a hill in the Fruitvale neighborhood. Beige stucco, chain-link fences, a parking lot full of Civics and Corollas. Mike walked through the front entrance and his legs carried him left, down a hallway, up a half-flight of stairs, and stopped in front of locker 247. His hands dialed the combination — 18, 33, 7 — before his brain caught up.
Muscle memory. His fingers knew. His mind didn’t.
First period was AP English. He walked in and sat in the third row, second seat from the window — again, automatic. A girl with box braids turned around and said, “Mike, did you finish the Gatsby essay?”
He stared at her for a beat too long. Something surfaced — a name. “Yeah. Mostly.”
“Can I see your thesis? Mine’s trash.”
“Sure, Destiny.” The name came out on its own.
She handed him her phone with a Google Doc open. He read her thesis statement, made a suggestion that was probably too sophisticated for a high school senior, and handed it back. Destiny gave him a look but said thanks.
The morning passed in fragments. Chemistry with Mr. Padilla. U.S. History with a teacher whose name he couldn’t retrieve even from muscle memory — he’d apparently never cared enough to remember it. Calculus, where his hand shot up to answer a derivative problem before he realized he was drawing from a college-level understanding of math that a sixteen-year-old shouldn’t have. He put his hand down. Kept quiet after that.
Between classes, faces appeared. Some came with names, some didn’t. A tall kid named Jordan dapped him up in the hallway without breaking stride. A guy named Ricky asked if he’d seen some YouTube video. Mike shook his head and kept walking. He wasn’t rude — just contained. Careful. He couldn’t afford to say the wrong thing about a memory he didn’t have or a joke he wasn’t there for.
By lunch, he was exhausted from the performance.
The cafeteria smelled like reheated pizza and floor cleaner. Mike grabbed a tray, sat at a table near the windows, and started eating alone. Two minutes later, a heavyset kid with glasses and a Razer hoodie dropped into the seat across from him.
“Bro, you didn’t answer my texts all weekend.”
Mike looked at him. The name came: Derek.
“Yeah. Sorry. Weird weekend.”
“Whatever. You see the Worlds bracket yet? Riot just dropped it.”
League of Legends. “No, not yet.”
A second kid sat down — thinner, Asian, wearing an oversized NASA t-shirt. “Yo, Mike. Derek. Did you guys hear Cloud9 drew Griffin in groups?”
“Kevin, that’s literally what I was just telling him,” Derek said.
Kevin Park and Derek Huang. Gaming club. His people in this life, apparently. Mike ate his pizza and let them talk. The conversation washed over him — League esports, a new Fortnite season, whether the school’s Overwatch team had any chance at regionals this year. He nodded in the right places. Laughed when they laughed. The muscle memory extended to social rhythms too — he knew when Derek was about to say something dumb, and he knew Kevin would roast him for it.
“Anyway,” Derek said, pointing a chicken tender at Mike, “first meeting’s today after school. Don’t bail.”
“Meeting for what?”
Derek and Kevin exchanged a look.
“The Pixel Dungeon,” Kevin said. “The gaming club? That we founded? Last year? That you’re the vice president of?”
“Right. Yeah. Sorry — like I said, weird weekend.”
“You good?” Kevin asked.
“I’m good.”
The Pixel Dungeon convened at 3:45 PM in Room 112 — a computer lab that smelled like old keyboards and energy drinks. Twelve students, mostly guys, two girls. Derek ran the meeting from behind the teacher’s desk with the energy of a kid who’d been waiting all summer for this.
“Welcome back, everyone. First order of business — Fortnite Friday is returning. Same format. Best squad wins bragging rights and Kevin buys them boba.”
“I never agreed to that,” Kevin said.
“You agreed last May. It’s in the minutes.”
“We don’t have minutes.”
“Exactly. You can’t prove you didn’t agree.”
The room laughed. Mike sat in the back, arms crossed, taking it in. The club ran through their agenda — an Overwatch team for the fall league, a Roblox game jam someone wanted to organize, whether they should start a Twitch channel for the club. One of the girls, a junior named Priya, pitched a VR demo day using the school’s two Quest headsets.
Then Kevin pulled up something on the projector.
“Okay, last thing. Has anyone heard of Axie Infinity?”
A few blank stares. Derek shrugged. Priya shook her head.
“It’s this game that runs on Ethereum. You buy these creatures called Axies as NFTs — like, they’re on the blockchain — and you battle them, breed them, and you can sell them for actual money. Real crypto.”
“Sounds like a scam,” Derek said.
“It’s not a scam. It’s made by this Vietnamese studio called Sky Mavis. I spoke to one of their team members on Discord, a guy named Jiho. I think he’s Korean unless he’s larping. But there’s no need for him to. So he must be. So yeah, Korean crypto gamer in a Vietnamese studio? How can that be a scam right? It’s still pretty small right now, but there’s this whole economy around it. Could be something big down the road.”
Mike’s spine straightened.
Axie Infinity.
He knew Axie Infinity. He knew it the way you know the ending of a movie you’ve already seen. Sky Mavis. The Ronin sidechain. The scholarship model that would explode across Southeast Asia in 2021. AXS hitting $165 in November 2021 before the entire thing collapsed. The Ronin bridge hack in March 2022 — $625 million stolen by Lazarus Group.
He knew all of it. Every beat. Every price. Every date.
Kevin was still talking. “—the token is called AXS and it’s trading at like nothing right now. I think it’s under a dollar. But the gameplay loop is actually fun, and if more people start playing—”
Mike’s hand moved on its own. He pulled out his iPhone and opened Safari. Typed “bitcoin price.”
$10,173.
He stared at it. Then typed “ethereum price.”
$178.
His heart was pounding. Not from fear this time. From something else entirely.
Bitcoin at ten thousand. Ethereum at one seventy-eight. AXS under a dollar. September 2019. COVID was six months away. DeFi summer was ten months away. The NFT explosion was eighteen months away. And after all of that — the bull run of 2021 that would take Bitcoin past sixty thousand and mint more millionaires than any financial event in history.
He knew every single thing that was about to happen.
Mike closed the browser and put his phone face down on the desk. His hands were trembling again — but not like they’d trembled at Tom’s kitchen table that morning. That was confusion. This was something sharper. Clearer.
This was the beginning of a completely different life.
End of Episode 4