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 my temples, as if some clumsy satanic drummer had set up shop behind my forehead and was beating out a devil's roll with every heartbeat. Then came the dry mouth. Not just thirst, but the sensation of someone packing my throat with scorching Saharan sand and polishing it with sandpaper. My tongue, swollen and rough, lay in my mouth like a dead lizard baked dry in the sun. Consciousness returned reluctantly, in torn shreds, clinging to the merciful 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 could have. I tried to grimace, but even that simple movement sent a fresh wave of nausea surging up my throat.
Except it was worse than that. It wasn't just the smell. It was the vomit itself. A sticky, cooling puddle of my own 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 absolutely 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, I pressed my trembling, unnervingly weak hands against the sticky, rough floor and forced my poisoned body upright. The room swayed like a ship's deck in a gale. I squeezed my eyes shut, gripped the floor with my fingers, and waited out the dizziness before finally looking around. What I saw made me grind my teeth. I hated it.
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, 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, forced to drink myself 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 then did it finally sink into my sluggish, half-functioning brain, that specific discrepancy 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 rough, sinewy hands, covered in a web of old scars and calluses from a decade of working wood and metal. Hands that could drive a hundred-millimeter nail into pine with one clean strike and not even feel it. These hands looked fit only for typing or turning pages. And overall, I felt somehow... shorter. Lighter.
Too much. Too many questions and not a single answer. I knew only that I knew nothing. But I needed to figure this out. Determined to find some kind of clue, I staggered to the only separate room in the studio, the bathroom. Every step sent a dull throb through my skull, and my body ached mercilessly, but somehow I made it inside.
Dirty would be putting it mildly. Deep yellow stains 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 instead of any real toiletries. A single bare bulb overhead cast a dim, sickly light.
Everything in that room screamed poverty, indifference, and neglect.
My gaze landed on the grimy mirror above the sink, covered in dried splashes. I looked into it.
"Oh, what the fuck!" I burst 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 crinkles at the corners of 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, about one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall. 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 one-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 the hell was I supposed to do now? Questions swarmed through my head like angry bees, and the 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 into 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 sluggish 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, stained ceiling, trying not to think about anything. Surprisingly, I started feeling drowsy. Good. To hell with problems. Things would look better in the morning. 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 faded into 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 alive: 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 the streets of Hell's Kitchen after dark. You'd 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 for 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 same one I'd caught with someone else just yesterday. A rich, spoiled kid who'd pulled up in a shiny Audi worth several times the rent on this studio. The shock had hit John so hard he couldn't hold himself together, and he'd spent his last dollar on cheap whiskey. He decided to drown his grief. And, apparently, 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'd spent the last ten years living in his hometown, restoring his parents' house from a ruin into something worth living in. No teenage infatuation with some red-haired heartbreaker. No bohemian arts college. I had no senseless, suicidal drinking that had apparently brought John Thompson's story to an 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 the wheat from the 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. I remembered the sharp, tart smell of fresh pine shavings from planing the boards for the veranda. The familiar weight of my favorite hammer in my hand, old and Soviet, had been passed down from my grandfather to my father and then to me. I could see the view of a crimson sunset from the porch I had finished just 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 that state? The thought lodged a heavy lump in my throat, and my eyes stung.
All that was left was to accept it.
Whatever lay behind my transmigration, some entity, some law of the universe, or some cosmic joke, it was beyond my understanding.
My options were limited. Either jump off a roof and end this absurd story, or just live.
I intended to live. The memories belonging to the body I now inhabited had finally settled into a coherent picture, and I could separate them from my own. They were dim, like an old, faded photograph. Reviewing 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. He lived in an orphanage until twelve, then a foster family that differed little from the orphanage, since there were twelve other kids in the house besides him. The enterprising guardians were obviously living off the generous subsidies 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.
As an orphan, he had received a subsidized 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 by on odd jobs and social benefits, tormented by 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 hadn't gotten hooked on drugs. He hadn't ended up in prison. He'd 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 every guy's dream at college, the one John had been pining over so hopelessly and one-sidedly. Coincidences like that don't happen. And then there was the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. And Stark Industries Tower, stabbing into the sky over central Manhattan. And the Daily Bugle with its infamous editor-in-chief, J. Jonah Jameson, famous throughout New York. 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 by 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 the 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, reciting my late mother's favorite saying. God rest her soul. I stared 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 filling my head 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 that resembled clean clothes in the wardrobe, filled a bucket with water in the bathroom, and got to work. I scrubbed the floor with focused intensity, attacking the ingrained grime, and the simple physical labor helped order my thoughts. After that, I wiped away the dust, tackled the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, and bagged all the trash, though I decided against taking it out to the street at night in New York's most dangerous neighborhood.
Having reached no conclusions, I sat down at the writing desk where an old, scratched laptop sat. I opened the lid, automatically typed in the password from John's memory, and was about to look up the current state of the world when whatever higher power manages these things for people in my situation decided this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without fanfare or ceremony, 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'd absorbed enough information about the world for the system to register my understanding of the situation I was in. Or maybe I was overcomplicating it and a simple eight-hour timer had just run out since I'd first woken 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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