Chen Yuan, 26 years old, a web designer in a second-tier city in the south, fell asleep at his desk due to excessive overtime work. When he opened his eyes again, he found himself lying in a strange apartment with a Soviet citizen ID card in his pocket. Outside the window was a city full of Russian slogans, and the radio was broadcasting the news that "The Government of the United States of America has officially signed a dissolution agreement."
The time is 1996. The location is a core city in a Soviet republic.
The bifurcation point in this world occurred in 1962 - the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with the complete concession of the United States. Over the next thirty years, the Soviet Union gradually replaced the United States and became the only superpower. The United States, on the other hand, was disintegrating amid internal and external troubles and split into seven independent political entities.
Chen Yuan became a Soviet citizen named "Alexey Chen" and worked as a bundler of newspapers and periodicals in a printing factory. He queued up to buy rationed food every day, ate cabbage soup and brown bread, and listened to the official narrative in Pravda. He lived a life that was calm on the surface but full of weirdness on the inside. That sense of weirdness is as ubiquitous as the air - everyone's faces carry a calmness of being content with the status quo, but that calmness is too perfect, so perfect that it looks like a photo that has been retouched repeatedly.
Three months later, a mysterious card appeared in his mailbox. He was led to a building called the "People's Palace", where he saw a suspended transparent sphere, a group of mysterious people with identical faces, and an existence from a higher dimension who called himself "K" -
