Oxford, England. October 2025.
The rain in Oxford... is a persistent humidity that permeates the limestone of university buildings, dissolving the distinction between air and water, between the academic present and the weight of eight centuries of accumulated history. For Thomas Blackwood, that rain was simply another variable in the equation of his own misery.
He walked toward his room in the Meadow Building of Christ Church, his boots echoing on the cobblestones with the rhythm of a broken metronome. In his backpack, the physical weight of three volumes on "Soil Mechanics in Permafrost" and "Imperial Russian Architecture" was insignificant compared to the static load oppressing his chest. His mind, trained to decompose complex systems into force vectors and material resistance, was failing to process the simplest and most devastating piece of data he had received six hours ago.
A failure.
That's what it had been. Not an act of fate, nor an unthinkable tragedy.
Flight BA-447 had suffered a catastrophic failure in its hydraulic systems over the North Atlantic. The redundancy had failed. The engineering had failed. And in that failure, the structure that sustained Thomas's life, his parents, his adorable little sister, his grandmother, had collapsed into the ocean, leaving only floating debris and a void where once there had been a family.
He entered his room. The space was a testament to his dual obsession: Euler diagrams for column buckling competed on the walls with topographic maps of Saint Petersburg circa 1900.
Thomas was an academic rarity, a hybrid who applied the brutal honesty of civil engineering to the romantic narrative of history. He sought to understand why empires fell, not for moral reasons, but due to institutional design failures.
Now, he was the collapsed empire.
He sat before his oak desk. His laptop screen still glowed with the list of condolence emails, a cascade of social trivialities attempting to patch a seismic crack with verbal band-aids.
'I'm so sorry.'
'We're with you.'
A soft and sad white noise.
Thomas opened the bottom drawer. There, next to his scale rulers and compasses, rested the solution to the problem of unmanageable pain. A bottle of malt whisky, a gift from his father for the publication of his thesis, and three vials of sodium pentobarbital he had discreetly synthesized in the materials laboratory during the last month. It hadn't been an impulsive decision; it had been a contingency plan.
"Life is material resistance," he murmured, uncorking the bottle. "And I've exceeded my limit."
The first drink burned, a chemical fire that prepared the ground. He began ingesting the pills with the efficiency of someone following a laboratory protocol. One by one. Without tears. Tears were redundant. Pain wasn't just another emotion in his system... it was an error signal in a nervous system that no longer had a purpose to continue existing in the wasteland of the living.
As the chemistry began shutting down the lights of his prefrontal cortex, Thomas looked out the window. Oxford's Gothic spires blurred under the rain. He thought about the Navier-Stokes equations, about the elegance of turbulent flow. He thought about how Russian history was a magnificent building constructed on swamp foundations. He thought it was a shame he couldn't fix it.
Darkness arrived, not as a dream, but as a server disconnect. Silence.
And then, the anomaly.
There was no void of non-existence that biology predicted. There was a transition. Thomas felt, with the part of his consciousness that shouldn't still exist, a sensation of vectorial displacement. He wasn't dying; he was being transmitted... or so he felt.
For a fraction of a second that seemed to last eons, he saw... or perceived, since he had no eyes... a structure. It wasn't heaven, nor hell. It was a network. Vast lines of golden and blue light that intersected in an impossible hyperbolic geometry, connecting points in the darkness. And in that network, he felt the presence of others.
He wasn't alone in transit. He perceived a coldness to his 'left,' a presence that radiated an ambition so dense it had its own gravity. A mind that didn't seek rest, but control...
[Player identified], whispered a voice that wasn't a voice, but data inserted directly into his cognitive core. [Insertion at coordinates: 59.7176° N, 30.4057° E. Temporal axis: -1.244].
Thomas tried to scream, to question, to analyze. But the network closed around him, compressing his vast adult intellect, his years of study, his pain and his engineering, into a biological container too small, too fragile.
The pressure was agonizing. And then, air.
. . . . . . . .
Alexandrovsky Palace (Александровский дворец), Tsarskoye Selo (Царское Село). August 1904.
The first piece of data he sensed was olfactory... beeswax, burned incense, and the metallic smell of clean blood. The second piece was auditory, a high-pitched, irritating scream that took several seconds to recognize as his own.
Thomas tried to open his eyes, but motor control of his extremities was nonexistent. His nervous system sent commands that were lost in the static of an immature biology. Panic.
Then, vision cleared. Blurry, saturated with light, but indisputably real.
He wasn't in Oxford. The ceiling above him wasn't the damp plaster of his student residence. It was a painted vault with cherubs and pink clouds, framed in gold moldings that screamed obscenely expensive late Baroque.
Giant faces leaned over him.
A woman. Pale, beautiful in a fragile and tense way, with eyes that contained religious terror. She wore a lace dress that Thomas instinctively dated to the early twentieth century. Alexandra Feodorovna (Александра Фёдоровна). The Empress.
A man. Trimmed beard, kind but weak blue eyes, with military epaulettes that gleamed under the gaslight. Nicholas II (Николай II). The last Autocrat.
"It's a boy," the man whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of relief and fear. "Is he... healthy?"
Thomas felt hands examining his tiny body. He felt the cold air on his naked skin. He tried to analyze his own physiology. He was breathing. His heart beat with a frantic but strong rhythm. There was no pain.
"He's perfect, Your Majesty," said a third voice, deep and professional. "Strong. No bleeding in the cord. Coagulation appears normal."
The word detonated in Thomas's mind like a demolition charge.
Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov. The glass child. The hemophiliac heir whose disease had been the state secret that rotted the empire from within, that brought Rasputin (Распутин), that accelerated the fall.
Thomas tried to move his extremities. They flexed. He gently struck the bars of the padded crib where they had placed him. There were no instant bruises. There was no dull pain of internal hemorrhaging that history books described as the Tsarevich's constant companion.
Understanding fell upon him with the heaviness of a steel beam.
He had died in 2025. He had been inserted in 1904. He was Alexei Romanov. But there was a deviated historical variable, this body wasn't sick.
The network he had glimpsed... the insertion. Someone had altered the initial conditions. Someone had fixed the genetic flaw.
Thomas looked at his biological parents. He saw in their eyes unconditional love, but his engineer's mind saw something more: he saw inefficiency. He saw a man incapable of governing and a woman paralyzed by mysticism. He saw an empire of 128 million souls sustained by a rotten administrative structure, heading toward an iceberg called the Twentieth Century at full speed.
And he was at the helm. Or would be, if he survived childhood.
'No,' thought Thomas, and the thought was clear, crystalline.
He cried no more. He observed. The room's temperature. The hierarchy of the servants. The weakness in his father's posture.
If he had been sent here, if that golden network and the cold presence he had felt in the void were real, then this wasn't a second chance. It was a mission. Or a game. And Thomas Blackwood had no intention of losing.
He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to begin drawing up the blueprints. He had fourteen years before the Ipatiev House (Ипатьевский дом) became his tomb. Fourteen years to reinforce the foundations, change the master beams, and convert this medieval autocracy into a machine capable of withstanding the storm he knew was coming.