[TBBT] Ch: 1 [The Future Is Mine] (Patreon)

Karl thought his first life had already taught him everything he needed to know about money, regret, and wasted potential. At twenty-three, he died after years of choosing survival over the scientific career he once dreamed of. Then he opened his eyes again in 1986 as Karl Peterson, the newborn son of a wealthy family.

This time, Karl has every advantage he once lacked. He has money, a powerful Login System, perfect memory, decades of future knowledge, and a mind that quickly turns him into one of the greatest young scientific talents in the world. By twenty-one, he already holds two PhDs and has the attention of NASA, universities, and government research programs.

Then he discovers something even stranger. Sheldon Cooper exists, which means his new life takes place inside the world of The Big Bang Theory.

Karl has no intention of wasting his second chance working under someone else's rules. With knowledge of future science, technology, stocks, and hit music that hasn't been written yet, he plans to build his own fortune, fund his own research, create his own companies, and eventually push humanity toward the stars.

The future is already in his head. Now he just has to build it.

Yeah, only if things were that easy...

[5.2k words] [Don't expect daily updates😬😬]

If somebody had asked me when I was eighteen where I expected to be five years later, dying alone after getting hit by a car definitely wouldn't have made the list. 

Then again, neither would most of my life.

I was twenty-three years old when I died, and there wasn't much waiting for me back home. I had no wife, no girlfriend, no house, and no savings worth talking about. My bank account had enough money for another month of rent, maybe two if I cut on food expenses and switched to instant noodles. Somehow, despite spending most of my childhood being called gifted, I'd managed to turn my adult life into one long lesson about how intelligence didn't mean shit when you were poor.

Money had always been a problem in my family. We had food on the table most days and a roof over our heads, so I knew plenty of people had things worse than we did. Knowing that didn't make watching my parents worry over bills any easier. My father worked whenever he could find work, my mother did the same, and some months were fine enough that everyone could relax. Other months ended with the two of them sitting around the kitchen table deciding which bill could survive being paid late.

I learned pretty early that wanting something and being able to afford it were completely different things.

Thankfully, I was a topper at school. Yeah, I'm bragging about my IQ. Math made sense almost as soon as someone explained it. Physics was fun, and chemistry became even better once I got past memorizing names and started understanding what was actually happening. I could usually read something once or twice, remember most of it, and get through a test without much trouble.

Teachers loved having a student like that, while my parents saw something even bigger. To them, my brain was basically our family's winning lottery ticket. I was supposed to get good grades, earn a scholarship, go to university, become some important scientist, make good money, and eventually help everyone else.

That was the plan, and for a while it looked like everything might actually work.

I got the scholarship.

It covered tuition, which sounded amazing until I discovered that tuition wasn't the only thing a university student needed money for. There was food, rent, books, transportation, and apparently existing in general came with a monthly subscription fee nobody had warned me about.

The scholarship helped enough that quitting immediately wasn't necessary, although there was still a gap between what I had and what I needed. I found a job to cover it, then found another job when the first one didn't pay enough. Before long, I was working so many hours that the jobs meant to keep me in university were starting to destroy the exact thing I was supposed to be protecting.

My grades were slipping.

That was when music entered the picture.

I'd been playing since childhood, mostly guitar, although I could handle a keyboard and a few other instruments well enough. I wasn't some once-in-a-generation musical genius who could pick up anything and become a master overnight. I was simply good enough that people were willing to pay me, and at that point in my life, being good enough to get paid sounded perfect.

At first, music solved almost everything. I could play a few nights each week, make more money than I would've earned stacking shelves, and still have enough time left for university. Bars, restaurants, and private parties, like I took whatever work I could get. Sometimes I played alone, while other nights I joined musicians who needed another guitarist. I even played songs I hated because drunk people loved familiar music, and drunk people were much more generous with tips after hearing something they knew.

I didn't care what I played as long as the money reached my account. Also, thanks to that, I was able to help out my parents every now and then and take a little load off their shoulders. And I was kinda happy to know that I was able to chip in something.

The problem began when music became more reliable than science. I could spend months helping with research and walk away with experience, references, and maybe my name buried somewhere near the bottom of a paper. Three decent nights at the right venue could actually pay my rent and help out my parents.

That choice became easier every year, especially as university demanded more of my time. Research didn't care that I needed money, laboratories didn't care that I had bills, and professors telling me how much potential I had didn't help when my landlord wanted actual currency.

Eventually, something had to give, and science ended up being the thing I left behind.

I told myself the decision was temporary, although that lie somehow lasted almost three years.

Music became my actual career after that, if I was being generous enough to call it one. I played wherever people would hire me, and my status slightly increased from random bars and birthday parties to big weddings, private events, studio sessions, local shows, and the occasional job that sounded impressive until somebody asked how much I'd actually been paid.

I wasn't famous, and I definitely wasn't rich. I was one of those musicians people watched in the background, enjoyed for an hour, and forgot five minutes after leaving the building.

There were still good nights; then there was that TV show where they hired me as a background guitarist, which paid nicely, and well, there were times I genuinely loved what I was doing. Music itself had never been the problem, which was probably what made the whole situation worse. I liked performing, and there were moments onstage when everything felt exactly where it belonged.

I simply hated knowing why I'd chosen that life.

Whenever I read about some scientific breakthrough, part of me wondered where I might've ended up if money hadn't forced me into making different choices. Maybe I would've gone nowhere special or in space. Maybe I would've failed anyway, or spent ten years inside some laboratory earning less than somebody selling advertisements online.

I still would've liked the chance to find out for myself.

Instead, I spent my twenty-third year doing the same thing I'd been doing for years. I worked, paid bills, tried to save whatever remained, then watched those savings disappear whenever life decided something needed to break.

Then 2026 decided I didn't need to worry about my future anymore.

My death wasn't heroic or meaningful. There was no dramatic final act, no child saved from a burning building, and definitely there weren't any beautiful women weeping over me as I uttered some profound last words.

I was walking home after work.

That was literally how it happened.

The gig had ended late, and I was tired enough that I thought of paying for a ride. Then I checked the app and saw that night cabs take extra charges. Well, what the heck, I decided walking would be healthier anyway, and started toward my apartment. 

That decision probably saved me twelve dollars, which was some fantastic financial planning considering what happened afterward.

I remember reaching the street and starting across. Then I got a call from a TV channel, which I obviously took. They wanted me to fill in for a pianist. I was really happy because they wanted me by tomorrow noon and were ready to pay double what I charge since they're running on schedule. Then, headlights suddenly filled my vision, followed almost immediately by the sound of a horn.

Then came the pain.

People always talked about how time slowed down when something terrible happened. My experience didn't work that way. Everything moved incredibly fast, and one second I was walking across the street while thinking about getting home, while the next left me lying on the road staring at the night sky as my entire body screamed at me.

Someone nearby was calling emergency services, and a woman kept telling me that I shouldn't move. I wanted to tell her I wasn't exactly planning to get up and jog home, although breathing had suddenly become difficult enough that comedy wasn't especially high on my priority list.

Something was seriously wrong. There was blood somewhere beneath me, probably in several places, while my hands felt strangely cold and my chest hurt every time I tried to breathe.

The strangest part was how clear my thoughts became once I understood what was happening.

Twenty-three years had been all I was getting.

Twenty-three fucking years.

I thought about my parents and everything they'd sacrificed. I wanted to be successful and support them, but... Well, they'll get whatever money I've saved so far. It wasn't much, but it'll help them for a while. Then I thought about school, university, and all those teachers who'd told me I could become anything as long as I worked hard enough. Eventually my thoughts reached science and the life I'd abandoned because I couldn't afford to keep chasing it.

Then, because apparently my brain wanted to make my final minutes especially depressing, I started thinking about money.

Money had controlled almost every major decision I'd ever made. It decided where I lived, what I ate, what I studied, what I stopped studying, which jobs I accepted, how much sleep I got, whether I went to the doctor, and whether paying for a ride home felt responsible.

That last choice became almost funny while I lay broken on the road. Heck, I don't even know the car model that smashed me. I was hoping it was a truck-kun. Because then, there's a possibility that I'll get reincarnated into another world. 

My vision darkened around the edges, and the sounds around me became harder to understand. Somewhere between the pain and the cold creeping through my body, one final thought settled into my head with absolute certainty.

If I ever got another chance at life, I wouldn't spend that one merely surviving. I'd make enough money that money would never control my choices again. Well, as long as I don't end up in Berserk or Elfen Lied or Corpse Party: Tortured Souls or any of those shitty anime worlds.

Then everything disappeared around me.

I'd always expected death to mean nothingness, which would've made a certain amount of sense.

Instead, I woke up crying.

Technically, I tried to scream and discovered I could only produce the impressive lung capacity of a very angry newborn baby. Understanding that particular problem took several confusing seconds.

Bright lights filled my vision while enormous people moved around me. Someone was holding my body, although even calling it my body felt strange because nothing worked properly. My arms barely followed instructions, my head felt ridiculously heavy, and every attempt at speaking produced another furious baby noise.

My first clear thought in my second life was probably the most intelligent thing I'd ever come up with.

"What the actual fuck was happening?"

A woman laughed somewhere nearby while I continued trying to understand why the entire world had suddenly become enormous.

"He's got strong lungs."

I understood her perfectly, which was reassuring for approximately half a second.

Then somebody carried me toward another person, and my newborn eyes eventually focused on a woman lying exhausted in a hospital bed. She was crying, although her entire expression changed the moment she saw me.

"Oh, look at him."

I tried looking around for whoever she was talking about before the obvious answer finally reached me. Everyone in the room was staring at the same person.

Me.

A man stood beside the bed wearing clothes that looked expensive even through whatever limited vision newborn babies were supposed to have. One hand rested near the woman's shoulder, and somehow he looked more nervous than the person who had actually survived childbirth.

"He's perfect."

The woman smiled as someone carefully placed me against her chest. She looked down at me with an expression so warm that my confusion briefly lost the fight for my attention.

"Hello, Karl."

That immediately got my attention.

Karl.

My name was still Karl.

That coincidence would've already been strange enough, but then the man leaned closer and made the situation even more confusing.

"Karl Peterson, welcome to the family."

Peterson.

My old last name hadn't been Peterson.

That was when my brain finally stopped stumbling around the obvious answer and accepted what had happened. I'd died on that road. I remembered the car, the pain, my final thoughts, and twenty-three years of life before everything went dark.

Now I was inside the body of a newborn baby named Karl Peterson.

Reincarnation was apparently real. Thank you, truck-kun.

I would've laughed if my mouth had been capable of doing anything besides drooling and screaming. During my first life, I'd played in bars where drunk people argued about religion, ghosts, aliens, simulation theory, and whether consciousness survived death.

Turns out reincarnation had been the winning answer.

That would've been much more useful information before getting hit by a car.

My new mother held me carefully while my new father stared down at me with an expression that made one thing immediately clear. These people wanted me here.

That realization felt strange in a way I couldn't properly explain. My old parents had loved me, so affection itself wasn't unfamiliar. Remembering twenty-three years of life while being held like something tiny and fragile still did something uncomfortable to my brain.

I didn't know these people.

They believed I was their newborn son, and technically they were completely right. I simply happened to be their newborn son with twenty-three years of memories already installed. And that made things really creepy on some level.

Thinking too deeply about the moral side of reincarnation seemed like an excellent way to drive myself insane before learning how to crawl, so I made a decision very quickly.

I was here, and this was my life now.

Then something appeared directly in front of my eyes.

A small blue screen floated in the air, completely unaffected by the people moving around the hospital room. For one wonderful second, I wondered whether newborn vision simply came with hallucinations.

Then words appeared across the screen.

[Login System Activated]

I stopped crying so suddenly that my mother immediately looked concerned.

"Is something wrong?"

A nurse came over to check me while I stared past her at the floating screen that nobody else seemed capable of seeing.

[Host identified: Karl Peterson]

[Daily Login available]

[Would you like to log in?]

Speaking obviously wasn't an option, although apparently the system didn't care about something as inconvenient as language. The moment I thought yes, the words changed.

[Login Successful]

[Reward: Perfect Memory]

I stared at the message for several seconds before something inside my head seemed to open.

My first life came rushing back with terrifying clarity.

Every song I'd played, every textbook I'd studied, every lecture I'd attended, and every stupid conversation I'd forgotten years earlier suddenly became clear again. Equations returned alongside lyrics and melodies. Scientific papers resurfaced with details I hadn't remembered reading. Faces, movies, television shows, news stories, companies, technology, famous people, and events from years across my first life arranged themselves inside my memory like they'd happened yesterday.

For the first time since waking up, I understood exactly how ridiculous my situation might become.

I'd somehow been sent into the past.

I didn't know the exact year yet, although everything around me looked older. The medical equipment, clothing, furniture, and even the television mounted in the corner seemed like they belonged in another time. And it seemed my area of vision expanded a bit.

Whatever year this was, I remembered what came afterward.

All of it.

My new father leaned closer while I was still trying to process the possibilities racing through my head.

"You've got your mother's eyes."

My mother looked at him with a tired smile while adjusting the blanket around me.

"He has your serious face."

I desperately wanted to explain that my serious expression came from realizing I might possess detailed knowledge of several decades that hadn't happened yet.

Instead, I sneezed directly against my mother's chest.

My father immediately started laughing.

"Definitely yours."

My mother gave him an annoyed look before pulling me closer against her.

"Ignore your father, Karl."

That was how I met my new family.

Over the next few months, I learned enough to understand exactly what kind of second life I'd been given.

The first important detail was the year.

I'd died in 2026 and somehow been dropped forty years into the past. It's 1986. My birthday is Feb 14th. Haha. Valentines day. How lucky? The idea would've been insane under almost any circumstances, although having perfect memories of those forty years made the situation considerably more useful.

The second important detail involved my family.

The Petersons had money.

They had real money, the kind I'd spent my first life seeing through windows and wondering what it must feel like when a broken washing machine didn't threaten your entire monthly budget.

My father, Robert Peterson, came from a family with investments spread across technology, aerospace, manufacturing, and several other industries that took me years to understand fully. My mother, Catherine, came from money too, although hers was the older variety involving property, trusts, investments, family connections, and people who seemed to know somebody useful in nearly every important place.

I'd been reborn into the exact kind of family my first-life self would've looked at and assumed they were playing life with cheat codes.

Then I remembered the blue screen floating in front of my eyes.

Apparently, I was playing with actual cheat codes.

The Login System appeared every day, and its early rewards were fairly small. Language comprehension came first, followed by improved coordination, stronger concentration, and small increases to how quickly my brain processed information.

Then the rewards became much more interesting.

[Daily Login Successful]

[Reward: Mathematics Knowledge]

Another day brought chemistry, then physics, biology, computer science, engineering, and eventually subjects I hadn't even properly studied during my first life. The system seemed almost obsessed with feeding me scientific knowledge.

I certainly wasn't going to complain about that particular obsession.

Science had been the greatest regret of my first life. Now I had wealthy parents, decades ahead of me, perfect memories of the future, a young brain, and some supernatural system that apparently wanted to turn me into a scientist. Though things sometimes got a little too intense for me with all that knowledge that I had to separate and arrange in my head. It felt like a massive archive, and I was storing info there.

If the universe was trying to send me a message, subtlety clearly wasn't part of the plan.

So I made another promise to myself.

I wouldn't waste this life wondering what could've happened under better circumstances. Financial problems wouldn't drag me away from the things I was good at, and I wouldn't spend years looking back at opportunities I'd been forced to abandon.

This time, I had the opportunity.

More than that, I had practically every advantage somebody could ask for.

Looking back, I can see exactly where I made my first real mistake. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that having every advantage meant I had no excuse to slow down.

By the time I was four, my parents already knew there was something unusual about me. By five, I was studying material intended for much older children, and private tutors became part of normal life before I reached seven. Regular school started feeling pointless around nine, while professors began visiting our house by eleven because my parents had run out of tutors capable of keeping up with me.

Everyone called me a genius.

Sometimes I hated hearing that word, while other times I enjoyed it far more than I probably should have.

Every achievement became proof that I was using my second life properly. Every award made me want another one, and whenever somebody said I was years ahead of everyone my age, some deeply competitive part of me immediately wanted to increase the distance.

The system certainly didn't discourage that behavior.

[Login Successful]

[Reward: Advanced Mathematics]

A few days later, another familiar message appeared.

[Login Successful]

[Reward: Organic Chemistry Knowledge]

Then another reward arrived before I'd even fully worked through the previous one.

[Login Successful]

[Reward: Applied Physics Comprehension]

Science gradually swallowed almost every part of my life. The difference was that this time nothing could force me away from it, which was exactly what I'd wanted.

At least, that was what I kept telling myself.

I didn't have anything resembling a normal childhood, and my teenage years weren't much better. While other kids went to parties, I studied. While they started dating, I kept studying. Summers disappeared into laboratories, special programs, academic competitions, research papers, and whatever qualification I decided I needed next.

I kept telling myself there would be time for everything else once I'd accomplished enough.

There would always be time later.

It was funny how quickly an old lie could follow someone into a new life.

The strangest part was that I wasn't miserable. I genuinely loved learning, solving problems, and finally understanding things that had frustrated me during my first life. There was also a particular rush that came from being the smartest person in a room and knowing everyone else understood it too.

That part probably wasn't especially healthy.

Then again, neither was most of my personality by the time I reached eighteen.

I was aware of the problem. I simply didn't care enough to change anything because the future, success, fame, and money mattered much more than my parents ever seemed capable of understanding.

For them, money had always existed somewhere in the background. There had never been a month when buying groceries threatened their ability to pay rent. They could tell me wealth wasn't everything because they'd never had to watch their bank balance decide whether an opportunity was possible.

I remembered exactly what being poor felt like.

I remembered checking my account before ordering food. I remembered turning down opportunities because I couldn't afford them, skipping things I wanted because something more important needed paying, and taking whatever work kept money coming in.

Most of all, I remembered standing on a street in 2026 and deciding that a ride home wasn't worth twelve dollars.

Then I remembered dying because I walked instead.

So yes, I cared about money far more than my parents thought I should.

By twenty-one, I'd achieved something my first-life self would've considered ridiculous.

I had two PhDs.

PhD in Food Science and Technology from UC Davis.

PhD in Aerospace Engineering, specializing in Bioastronautics from MIT.

I had two reasons for getting the degrees. The first was food. Not survival food that comes in beige cubes and vacuum-packed misery they called meals. I wanted to make food that actually tasted good after years in space, submarines, bunkers, or after a disaster had taken everything else away. People underestimate what good food does to you. Give someone a decent meal when they're exhausted, scared, and stuck somewhere they don't want to be, and suddenly tomorrow doesn't seem quite so terrible.

The second reason was the part that got me into aerospace. I wanted to figure out how to keep people human when their environment wasn't. Gravity, radiation, isolation, confinement, disrupted sleep, recycled air, muscle loss, bone loss, psychological stress... space doesn't just try to kill you. It slowly takes pieces of you away. Bioastronautics was supposed to be about figuring out how to stop that. Better habitats, artificial gravity, life-support systems, exercise systems, human factors, closed-loop biological systems, anything that could make living in space less like surviving a hostile experiment and more like actually living there. I wasn't interested in getting people to Mars once. I wanted to make sure that, when they got there, they could stay.

The year was 2007, and my life looked absurdly successful from the outside. I had qualifications, research experience, connections, published work, and a reputation that had started spreading far beyond the universities I'd attended.

My parents were thrilled with everything I'd accomplished. Professors wanted me working with them, government agencies knew my name, NASA knew my name, and even people inside military research circles had begun paying attention to what I was capable of doing.

I should've been happy.

Instead, I found myself sitting alone at my desk one night, staring at a stack of job offers while wondering why I felt almost nothing.

I'd spent twenty-one years building myself toward this point, although in some ways I'd spent two entire lives preparing for it. The poor science student I'd once been would've killed for the opportunities sitting in front of me.

NASA, Federal research programs, private laboratories, and major universities wanted me to work for them. These were prestigious positions people spent entire careers trying to reach, and every offer represented the kind of future I'd once believed would solve everything.

I looked at them and saw salaries.

Very good salaries, certainly more than most people would ever earn, although they were still salaries.

For reasons I couldn't immediately explain, that bothered me more than it should have.

Maybe depression had finally caught up with me. Maybe I was simply greedy, or maybe spending my childhood treating life like one endless list of achievements had finally broken something inside my head.

There was another possibility I couldn't ignore.

Maybe I was tired of spending my life creating things that somebody else would eventually own.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at the papers spread across my desk. Research contracts sat beside employment terms, intellectual property agreements, government restrictions, and long sections explaining what happened to inventions created using institutional or federal resources.

There were rules about classified work, ownership, patents, publication, and even more rules about commercialization.

I'd spent my entire second life preparing to become exactly what my first-life self had wanted.

A scientist.

For the first time, I finally asked myself a different question.

What did I actually want from being a scientist?

The answer came surprisingly quickly.

I wanted freedom, ownership, and enough money that nobody could ever control my choices again.

My eyes moved around the room while I thought about everything I'd sacrificed to reach this point. Books filled the shelves, research papers covered half the desk, and several magazines had been stacked beside my computer. One of them contained an article I'd read earlier that week about developments in theoretical physics.

The name attached to part of the article had caught my attention.

Sheldon Cooper.

I'd come across his name more than once by then. He was a young physicist with ridiculous intelligence, interesting research, and what appeared to be an almost unhealthy obsession with his field.

His name bothered me because I knew I'd heard it before.

Perfect memory didn't automatically make every connection immediately obvious, especially when I had decades of memories to sort through. It took several days before I finally remembered where Sheldon Cooper belonged.

The Big Bang Theory.

It had been a television show during my first life.

I'd seen episodes here and there, caught pieces of different seasons, watched clips online, and listened while friends talked about the characters. I'd never cared enough to memorize the show because I'd had plenty of problems in my own life.

Now I apparently lived in that world.

My reaction after figuring it out had been surprisingly simple.

That was pretty cool.

Then I'd gone back to work.

There were certainly worse fictional universes to end up inside. As far as I remembered, I wasn't living somewhere superheroes destroyed cities every other week, aliens regularly invaded the planet, or wizards secretly operated behind train stations.

The world seemed mostly normal, which meant Sheldon Cooper existing didn't matter very much to my plans.

At least, that was what I believed in 2007.

That night, I reviewed the NASA documents and reflected on all that I had gathered during my second life. Twenty-one years had passed. I had earned two PhDs, but I had made almost no genuine friends, hadn't been in any significant relationships, and had few, if any, typical teenage memories. However, I had developed a considerable reputation across various scientific disciplines and had a family fortune awaiting me in the future. Despite all these advantages, a part of me still felt like the twenty-three-year-old musician who had died stressed about finances.

That realization scared me more than I wanted to admit because if everything I'd already achieved wasn't enough to make that fear disappear, I had absolutely no idea what would finally be enough.

Then another thought entered my mind.

It was greedy, a bit ridiculous and reckless, and possibly the smartest idea I'd had in years.

I remembered music.

Thanks to the first major reward the System had ever given me, I didn't remember it vaguely either. I could remember songs I'd ever heard with frightening clarity. Melodies, lyrics, arrangements, performances, trends, albums, artists, production styles, and sounds that hadn't even become popular yet were sitting inside my head.

Thousands of songs existed in my memories before anyone in this world had written them.

I slowly sat straighter as the idea started taking shape.

It was 2007.

YouTube was growing rapidly. Digital music was becoming more important every year, social media was changing how people discovered artists, and I already knew streaming would eventually tear apart most of the industry's existing business model.

More importantly, I knew what millions of people were going to listen to during the next two decades.

I knew the hit songs before anyone wrote them.

I knew which sounds would become popular and which trends would disappear.

I knew what worked.

And I already knew how to play.

My first life had given me years of experience as a working musician. So, I wouldn't even be starting from zero.

Back then, music had pulled me away from science because I needed money badly enough to choose survival over the future I actually wanted.

This time, music could do something completely different.

It could fund the science.

My science.

My laboratories, my patents, my companies, my technology, and eventually even my rockets could belong to me instead of some university, government agency, or corporation that happened to employ me.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious the opportunity became. I had scientific knowledge decades ahead of the world, a supernatural system making me smarter every day, a wealthy family behind me, and perfect memories of some of the most successful music ever created. Also, let's not forget the stocks. 

For most of my life, I'd treated those things as completely separate advantages.

Maybe they didn't need to stay separate.

I reached across the desk and picked up the NASA offer again, reading the first page before another laugh escaped me. This time I didn't bother stopping because the whole situation was too absurd.

In my first life, I'd abandoned science because music paid the bills.

In my second life, I was about to use music to make enough money that nobody could ever tell me what kind of science I was allowed to pursue.

I lowered the paperwork and stared at the ceiling while the plan continued building inside my head.

My parents were going to lose their fucking minds.