Chen Yuan, twenty-six, is a web designer in a second-tier city in southern China. After working overtime for too long, he falls asleep at his desk. When he opens his eyes again, he finds himself lying in an unfamiliar apartment. In his pocket is a Soviet citizen's identity card. Outside the window is a city covered in Russian slogans, and the radio is reporting that "the government of the United States of America has officially signed an agreement to dissolve."
The year is 1996. The place is a major city in one of the Soviet republics.
The timeline diverged in 1962: the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with the United States' complete retreat, and over the next thirty years the Soviet Union gradually took America's place as the world's sole superpower. The United States, beset by internal and external crises, fell apart into seven independent political entities.
Chen Yuan has become a Soviet citizen named "Alexei Chen," working at a printing factory bundling newspapers and periodicals. Every day, he queues for rationed food, eats cabbage soup and black bread, and listens to the official narrative in Pravda, living a life that seems peaceful on the surface but feels strange at every turn. That strangeness is everywhere, like the air itself. Everyone's face wears a calm acceptance of things as they are, but the calm is too perfect, so perfect it seems like a photograph that's been retouched again and again.
Three months later, a mysterious card appears in his mailbox. It leads him to a building called the "Palace of the People," where he encounters a floating transparent sphere, a group of mysterious people with identical faces, and a being calling itself "K," from a higher dimension...
