Constantinople, Ottoman Empire — February, 1898 Ayaan was eight now, and his days had settled into a rhythm.
Mornings brought lessons.
Afternoons brought work at the shop.
Evenings brought questions he wrote down to answer later.
Somewhere in between, there was almost always time for Zeynep.
Eight years had passed since he’d died in 2025, and eight years since he’d opened his eyes again as a helpless infant more than a century earlier.
His old memories were still sharp — university, his coursework, the shape of the world he’d left behind — but they no longer felt like the whole of who he was.
Fatma wasn’t simply the woman who’d raised this body.
She was his mother.
Mehmet wasn’t simply a merchant he studied for lessons.
He was his father.
And Zeynep had been beside him for three years now, ever since they were five, long enough that he could no longer picture the neighborhood without her in it.
That morning, Mehmet set a small ledger in front of him.
“Read this.” Ayaan picked it up.
Names, amounts, dates, goods, payments — page after page of ordinary transactions, the kind of thing he could have read in his sleep back when reading columns of numbers had been half his university education.
He read carefully anyway, because his father had taught him that carefully was the only way worth doing it, and after a few minutes he looked up.
“There’s a mistake.” Mehmet raised an eyebrow.
“Where?” Ayaan pointed.
“This customer paid twice.” His father took the ledger back and checked the page, then the one before it, then the one before that.
His expression changed.
“You’re right.” Ayaan smiled.
“How did you notice?” Mehmet asked.
“The numbers didn’t match.” His father nodded slowly and closed the ledger.
“Never trust a number just because it’s written down.” Ayaan’s smile faded a little.
“Why not?” “People make mistakes.
Sometimes because they’re tired.
Sometimes because they’re careless.” “And sometimes?” Mehmet looked at him for a moment.
“Sometimes they lie.” Ayaan went quiet at that.
He’d studied accounting once, in another life, but hearing it put so plainly made it land differently.
Records weren’t just numbers.
They were stories somebody had chosen to write down, and the person reading them had to decide whether to believe the story or check it for themselves.
After breakfast, he followed his father to the shop.
He wasn’t only allowed to watch anymore.
At eight, he could actually help — sorting small packages, counting inventory, recording sales, sometimes even talking to customers while his father stayed close by.
That afternoon, a man came in looking for paper.
Ayaan brought him two kinds.
“Which is cheaper?” the man asked.
“That one.” “And which is better?” “This one.” The man looked at him, a little surprised.
“How do you know?” Ayaan hesitated — he couldn’t very well explain years of quietly studying paper stock — so he kept it simple.
“I’ve used it.” The man nodded and bought the better one.
After he left, Mehmet glanced over.
“That was good.” “Why?” “You didn’t push him toward the expensive one.” “He asked which was better.
I told him the truth.” “People come back,” his father said, “when you tell them the truth.” Later that same afternoon, a different customer stormed in holding a package.
“This isn’t what I ordered.” Mehmet checked the receipt.
The customer was right — the wrong item had gone out.
Ayaan braced for an argument.
Instead, his father apologized and quietly replaced the item, no charge.
After the man left, Ayaan stared at him.
“You didn’t make him pay for it.” “Why would I?
It was our mistake.” Ayaan turned that over for a while.
A shop didn’t earn trust by avoiding every loss.
Sometimes it earned trust by owning its mistakes, even when that cost money in the moment.
That evening he wrote it into his notebook: A business protects its name even when that costs something.
He underlined it once.
Spring came, and his education widened past the shop.
His mother taught him how a household actually ran, coin by coin, meal by meal, nothing wasted that could still be used.
His father kept teaching him the shop, a little more responsibility handed over every month.
And on his own, Ayaan started reading more seriously about the empire itself — not the broad outline he remembered from another life, but the real texture of it: its provinces, its army, its trade routes, its debts, its schools, its uneasy relationship with the powers of Europe.
The more he read, the less it looked like the simple story of decline he half-remembered from a history class a century away.
There were new schools opening.
Railway plans on paper.
Attempts at reform running straight into old habits that refused to move.
The empire wasn’t simply falling apart.
It was struggling, in a dozen directions at once, to become something else.
If he wanted to help hold it together, he understood, he couldn’t just drop in ideas from the century he remembered.
He’d have to fit them to this one.
That would take decades — but decades, at least, he had.
One afternoon Zeynep found him surrounded by books.
“Why so many?” “I’m studying.” “Again?” “Yes.” “You always study.” “You always complain.” “I don’t complain.” “You’re complaining right now.” She sat down next to him anyway.
“What are you even reading?” “History.” “Is it interesting?” “Sometimes.” “Tell me something interesting, then.” He thought for a second.
“There might be new railways someday.
Big ones.” “Why does that matter?” “They’d make it faster to move things.
Faster to travel.” She considered that, unimpressed.
“So you want to build a railway?” “Maybe.
Someday.” “That’s very big.” “It is.” She shrugged.
“Then start smaller.” He looked at her.
“Like what?” She pointed at the notebook sitting beside him.
“That.” He laughed.
“You sound like my father.” “Good.” The comment stayed with him longer than she probably meant it to.
Start smaller.
He’d been thinking too far ahead — electricity, automobiles, telephones, all the things he knew were coming eventually — without stopping to notice that none of it could exist yet.
There were no factories for it.
No trained workers.
No supply chains.
If he wanted to change anything real, he’d need to build the plain, unglamorous foundations first: education, honest accounting, reliable trade.
None of it was exciting.
All of it mattered.
He still made time for her, though, even with all the reading.
He’d learned that lesson in his first life too late to use it — people who chased success for its own sake sometimes looked up decades later and realized they’d forgotten to actually live.
He didn’t want to make that mistake twice.
Their friendship kept growing in its own ordinary way: arguing over whose handwriting was neater, who ran faster, who’d started the last argument, always underneath a kind of trust that didn’t need explaining.
She knew he went quiet when he was thinking something through.
He knew she got stubborn the moment she believed she was right.
One afternoon she handed him a small cloth pouch.
“Open it.” He did.
A handful of coins sat inside.
“Why are you giving me money?” “I’m not.
I want to save it.
I just don’t know where to keep it.” “You trust me with it?” “Yes.” He found a small box and set it aside for her.
“This one’s yours.
Don’t spend it.” “I won’t.” “And if you forget?” “I’ll remind you.” She smiled at that, satisfied, and Ayaan almost laughed at the strangeness of it — two eight-year-olds quietly starting to save money while the century turned around them without asking permission.
He didn’t treat it as a joke for long, though.
Saving was where everything else eventually started.
By autumn, the stationery idea had stopped being just an idea.
He’d watched the market long enough to see the gaps in it clearly: paper quality that changed from batch to batch, suppliers who couldn’t be relied on, prices that swung for no reason anyone could explain.
Students needed supplies.
Small offices needed paper and ink.
Merchants needed both, constantly, and complained just as constantly about how hard good stock was to find.
The demand was already there.
The only real question was whether he could actually build something around it.
He brought it to his father.
“I want to sell writing materials.
Something of my own.” Mehmet studied him.
“How much have you saved?” Ayaan showed him.
It wasn’t much.
“And you think that’s enough to start a business?” “Not a big one.
A small one.” “What would you sell?” “Paper.
Ink.
Pens.
Notebooks.” “Where?” “Near the school.” “Who supplies you?” “I don’t know yet.” “Where do you keep the goods?” Ayaan paused.
“I haven’t figured that out.” His father almost smiled.
“Then you’re not ready yet.” Ayaan’s face fell for a second, until Mehmet added, “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it.
It means you have more questions to answer.” “Then I’ll answer them.” “Good.” That night he filled several pages with his first real plan — not a polished one, but his own.
Products: paper, ink, pens, notebooks.
Customers: students, teachers, small merchants, clerks.
Costs: goods, transport, storage.
Risks: unsold stock, damaged goods, prices shifting under him, suppliers letting him down.
He almost stopped there, then added one more line: competition.
If other shops already sold the same things, he’d need a real reason for anyone to choose him instead — price, quality, reliability, or simply being closer to the school gate.
He stared at the page for a long moment before closing the notebook.
It wasn’t a business yet.
It was a list written by an eight-year-old with a box of borrowed coins.
But it was starting to look like one, and that was further than he’d been a year ago.
By the end of the year he’d learned more than he’d expected to — that profit wasn’t the same thing as revenue, that cash mattered as much as goods on a shelf, that a good reputation could take years to build and an afternoon to lose, and that patience, more often than not, wasn’t weakness.
It was strategy.
On the last evening of 1898, he sat outside with Zeynep, the air sharp and cold, her coat pulled tight around her shoulders.
“You’re thinking again,” she said.
“I am.” “Business?” “Business.” She sighed.
“You always think about business.” “What are you thinking about?” She looked up at the sky.
“Nothing, really.” “That’s impossible.” “What are you thinking about, then?” He considered how much to say.
Not everything — never everything — but something.
“I want to build something that actually matters.” “Like what?” “I don’t know yet.” “Then how do you know it matters?” He looked out toward the rooftops.
“Because I want things here to be better.” She was quiet for a moment, then nodded.
“I think you actually can.” “You really think so?” “Yes.” “Why?” She shrugged, like it was obvious.
“Because you never stop.” He smiled at that and let it sit, because it was probably the best answer she could have given him.
The year ended quietly, the way most years did.
No one in the empire knew his name.
To his parents he was simply their son.
To Zeynep he was simply her closest friend.
But inside his own head, something had shifted.
He wasn’t only preparing for the future anymore.
He’d started, in the smallest possible way, to build it.
That night he opened his notebook to a clean page and wrote a new heading: 1898 — Age 8.
Underneath it, one line: Next year, I start preparing seriously for my first business.