The awakening…
It wasn’t just bad.
It was outright shitty, the kind that makes you regret the very fact of your existence.
The first blow was a hammer of pain splitting his skull from the inside.
Not a sharp, cutting pain, but a dull, throbbing rhythm in his temples, as if behind the bone, an unskilled satanist drummer was beating a devilish roll with every heartbeat.
The second came with the dry mouth.
Not just thirst, but a feeling like his throat had been filled with the hot sand of the Sahara and then sanded down.
His tongue, swollen and rough, rolled around in his mouth like a dead, sun-dried lizard.
Consciousness returned reluctantly, in ragged shreds, clinging to the saving, dark remnants of oblivion, but reality was persistent and merciless.
Before he could fully come to his senses and gather the fragments of his thoughts together, a smell hit his nose.
A nauseating, sour-sweet, unmistakable stench.
The smell of vomit.
Ironically, that stench cleared his mind better than a bucket of ice water could have.
He tried to wince, but even that simple movement of his facial muscles brought a new wave of nausea rising to his throat.
Although no…
It was even worse.
It wasn’t just the smell.
It was the vomit itself.
A sticky, cooling puddle of his own body’s vile secretions had soaked through his T-shirt and unpleasantly chilled the skin on his back and shoulder.
The realization of this fact washed over him like an icy wave of disgust, making him shudder.
And that would be one thing, things like that happen in life, but this was decidedly not what he remembered from the last moments before sleep.
He distinctly remembered going to bed.
At his own home.
In his clean, freshly made bed.
Completely sober and in a sound state of mind.
And now…
With difficulty, leaning on the sticky, rough floor with trembling, unusually weak hands, he forced his poisoned body into a sitting position.
The room swayed like a ship’s deck in a nine-point storm.
He squeezed his eyes shut, digging his fingers into the floor and waiting out the dizziness, and finally looked around.
What he saw he categorically, down to the grinding of his teeth, did not like.
This was not his bedroom.
This wasn’t even close to his home.
A tiny one-room, or rather, a studio.
Roughly twenty-five, maybe thirty square meters.
A large room, if that word even applied here, serving as both living room, bedroom, and God knows what else.
A worn-out couch with springs poking out in places, one that had seen better days back during Nixon.
A clumsy wardrobe made of cheap particleboard with faux-wood veneer peeling at the edges.
A desk piled with papers and empty instant noodle packages.
In the corner huddled a kitchen set — a couple of cabinets, a sink with a mountain of dirty dishes, and a two-burner electric hotplate.
Everything looked not just shabby, but squalid and hopeless.
Compared to my spacious private house, which I had been raising from the ruins with my own hands for the last ten years, this place looked like a doghouse next to a palace.
But that wasn’t the main question.
WHAT.
WAS.
I.
DOING.
HERE?
Thoughts were tangled, catching on each other.
Kidnapped, forcibly drugged into unconsciousness, and dumped here?
An insane idea.
Who would need me?
Did my friends set up some idiotic prank beyond good and evil?
No, not their style at all.
And practically all of them were back in the city, hundreds of kilometers away.
Did they have nothing better to do than drive in the middle of the night to pull off such a complicated and pointless operation?
Plus, they would have had to somehow get me out of the house without waking me, pour liters of alcohol down my throat…
No, it didn’t add up.
Not at all.
And only now did it dawn on his still-not-too-sharp mind.
That discrepancy that his subconscious had been stubbornly ignoring, but it kept pushing its way out, causing a dull, gnawing anxiety.
The body!
The proportions!
His hands!
What the hell did they look so…
skinny and delicate?
These were not his working, sinewy hands, covered in a dense web of old scars and calluses from ten years of working with wood and metal!
Hands that could drive a hundred-nail into a pine board with one precise punch and not even feel it.
But these…
These were only good for pressing keyboard buttons or flipping pages.
And overall, he felt like he was…
shorter?
Lighter?
Difficult.
Too many questions and not a single answer.
All I know is that I know nothing.
But I need to figure it out.
With a firm intention to find at least some clue, I, staggering, headed for the only separate room in this studio — the bathroom.
Every step echoed with a hollow pain in my head, my body ached mercilessly, but I somehow made it inside.
Dirty would be too mild a word.
The ingrained yellowness on the toilet porcelain, a deep crack in the sink haphazardly taped over with gray electrical tape, a slippery cheap bar of soap instead of the real thing.
The single bulb without a shade gave off a dim, deathly light.
Everything here screamed of poverty, indifference, and neglect.
My gaze fixed on the grimy mirror over the sink, covered in dried splatters.
That’s the mirror I looked into.
“What the fuck, man!” escaped me in a hoarse, unfamiliar youthful voice.
I recoiled from the mirror as if it were a leprous zombie-creature with a timed explosive device on its chest.
Staring back at me from the mirror was…
not Me.
That’s the short version.
The long version: a youth of about nineteen was staring back at me.
Disheveled dark brown hair, large brown eyes filled with a mixture of animal fear and bewilderment, and a rather ordinary, unremarkable face.
None of my usual three-day stubble, no network of crow’s feet around the eyes, no deep scar on the chin left by a slipping chisel a couple of years ago.
Just smooth, pale skin with barely noticeable traces of teenage acne.
A thin build, about five-foot-nine, judging by rough estimates.
Clothes: a gray T-shirt soaked in vomit and plaid cotton shorts.
I stood there thunderstruck, staring at the reflection, but I didn’t see it.
Before my inner eye rose a different picture.
My workshop in the garage.
The smell of ozone from a working welding machine mixed with the tangy sweetness of pine shavings.
My hands, which I had so inappropriately thought of earlier…
I remembered them down to the smallest detail.
A broad, calloused palm that could easily grip the end of a two-by-four.
A network of small whitish scars — the memory of slipping drill bits, sharp metal edges, and splinters that had become part of the skin’s landscape.
Under the nails — an ingrained, almost permanent dark line of machine oil and wood dust that no solvent could remove.
Those hands were a tool, an extension of my will.
And what I saw now on myself and in the mirror…
These pale, narrow palms with the thin fingers of a pianist or an artist — they evoked in me not just rejection, but a deep, animal sense of wrongness.
As if they had replaced not just my body, but my very essence.
I clenched my fists, feeling the unfamiliar crunch of thin joints.
No, these were absolutely not my fists.
How?
How did I end up in the body of this…
guy?
Why me of all people?
What happened to my real body?
Who even is this guy?
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
Questions swarmed in my head like frenzied bees, and the hangover headache, which had refused to subside, turned into a deafening migraine.
With difficulty, I pulled off the vomit-soaked clothes and disgustedly threw them into a corner, then climbed under a cold shower.
The icy streams brought me back to my senses a little, washing away not just the dirt but also some of the primal shock.
Deciding not to clutter my barely functioning head with a thousand and one questions for now, I stepped around the puddle of vomit on the floor and collapsed onto the couch.
Lying down and staring at the cracked, finely wrinkled ceiling, I tried to think of nothing.
Surprisingly, I started to feel sleepy.
That was good.
To hell with the problems — morning is wiser than evening.
A weak, irrational hope still flickered inside me that all this was just a dream.
A bad, horribly realistic, damn scary dream, but just a dream.
With such hopeful thoughts, I slipped back into the kingdom of Morpheus, and even the headache finally faded into the background.
How long I slept…
I have no idea.
But when I woke up, a thick, velvety night already reigned outside the window.
The city lived its own life: neon signs and lanterns cast bizarre, dancing shadows on the walls of the room; the hum of cars and a distant, mournful wail of a siren drifted in.
New York at night must be beautiful, but it’s better not to venture into the streets of Hell’s Kitchen after dark.
You’d be very lucky if they only took your wallet and smartphone, not your life.
Though, there’s a chance the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen might hear your prayer for help and take care of the thugs.
But what would he ask for in return?
They wouldn’t call a simple vigilante the Devil for his pretty eyes…
“What the?..” I whispered into the emptiness, suddenly realizing that these thoughts…
weren’t entirely mine.
They flooded in suddenly, like a burst dam.
Someone else’s memories, feelings, emotions.
I — John Thompson.
An orphan.
A student at New York College of Arts.
And I’m head over heels in love with a red-haired girl from my class.
The very one I literally caught with another guy yesterday.
A rich rich kid who picked her up in a shiny Audi whose price exceeded the cost of this rental studio several times over.
The realization hit John’s mind so hard that he couldn’t hold back and spent his last money on cheap whiskey.
Decided to drown his sorrow in alcohol.
And, judging by everything, he drowned himself.
No!
No!
NO!
I am Alexander Nikiforov!
A thirty-eight-year-old bachelor freelancer, something of a jack-of-all-trades by my own humble estimation, who spent the last ten years living in my hometown, restoring a private house inherited from my parents from the ruins.
No stupid teenage crushes on red-haired she-devils, no bohemian art colleges, and certainly no act of senseless suicidal alcoholism, which probably ended the suffering of that damned John Thompson!
“I am Me, even if I have the memories of an inexperienced idiot from the USA!” I declared firmly and clearly into the emptiness, cementing this important fact first and foremost for myself.
It’s one thing to just be aware, continuing to get tangled in your own thoughts, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, and another to know for certain that it is your personality that is dominant.
I am Alexander, somehow ended up in this kid’s body.
And for a moment, it hit me.
Not panic, no.
A hollow, black, hopeless longing.
Home.
My home.
Ten years of life poured into every brick, every board.
In my memory surfaced the pungent smell of fresh pine shavings when I planed the boards for the porch.
The feel of the familiar weight of my favorite hammer in my hand — an old Soviet one, inherited from my father, and him from his father.
The view of the crimson sunset from the porch I finished just a month ago.
All my labors, all my plans…
All of it was just erased.
As if I had never existed.
What happened to my body?
Did it just die in its sleep?
Is it lying there now, growing cold in a house that, since I have no heirs, will go to the state?
At these thoughts, a heavy lump lodged in my throat, and my eyes treacherously stung.
All that’s left for me…
is to accept it.
The entity, the law of the universe, or just a cruel joke of the cosmos — whatever was behind my relocation, it was beyond my understanding.
There weren’t many options.
Either jump off the roof, ending this absurd story, or…
just live.
And live I intended.
The memories of the “meat suit” had finally settled, arranged themselves into a more or less coherent picture, and now I could separate them from my core personality.
They were…
dim, like an old faded photograph.
Mentally running through John Thompson’s biography, I realized the guy I got was as ordinary, nondescript, and unremarkable as they come.
At seven, he lost his parents in a car accident.
Until twelve, an orphanage.
Then a foster family, which in fact was little different from the orphanage, since besides him, there were twelve other children there.
Obviously, the enterprising guardians lived off substantial social payments from the New York city hall.
John felt no particular warmth towards them, understanding perfectly well that for them, he was just a business project.
So as soon as he turned eighteen, he set off on his own.
Being an orphan, he received a subsidized social loan for education at the College of Arts, majoring in theater acting.
And for a year now, he had been eking out a miserable existence as a poor student, scraping by on odd jobs, welfare, and the eternal torment of the student loan he’d have to figure out how to pay back after graduation.
And it would seem, well, life’s life, especially by American standards.
He didn’t get hooked on drugs, didn’t go to prison, even tried to study.
But as soon as one specific name surfaced in the stream of memories, I understood what global, universal hell my fate had dragged me into.
Mary Jane Watson.
The red-haired honor student, beauty, activist, and dream of all the guys in college, for whom John had pined so hopelessly…
No such coincidences exist.
And also the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
And also the Stark Industries tower piercing the sky in the center of Manhattan.
And also the Daily Bugle newspaper with its flamboyant editor-in-chief, famous throughout New York, J.
Jonah Jameson.
Not enough?
How about news about the mysterious nation of Latveria?
Or the upcoming space expedition that was being chewed over in all the news — the expedition of one Reed Richards.
The cherry on top of this cake of madness was Spider-Woman — a masked heroine who had appeared in the city relatively recently but had already won the hearts of the citizens, and whom the mustachioed scandal-monger from the Bugle absolutely despised.
I am in the Marvel world.
A world where goddamn mutants fight on equal footing with Asgardian gods.
A world where flying-by cosmic abomination can wipe out with a snap of its fingers not just a planet — half a galaxy.
A world where the concept of the Multiverse is so basic that there are literally an infinite number of them…
The main thing is not to end up in that cluster which is slated for destruction on a whim of the conditional Phoenix or by decision of the Living Tribunal.
“Well…
Heavy is my unlight life, my cursed existence, my bitter fate…” I muttered my mother’s favorite saying, God rest her soul, staring blankly at the wall.
Existential dread rolled over me like an icy wave, threatening to paralyze my will.
To distract myself somehow, I walked to the window.
The view was of the blind brick wall of the neighboring building and a narrow, garbage-strewn alley.
The echoes of a drunken argument drifted up from below, somewhere far away a siren began to wail.
Hell’s Kitchen in all its glory.
So what the hell am I supposed to do in a situation like this?
My gaze fell again on the drying puddle of vomit.
I wasn’t the least bit sleepy.
Instead of burdening my brain with heavy thoughts that were unlikely to lead to anything useful, I decided to do what I could at least — clean up.
Finding something in the closet that remotely resembled clean clothes, I filled a bucket with water in the bathroom and got to work.
I scrubbed the floor with a vengeance, rubbed off the ingrained grime, and this simple physical labor helped organize my thoughts.
Along the way, I wiped the dust, washed the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, gathered all the trash into bags, but I didn’t dare take them out at night into the streets of the most dangerous district of New York.
Having come to no concrete conclusion, I sat down at the desk where an old, scratched laptop lay.
Opening the lid and automatically entering the password from John’s memory, I was about to start searching for information on the current state of affairs in the world, but the higher entity, or whoever is responsible for logistics for people from other worlds, decided this was the perfect moment for a surprise.
Without pomp, without unnecessary fanfare, a modest, translucent blue notification flashed right before my eyes.
[System “Celestial Forge” Activated!]
Whoa…
Now that’s a twist.
And what, I wonder, earned me such an honor?
Maybe there was a complete assimilation of memories?
Or did I get enough information about the world and, as a result, realize what a mess I was in?
Or maybe I’m overcomplicating things, and it’s just been a conditional eight hours since my first awakening?
Ah, what the hell does it matter!
The main thing is that this is a system.
And a system is a chance.
A chance not just to survive, but, perhaps, to achieve something in this crazy world.