The first thing to register was the cold.
It wasn't the gentle, managed chill of an overzealous air conditioner from his apartment in 2025. This was a hostile, invasive cold, a physical presence that seeped through the thin, scratchy blanket and sank its teeth directly into his bones. It carried on its razor's edge the smells of a world he didn't recognize: the acrid bite of cheap tobacco, the damp funk of coal smoke, and the sour tang of unwashed bodies.
Jake Vance's eyes cracked open. The world was dark, painted in shades of gray and deep shadow. A single, unsteady flame danced atop a gas lamp on a far table, its light flickering as if struggling for breath.
He tried to sit up, and a groan escaped his lips. His whole body felt alien. A dull, grinding ache lived in his left shoulder, an old pain that wasn't his. His hands, when he pushed himself up, felt rough and calloused against the splintered floorboards, the hands of a laborer, not a high school history teacher who spent his days wrestling with smartboards and grading papers. His own body was soft, yielding to the slow decay of his late thirties. This one felt… coiled. A bundle of wiry muscle and nervous energy that hummed beneath the skin, thrumming with a tension that set his teeth on edge.
Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness. This wasn't his room. This wasn't his body.
He pushed the threadbare blanket aside and staggered to his feet, his balance precarious. The room was a small, squalid box. Water stains bled down the wallpaper in patterns like diseased maps. A heavy wool coat, smelling of rain and grit, hung from a nail on the door. On the rickety table beside the sputtering lamp, there was a half-eaten hunk of black bread, hard as a rock, a glass of what looked like cold, dark tea, and a stack of pamphlets.
He picked one up. The paper was coarse, the ink smudged. The script was a foreign, elegant scrawl of curves and hooks he vaguely recognized but couldn't place. Georgian. Beneath it, in the more familiar Cyrillic alphabet, was Russian. He could parse some of it, fragments from his university electives. Workers… Struggle… Revolution…
A part of his mind, the analytical teacher part, tried to piece it together. Georgia. Early 20th century. Bolshevik propaganda. It felt like a bizarrely immersive historical simulation, the kind of thing tech billionaires dreamed of. But the pain in his shoulder, the grit under his fingernails, the gnawing cold in his marrow—it was all too real.
He needed to see his face. He needed an anchor, a single piece of evidence to prove he was still Jake Vance, somehow caught in a terrible, vivid dream.
His eyes scanned the grimy walls and found it. A small, cracked mirror, its silvering flaked away at the edges like a fading memory. He took a hesitant step closer, his heart hammering against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive silence. He leaned in, his breath fogging the glass for a second before clearing.
The face that stared back was not his.
It was the face of a man in his mid-to-late twenties, gaunt but intense. The skin was rough, scarred with the faint, tell-tale pockmarks of a childhood bout of smallpox. A thick, dark mustache covered his upper lip, and his hair was a messy, untamed black. But it was the eyes that seized him, that froze the blood in his veins. They were dark, deep-set, and radiated a chilling, predatory intelligence. They were the eyes of a man who had seen hardship and had hardened himself against it, becoming something more dangerous than the world that had tried to break him.
Jake knew this face. He'd shown it to his students just last week on a PowerPoint slide titled "The Rise of Totalitarianism."
Ioseb. Ioseb Jughashvili.
The name echoed in the silent chamber of his skull, followed by the one the entire world would come to fear.
Stalin.
The room seemed to tilt, the floor dropping away beneath him. He stumbled back, his hand flying to his mouth to stifle a cry that was half-gasp, half-sob. It couldn't be. It was impossible. He wasn't just in the past. He was wearing the skin of a monster.
His mind, his greatest asset as a teacher, became a torture device. It wasn't just a vague sense of dread; it was a torrent of concrete, horrifying data. The Great Purge of '37. The show trials. The NKVD. The Holodomor in Ukraine, a man-made famine that starved millions. The endless labyrinth of the Gulag archipelago, stretching across the frozen expanse of Siberia, swallowing lives like a thirsty god.
Twenty million. Thirty million. The numbers were so vast they became meaningless abstractions in a textbook. But now, standing in this cold room, wearing this man's flesh, they were terrifyingly real. Every future death, every tortured confession, every starving child felt like a debt that had just been placed squarely on his soul.
He felt the weight of it all pressing down, threatening to shatter him. What could he possibly do? Try to be a "good" Stalin? It was absurd. It was like trying to be a "gentle" plague. The very machinery of this man's life, the political currents he was already caught in, the brutal logic of the revolution—it all led to one place. A mountain of skulls.
He, Jake Vance, the man who got anxiety from parent-teacher conferences, who couldn't bring himself to step on a spider, was now in control of the vessel for one of history's greatest butchers.
The thought brought a moment of shocking, absolute clarity. The panic receded, replaced by a cold, hard certainty. There was no dilemma here. There was no grand mission to "fix" history. There was only one moral, ethical, and necessary action. The history teacher in him saw it as a simple, terrible equation. The death of one man, right here, right now, to prevent a genocide.
He had to kill Joseph Stalin. Before the real one had a chance to begin.
His eyes darted around the room, frantically searching for a weapon, a tool. The bread knife on the table was small, probably dull. Too uncertain. Poison? Impossible. He needed something absolute. Something final.
His gaze fell on the window. It was tall and narrow, overlooking a dark alleyway. He strode over to it, his movements no longer hesitant but driven by a grim purpose. He wasn't Jake Vance anymore. He was the hand of a more humane future, here to perform a terrible, necessary surgery on the timeline.
The old wood of the window frame groaned in protest as he forced it open. An icy gust of wind blasted his face, carrying the smell of wet cobblestones and decay from three stories below. It would be quick. It would be certain.
He placed a calloused hand on the sill, his knuckles white. There were no tears. No second thoughts. Just the chilling, resolved quiet of a man who had been given an impossible responsibility and had found the only answer.
He swung one leg over the edge, the cold stone biting through his thin trousers. For a moment, he was perched between two worlds: the squalid room of the past and the unforgiving cobblestones that promised to save the future.
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