Koreatown, Los Angeles.
December 25, 1988.
The holiday lights strung across Sixth Street didn’t hide the grime on the pavement.
Aaron stood in the mouth of a damp alley.
He held a paper bag of thrift-store clearance clothes.
Three guys boxed him in.
They looked like they hadn’t slept since Tuesday.
“Hand over the cash, kid.” The guy in the center was twitchy.
He grinned with dead eyes.
Aaron let out a slow breath.
He set the paper bag on the asphalt.
“Look at me.” Aaron kept his hands visible.
“I’m shopping at a secondhand store on Christmas.
I have thirty-six dollars to my name.
Take it.
We don’t need to make this a felony.”
Aaron turned out his pockets.
He offered up the crumpled bills.
He watched their hands.
The twitchy guy’s right hand hovered near his waistband, but the jacket hung flat.
No weight.
No iron.
It was a bluff.
“Told you the kid would fold,” the leader laughed.
He snatched the cash.
He shoved Aaron hard against the brick wall.
“Let’s see what else he’s holding.”
The guy leaned in.
He dropped his guard completely to pat down the coat.
Aaron didn’t take a fighting stance.
He just shifted his weight, grabbed the man by the back of the neck, and drove his forehead squarely into the bridge of the guy’s nose.
Bone crunched.
The man dropped like a stone.
He shrieked and clutched his face.
The other two froze.
Aaron didn’t wait.
He stepped over the bleeding man, drove a heavy boot into the second guy’s kneecap, and slammed his elbow into the third one’s throat.
The guy stumbled backward and collapsed.
It was over in ten seconds.
No finesse, no posturing.
Just the hollow crack of bone and three junkies bleeding on the asphalt.
Aaron crouched.
He pried his thirty-six dollars out of the leader’s clenched fist and picked up his paper bag.
“You’re shaking people down for pocket change on a holiday.” Aaron adjusted his collar.
“Have some self-respect.”
He left the alley.
He didn’t look back.
His place was a cramped, third-floor apartment.
It smelled of cheap bleach and rusty pipes.
He walked straight to the bathroom, flipped on the harsh overhead light, and stared into the mirror.
It had been a week, but the reflection still felt like putting on someone else’s suit.
Deep-set eyes, dark wavy hair, a sharp jawline.
Six-foot-one.
Nineteen years old.
In his past life, he wasn’t some polished studio executive.
He was a sixty-year-old shark.
He made his money where the law stopped looking.
He ran underground casinos, bankrolled unsanctioned prize fights, and floated high-interest loans to desperate men.
To wash the cash, he churned out third-rate action schlock.
He owned the bottom-feeding distribution pipelines that shoved VHS tapes into every rundown video store in the country.
It was an ugly, highly lucrative empire.
When his partners tried to trade him to the feds to dodge a racketeering indictment, they miscalculated.
They didn’t know how far he would go to avoid a cage.
He sat in the back of an armored town car with the men about to testify against him.
He hadn’t begged.
He just reached over the seat, grabbed the steering wheel, and put them all through a concrete barrier at eighty miles an hour.
He expected blackness.
Instead, he woke up in a pool of vomit on a linoleum floor in Koreatown.
The original owner of this body—Aaron Anderson—had lived a short, miserable tragedy.
His father was a casualty of the ’87 market crash.
The man jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge just as Aaron finished high school.
Broke and alone, the kid took a mailroom job at a Hollywood agency.
Last week, the kid celebrated his impending promotion to a junior desk.
He drank a bottle of cheap tequila, popped a handful of painkillers, and quietly stopped breathing.
When the heart started beating again, a different man was behind the wheel.
Aaron leaned over the sink.
He splashed cold water on his face.
He grabbed a frayed towel and dried off.
He stared down at his unblemished forearms.
The body was nineteen, wiry and unmarked, but the reflexes belonged to a man who spent four decades navigating loan sharks and bare-knuckle promoters.
Taking apart three junkies in an alley wasn’t anything special.
It was just muscle memory.
He walked over to the peeling wall and tapped the calendar.
December 1988.
He stared at the grid of days.
He knew every box office hit, every massive flop, and every paradigm-shifting trend of the next thirty years.
It wasn’t magic.
It was the greatest insider-trading advantage in the history of human commerce.
He didn’t just want a seat at the table.
He was going to buy the casino.
The next morning, Aaron put on the thrift-store Italian suit.
He had spent ten of his thirty-six dollars getting it tailored.
The fabric was slightly faded, but the break on the pants was perfect, and the shoulders sat exactly right.
In this town, silhouette was everything.
He splurged on a cab.
“Beverly Hills.” Aaron slid into the vinyl backseat.
“Creative Artists Agency.”
The driver glanced in the rearview mirror.
He took in the suit and the slicked-back hair.
“Looking sharp, kid.
CAA snatch you up straight out of school?”
“Something like that,” Aaron said.
“Place is a madhouse,” the driver muttered.
He merged onto Wilshire.
“Economy is bleeding out, but you movie guys just keep printing money.
Everyone wants a piece.”
“People always pay for a distraction.” Aaron looked out the window.
He watched the palm trees blur past the glass.
His mind mapped out the board ahead.
Creative Artists Agency.
Michael Ovitz’s empire.
The place that invented the packaging fee and held a gun to the head of every major studio in town.
The cab pulled up to the glass-and-steel monolith.
Aaron paid the fare, stepped onto the curb, and buttoned his jacket.
He looked up at the towering structure.
It was a very crowded, very expensive aquarium.
It was time to eat.
P.S.
Hey everyone, if you’re wondering what Aaron looks like, I’ve posted a character reference picture down in the comments!
This story originates from a translation work, but I’ve rewritten it from the ground up.
I’ve overhauled the standard “edgy” MC attitude, changed the dialogue, fixed the chinese idioms to something appropiate and relevent also corrected messy numbers, and removed all the chinese problematic, racist, and nationalistic filler china is great this nd that we should bow nd all.
Think of this as a “remaster” rather than a 1:1 translation, to give you the best reading experience possible.
Enjoy!
— Lucent out 😉