Nick Burkhardt had been reborn into this world.
In his previous life, he served in the United States Army.
He had never belonged to an elite special operations unit or carried out missions hidden behind layers of government secrecy.
He was an experienced squad leader assigned to a field kitchen, but that did not mean he had spent his military career safely behind a stove.
His unit had delivered hot meals and supplies to forward positions under dangerous conditions.
On more than one occasion, Nick had exchanged his cooking utensils for a rifle, helped defend a supply convoy, and returned with a couple of enemy prisoners along with the empty food containers.
After leaving the Army, his life became almost painfully ordinary.
He worked a steady civilian job, clocked in every morning, and went home at the same hour each evening.
Several enthusiastic coworkers repeatedly tried to arrange dates for him, but he politely declined every attempt.
Most of his free time went toward video games, anime, movies, and television shows.
He had accumulated more fictional knowledge than practical dating experience, though that had never bothered him.
Eventually, the quiet routine began to feel empty.
Nick had started wondering whether he should finally settle down, get married, and build a family of his own.
Before he could make that decision, a wildfire swept through a mountain community.
Nick joined the emergency rescue effort without hesitation.
While helping evacuate people trapped near the advancing flames, the ground beneath him collapsed.
He lost his footing and fell from a cliff.
When he opened his eyes again, he was no longer an adult veteran.
His soul had entered the body of a six-year-old white boy named Nick Burkhardt, who had fallen into a coma after a serious car accident.
Twenty years passed faster than he could have imagined.
His former life had not disappeared, but the memories had faded around the edges.
They felt less like personal experiences and more like scenes from an old movie he had watched long ago.
On certain nights, forgotten faces and distant voices resurfaced without warning, leaving him awake until morning.
For those twenty years, Portland, Oregon, had been his home.
This world was remarkably similar to the one he remembered.
Certain historical details were different, and the newly released Apple phone displayed a complete apple instead of the familiar bitten logo.
Beyond those small inconsistencies, Harvard remained in Cambridge, Stanford still stood in California, and most major events had unfolded exactly as he recalled.
Nick’s parents had supposedly died in the same car accident that left their six-year-old son comatose.
They left behind a modest insurance settlement and a two-story house in a quiet middle-class Portland neighborhood.
After he awakened, his maternal aunt took responsibility for him.
Marie Kessler was his mother’s younger sister.
To the outside world, she was simply Aunt Marie, the woman who gave up part of her own life to raise an orphaned nephew.
Nick knew there was more to her than she allowed anyone to see.
Even after living with her for years, however, he had never discovered the full truth.
He completed high school with respectable grades and enrolled at Portland State University.
He majored in criminology, added psychology as a minor, and graduated without causing Aunt Marie too many sleepless nights.
After college, he joined the Portland Police Bureau.
Hank Griffin had been one of Nick’s closest friends since high school.
He grew up in a stable home with loving parents, though his academic record had never reflected the support he received.
Hank barely made it through graduation before enrolling in community college.
He did not remain there long.
Lectures and textbooks had never suited him, so he applied to the Portland Police Bureau and became a patrol officer.
To nearly everyone’s surprise, Hank proved to be an excellent cop.
He remained calm under pressure, understood people better than his grades suggested, and possessed strong instincts on the street.
Nick entered the department more than two years later, and the two eventually became partners.
After working together for a little over a year, Hank earned a detective assignment first.
Neither man had reached thirty, yet Hank already had nearly six years of police experience.
Nick had spent more than three years in uniform and had recently passed the department’s detective selection process.
Today would be his final shift as a patrol officer.
Tomorrow morning, he was scheduled to report to the detective division on the second floor.
Hank had volunteered to pick him up, but friendship was not the only reason he had driven across town so early.
A promotion party was being held at a police bar that evening, and Hank was determined to make sure Nick attended.
For the past three years, Nick had appeared in the Portland Police Bureau’s charity calendar.
His photograph always occupied the July page, earning him the nickname Mr.
July.
His popularity had little to do with favoritism.
Nick was a capable officer with an impressive service record, but his appearance was what sold the calendars.
His height, face, and athletic build even surpassed the unofficial standards set by the firefighters at the Portland Fire Bureau.
That was an accomplishment many Portland cops considered more important than any departmental award.
Once word spread that Mr.
July would attend the party, women from several police divisions and neighboring public-safety departments were certain to appear.
Most of them would surround Nick.
Hank understood that perfectly, but he also knew one man could not entertain an entire room.
Several attractive women would inevitably fail to reach the center of Nick’s admirers.
That was where Hank intended to make his move.
Nick had seen through the plan the moment his friend invited him.
Still, Hank had been unusually generous and presented him with a new Safariland quick-draw duty holster fitted for a Glock 22.
Accepting the invitation seemed like a fair exchange.
After breakfast, the two left the house and climbed into Hank’s aging Mercury Grand Marquis.
Portland was Oregon’s largest city.
Morning traffic was not as vicious as Los Angeles or New York, but the crowded streets could still test anyone’s patience.
Nick’s neighborhood was close enough to the police headquarters that they were in no danger of arriving late.
Even so, crawling through traffic one car length at a time quickly became irritating.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Nick stared through the window while a small golden card spun between his fingers.
It moved so quickly that it left faint afterimages in the air.
One moment it rested against his knuckles, and the next it vanished before reappearing between two fingers.
Hank noticed the display and chuckled.
“Your little magic act keeps getting better.” The sight brought back an old memory.
During high school, Nick had used the same routine to charm the school’s cheerleading captain.
By the end of the evening, she had willingly gone home with him.
Hank still believed the card was a magician’s prop.
He had no idea that it was Nick’s greatest secret.
The small object was made from an unknown golden material and covered in intricate patterns that seemed to shift whenever light touched them.
Nick called it the Magic Movie Ticket.
Its disappearance was not sleight of hand.
The card could merge directly into his body and reappear whenever he summoned it.
It could not be broken, burned, stolen, or permanently lost.
Once the ticket accumulated enough energy, it began emitting a gentle golden glow.
Nick could then tear it in half and enter the world of a randomly selected movie.
Those worlds were not illusions.
Every location, object, creature, and character inside them was real.
Nick was the outsider inserted into an existing story.
If he remained alive until the movie’s main plot reached its conclusion, the ticket provided a random basic reward.
Completing the additional objective assigned to him increased both the quality and value of what he received.
Once he left that reality, the divided halves restored themselves.
The complete card returned to his body, where it remained until he chose to summon it again.
The ability sounded incredible, but it carried one severe limitation.
Its charging speed was agonizingly slow.
During the twenty years since Nick’s rebirth, the Magic Movie Ticket had accumulated enough energy only twice.
Despite countless experiments, he had never discovered a reliable way to accelerate the process.
The first activation occurred ten years after his arrival in this world, when his current body was sixteen.
After tearing the glowing card, Nick appeared in the year 2122 aboard the commercial towing vessel USCSS Nostromo.
The ticket had created a believable identity for him as an additional crew member.
None of the seven original personnel—including Captain Dallas, Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Ellen Ripley—questioned his presence.
The Nostromo even contained an eighth hypersleep pod, as though Nick had always belonged there.
His assigned objective appeared soon after he awakened.
He had to eliminate the hostile alien organism aboard the ship and save as many crew members as possible.
At first, sixteen-year-old Nick had been overflowing with confidence.
He had spent years consuming science-fiction movies, survival-horror games, and stories about ordinary people being dropped into deadly fictional worlds.
With complete knowledge of the plot, he imagined himself becoming the clever outsider who prevented every tragedy before it occurred.
He had also recently rewatched Alien after Alien Resurrection renewed his interest in the franchise.
The important scenes were still fresh in his mind.
In theory, he had every possible advantage.
Reality crushed that confidence almost immediately.
The Nostromo received the mysterious transmission from LV-426 and landed on the moon’s hostile surface.
Before the crew even reached the derelict spacecraft and encountered the facehugger, Nick made a mistake while operating his unfamiliar equipment.
His spacesuit was damaged during the surface expedition.
The thin atmosphere leaked inside as the temperature around him dropped.
Nick struggled to repair the breach, but his hands became numb before he could seal it.
He died from hypoxia and hypothermia without ever seeing the Xenomorph.
His first journey into a movie world ended before the real horror even began.
A film he had already entered could never be selected again.
His opportunity to explore the Nostromo, save the crew, and change the ending of Alien was gone forever.
Since Nick had failed before the main story properly began, he did not receive a normal completion reward.
The ticket instead granted him a consolation ability.
Passive Skill: Suspended Animation Recovery The ability allowed Nick to enter a deathlike state whenever he suffered from an injury or illness.
While suspended between life and death, his body would gradually restore itself until every wound and physical abnormality had completely healed.
It was not resurrection.
If he died instantly or his body was destroyed, the skill could do nothing.
Given enough time to activate, however, it could return him to perfect physical condition.
The first result appeared the morning after his return from the Nostromo.
Sixteen-year-old Nick went to sleep with his face covered in stubborn teenage acne.
When he woke, every blemish had vanished overnight, leaving his skin completely clear.
Aunt Marie stared at him for nearly a full minute.
Her reaction made Nick wonder whether his miraculous recovery had frightened her—or whether she already understood far more about the supernatural than she was willing to admit.
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