Chapter 1
Waking up wasn't just bad. It was frankly lousy, the kind that makes you regret the very fact of your existence.
First came the hammer of pain, splitting my skull from the inside. Not sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, pulsing rhythm in the temples, as if some clumsy satanist drummer had set up shop behind the bone and was beating out a devil's roll with every heartbeat. Second came the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but the sensation of someone having packed my throat with scorching Sahara sand and then polished it with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, shifted around in my mouth like a dead lizard baked dry in the sun. Consciousness came back reluctantly, in torn shreds, clinging to the merciful dark scraps of oblivion, but reality was persistent and merciless.
Before I could fully come to my senses and piece together a coherent thought, a smell hit me. A nauseating, sour-sweet, unmistakably familiar stench. Vomit. Ironically, that stink cleared my head better than a bucket of ice water ever could have. I tried to grimace, but even that simple movement sent a fresh wave of nausea surging up my throat.
Although, no. It was even worse than that. It wasn't just a smell. It was the vomit itself. A sticky, cooling puddle of my own body's foul output had soaked through my T-shirt and was chilling the skin on my back and shoulder in the most unpleasant way possible. That realization washed over me in an icy wave of disgust, making me shudder. And that alone would have been bad enough, plenty worse happens in life, but this was categorically not what I remembered from my last moments before sleep. I clearly remembered going to bed. At my house. In my clean, freshly made bed. Completely sober and in a perfectly sound state of mind. And now...
With great difficulty, pressing my trembling, unnervingly weak hands against the sticky, rough floor, I forced my poisoned body upright into a sitting position. The room swayed like a ship's deck in a force-nine storm. I squeezed my eyes shut, gripped the floor with my fingers, and waited out the dizziness before finally looking around. What I saw, I categorically, to the point of grinding my teeth, did not like.
This wasn't my bedroom. This wasn't even close to my house.
A tiny one-room apartment, or more precisely, a studio. Twenty-five square meters at a glance, maybe thirty. One large room, if that word even applied here, doing the work of living room, bedroom, and God knows what else. A battered couch with springs poking through here and there, a piece of furniture that had seen better days back in Nixon's era. A clunky wardrobe of cheap particleboard with peeling wood-grain film at the edges. A writing desk buried under papers and empty instant noodle packages. A kitchen set huddled in the corner, a couple of cabinets, a sink buried under a mountain of dirty dishes, and a two-burner electric hotplate. Everything looked not just shabby, but wretched and hopeless. Compared to my spacious private house, the one I had pulled from ruins with my own hands over the last ten years, this place looked like a doghouse next to a palace.
But the main question wasn't any of that. WHAT. WAS. I. DOING. HERE?
Thoughts tangled, snagging on each other. Kidnapped, forcibly drunk into oblivion and dumped here? Absurd. Who would bother with me? Some idiotic prank from friends, way beyond the pale? No, not their style at all. Besides, practically all of them were in the city, hundreds of kilometers away. What, they had nothing better to do than drive through the night to pull off some elaborate and completely pointless operation? They would have had to somehow extract me from my house without waking me and pour liters of alcohol into me on top of that. No, it didn't add up. Not at all.
And only now did it finally reach my still not-entirely-functioning brain. That very discrepancy that my subconscious had been stubbornly ignoring, yet kept pushing to the surface, feeding a dull, gnawing anxiety. My body. The proportions. My hands. What the hell was wrong with them? Why did they look so... thin and delicate? These weren't my working, sinewy hands, covered in a dense network of old scars and calluses from a decade of working with wood and metal. Hands that could drive a hundred-millimeter nail into a pine board with one clean punch and not even feel it. These hands looked only good enough for pressing keyboard keys or turning pages. And in general, I felt somehow... shorter. Lighter.
Too much. Too many questions and not a single answer. I only knew that I knew nothing. But I needed to figure this out. With a firm intention to find at least some kind of clue, I staggered my way to the only separate room in the studio, the bathroom. Every step sent a dull throb through my skull, my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I made it inside. Dirty would be putting it mildly. A deep yellowing had set into the toilet's porcelain; a wide crack in the sink had been haphazardly patched with gray tape; a slippery, cheap bar of soap sat on the ledge in place of anything resembling a real toiletry. From the single bare bulb above came a dim, sickly light. Everything in that room screamed of poverty, indifference, and neglect. My gaze landed on the grimy mirror above the washbasin, covered in dried splashes. I looked into it.
"Oh, what the fuck!" burst out of me in a hoarse, alien, youthful voice. I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie with a live grenade strapped to its chest.
Looking back at me from the mirror was... not Me. That was the short version. The longer version: a young man of about nineteen. Disheveled dark-brown hair. Large brown eyes swimming with a mixture of animal fear and confusion. A face that was perfectly ordinary and completely unremarkable. No familiar three-day stubble. No web of fine lines around the eyes. No deep scar on the chin from a chisel that had slipped a couple of years back. Just smooth, pale skin with the faint ghost of teenage acne. A lean build, roughly a hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall by rough estimation. A gray T-shirt soaked in vomit. Checkered cotton shorts.
I stood there, thunderstruck, staring at the reflection without really seeing it. Behind my eyes rose another image entirely. My workshop in the garage. The smell of ozone from a running welder, laced with the warm sweetness of pine shavings. My hands, the ones I had so inopportunely thought about just moments ago. I remembered them down to the last detail. A wide, calloused palm capable of wrapping easily around the end of a hundred-millimeter beam. A network of small whitish scars, souvenirs from slipped drill bits, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had long since become part of the skin's landscape. Under the nails, an almost permanent dark stripe of machine oil and wood dust mixed together, something no solvent could fully remove. Those hands were a tool, an extension of my will. And what I was looking at now, both on my body and in that mirror, these pale, narrow palms with thin fingers better suited to a pianist or a painter, stirred in me not just rejection, but something deeper. A primal, animal sense of wrongness. As if they had replaced not just my body, but my very essence. I clenched my fists and felt the thin knuckles crack in an unfamiliar way. No. These were definitely not my fists.
How? How had I ended up in this guy's body? Why me specifically? What had happened to my real body? Who even was this guy? What in the hell was I supposed to do now? Questions swarmed through my head like maddened bees, and the already-stubborn hangover pain sharpened into a full-blown migraine.
I stripped off the vomit-soaked clothes with difficulty and tossed them into the corner in disgust, then climbed under the cold shower. The icy jets brought me back to something resembling a functioning human being, washing away not just the grime but a layer of the initial shock along with it. Deciding not to torture my sluggishly working brain with a thousand and one questions for now, I sidestepped the vomit stain on the floor and collapsed onto the couch.
I sprawled out and stared at the cracked, finely wrinkled ceiling, trying not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I started feeling drowsy. Good. To hell with problems. Morning is wiser than evening. A weak, irrational hope still flickered somewhere inside me that all of this was just a dream. A bad, terrifyingly realistic, deeply unsettling dream, but a dream all the same. With those encouraging thoughts, I drifted back into Morpheus's realm, and even the headache finally retreated to the background.
How long I slept like that, I had no idea. But when I woke up, a thick, velvety night had settled outside. The city was living its life: neon signs and streetlights threw strange, dancing shadows across the walls, and from somewhere below came the steady hum of traffic and a distant, mournful wail of a siren. Nighttime New York must be beautiful, but it was better not to be out on Hell's Kitchen's streets after dark. You would count yourself lucky if they only took your wallet and your phone and left the rest of you intact. Though there was always a chance the Devil of Hell's Kitchen might hear your call for help and deal with whoever came at you. But what would he ask in return? A simple vigilante didn't get called the Devil for nothing.
"What the..." I whispered into the empty room, suddenly realizing that those thoughts weren't quite mine.
They surged in all at once, like a dam giving way. Someone else's memories. Feelings. Emotions. I was John Thompson. An orphan. A student at the New York College of Arts. And I was completely, hopelessly in love with a red-haired classmate. The very one I had caught just yesterday with someone else. A rich, spoiled kid who had pulled up for her in a shiny Audi worth several times the rent on this studio. The shock of it had hit John's brain so hard he couldn't hold himself together, and he had spent his last dollar on cheap whiskey. Decided to drown his grief. And, apparently, had drowned himself instead.
No. No. NO. I was Alexander Cole. A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor and freelancer, a jack-of-all-trades by my own humble assessment, who had spent the last ten years living in his hometown, restoring the house his parents had left him from a ruin into something worth living in. No stupid teenage infatuation with some red-haired heartbreaker. No bohemian arts college. Certainly no act of senseless, suicidal drinking that had apparently brought this particular John Thompson's story to its end.
"I am myself, even if I'm carrying the memories of some inexperienced idiot from the USA," I said, firmly and clearly, into the empty room, cementing that fact first and foremost for my own benefit.
There is a difference between simply realizing something while still getting tangled in your own thoughts, struggling to separate wheat from chaff, and firmly knowing that your personality is the one in control. I was Alexander. Somehow, I had ended up in this guy's body.
And for a moment it hit me. Not panic. Something worse. A dull, black, bottomless melancholy. Home. My home. Ten years of life pressed into every brick, every board. The sharp, tart smell of fresh pine shavings when I had planed boards for the veranda surfaced in my memory. The familiar weight of my favorite hammer in my hand, old and Soviet, passed down from my grandfather to my father and then to me. The view of a crimson sunset from the porch I had only finished a month ago. All my work. All my plans. Just gone. Erased. As if I had never existed. What had happened to my body? Was it lying there right now, cooling in that house, which without any heir would simply revert to the state? The thought pushed a heavy lump up into my throat, and my eyes stung treacherously.
All that was left for me was to accept it.
Whatever stood behind my transmigration, some entity, some law of the universe, some cosmic joke, it was beyond my understanding. The options were not many. Either jump from a roof and close out this absurd story, or just live.
Living was what I intended to do. The memories belonging to the body I was now in had finally settled into a more or less coherent picture, and I could now separate them from my own. They were dim, like an old, faded photograph. Running through John Thompson's biography in my mind, I understood that the guy whose skin I had inherited was about as ordinary, plain, and unremarkable as a person could be.
He had lost his parents in a car accident at seven. An orphanage until twelve, then a foster family that in practice differed little from the orphanage, since besides him there were twelve other kids in the same house. The enterprising guardians were obviously living off the generous social allocations from New York City Hall. John had no warm feelings for them and understood perfectly well that he was nothing more than a line item in their budget. The moment he turned eighteen, he left.
Being an orphan, he had received a subsidized social loan for his education at the College of Arts, majoring in theater performance. For the past year he had been grinding through the miserable existence of a broke student, scraping together money from odd jobs, social benefits, and endless anxiety about the student loan he would somehow have to pay back after graduation.
And, on the surface, fine. Life is life, especially by American standards. He had not gotten hooked on drugs. He had not ended up in prison. He had even tried to study. But the moment one specific name surfaced from the stream of memories, I understood exactly what kind of spectacular, universe-scale disaster fate had thrown me into.
Mary Jane Watson.
The red-haired honors student, campus beauty, activist, and the dream of every guy at college, the one John had been suffering over so hopelessly and one-sidedly. Coincidences like that do not happen. And then there was the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. And Stark Industries Tower knifing into the sky over central Manhattan. And the Daily Bugle with its infamous, New York-famous editor-in-chief, J. Jonah Jameson. Not enough? How about news coverage of the mysterious state of Latveria? Or the upcoming space expedition that had been all over the news, an expedition led by a certain Reed Richards? The cherry on top of this particular cake was Spider-Woman, the masked heroine who had appeared in the city only recently but had already won over the public, much to the fury of that same mustachioed loudmouth at the Bugle.
I was in the Marvel universe.
A world where mutants fought on equal footing with Asgardian gods. A world where a cosmic horror drifting past could, with a snap of its fingers, erase not just a planet but half a galaxy. A world where the Multiverse was not a theoretical concept but a basic fact of existence, and there were, literally, infinite versions of it. The main thing was not to end up in one of those branches marked for destruction, whether by the whim of some conditional Phoenix or by the ruling of the Living Tribunal.
"Yeah... Heavy is the burden of my uneasy life, my accursed existence, my bitter fate," I muttered my late mother's favorite saying, God rest her soul, staring blankly at the wall.
Existential dread rolled over me in an icy wave, threatening to paralyze my will entirely. To shake it off, I got up and walked to the window. The view opened onto the blank brick wall of the neighboring building and a narrow alley piled with trash. From below came the echoes of a drunken argument, and somewhere in the distance a siren wailed. Hell's Kitchen in all its glory.
So what was I supposed to do now?
My gaze snagged on the drying puddle of vomit. Sleep was the last thing on my mind. Rather than loading my brain with heavy thoughts that would probably lead nowhere useful, I decided to do the one thing I actually could do right now: clean up.
I found something resembling clean clothes in the wardrobe, filled a bucket with water in the bathroom, and got to work. I scrubbed the floor with focused intensity, going after the ingrained grime, and the simple physical labor helped order my thoughts. Along the way I wiped down the dust, worked through the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, and bagged up all the trash, though I decided against taking it out to the street at night in New York's most dangerous neighborhood.
Having arrived at no concrete conclusions, I sat down at the writing desk where an old, scratched laptop was waiting. I opened the lid, typed in the password from John's memory automatically, and was about to start looking up information about the current state of the world, when whatever higher power manages the logistics for people in my situation decided this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without fanfare, without any flourish at all, a modest semi-transparent blue panel blinked into existence in front of my eyes.
[System "Celestial Forge" Activated!]
Well then. That was a development. What exactly had I done to earn this particular honor? Maybe the full assimilation of memories triggered it. Or maybe I had taken in enough information about the world and the system had registered that I understood the hole I was in. Or maybe I was overcomplicating it and a simple eight-hour timer had just run out from the moment I first woke up. Honestly, what did it matter? The point was this: a system. And a system was a chance. A chance not just to survive, but maybe to actually build something in this insane world.
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