1970 American Tycoon
In 2024 Los Angeles, twenty‑one‑year‑old programmer and struggling novelist Ethan Cole tests a homemade VR rig in his cramped apartment. A catastrophic malfunction catapults his consciousness back to July 1970—into his own seventeen‑year‑old body. Armed with five decades of technological breakthroughs, blockbuster-story blueprints, and insider knowledge of the entertainment industry, Ethan seizes a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to rewrite history.
Under the alias “Michael Crichton,” he pens Jurassic Park and The Da Vinci Code before their original authors ever imagined them, funneling the profits into seed capital. With his high‑school friends and a handful of disillusioned engineers, he establishes NeonForge—a visionary startup that fuses the forthcoming innovations of Apple, ARM, and Sony into one retro‑futuristic powerhouse. By day, Ethan dazzles investors with prototypes of personal computers, arcade cabinets, and immersive VR demos decades ahead of their time. By night, he anonymously sells futuristic screenplays that reshape Hollywood’s golden age before it even begins.
But prodigious success draws perilous attention. Government agents grow suspicious of NeonForge’s uncanny lead on emerging technologies. Rival entrepreneurs and corporate spies hatch schemes to steal Ethan’s designs. Campus protests over Vietnam-era politics threaten his secret lab hidden beneath the garage. And in the quiet moments, Ethan wrestles with the moral cost of erasing the future he once knew—wondering if the timeline can bear so many paradoxes.
When a cryptic message appears on his prototype network—seemingly from another time traveler—Ethan realizes he’s not alone in rewriting history. To protect his fledgling empire and preserve the world he’s building, he must outwit unseen adversaries, master the volatile intersection of tech and culture, and unlock the mystery of the VR accident that shattered time.
As NeonForge rises, Ethan teeters on the brink of godlike power: a teenager who commands the future. But the higher he climbs, the more fragile his world becomes. In a race against conspiracies, paradoxes, and his own ambition, Ethan must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice for the chance to become the ultimate 1970 American tycoon—and whether any future is worth forging at the cost of the one he left behind.
