coda careers

Every night, Zen takes a pill and enters a dream where he lives an entire lifetime in another profession. One night he spends forty years as a neurosurgeon. The next night he becomes a Michelin star chef. Then a wildlife photographer in Antarctica. A detective. A game developer. A fighter pilot. An astronaut. A novelist. A violinist. A king. A street magician. A manga artist. When he wakes up, only eight hours have passed. But he remembers every life. Every skill. Every mistake. Every person he loved. By the age of twenty two, Zen has lived thousands of years and mastered hundreds of professions. The problem is that the human mind was never meant to carry that much experience. He begins mixing memories between lives. He instinctively reaches for surgical tools he has never touched. He misses children he raised in lives that never existed. He mourns a wife who lived only in another reality. He speaks languages he never studied. He remembers birthdays that never happened and funerals that nobody else attended. And eventually he starts asking himself a terrifying question: If I have lived a thousand lives, who exactly am I?