Earth Prime: Monday, August 11th, 2025 4:00 AM
The start of this morning was like any other morning. I woke up at 4 am, made breakfast, took a shower, put on clothes, put on my boots, and left for work at 5. When I arrived at the job site, I decided to take a short break before I had to start heading in. When I got to the doors to the work site, I fell into a portal. I heard a faint voice while I was falling, "Good luck!". I landed just as suddenly as the portal appeared, and my mind was pulled toward a glowing sticky note on my jacket, which said:
"Welcome, Max, to the world of Limitless. You now have Omniversal Portal Creation. With it, you can open a portal to pretty much any place or time in any world you have ever seen in fiction or reality. Interdimensional travel has no limits, but it takes 1.2 megaseconds or about 14 Earth solar days to recharge for omniversal travel. The ability comes with Blank, making you immune to omnipotent all-seeing beings, provided you do not draw their direct attention. The other rules and abilities you'll have to find out yourself. -Q&q".
As I finish reading, the note disintegrated, and I felt a stirring sensation appear in the back of my mind with a feeling that I can go between variants of this world. Then panic set in: where am I, when is it, am I injured, do I have my phone, and can I go home? I tried my best to calm down by focusing on taking deep breaths and trying to meditate some. After 30 minutes, I calmed myself enough to check on my situation. First, I checked myself for injuries, and fortunately, I was fine. Next, I looked to see if my stuff came with me, and I quickly found my phone, keys, wallet, tablet, water bottle, lunch box, and finally my bag of tools.
I turned on my phone, and unfortunately, it could not connect to cell service, though 911 was still available. The next thing I discovered was that my phone's time had updated; it was April 11th, 2015, at 6:35 AM; I was 10 years in the past. I felt an even greater panic attack coming as I looked around and found I was in an alleyway. I started looking for my location using my phone's GPS and found that I am in New York, in Manhattan. It took another 30 minutes for me to finish calming down.
Now let's think of a plan; I need more money to get a hotel room, I need to know what is happening, and if I am truly in the world of
Limitless. I can get money from a pawnshop for today, but information is more important right now. So I headed for the nearest library; it took about 20 minutes to get there. Unfortunately it will be closed for another 35 minutes so I waited to be let in. Luckily, the library wasn't that strict with home addresses, so I easily gained a library card. Now I made my way towards the computers. I noticed I could read text in languages I had never learned, and I realized this could be an extremely useful ability if it also extended to speech or even programming. So, programming was the first thing I checked when I logged in. The easiest place to check was GitHub, and Git was one of the first repositories there. When I started looking at Git's source code, I realized I understood code much better than before.
With that side tangent over, I checked the downloaded copy of Wikipedia on my tablet for the TV show Limitless to find the most searchable person, and I found "Edward Morra," a Senator. Once I had the candidate, I wasted no time looking him up, and unsurprisingly, he was real. This was the world with NZT, the miracle drug that makes you a genius with perfect recall for 8 hours, but with terrible side effects like memory loss and extreme paranoia. Fortunately, there is an injectable drug called "
The Booster Shot" that can prevent these side effects for 30 days, and even better, a permanent version is possible; annoyingly, Morra is the only source. After that, I figured that my first move had to be making enough money to gain some NZT. To get the money, bug bounties or translation work are my best bet, and my first step to take that is to open a bank account.
Unfortunately, I discovered that it was impossible for me, as I don't have a country of citizenship, to get an ITIN or SSN. The next most useful thing is to download a "new" map of the city to my tablet. While I was downloading the map, I used my tablet to look through what I could for this world. Next, I looked at a dictionary for a bunch of languages and listened to what I could for those languages. The languages I focused on are the ones that I think can be the easiest to consistently profit from, so I went through some of the most common languages, like Spanish and Mandarin. The last thing I did in the library was to find a good open pawnshop and a cheap hotel.
I quickly headed to the pawnshop I found with a good reputation. When I entered, I separated what I was willing to let go of, which was a fluke multi-meter and a couple of spare tools. By the end, I managed to argue for $175 to go with my $20 and gained a better hope for the future. Now I've got enough to get a hotel room.
When I arrived, I got a room for $65 a night and had dinner, and started to make more long-term plans before I went to sleep. My current plan is to find work and a group that I can share an apartment with and do my best to get some NZT pills.
I woke up the next morning, had breakfast, and started to look for work. To get work, I started asking around for people in need of electrical work or a translator. Fortunately, I found more people in need of a translator, so I made $75 from that and $25 to fix someone's receptacle before grabbing lunch. For the rest of the day, I went searching for a longer-term place to stay and found a group living in a 3-bedroom apartment that is looking for a roommate. The rent is $400 a month, and I paid them $100 up front with a promise that within the next 7 days, I will pay them the rest. After making that deal, I realized that I finally have a stable spot to relax, so I meditated on my power. It felt like it was a bit stronger than before, and felt like there was a limit on how strong it could be without exercising it. After meditating, I had dinner and then went to sleep.
I got up at my new home, had breakfast, and looked for more work so I can live up to that promise. By lunch, I had earned $90; now it was time to start looking for my first source of NZT, so I used my tablet to look for the easiest source with the least risk. After looking for a while, I found Eli Whitford, who is the person the MC in the show gets his first pills from. Annoyingly, he gets shot in the first episode.
Now I just need to find if he is still alive, to do that, I went to the library to look him up. The best place to start is Manchester-Reid, as that is where he works. Unfortunately, Reid doesn't have a public list of employees, but they do have a link to their LinkedIn on the hiring page. After finding that, I started to look through their page for people named Eli Whitford. Luckily, I only got one match, and he is still alive; he just updated his Facebook. Now that I have found him, I started to look for where he lives and found 6 potential locations to check. When I finished looking him up, I noticed it was getting late, so I left, and I had dinner, then went back home and had a good night's sleep.
Over the next week, I managed to pay off the rest of my rent with a bit over $500 left over to get NZT. I spent most of my free time reading through C and JavaScript documentation and best practices to prepare for when I get NZT. The last thing I did that week was to go through the locations where Eli might live and eventually found him. Today I finally decided to get NZT. My plan was simple: get to where Eli lives and buy a few pills or where he is acquiring them. When I got there, I knocked on his door and waited.
After about 20 minutes of waiting, he finally came and opened the door and asked.
"What do you want?"
"Your NZT supplier or a couple of pills."
"How do you know that I have it? That's an extremely dangerous conversation to have publicly. Come in."
Going inside, "Your Manchester-Reid records made it obvious."
Mumbling under his breath, "I thought I was better at covering my tracks." "So, are you going to tell anyone about this?"
"I will if you don't give me a good deal also, as a warning; I'm not the only one who knows, but I'm certainly the most pleasant."
"I am not going to sell out my supplier. What are you going to give me to give some pills to you?"
"$400 for 3 pills sounds about right."
"That would be a loss. $500 for 3."
"Now, now, we wouldn't want your secret getting out, or tell Morra that you are skipping town. You wouldn't last long if I did. $425 for 3"
"$465 for 3 is my last offer."
"You can do lower $450 for 3."
"Deal."
