He was floating.
Not in water, not in air — somewhere between. A warm suspension, weightless, like the moment between sleep and waking stretched into an eternity. Then the sensation shifted. Ground beneath his feet. Noise. Movement.
Mike opened his eyes and he was standing in the middle of an intersection.
People everywhere — hundreds of them, moving in every direction, crossing in waves. Neon light poured down from every surface. Giant LED screens blazed from the faces of buildings, cycling through advertisements in a language he couldn’t read. The air was humid and electric. Cars idled at the crosswalk. A police officer in a white uniform directed traffic with choreographed precision.
This wasn’t San Francisco. This wasn’t Oakland. This was somewhere he’d never been.
The signs were in Japanese — the storefronts, the scrolling text on the screens, everything. He didn’t speak the language, but he’d seen enough movies, enough anime, enough YouTube videos to know. This was Tokyo. And this intersection — the sheer scale of it, the diagonal crosswalks, the iconic scramble — this was Shibuya.
Everything was muffled. The voices around him sounded like they were coming through water. The neon lights pulsed too slowly, as if the city was breathing. He was here but not here. Watching from inside a bubble.
Then a face appeared on one of the massive screens above him.
Mike froze.
It was him. The old man. The same sharp cheekbones, the same dark steady eyes. Younger than when Mike had seen him on Divisadero — but more confident, in a tailored suit, seated behind a desk for what looked like a news broadcast. Japanese text scrolled beneath his face. Mike couldn’t read any of it. But then — English. Just a few letters, glowing white against a blue chyron at the bottom of the screen.
CEO — FRONTIER
The old man was speaking — calm and authoritative, with the same quiet intensity Mike had seen in that alley. But here he wasn’t bleeding on the ground. Here he was someone. Someone important.
Frontier. CEO of Frontier.
The screen flickered, the neon dimmed, and the crowds dissolved into mist. The intersection folded inward like wet paper, and Mike felt himself falling backward through the warm suspension again — drifting, sinking —
His eyes opened to morning light falling across the blue walls of his bedroom, the Warriors poster, the half-empty glass of water on the nightstand.
Tuesday.
Mike lay there for a full minute, staring at the ceiling. The dream was already fading at the edges, the way dreams do, but the face on the screen from Shibuya stayed sharp. The old man from Divisadero — the CEO of something called Frontier. A Japanese CEO of a company he’d never heard of. The same man who had saved his life in a crushed Prius in the rain — and whom Mike had saved in an alley on Divisadero.
He went downstairs. The kitchen was empty. A note on the counter in Tom’s handwriting:
Had to drive down to LA — meeting with a production company about a pilot script. Back late tonight or tomorrow morning. There’s leftover pasta in the fridge. Don’t burn the house down. — Dad
Mike fixed himself a bowl of cereal and sat at the kitchen table. The house was quiet. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking of a wall clock he hadn’t noticed before.
He pulled out his phone and typed “Keith Adams Organic” into Google.
The results loaded. TechCrunch. Wired. Bloomberg. Keith Adams stared back at him from a dozen thumbnails — younger, leaner, but with the same careful smile Mike had seen at his mother’s funeral. In 2019, Organic was a unicorn. Over a billion-dollar valuation. Series B funding of $200 million led by Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. Keith had been profiled as one of the most promising AI founders in Silicon Valley. The red carpet was rolling out for him in real time.
Mike scrolled through the articles. Organic’s AI offerings were already being piloted in consumer software, B2B infrastructure, financial services, and autonomous vehicle R&D. The mobility division — the one his mom had called Keith’s baby — was listed as a “future growth vertical” in a Forbes piece from June 2019.
He looked at Keith’s face on the screen. The same face that had been on the other side of a bathroom door at a funeral wake, calmly discussing the murder of Mike’s mother like it was a line item on a quarterly report.
Something cold settled in Mike’s chest. Not fear. Not sadness. Something harder.
He closed the browser and opened Maps. Typed “Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma.”
Twenty-two minutes by BART.
He found her in Section 14, Row G. A modest headstone, weathered but clean. Someone — Tom, probably — had been maintaining it.
ANITA MARIE FRIEDRICH March 3, 1971 — December 19, 2002 Beloved wife and mother
December 19, 2002. Mike had been born October 1. She’d died less than three months after giving birth to him. He didn’t know the specifics — complications, maybe, or something that had been there before the pregnancy. The headstone didn’t say. It just said beloved.
Mike sat on the grass in front of the stone and cried.
Not the stunned, numb grief of his previous life — the phone call from Tom, the morgue, the police reports. This was different. This was grief for a woman he’d never known in this life but had loved desperately in another. A mother who had kissed his forehead every morning and worried about robotaxis and asked Tom what a dead man’s switch was. A mother who had been murdered by her own boss and buried under a lie.
She existed here too. Different last name. Different life. But she’d been real, and she’d been his, and she’d died before he could remember her face.
He wiped his eyes. Stood up. Put his hand on the top of the headstone.
“I’m going to make this count,” he said. “Both lives. I’m not going to waste either one.”
He didn’t know exactly what that meant yet. But standing in that cemetery, with the cold Colma wind cutting through his hoodie, he felt something ignite in him. Not a plan — not yet. Just fuel. Raw, furious, unrefined fuel.
He took BART back to the city. It was early evening and he had nowhere to be — Tom was in LA, school was done. He checked his phone. A calendar notification he didn’t remember setting:
SF Blockchain Dev Meetup — Starfish Mission, 7:00 PM
Starfish Mission. He didn’t know the place, but the previous Mike apparently did. Some crypto and blockchain event space in SoMa. The old Mike — the Mike of this universe — had been more of a gaming kid than a crypto kid, but he clearly had broad interests. VR, blockchain gaming, NFTs, developer tools. The kind of high school kid who signed up for meetups he was technically too young for and showed up anyway.
Mike walked over. The venue was a converted warehouse on a side street near the Caltrain station — exposed brick, string lights, folding chairs arranged in rows facing a projector screen. Maybe forty people. Mostly developers in their twenties and thirties. A few older VCs lingering near the back. Everyone had a lanyard.
The talk was about Ethereum scalability. Layer 1 versus Layer 2. Whether Cosmos and Polkadot would fragment liquidity or expand the ecosystem. Mike understood about sixty percent of it from his CS background and another thirty from his crypto degen days in his past life. The remaining ten percent was new — deep protocol-level stuff he’d never bothered with when he was just trading memecoins.
After the talk, networking. Clusters of people standing around with laptops and beers, arguing about gas fees and sharding. Mike gravitated toward the refreshments table.
A long folding table covered in chips, hummus, and a couple of galvanized buckets filled with ice and bottles of Budweiser. Mike stared at the beers. He hadn’t had a drink since the night before Anita’s funeral — Tom had let him have a whiskey, said he needed it. That felt like a lifetime ago. Technically, it was. A completely different lifetime and universe ago. By his physiological clock, it had been no more than a couple of days since the funeral. By his psychological clock, it felt like years.
He wanted one so badly. Just one cold bottle to take the edge off a day that had included a dream about Tokyo, a dead mother’s gravestone, and the face of the man who murdered her smiling from a TechCrunch article.
But he was sixteen.
He stood there, hand hovering near the bucket, caught in a private war between a twenty-three-year-old’s need and a teenager’s legal reality. His fingers twitched. He pulled back. Reached again. Pulled back.
“You look like a man in crisis.”
Mike turned. A guy in a baseball cap and a plain black t-shirt was standing next to him, grinning. Maybe mid to late thirties. Slim, a little scruffy, with the kind of relaxed energy that came from either total confidence or total indifference. He reached into the bucket, pulled out a Budweiser, popped the cap on the edge of the table, and handed it to Mike.
“Here.”
“I’m — I’m actually underage.”
The guy laughed. Not mocking — genuine. “At a blockchain meetup? Nobody’s checking IDs. You’re fine.”
Mike took the bottle. The first sip was unreasonably good.
“So,” the guy said, grabbing one for himself. “You a developer?”
“Yeah. Mostly games. Some web stuff.”
“Into crypto?”
“Getting there. I’ve been following some crypto games, NFTs. I think there’s a huge future in it.”
The guy’s eyebrows rose. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
Mike paused. He had to be careful here — he couldn’t explain that he’d literally seen the future. But he could gesture at it.
“Digital ownership,” he said. “Right now, if you play a game, you don’t own anything. Your skins, your items, your characters — they live on someone else’s server. NFTs change that. And once people realize they can actually own and trade their in-game assets, with real economic value, the entire gaming industry flips. You’re not just playing anymore — you’re investing. And the metaverse layer on top of that — virtual land, virtual identity, interoperability between worlds — that’s where it goes.”
Mike knew, of course, that the metaverse and NFT boom had collapsed spectacularly in the bear market that started in 2022. None of what he’d just said would age well in the long run. But that didn’t matter. In September 2019, this kind of optimistic take would be viewed as sentient and prophetic — the words of someone who could see around corners.
The guy stared at him. Then he smiled — a real smile, with a sparkle in his eyes.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Sixteen, and you’re talking about interoperability and digital asset ownership at a blockchain meetup in SoMa.” He shook his head. “Man. I love this city.”
He took a sip of his beer. “Listen — I’m building a new blockchain. Layer 1. Very fast, very cheap. We’re looking for smart developers who can build applications on it. Games, DeFi, whatever. We’re early, but we’re moving fast. If you’re interested in building, I’d love to stay in touch.”
He extended his hand.
Mike shook it. “I’m Mike.”
“I’m Anatoly.”
The name hit Mike like a third collision. He didn’t flinch — he’d learned, in the last forty-eight hours, to absorb shocks without showing them. But inside, every neuron fired at once.
Anatoly Yakovenko. Solana. The blockchain that would go from nothing to a $70 billion market cap. The chain that would host the most explosive DeFi and NFT ecosystems in crypto history. The chain that would crash, resurrect, crash again, and come back stronger every time.
And its founder had just handed Mike a beer and asked him to build on it.
“Nice to meet you, Anatoly,” Mike said. “I’d love to stay in touch.”
End of Episode 5