The laptop looked alien on the mahogany desk.
It was a Dell XPS from 2024. Sleek aluminum. A carbon fiber keyboard. Beside the heavy brass inkwell and the Bakelite telephone, it looked like an artifact from a crashed spaceship.
Jake stared at its black screen.
He hadn't touched it since the day he woke up in Stalin's body. The battery had died that first night.
"Can you do it?" Jake asked.
Kurchatov stood behind him. The physicist was holding a tangle of copper wires and a voltmeter. He looked terrified.
"It requires 19.5 volts of direct current," Kurchatov muttered, reading the tiny print on the bottom of the laptop. "Our grid fluctuates between 200 and 240. If I plug it into the wall, it will explode."
"Don't plug it into the wall," Jake said. "Use the transformer."
Kurchatov adjusted a bulky wooden box filled with coils. It hummed angrily.
"This is madness, Comrade Stalin," Kurchatov whispered. "What is this machine? Where did you get it?"
"It is a calculator," Jake lied. "From the future."
Kurchatov didn't laugh. He had seen the graphite pile. He had seen the T-34s. He knew Stalin didn't make jokes about technology.
"Connect it," Jake ordered.
Kurchatov's hands shook as he stripped the wires. He twisted them into the charging port. He wrapped it in electrical tape.
"Ready?"
"Do it."
Kurchatov flipped the switch.
The transformer buzzed. A spark jumped. The smell of ozone filled the room.
Jake held his breath.
For a second, nothing happened. The screen remained a black void.
Then, a flicker.
The Dell logo appeared. White light cut through the gloom of the 1920s office.
"My God," Kurchatov gasped, shielding his eyes. "It is alive."
Jake felt a tear roll down his cheek. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The font. The pixels. The crisp, clean light of the 21st century.
The desktop loaded. His old wallpaper—a picture of his dog, Buster.
Buster had been dead for a hundred years.
"Leave me," Jake whispered.
"Comrade?"
"Get out!" Jake roared. "And speak of this to no one, or I will have you shot!"
Kurchatov scrambled out the door, pale as a sheet.
Jake locked it.
He sat down. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. It felt smooth, perfect.
He didn't have internet. The wifi icon was a useless gray X.
But he had his hard drive. He had his offline Wikipedia dump. He had his downloaded PDFs.
He opened the folder marked HISTORY_ARCHIVE.
He clicked on World_War_II_Timeline.pdf.
He waited.
The file opened.
He scrolled down to 1925.
1925: Locarno Treaties signed. Hitler publishes Mein Kampf. Stability in Europe.
Jake looked at the map on his wall.
Reality 1925: Soviet mobilization. German rocket program burned. Poland militarizing.
He wasn't reading history anymore. He was reading a fantasy novel.
He closed the file. He opened a new document. A blank Word page.
The cursor blinked. Blink. Blink. Blink.
It was waiting for him to write the new history.
"I am the author," Jake whispered.
He began to type.
Project Sledgehammer. Phase 2 objectives:
Secure border with Poland.
Integrate German scientists.
Prepare for American retaliation.
The keys clattered softly. It was a comforting sound. A sound of control.
Then, the screen flickered.
A pop-up window appeared.
SYSTEM ERROR: CRITICAL BATTERY FAILURE.
"No," Jake hissed. "No, no, no."
The transformer sparked again. Smoke poured out of the wooden box.
The screen went black.
"Come back!" Jake shouted. He slammed his fist on the desk.
Silence. The laptop was dead again. A brick.
Jake sat in the darkness. The smell of burning insulation stung his nose.
He had touched the future for five minutes. And now it was gone.
But in those five minutes, he had realized something.
The file World_War_II_Timeline.pdf was static. It was dead.
But the blank page... the blank page was alive.
Jake stood up. He shoved the laptop into his safe.
He didn't need the computer. He didn't need the archives.
He walked to the window.
"I don't need to know what happens," Jake said to the night. "I decide what happens."
The interrogation room in the Lubyanka was surprisingly clean.
Wernher von Braun sat on a metal chair. He was bruised. His lip was split. But his eyes were defiant.
Robert Goddard sat next to him, slumped, defeated.
Menzhinsky stood by the door.
Jake walked in.
Von Braun looked up. "So," the boy sneered in German. "You are the barbarian king."
Jake pulled up a chair. He sat backwards, straddling it.
"I am the man who saved your life," Jake said in perfect German. "If I hadn't taken you, the British would have bombed your lab next week."
"You burned my work!" von Braun shouted. "You destroyed the Aggregat!"
"I destroyed a toy," Jake said.
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a piece of paper. It was the sketch of the launch rail Menzhinsky had intercepted.
Jake tore it in half.
"You are thinking too small, Wernher," Jake said. "You want to hit London? Paris?"
He leaned closer.
"I want to hit Washington."
Goddard's head snapped up. "That's impossible. The fuel load... the staging..."
"It is possible," Jake said. "If you have the resources of a continent."
He looked at von Braun.
"I will give you a city. A whole city in the Urals. I will give you ten thousand workers. I will give you all the aluminum in Russia."
"And in return?" von Braun asked, suspicious.
"You build me a rocket that can carry a five-ton payload across the Atlantic," Jake said.
"Five tons?" Goddard gasped. "What weighs five tons?"
"A sun," Jake said.
The scientists exchanged a look. They didn't understand the payload. But they understood the scale.
They were dreamers. And Jake was offering them an unlimited budget.
"If we refuse?" von Braun asked.
"Then you go to Siberia," Jake said simply. "You shovel snow until you die. And someone else builds the rocket."
Von Braun looked at his hands. He looked at Goddard.
The boy's ambition was warring with his patriotism. Ambition was winning.
"I need titanium," von Braun said. "And liquid oxygen."
"You'll have it by Monday," Jake said.
He stood up.
"Welcome to the Soviet Space Program."
The courtyard. Dawn.
Nadya was walking through the snow. She was wrapped in a fur coat.
She stopped by the wall where the executions usually happened. The snow was fresh, clean. No blood today.
She held the silver rattle Menzhinsky had given her.
She shook it. A tiny, tinny sound.
"Nadya."
She turned.
Jake was watching her from the doorway. He looked exhausted. But his eyes were burning with a strange new light.
"You were with the Germans," Nadya said.
"I was recruiting," Jake said.
"Recruiting for what?"
"For the future," Jake said. He walked over to her. He put a hand on her stomach.
"He kicked," Nadya said softly.
Jake felt it. A small flutter against his palm.
A life. A real life.
"He is strong," Jake said.
"He needs a father, Koba," Nadya said. "Not a Tsar."
"He will have both," Jake promised.
He looked up at the sky. It was a pale, winter blue.
In his timeline, Yuri Gagarin went to space in 1961.
"We are going to put a man on the moon," Jake said suddenly.
Nadya looked at him like he was crazy. "The moon? Koba, people are hungry. They need bread, not the moon."
"They will have bread," Jake said. "But they need something to look up to. Something that isn't a war."
He squeezed her hand.
"I'm going to give them the stars, Nadya. Before the Americans even figure out how to fly."
It was a pivot. A massive, desperate pivot.
He couldn't fix the war on the ground. The politics were too messy. The hatreds were too deep.
So he would win the war in the sky.
If he controlled orbit, he controlled the world.
"Come inside," Jake said. "It's cold."
They walked back into the fortress.
Behind them, the sun rose over Moscow. It glittered on the red stars and the golden domes.
The laptop was dead. The history books were closed.
Jake Vance was flying solo. And for the first time, he wasn't afraid.
Washington D.C. The White House.
President Calvin Coolidge sat at his desk. He was reading a report from the OSS.
Subject: Soviet Industrial Activity.
Anomalies: Massive power diversion to Urals. Disappearance of leading German and American rocketry experts. Sudden modernization of Red Army.
Coolidge frowned. He was a man of few words.
He picked up the phone.
"Get me Hoover," Coolidge said.
"Which one, Mr. President?"
"Edgar," Coolidge said. "The FBI man. Tell him we have a problem in Russia."
He looked at the map on his wall. The red blob of the Soviet Union seemed to be pulsing. Growing.
"They are waking up," Coolidge whispered.
He didn't know about the time traveler. He didn't know about the laptop.
But he knew one thing.
The Cold War hadn't waited for 1945. It had started today.
And America was already behind.