Alistair Finch believed history was a series of levers and gears, a grand machine that, with the right pressure in the right place, could be steered. It was this belief that made his career as a historian so frustrating—he was a master mechanic forbidden to touch the engine. His obsession was the Russian Empire, a behemoth he felt could have dominated the 20th century if not for the tragic incompetence of its leaders. He was mentally outlining a new paper on this very topic when the crosstown bus ran the red light, proving that a grand machine can still be broken by a single, stupidly malfunctioning part. His final thought was one of pure academic indignation.
His last truly conscious thought had been of a map. It was a projection from his final presentation: the Russian Empire, circa 1890. A sprawling, bloated titan of a state, rife with ethnic tension, hamstrung by a feudal hangover, and ruled by an autocracy wholly unprepared for the industrial crucible of the 20th century. Alistair had argued, with a passion that often made his colleagues uncomfortable, that its fall wasn't inevitable. Not the collapse, not the 70 years of brutal communism, not the eventual decline into a fractured kleptocracy. What it lacked was a mind unbound by the fatalism of its time.
The shriek of twisting metal and the final, explosive punctuation of breaking glass was the last thing his 21st-century ears ever heard.
Then, silence. A profound, absolute quiet that felt less like the absence of sound and more like its own entity. It was followed by a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the chilling emptiness of non-existence, a void that stretched into an eternity and yet lasted but a moment.
Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a violent, hacking cough.
Alistair's—no, not Alistair's—body convulsed on a hard, lumpy surface. The air he dragged into his lungs was thick with the smell of damp wool, woodsmoke, and something acridly unpleasant, like old sweat and boiled cabbage. It was a stench of poverty, a smell wholly alien to his sanitized modern world.
His eyes cracked open. The world was blurry, lit by the weak, flickering orange of a single tallow candle. Rough-hewn wooden beams hung low overhead, shadowed and menacing. He was lying on a thin, straw-stuffed mattress laid over a simple wooden frame. A coarse, threadbare blanket was tangled around his legs.
Panic, cold and sharp, tried to seize him, but it was immediately submerged by a tidal wave of… something else. A torrent of memories, feelings, and sensations that were not his own flooded his mind.
Mikhail Anatolievich Volkov. Baron Volkov. Age: eighteen years. Lord of Volkovo, a patch of mediocre farmland and struggling forest two days' ride from the nearest provincial town in the governorate of Pskov. Father, the Baron Anatoly, dead four months from consumption. Mother, dead ten years. The barony is mortgaged to the hilt to a merchant in St. Petersburg. The three remaining serf-families-turned-tenants are threatening to leave before winter.
The information came not as learned facts, but as lived experience. He could feel the phantom chill of a Russian winter in his bones, taste the watery kasha that was his daily meal, and understand the complex mix of pride and despair that came with a noble title attached to a failing estate. The Russian language wasn't a translation in his head; it was simply… thought. He knew the nuances of addressing a peasant versus a fellow noble, the proper way to make the sign of the cross, the gnawing hunger that was a constant companion.
Alistair's own mind reeled, fighting for dominance over the intruding consciousness of the boy, Mikhail. He was both men at once. He was the 38-year-old historian with a doctorate in economic history and a morbid fascination with grand strategy. And he was the 18-year-old, impoverished Russian baron, whose final, desperate memory was of a feverish collapse after days of trying to fix a leak in the manor's dilapidated roof. The boy's body had given out.
And Alistair's mind had taken its place.
He pushed himself up, his new body protesting with the aches of illness and malnutrition. He was thin, all sharp angles and bony limbs beneath a simple linen shirt. Stumbling to a small, warped mirror hanging on the wall, he confronted his new reality. The face that stared back was pale and gaunt, with wide, startled gray eyes and a shock of unruly dark hair. It was the face of a boy on the cusp of manhood, a face etched with a hardship Alistair had only ever read about.
The boy Mikhail's panic began to fade, not replaced by calm, but shoved aside by a colder, sharper consciousness. Alistair's mind, a tool honed on data and strategic modeling, started to work through the sensory chaos. It latched onto facts, anchoring itself against the tide of impossible reality. This wasn't some historical theme park. It was his specialized subject, sprung to life. He was no longer a spectator looking at a map; he was a piece on the board, and while his starting position was laughably weak, for the first time in his life, he could actually play.
He staggered to the room's single, grime-streaked window and pushed open the heavy wooden shutter. The pre-dawn light revealed a bleak landscape. A muddy yard, a listing stable, and beyond it, flat, uninspiring fields disappearing into a line of dark forest under a vast, indifferent sky. This was his domain. An empire of dust and echoes.
The despair of his new situation began to morph into something else, a terrifying, exhilarating spark. The frustration he had felt in his own time, the yearning to build instead of just analyze, now had an outlet beyond his imagination. The simulations he had run, the empires he had built in the sterile environment of a computer, were no longer just a game.
This was the arena.
He was no longer Dr. Alistair Finch, a man out of time. He was Baron Mikhail Volkov, a man with all the time in the world. And a monumental task ahead. First, survival. Then, growth. And then…
A slow, cold smile stretched across the young baron's face, a look of predatory calculation that belonged to a man twice his age and from a different century altogether.
…then, he would give Russia the leadership it deserved. He would avert its collapse. He would seize the reins of this slumbering titan. He would not just save the empire. He would build it into the powerhouse he always knew it could be, and he would place himself at its very heart, on the throne itself.