The Kremlin basement was cold, but the server room was sweltering.
It wasn't a server room in the modern sense. It was a tomb of failed dreams.
Turing sat on the floor, surrounded by the disassembled guts of the Laptop.
The motherboard lay on a clean cloth. Under a magnifying glass, the burnt capacitor looked like a crater on the moon.
"It's dead, Alan," Kapitsa said gently. "Let it go."
Turing didn't look up. He was soldering a copper wire thinner than a hair onto the board.
"The architecture is redundant," Turing mumbled. "If I bypass the power regulation circuit... I can direct-feed the voltage to the memory core."
"You'll fry the drive," Kapitsa warned. "And lose the data forever."
"The data is locked in a silicon coffin!" Turing snapped. He looked up, his eyes wild and bloodshot. "If I don't open it, it's useless anyway."
He touched the soldering iron to the board. A tiny wisp of white smoke rose up. The smell of burning plastic filled the air.
"Contact," Turing whispered.
He looked at the power switch.
"Connect the battery."
Kapitsa hesitated, then connected the leads to the car battery.
The fan whirred. A sickly, grinding sound.
The screen flickered. Grey. Then blue.
"Come on," Turing begged. "Talk to me."
A line of text appeared.
BOOT DEVICE NOT FOUND.
Then, a second line.
CRITICAL HARDWARE FAILURE.
And then, with a sharp pop, a spark jumped from the motherboard. A small flame erupted near the processor.
"No!" Turing screamed.
He grabbed the fire extinguisher and blasted the machine. White foam covered the wreckage.
The fire was out. But so was the hope.
Turing dropped the extinguisher. He fell to his knees, sobbing. It wasn't the cry of a scientist who lost an experiment. It was the cry of a believer whose god had died.
Kapitsa put a hand on his shoulder.
"It's over, Alan. We are alone now."
Turing looked at the foam-covered lump of plastic.
"He will kill us," Turing whispered. "Stalin needed the machine. Without it, we are just... expense."
"Then we must be useful," Kapitsa said. "We build what we remember. From scratch."
Turing wiped his face. He looked at the chalkboard where he had scribbled the equations for the hydrogen bomb trigger.
"Memory," Turing said. "Yes. We have to write it all down. Before we forget."
He grabbed a piece of chalk. He started writing furiously. Dates. Constants. Formulas.
The Machine was dead. The Cult of Memory had begun.
Berlin. The Reich Chancellery.
Adolf Hitler stood by the window, looking out at the Wilhelmstrasse.
He was in a good mood. He was humming Wagner.
Goebbels sat on the sofa, reading a report.
"The intelligence is confirmed, my Führer," Goebbels said. "The 'Oracle' in Moscow has gone silent."
Hitler turned. "Explain."
"Our spies in the Kremlin report a cessation of all 'future-tech' directives," Goebbels said. "No new rocket designs for three weeks. No economic miracles. The Soviet planners are using standard 1929 models again."
Hitler smiled. It was a predatory, wolfish grin.
"He has run out of magic," Hitler said.
He walked to the large map of Europe on the wall. He traced the line of the Soviet border with his finger.
"Stalin was playing a game of poker," Hitler mused. "He was raising the stakes every hand because he knew the cards. But now?"
Hitler tapped the map.
"Now he is bluffing."
"Shall we accelerate Barbarossa?" Goebbels asked.
"No," Hitler said. "Not yet. We let him sweat. We let him make mistakes."
He looked at Ukraine on the map.
"The famine is his weakness. If he starves the peasants to feed the army, they will revolt. We simply wait... and offer them bread."
Hitler turned back to the window.
"Send a message to Tokyo," Hitler ordered. "Tell the Emperor that the Soviet bear has lost its teeth. It is time to poke it."
New York City. Wall Street.
The ticker tape machine was chatter-boxing away.
SELL. SELL. SELL.
The Great Depression was deepening. But in one office, the mood was different.
J. Edgar Hoover stood looking at the skyline. The Empire State Building was halfway built, a steel skeleton against the grey sky.
"The latest intercepts from Leningrad," an agent said, handing Hoover a folder. "The British courier, Bennett. He didn't make it to Helsinki."
"Dead?"
"Hospitalized. Convenient accident."
Hoover flipped open the file.
"But the package?"
"Missing. The Cheka intercepted it."
Hoover closed the file. He didn't look disappointed. He looked validated.
"It confirms everything," Hoover said. "Stalin is terrified of leaks. Which means the rumors about the biological experiments are true."
"If he has super-soldiers, sir... can we fight them?"
"They aren't super-soldiers, Johnson. They are sick men on drugs."
Hoover walked to his desk. He picked up a phone.
"Get me the President."
He waited.
"Mr. President. It's time for Phase Two."
He listened.
"Yes, sir. The embargo. Total blockade. No grain. No steel. No machine parts. If Stalin wants to build a fortress, let's see how long he lasts without windows."
Hoover hung up.
He looked at the globe in the corner. He spun it. The red blotch of the USSR spun by.
"Starve," Hoover whispered. "Just starve."
The Kremlin. The War Room.
Jake stood before his generals. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and fear.
Zhukov pointed to the map of the East.
"The Japanese have moved three divisions back to the Mongolian border," Zhukov said. "They are digging in. But they are probing. Small skirmishes."
"They smell blood," Jake said.
"And in the West?"
"The Finns are quiet," Timoshenko said. "But the Germans have moved Panzers to Poland. 'Exercises', they say."
Jake looked at the map. It was a ring of fire.
And inside the ring, the country was dying.
"Grain reserves?" Jake asked.
"Critical," Molotov said. "We have enough for the army for six months. The cities... maybe three. The villages have nothing."
Jake closed his eyes.
He saw the faces of the children in the Metro station. The warm hands on the marble.
If the grid failed, if the army starved, that station would become a tomb.
"We need a trade partner," Jake said. "Someone the blockade doesn't touch."
"There is no one," Molotov said. "The US, Britain, France... they have all closed the doors."
"Not everyone," Jake said.
He opened his eyes. He looked at the map of the Middle East.
"Persia," Jake said. "And Turkey."
The generals looked confused.
"They have oil," Jake said. "But they need weapons. Modern weapons. The stuff we built before the laptop died."
"You want to sell our best tech to the Turks?" Zhukov asked, horrified. "The T-34 designs? The rocket schematics?"
"Not the best," Jake said. "The second best. The export models."
He walked to the table.
"We become the arsenal of the non-aligned world. We sell guns for grain. We sell rockets for fruit."
"It's dangerous," Molotov said. "If the tech falls into British hands..."
"It's already out there!" Jake yelled. "The secrets are leaking like a sieve! We might as well get paid for them!"
He slammed his hand on the table.
"Send an envoy to Ankara. And Tehran. Tell them the Soviet Union is open for business. No ideology. Just cash and calories."
The generals nodded slowly. It was a desperate move. A capitalist move.
But a drowning man grabs the blade of a sword if it keeps him afloat.
"One more thing," Jake said.
He looked at Menzhinsky, who was sitting in the corner, silent as a gargoyle.
"The internal threat," Jake said. "The dissent."
Menzhinsky looked up.
"The prisons are full, Comrade Stalin."
"Empty them," Jake said.
The room went dead silent.
"Excuse me?" Menzhinsky asked.
"Not into the streets," Jake said. his voice cold. "Into the factories. Every prisoner who can hold a wrench. Every political dissident who knows math. Put them on the assembly lines. Offer them double rations."
"Slave labor?" Zhukov asked.
"Patriotic service," Jake corrected. "If they build, they eat. If they refuse, they freeze."
He looked at his hands. They were trembling again.
He was turning the entire country into a Gulag to save it.
"Do it," Jake whispered. "We have to survive the winter."
Magadan. The End of the World.
The train stopped. The doors of the cattle car slid open.
The cold was absolute. It wasn't weather; it was a physical assault. Minus forty degrees.
Lena, the former maid, stumbled out. She was wearing her thin Moscow coat. She had wrapped newspapers around her legs.
Guards with dogs shouted. "Move! Form up!"
Lena fell into the snow. Her hands were blue.
She looked at the landscape. Barbed wire. Watchtowers. Grey barracks.
This was the reward for kindness.
A woman helped her up. She was older, with a face like dried leather.
"Stand up, girl," the woman hissed. "If you lay down, you die."
"I... I didn't do anything," Lena sobbed.
"None of us did," the woman said. "That's why we're here."
Lena looked at the camp gate. Above it, a red banner flapped in the wind.
LABOR IS A MATTER OF HONOR.
Lena touched her pocket. The ring was gone. Confiscated.
But she still had her memory. She remembered Nadya's eyes. The desperation.
"Move!" a guard struck her with a rifle butt.
Lena marched.
She didn't know politics. She didn't know about time travel or laptops.
She only knew that the man in the Kremlin was a devil.
And as she walked into the darkness, a spark of hatred lit up in her chest. It was small, but it was warm.
It was the only warmth she had left.
Moscow. The Metro Station.
Jake stood on the platform again. It was late. The station was empty.
He looked at the mosaic on the ceiling. The rockets flying to the stars.
"Lies," he whispered.
He wasn't building Star Trek. He was building Mordor.
He sat on a bench. He put his head in his hands.
He missed the laptop. He missed the certainty.
Now, every decision was a roll of the dice. And the dice were loaded with bones.
"Hey, Mister."
Jake looked up.
A street urchin, maybe ten years old, was standing there. Filthy face. Bright eyes.
He didn't recognize the Dictator in the shadows.
"You got a cigarette?" the boy asked.
Jake chuckled. It was a dry, rasping sound.
"No," Jake said. "I don't smoke."
"You look like you need one," the boy said.
The boy sat down next to him. He pulled a crumpled piece of bread from his pocket. He broke it in half.
"Here," the boy said. "You look hungry."
Jake stared at the bread. It was stale. hard as a rock.
"Why?" Jake asked.
"My mama says we gotta share," the boy said. "Or the cold gets inside us."
Jake took the bread. He held it like it was a holy relic.
He was starving millions. And a starving child was feeding him.
Tears pricked his eyes.
"Thank you," Jake whispered.
He ate the bread. It tasted like dust.
"What's your name?" Jake asked.
"Sasha."
"Sasha," Jake said. "Go home. It's late."
"I live here," Sasha said. "It's warm."
Jake nodded.
"Yes," Jake said. "It is warm."
He stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his gold watch. It was a Swiss breguet, worth a fortune.
"Take this," Jake said. "Sell it. Buy a coat. Buy food."
Sasha's eyes went wide. "For real?"
"For real."
Sasha grabbed the watch and ran. He didn't look back.
Jake watched him go.
It was a meaningless gesture. A drop of water in an ocean of blood.
But it felt like the only real thing he had done all day.
He walked toward the exit, toward the escalator that led up to the cold.
He had to go back to being the monster. But for five minutes, he had just been a man eating bread on a bench.
And that was enough to keep going for one more day.