Chương 1: Bet It All

My hands were shaking as I sat in the corner of Benny's, a lousy dive on Forty-second and Eighth, the kind of place where they watered down the beer and where going into the bathroom without a knife counted as reckless optimism. The room buzzed around me: workers in greasy overalls, clerks with ties hanging crooked, a pair of prostitutes at the bar calmly sipping gin. Everyone was shouting, laughing, crying, pointing at the screens, while I tried to keep my trembling fingers wrapped around a mug of beer.

On four ancient televisions mounted in the corners, Game Four of the NBA Finals was playing: the Golden State Warriors against the Washington Bullets. Underdogs against favorites. David against Goliath. Why was I so nervous? Simple. I had bet everything on that game. Literally everything I had, and a fair bit I did not. I pawned the car, sold the watch David had inherited from his father, and emptied my room of anything that could be turned into cash: a radio, silver cufflinks, a winter coat.

Then I took out a loan at an interest rate so obscene it would make street robbers step aside out of professional respect, and scraped together twelve hundred dollars. In 1975, that was money you could live on for half a year. A teacher's annual salary. Half the price of a brand-new Ford. And I had put all of it on the Warriors at three and a half to one. The bookmaker had looked at me like I was an idiot when he took the bet. Maybe he was right. A gambling addict, you say. A degenerate. A lunatic.

A moron who belonged in a padded cell. I would agree with you, if not for one small detail. I took a sip of warm, watered-down beer, let my eyes slide across the nearest television, and caught the logo in the corner of the screen. Stark Industries. Not Sony. Not Panasonic. Not General Electric. Stark Industries. And that, as they say, was the whole damn problem. My name is… Actually, it does not matter what my name used to be. Right now, I am David Miller. Twenty-eight years old. Insurance clerk from New York.

His body. His life. His memories too, partly, mixed with mine so thoroughly that sometimes even I could not tell where he ended and I began. Two months ago, I had been an ordinary Russian writer, twenty-six years old and not especially successful, if I was being honest. I had published two novels, each selling a few thousand copies before quietly disappearing into the void. My third book was supposed to be about a man who ends up in the past and rises in America using knowledge of the future.

The subject had been close to me since childhood. I had always been obsessed with that era. America, the Soviet Union, the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, the whole turning point of the modern world. I read everything I could find. Dates, names, events, stock prices, gas prices, newspaper headlines, restaurant menus, match results. I liked the texture of the time itself. I wanted to understand how that whole period worked.

When I finally started writing the book, I buried myself in the research and enjoyed every little detail I dug up. My friends used to twirl their fingers at their temples whenever I went off on another rant about some obscure event from the seventies, but they still listened. Well, if I ever see my friends again, I will have better stories to tell them. First-hand experience is hard to beat. The only question was: what the hell was a Marvel corporation doing here?

Whoever was in charge of soul transfers had clearly screwed up my assignment. I had prepared for Watergate, the oil crisis, the rise of Apple and Microsoft. I had not prepared for Howard Stark building missile guidance systems somewhere in California, or for the possibility that one day a purple bastard with a glove might drop in from space. How did it happen? No idea.

I fell asleep in my Moscow apartment in 2023 and woke up in a shabby little room in Manhattan, inside the body of a man whose memories were now partly mine. Maybe it was a stroke and a dying hallucination. Maybe some cosmic bug in the matrix. Maybe I had simply gone insane. Maybe someone had drugged me. It did not matter. What mattered was that I was here. And the only thing I had was memory. I remembered who would win the NBA championship in 1975. I remembered who would become president.

I remembered which stocks would explode, which companies would go bankrupt, which technologies would change the world. Except Stark Industries had never existed in my world. It was a fictional corporation from comic books. Tony Stark's empire. Iron Man's legacy. And here it was, glowing in the corner of a television screen. Real. Tangible. Part of the world. Which meant I had no idea whether my knowledge still worked. Maybe history flowed differently here. Maybe the Warriors would lose the series.

Maybe I was about to lose everything and end up on the street with no money, no home, and no future. That was why I was shaking. Knowledge was one thing. Believing in it when everything you owned was on the table was something else entirely. Especially when there were obvious variables. Third quarter. The Bullets were up by six, and the room began to darken around the edges of my vision. A fat man beside me, sweaty and red-faced in a Bullets T-shirt, burst out laughing and slapped me on the back.

"What's wrong, kid? Bet on those losers? Here's some advice: get out before it gets really depressing." I did not answer. I could not. There was a lump in my throat the size of a fist. Fourth quarter. And then the Warriors began to climb back. Rick Barry, their star, their god, their mad genius, tore through the Bullets' defense, while Jamaal Wilkes grabbed everything that fell from the sky. The bar started to quiet down. Two minutes left. Four-point difference. One minute. Two points. Thirty seconds.

The Bullets tied the game. I stopped breathing. Fifteen seconds. Barry brought the ball up. A feint. A drive. A pass to Wilkes. The shot. The ball hung in the air, and time stopped. Please. Please. Please. The net snapped. Final buzzer. The bar exploded. Someone howled. Someone threw a glass at the wall, and it burst into a fan of glittering shards. The fat man in the Bullets shirt collapsed forward onto the table, clutching his head with both hands.

The bartender was dragging some drunk outside after he tried to smash one of the televisions. And I just sat there. And cried. The Golden State Warriors were NBA champions. Four-zero. A clean sweep. One of the greatest upsets in basketball history. A team that had barely been considered a playoff contender at the start of the season had swept the best team in the league. Two of the four games had been decided by one point. The total margin across the whole series was sixteen points.

Sixteen goddamn points had just changed my life. Tears ran down my cheeks, and I did not try to stop them. This world was not mine. This body was not mine. But the chance was real. And for now, that was enough. From twelve hundred dollars, I had just made a little over four thousand. Minus the loan repayment, minus buying back the car, minus all the other debts, I would still have about fifteen hundred clean. Fifteen hundred dollars in my pocket. Now I just had to collect the winnings.

I paid for my beer and left a tip calculated to be forgettable: not too stingy, not too generous. Then I stepped outside. Spring New York hit me in the face with the smell of garbage, exhaust fumes, and something fried from a cart on the corner. The bookmaker's office was three blocks away. I walked calmly. No hurry. Inside, there was a short line. I was not the only one who wanted to cash out immediately. I waited my turn, handed over the ticket, and received a check.

The man behind the counter was gray-haired, with a face like crumpled parchment. He looked at the amount, then at me. Something flickered in his eyes. Respect, maybe. Or a threat. In this city, it was easy to mistake one for the other.

"You're a lucky son of a bitch," he said.

"Don't see that too often."

"Beginner's luck," I replied. He snorted. The moment I stepped back onto the street, I felt eyes on me. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe not. In 1970s New York, walking around with four thousand dollars on you was practically a death sentence. People here would cut you open for twenty bucks. For that kind of money, they would carve you up and feed you to the rats in a basement. I spent almost an hour doubling back through the city. I went down into the subway at Times Square. Got off at Thirty-fourth.

Entered Macy's, went up to the third floor, took the fire stairs down to the first, and left through a service exit. Then the subway again. Two transfers. Another store, this one with two exits. Paranoid? Possibly. Alive paranoid? Definitely. When the door of my room finally shut behind me, I slid down it and sat on the floor. Ten square meters. A bed, a table, a chair, a wardrobe. A window overlooking a fire escape and the blank wall of the neighboring building.

The wallpaper had once been beige; now it was an uncertain gray, swollen in places from damp. The faucet in the corner had been dripping for two weeks, and the landlord had no intention of fixing it. According to him, functional plumbing was apparently a premium feature. A hole. But a hole within half an hour of work, practically in the middle of Manhattan. If you value your time, you pay for it. With sweaty fingers, I felt for the check in the inner pocket of my jacket. Still there. Paper.

Just paper with numbers on it. And yet at that moment it felt so pleasant under my fingers—smooth, cool—that my mind produced comparisons with a woman's skin. I shook my head to drive the thought away. Ugh. Get a grip. Beyond the thin wall, someone coughed hard enough to tear something loose. Downstairs, a television blared in Spanish, some eternal Mexican melodrama. The faucet kept dripping. Tap. Tap. Tap. I unfolded the check and looked at the numbers again. Then again. As if they might disappear. They did not.

The alarm rang at six in the morning. A vile mechanical clatter that made me want to hurl the damned thing at the wall. In my previous life, I had woken up to a gentle melody from my smartphone, volume rising gradually like civilization itself cared about me. Now I had a rattling metal monster whose only purpose was to break the human brain. I sat up and rubbed my face. Outside the window, April morning was turning gray. Fire escape. Blind brick wall. A strip of sky the color of dirty cotton. New York.

First thing: contrast shower. Calling it a bathroom was generous. It was a closet two meters by one and a half, just large enough for a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall the size of a phone booth. Hot water arrived when it felt like it. Cold water, of course, worked perfectly. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Exactly what I needed. David Miller's body hated contrast showers.

Every morning it resisted, shrank in on itself, tried to escape the icy streams. But I was more stubborn. After two weeks of suffering, the organism surrendered and began to treat the procedure as an unavoidable evil. After a month, it had almost gotten used to it. Now, two months in, I barely flinched when switching from hot to cold. Barely. After the shower: twenty push-ups. Twenty squats. A one-minute plank. Modest? Yes.

But before my arrival, David Miller had done absolutely nothing except haul his carcass from bed to office and back again. I had to start somewhere. Breakfast: four eggs, oatmeal, toast with butter, an apple. Not because it tasted good. Because it was correct. Protein, carbs, fat, a bit of vitamins. The previous owner of this body had lived on donuts and vending machine coffee. No wonder that by twenty-eight he had started developing a belly and got winded on the third floor.

I brewed coffee in a copper cezve, the one object I had bought for myself in the past two months. Found it in an antique shop on Bleecker Street. Paid five dollars. The seller looked at me like I was insane. Who in America needed a Turkish coffee pot when percolators existed? Before this, I had not even known what a percolator was. Coffee from a cezve was a ritual. The only thing left from the man I had been. The bathroom mirror. I stood in front of it, studying the face that still felt foreign. David Miller.

Hair: mousy, dull, already starting to thin at the temples. By forty, if nothing was done, there would be a bald spot. Eyes: gray-blue, unremarkable, a little too wide. Nose: slightly long, with a small bump, maybe broken in childhood. Lips: thin and pale. Chin: weak, sloping. Ears: stuck out a little. Build: office worker. Narrow shoulders, sunken chest, arms with no hint of muscle. The stomach no longer stuck out, thanks to morning exercise, but six-pack abs were still somewhere on the far side of the moon.

Height: five foot nine. One hundred seventy-five centimeters, in proper units. Not short. Not tall. Average. The perfect appearance for an invisible man. A face you forgot one minute after the conversation ended. A body that vanished in a crowd. Voice… I cleared my throat and said aloud:"Good morning." A baritone. A little hoarse. Two months ago, I had looked into this mirror and howled. Literally howled, like a wounded animal, scraping my fingernails against the tile. The hysteria lasted three days.

Then it passed. Not because I accepted anything. Because I got tired. Also, the neighbors started complaining. Now I just looked. The dissonance had not gone anywhere. Every time I saw these hands, heard this voice, met this reflection, something inside me curled up in disgust. I wanted to spit. But I no longer screamed. Progress. The Ford Pinto was exactly where I had left it, in the alley around the corner, between a garbage can and a fire hydrant. A '73 model. Dirty orange. Dent in the front fender.

A long scratch across the hood. In my time, the Pinto was remembered as a synonym for disaster. Rear-mounted fuel tank. One good hit from behind, and the car turned into a torch. Hundreds dead. Lawsuits. Scandal. Ford's reputation buried for years. But that would come later. Toward the end of the decade. For now, it was just a cheap, reliable car that started on the first try and did not drink as much gas as the mastodons of the fifties. I turned the key. The engine sneezed, coughed, then rattled awake.

I pulled out of the alley and merged into traffic on Third Avenue. Manual transmission. No power steering. No air conditioning, just open windows and a draft. In my old life, I had driven a cheap electric car with not a single mechanical button left inside it. I complained about traffic. Dreamed of teleportation. Funny. Here, driving demanded full concentration. Every pothole. Every gust of wind. Every gear shift. Hands on the wheel, foot on the clutch, eyes on the road. No screens. No notifications.

No endless stream of information. Just you and the road. Maybe there was something to that. Though power steering would have been nice. By evening my arms would feel like I had spent the day at the gym. While my hands worked the wheel around a two-lane jam on Park Avenue, my head worked through the plan. Fifteen hundred dollars. A good start. But only a start. To truly rise, I needed different numbers. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Money, money, and more money.

I had not been given superpowers. No serum. No radiation. No bite from a radioactive creature. Just a man in someone else's body, in someone else's time, in a world where gods and monsters were not metaphors. But money and power? Those could compensate for a lot. I knew how to get them. I knew which stocks would rise, which companies would become giants, which technologies would change the world. But knowledge without capital was nothing. Especially… My fingers tightened on the wheel until my knuckles went white.

This was fucking Marvel. Too much in this world was wrong. Not according to my script. Take Apple, for example. In my reality, Jobs and Wozniak were already on their way to soldering together their first computer in a garage, preparing to change an entire industry. Here? Here, Stark Industries had already swallowed the personal electronics market before two California geeks had even filed the paperwork.

Howard Stark, with his defense contracts and bottomless budget, was not the kind of opponent a garage start-up could compete with. Half my knowledge of the future was garbage. Beautiful, detailed, absolutely useless garbage. Stop. Calm down. Step by step. The next bet was already chosen: the FA Cup Final, May third. West Ham against Fulham. First Division against Second Division. Favorite against Cinderella. Football logic said Fulham could surprise people. They had already surprised everyone by reaching the final.

Romantics would bet on them. I was not a romantic. I knew Alan Taylor would score twice and the Hammers would win two-nil. The odds were garbage. One and a half to one, maybe a little less. With fifteen hundred, I would turn it into twenty-five hundred, three thousand if I was lucky. No fireworks. No jackpot. A boring, reliable bet on the favorite. And that was exactly what I needed now. All-in once. For the start. For the breakthrough. After that: methodical, cautious, invisible.

A gray mouse quietly gnawing at the cheese while the cats hunted louder prey. Atlantic Insurance Company occupied four floors of a building on Fifty-seventh Street. Glass, concrete, chrome. Architecture of postwar optimism, already starting to dull beneath a layer of city soot. I parked two blocks away—nothing closer was available—and walked the rest of the way. Past newspaper stands with headlines about Vietnam and Watergate. Past a hot dog cart smelling of fried onions. Past some junkie.

Past a beggar on the corner holding a cardboard sign that read VETERAN, PLEASE HELP. There were more homeless people in 1970s New York than in my time. Or fewer? Hard to say. In the 2020s, they had simply been pushed off the central streets. Into shelters, into suburbs, somewhere beyond the edge of our attention. Here, they were still visible. An inconvenient truth sticking out from under the polished facade of the great American dream. Then again, America had always had a problem with the homeless.

The capital of capitalism was not exactly gentle with ordinary people. The elevator in the building was old, with grille doors and a mechanism that creaked like it resented its own existence. I stepped in with three other clerks. Identical suits, identical briefcases, identical faces. I nodded. Received nods in return. No names. No conversation. The morning ritual of office plankton. Fourteenth floor. Technically the thirteenth, but Americans and their superstitions.

On the elevator panel, twelve was followed immediately by fourteen. Interesting. Were they fooling evil spirits, or only themselves? The doors opened. I stepped into the familiar hell. The Atlantic Insurance office was one hundred and twenty desks in an open space divided by low partitions. One hundred and twenty typewriters clacking all day like machine guns. One hundred and twenty telephones ringing out of rhythm.

One hundred and twenty people trying to look busy under the supervision of five managers who wandered between the rows like prison guards. The smell was coffee, cigarette smoke, cheap cologne, sweat, and paper dust. In my time, smoking in offices had been banned thirty years before I was born. Here, everyone smoked, including the secretaries. By the end of the day, you could cut the air with a knife.

"Good morning, Mr. Miller." Marilyn. Receptionist. Blonde, twenty-five, too much makeup and too little hope in her eyes. Third year working here. Dreamed of marrying one of the managers and escaping this hell. Unlikely. There were better prospects.

"Good morning, Marilyn." Standard exchange of pleasantries. I had learned to deliver it with a precisely measured dose of warmth: polite enough not to seem rude, not warm enough for her to think I was flirting. Gray mouse. Unremarkable. Uninteresting. My desk was in the third row from the window, seventh from the left. Far enough from management not to be constantly visible. Close enough to the exit to run if necessary. I sat down, turned on the desk lamp, and pulled out a folder. Insurance claims.

Forms in triplicate. Stamps, signatures, policy numbers. Monotonous, mind-numbing work that computers had been doing in my world for decades. My hands filled out forms. My eyes moved over the lines. My mouth answered colleagues' questions. Yes, Steve, I will pass that to Johnson. No, Linda, I have not seen the March report. Of course, Mr. Thompson, I will finish it by three. My mind was elsewhere. At Wembley. In London. Where, on May third, Alan Taylor would score two goals and bring victory to West Ham.

Unfortunately, I could not leave this office hell yet. This little plankton island was too useful as cover. A stable salary. No questions. Complete invisibility. Exactly what a man needed when he did not want anyone asking about strange inflows of money.

"Miller!" Hanson's voice—Harold Hanson, my direct supervisor—cut through the office noise like a siren. Fifty-two years old. Red hypertensive face. Bags under his eyes. Tie permanently crooked. Every day at exactly eleven, he poured whiskey from a flask hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk. By five in the afternoon, he was properly drunk. Everyone knew. No one said anything. The seventies.

"My office. Now." Relieved sighs rose from the nearby desks. Someone threw me a fake-sympathetic look. Hang in there, buddy. Rats happy it was not their turn today. Hanson's office smelled of tobacco, sweat, and old alcohol. He was already behind the desk, flushed red, folder in hand.

"Close the door." I closed it.

"What is this, Miller?" The folder slapped onto the desk.

"What the hell is this?" The Kowalski policy. I remembered it. Auto insurance. Standard case. Everything had been filled out correctly.

"The date, Miller! The date!" I looked. In the inspection date field, I had written 03/04/75 instead of 03/03/75. One number. A number that did not matter in the slightest. A typo that would cause no real problems.

"Do you even understand how much money this company loses because of people like you?" Hanson pushed himself half out of his chair, fists planted on the desk. The smell of whiskey reached me even from there.

"I have been in this business for twenty years! Twenty years! And I will not let some snot-nosed—" He kept shouting. Spit flew onto the polished surface of the desk. His face darkened toward purple. I stood and watched. Not him. Through him. My head was empty.

"—and if I see anything like this again, Miller, I swear to God—""You are right, Mr. Hanson." He stopped. Blinked. Clearly, he had expected excuses. Arguments. Maybe tears.

"I made a mistake. I will correct it immediately. It will not happen again." Silence. Hanson stared at me, searching for a trick. He did not find one.

"Well…" He leaned back in his chair, slightly disoriented.

"Good. You're dismissed. And I want it on my desk by three."

"Of course, Mr. Hanson." I left. Closed the door softly, without slamming it. Returned to my desk under the curious looks of my coworkers. Linda from the neighboring department mouthed, "You okay?" I nodded. Smiled. Two months ago—in my previous life, in my previous body—I would already have been rehearsing an angry resignation speech. Or, more likely, thinking of ways to discreetly spit into his coffee. I was the kind of person who did not know how to swallow humiliation quietly.

Now I simply sat through the scolding and walked out. Because I had a goal. And therefore it did not matter what Hanson wanted. It did not matter how he shouted. It did not matter what kind of shit he dumped on me. Let him. The gray mouse act was necessary now. An unremarkable clerk who arrived on time, left on time, did not stand out, did not argue, did not get remembered. Six months. One hundred eighty-two days in someone else's body, in someone else's world, in someone else's life.

I sat in my little room—the same ten square meters overlooking the fire escape—and stared at the numbers in my notebook. One hundred three thousand four hundred twelve dollars. To be exact. One hundred three thousand. In April, I had twelve hundred. Borrowed. I leaned back in the chair and laughed. Quietly. Hoarsely. With a taste of hysteria in my mouth. Then I stopped. Looked at my hands. They were shaking. Then again, they shook all the time now. The path to that money had not been a straight line.

It had been more like the EKG of a man having a heart attack: spikes, drops, moments where the line seemed about to go flat. After the Warriors came West Ham. A boring bet on the favorite. A thousand dollars in profit. Then the Philadelphia Flyers winning their second straight Stanley Cup. Leeds United in the English championship. And that was where the Marvel world bared its teeth. Leeds lost. In my history, they had taken the title. Here, they did not. Maybe Howard Stark had sponsored Derby County.

Maybe a butterfly had flapped its wings somewhere in Tokyo. I did not know. The fact remained: I lost eight thousand dollars in a single evening. Eight thousand. Two months of work. Gone like morning fog. I did not sleep for three days after that. I sat in my room, stared at the wall, and thought: what if all of it was a lie? What if nothing else came true? What if I was just a madman who had invented a past life for himself? Then I pulled myself together. Changed the strategy. Double-check everything. Dig deeper.

Look for differences between this world and mine. Pay attention to every detail. Especially who invested in what. The system began to work again. Muhammad Ali regained the title from Joe Frazier—I bet on Ali and took a decent payout. Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon—the first Black champion in history, and the odds were sweet. The Cincinnati Reds took the World Series, and history did not fail me there. There were mistakes too.

Bayern Munich in the European Cup final—in my world they won, here they barely dragged it into extra time, and I nearly went gray. The presidential primaries—I bet on Reagan against Ford, and Reagan withdrew from the race a month before the convention. Lost twelve thousand. But overall, the system worked. One hundred three thousand. In half a year. From nothing. That was if you did not count what remained of my mental health. The bathroom mirror showed me a stranger.

Externally, David Miller had changed for the better. Regular exercise—now not twenty push-ups, but seventy—had burned off fat and built something that vaguely resembled muscle. Proper food had taken away the unhealthy pallor. His posture had straightened. Even the hair seemed to have stopped falling out quite so aggressively. Or maybe I was comforting myself. But the eyes. The eyes looking out of the mirror had something wrong in them. Something hunted.

Like an animal that had been running from hunters for too long. I lived in constant stress. Every bet was Russian roulette. Every trip outside meant paranoia. Was someone following me? Had someone recognized me? Every night brought nightmares. In some of them, I woke up back in my own world, in my own body, realized this had all been a dream, sighed in relief—and then woke again in this body. In others, worse ones, they found me. Figured me out. Killed me for "cheating." Insomnia became normal.

Three or four hours a night, in fragments. My appetite swung wildly: sometimes I could not eat for days, sometimes I devoured anything I could get my hands on. My hands shook. In the mornings, nausea sat in my throat. I did not know what to call it. Anxiety disorder? Post-traumatic stress? Plain exhaustion? It did not matter. What mattered was that I was holding together. For now.

"The Lucky One." That was what they called me in New York betting circles. I found out by accident. I walked into a bookie's office on the West Side, a new neighborhood for me, somewhere I had not placed bets before. As usual, the first thing I did was listen to the whispers. Two guys were talking near the counter.

"…you heard about the Lucky One? They say he won again. The Reds in the Series, can you believe it?"

"Bullshit. Nobody calls that many in a row."

"No, I'm telling you. Frankie from Fifth Avenue says his guys tried to figure the bastard out. Nothing. Like a ghost. Shows up, places a bet, disappears."

"So no one's seen him?"

"They have. They say he's just some ordinary guy. No face, no presence. Lose him in a crowd in two seconds." I finished my coffee and walked out, making sure not to quicken my pace. No face, no presence. Perfect description. Perfect disguise. The gray mouse was finally working for me. The problem was something else. They were looking. More and more often, I heard those whispers. Someone was testing the ground. I could practically feel the envy building around my money. And in this city, envy was a dangerous thing.

Why envy, if there was a simpler solution? A knife in a dark alley. A body in the East River. No questions. No witnesses. The police would call it a robbery, if they bothered at all. Damn it. I was preparing for the next stage of the plan. Betting was a trick. A way to build starting capital. But you did not become a billionaire through gambling. To really rise, I needed assets. Business. Patents. Companies. In my free time, I studied the market. Newspapers, magazines, stock reports. What was new.

What affected what. Where things lined up with my history, and where the divergences began. Coca-Cola existed. Ford existed. General Electric existed. McDonald's existed and was growing like yeast. Most of the major players were in place, operating more or less like they had in my world. But there were differences. And the differences were a problem. Stark Industries was the obvious one. Defense, energy, electronics. Howard Stark was building an empire that had simply never existed in my reality.

Half the market where other companies were supposed to rise already belonged to him. A genius, a billionaire, a defense contractor. His corporation was a monster devouring everything in its path. Technologies, start-ups, patents—if something promising appeared on the horizon, Stark's people were already there. Royce Energy: an oil giant I had never heard of. According to the papers, it controlled a third of Alaskan production. In my history, other players had dominated there.

Rand Corporation: not the RAND that was a think tank. Here, it was also a technology conglomerate. Something connected to K'un-Lun? I did not know that corner of the universe well enough, but the name appeared in the financial sections too often to ignore. Trask Industries: robotics miracles. Osborn Chemical: still a small pharmaceutical company, but I knew that name. Norman Osborn. The Green Goblin. In ten or fifteen years, one of the richest men in America, if this universe followed the comics. If.

I set the newspaper aside and rubbed my eyes. Too many variables. Too little data. Different rules. Different players. Different opportunities. I would have to move carefully. Gather information. Look for markers—events that could tell me exactly which version of the universe I had landed in. But some things had to remain. Not every genius had fallen into Stark's net. Not every idea had been stolen. I just needed to dig deeper. I needed patents. Old ones that had not fired yet but would in the coming years.

New ones that could be bought for pennies from lone inventors before they understood what they were holding. For that, I needed a company. Officially registered, with a legal address and a bank account. You could not buy patents as a private individual. Too visible. Too many questions. But first, I needed one more capital jump. The last big bet before leaving the game forever. October 1975. The World Series. Cincinnati Reds against Boston Red Sox.

In my world, it had been one of the greatest series in baseball history. Seven games. Drama. Legends. The Reds won. I checked every scrap of data, even hired people to find missing information. History would repeat itself. I was sure of it. And if it did not… I looked at my shaking hands. If it did not, I would have to start over. But first… I needed protection. One hundred three thousand dollars was a lot for a clerk. It was little for a businessman.

And it was nothing compared to what I would need if someone decided that the Lucky One had been winning too much. I needed people. Strong people. Reliable people. People who knew how to keep their mouths shut. Not gangsters. Gangsters would eventually need to be paid off or escaped from. I needed professionals. Men who worked for money and respected contracts. And I knew where to look. Vietnam had ended in April. Thousands of soldiers were coming home and discovering that home had not been waiting for them.

No jobs. No respect. Only sideways glances, accusations of war crimes, and nightmares at night. Men trained to kill. Men who knew how to survive. Men with nothing to lose. The perfect recruiting pool. I needed to find the right veterans. Not broken men, but desperate enough to accept work from a stranger. Not psychopaths, but hard enough to protect me from any threat. I knew where to begin. Veteran bars on the Lower East Side. Shelters in the Bronx. Benefit lines at the Veterans Affairs offices.

There— my future army was waiting.