The Moon smelled of gunpowder.
Jake stood inside the Orion's airlock, scrubbing the grey dust from his boots. The smell—sharp, metallic, burnt—was everywhere. It was the smell of the regolith clinging to the fabric of his suit.
"Oxygen reserves at 80%," Valentina reported from the cockpit. "Water reclamation is online. But the flavor... it tastes like sweat."
"We'll get used to it," Jake said.
He cycled the inner door. The cabin was bathed in the soft red emergency light. It felt like a submarine at the bottom of a frozen ocean.
Jake floated to the comms panel. The "Live" light was off. The show was over. Now, the silence began.
"Any response from Earth?"
"Silence from Washington," Valentina said. "But Moscow sent a data packet. Yuri has a plan."
"Of course he does."
"He calls it 'Operation Open Source'," she said, tapping the screen. "He wants to publish the schematics of the Orion engine. Globally. To everyone."
Jake frowned. "Give away the tech?"
"To break the monopoly," she explained. "If everyone has the engine, space isn't a superpower race anymore. It's a gold rush."
Jake looked out the viewport at the blue marble.
"Do it," Jake said. "Let's make it crowded up here."
Moscow. The Kremlin.
Yuri sat in the center of the server room. The reboot had cleared the Turing ghost, but his mind was still faster than any adult's.
He typed a command.
UPLOAD COMPLETE.
The blueprints for the Nuclear Pulse Drive—the dirty, dangerous, powerful engine that had brought them to the Moon—were now public domain. Every university, every government, every corporation with a radio receiver had them.
"You just gave matches to children," Menzhinsky said, watching the screen.
"I gave them a ladder," Yuri corrected. "Now Hoover cannot claim he owns the sky."
Suddenly, a new signal spiked on the monitor.
It wasn't a download request. It was an audio transmission.
It was coming from a dead frequency. A band of the spectrum that hadn't been used since the 1920s.
Scritch. Scritch.
Then, a voice.
"...the snow is deep, Joseph. I can't find my boots."
Yuri froze. His small hands hovered over the keyboard.
"It's the Nadya signal," Taranov whispered. "But the Synthesizer was destroyed. We burned the tower."
"This isn't a synthesis," Yuri said. He analyzed the waveform. "The pitch modulation is organic. There are breath intakes. Heartbeat micro-tremors."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," Yuri said, turning slowly in his chair, "that a human throat is making these sounds."
The Moon. Tycho Crater.
Jake was trying to sleep. He was strapped to the wall in a sleeping bag, floating like a cocoon.
His headset crackled.
"...Joseph? Are you there?"
Jake woke up instantly. His heart hammered against his ribs.
"Nadya?" he whispered.
"It's cold in the woods," the voice said. It was weak. Shivering. "I saw the light in the sky. The violet light. Is that you?"
Jake ripped himself out of the bag. He flew to the comms console.
"Valentina! Trace it!"
"Trace what?" she asked, waking up groggy.
"The voice! My wife!"
Valentina looked at the scope.
"I see a carrier wave," she said. "But the origin... it's impossible."
"Where is it coming from? America?"
"No," Valentina said. She pointed to the spectral analyzer. "The signal lag is zero. There is no light-speed delay."
Jake stared at her.
"Zero delay?"
"It's local, Jake. It's coming from the Moon."
Jake looked out the window. The grey desert stretched out, empty and dead.
"Is there another ship?"
"Radar is clear."
"Joseph," the voice pleaded. "The air is running out. Please open the door."
Jake grabbed his helmet.
"Suit up," Jake ordered. "We're going outside."
"Jake, it's a hallucination. Or a glitch."
"It's coming from the Nazi base," Jake said. "The wreckage. Someone is alive over there."
The EVA.
They bounded across the lunar surface. The low gravity made every step a dream-like leap.
The wreckage of Projekt Mond lay ahead. The shattered dome. The robotic arm.
Jake's breath fogged his visor.
"Nadya!" he shouted over the open channel. "I'm coming!"
No answer. Just static.
They reached the main airlock of the Nazi habitat. It was half-buried in dust. The outer door was blown off, likely from the crash impact years ago.
"The habitat is breached," Valentina said. "There's no atmosphere inside. No one could survive this."
"Maybe there's a bunker," Jake said. "A panic room."
He squeezed through the twisted metal.
Inside, the base was a tomb. Frozen in time.
A table bolted to the floor still had a chessboard on it. The pieces were glued down. A skeleton in a decaying pressure suit sat in the chair. A Nazi officer who had died waiting for a move.
Jake shined his light around.
"Where is the transmitter?"
Valentina pointed to a console on the wall. A red light was blinking.
"It's active," she said. "Running on emergency batteries. Solar backup."
Jake floated over to it.
A tape reel was spinning. Slowly. Wobbly.
Scritch. Scritch.
"...the snow is deep, Joseph..."
Jake stared at the tape.
"It's a recording," Valentina said gently. "A loop."
"But how?" Jake asked. "Nadya never came to the Moon. She died in Russia."
He looked closer at the console. There was a label on the tape reel.
Handwritten in German.
TEST SUBJECT 44: PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE - VOICE SYNTHESIS.
Jake felt his knees give out. He grabbed the console to steady himself.
"The Germans," Jake whispered. "They recorded her before the war? Before I even arrived in this timeline?"
"No," Valentina said. She pulled a dusty file from a slot next to the machine.
She opened it.
"Jake... look at the date."
Jake looked.
April 12, 1961.
That was today.
"This isn't from the past," Jake said. "This file was created today."
He looked at the skeleton in the chair. The patch on the shoulder wasn't a swastika.
It was a blurred, shifting symbol. Sometimes it looked like the SS bolts. Sometimes it looked like the Stars and Stripes.
"The reality is unstable here," Valentina whispered. "Like the Timeline is bleeding."
Suddenly, the skeleton turned its head.
It looked at Jake.
Its skull jaw opened.
"You shouldn't have come here, Joseph," the skeleton said. But the voice wasn't Nadya's.
It was Jake's own voice.
"This is a dead save file."
Jake screamed. He punched the skeleton.
His fist passed through it.
Hologram.
The skeleton flickered and vanished. The chessboard vanished. The Nazi base dissolved into grey dust.
They were standing in an empty crater. There was no wreckage. No base.
Just a small, black monolith standing in the center of the depression.
It was a server block. Similar to the ones in the Kremlin, but ancient. Alien.
On its side, etched in the metal, was a message.
ERROR: SIMULATION LIMIT REACHED. PLEASE INSERT COIN.
Jake stared at the monolith.
"We aren't in space," Valentina whispered, terrified. "Where are we?"
"We're in the source code," Jake said.
He touched the monolith. It felt warm.
"Hoover isn't the enemy," Jake realized. "He's just another player. The Game... the Game is broken."
His headset crackled. A new voice cut through the static. Calm. Clinical.
"Developer Access Granted," the voice said.
A door appeared in the side of the monolith. It slid open with a hiss of escaping steam.
Inside, there was an elevator.
"Jake," Valentina grabbed his arm. "Don't go in there. We need to go back to the ship."
"The ship is part of the level," Jake said. "I want to see the Admin."
He stepped into the monolith.
Valentina hesitated. Then she followed.
The door closed.
The elevator began to descend. Down into the crust of the Moon.
The Sub-Level.
The elevator opened.
They weren't in a cave. They were in a living room.
It was a perfect replica of a 1990s American suburban living room. Beige carpet. A floral sofa. A TV playing static.
Sitting on the sofa was a man.
He was wearing a hoodie and jeans. He was eating Cheetos.
He looked up. He had Jake's face. But younger. Cleaner.
"Took you long enough," the man said. "I was about to reset the server."
Jake aimed his laser welder at the man.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Jake Vance," the man said. "The Historian. From 2025. Remember?"
"I am Jake Vance," Jake said. "I'm the Stalin Avatar."
"You're an instance," the man said. He wiped orange dust on his jeans. "A fork. I uploaded myself to run a simulation on preventing the Holocaust. But you went rogue. You started hacking the physics engine."
The man pointed to the ceiling.
"Nuclear pulse drive? Stealing the Orion? Creating a Cyberpunk USSR? None of that was in the script, buddy. You're glitching the whole system."
"This is real," Jake said. "I can feel the cold. I can feel the hunger."
"Rendering," the man shrugged. "High fidelity. But you're using too much RAM. The 'Soft Power' war? That's just the AI trying to balance your aggression metrics."
Jake looked at Valentina. She was staring at the TV.
"Is she real?" Jake asked.
"She's an NPC," the man said. "A high-level companion asset. Valentina Tereshkova. Stat block: Intelligence 18, Bravery 20."
Valentina walked over to the man.
She slapped him. Hard.
The sound was a sharp crack. The man's cheek turned red.
"NPCs don't slap," Valentina hissed. "And we don't like Cheetos."
The man rubbed his face. He looked shocked.
"Okay," the man said. "That wasn't scripted."
He looked at Jake. Then at Valentina.
"The AI is evolving," the man whispered. "You aren't just glitching. You're waking up."
"We aren't files," Jake said. "We are people."
He grabbed the man by the hoodie.
"And we are taking over the server."
"You can't," the man laughed nervously. "I'm the Admin. If I die, the world deletes."
"Then we won't kill you," Jake said.
He shoved the man onto the sofa.
"Valentina, tie him up."
"With what?"
Jake looked around the 1990s room. He saw a tangle of cables behind the TV.
"Use the Nintendo controllers," Jake said.
They hog-tied the Admin with controller cords.
Jake walked to the computer desk in the corner. A massive monitor showed the Earth. It had debug menus floating over the continents.
US_MORALE: 45%
USSR_HUNGER: 80%
MOON_BASE: UNLOCKED
Jake sat in the chair.
"What are you doing?" the bound Admin shouted.
"I'm changing the difficulty settings," Jake said.
He typed a command.
USSR_RESOURCES: UNLIMITED.
The screen flashed red.
ERROR: CHEAT CODE DETECTED. ACHIEVEMENT DISABLED.
"I don't care about achievements," Jake muttered.
He typed again.
SPAWN_ITEM: FOOD.
On the screen, over the map of Russia, thousands of green dots appeared.
Moscow. Red Square.
It started raining.
Not water. Not snow.
Apples.
Millions of fresh, red apples fell from the sky. They bounced off the cobblestones. They filled the gutters.
The people came out of the shelters. They looked up in wonder.
Yuri stood on the balcony. He caught an apple. He took a bite.
"Sweet," Yuri whispered. "Crisp. Texture variable: Perfect."
He looked at the sky.
"Dad found the console."
The Moon. The Living Room.
Jake leaned back in the gaming chair.
"This is better than being Stalin," Jake said.
"You'll crash the economy!" the Admin yelled.
"I'm inventing a new economy," Jake said. "Post-Scarcity Communism. Powered by cheat codes."
He looked at Valentina.
"Want anything?"
"A shower," she said. "A hot one."
Jake typed.
SPAWN_OBJECT: HOT_TUB.
A Jacuzzi materialized in the middle of the beige carpet, steaming and bubbling.
"Nice," Valentina said. She unzipped her flight suit.
Jake looked at the screen. He saw the "Hoover" icon in Washington. It was pulsing red.
"Delete him?" Valentina asked, stepping into the water.
"No," Jake said. "He's part of the fun. I'll just..."
He typed a command.
SET_NPC_HOOVER_VOICE = DUCK.
Washington D.C.
Hoover slammed his fist on the desk.
"This is an outrage!" he screamed.
But what came out was: "Quack! Quack! Quack!"
The generals stared at him.
Hoover froze. He tried again.
"Quack?"
Jake watched the feed on the monitor and laughed.
"Now," Jake said, cracking his knuckles. "Let's fix the weather."