U.S. Eastern Time, 2:41 PM.
The sun was a killer.
One hundred and thirty-seven meters away, the heat warped the air, making the figure on the stage—the one with the iconic golden hair—shimmer and distort.
It didn’t matter. For a professional, a little atmospheric disturbance was just another variable in the equation.
He lay in the shadows of the rooftop, the blistering barrel of his rifle pressed against his cheek. A bead of sweat slid down his brow, hit the receiver of the AR-15, and vanished with a hiss.
The center of the crosshairs was locked steady on the back of the most famous and divisive head in the world.
Wind, zero. Humidity, sixty-two percent. Target is turning to wave to the crowd. He’s about to expose his left temple. A perfect window.
He exhaled, his index finger resting gently on the cool metal of the trigger.
Goodbye, Mr. President.
…
China, Beijing Time, 2:41 AM.
My name is Liang Jian. I’m thirty years old, an IT engineer. And at this very moment, I was experiencing the closest thing to nirvana a man like me can achieve.
The air conditioner hummed its holy song, sealing my tiny apartment off from the suffocating heat of a Beijing summer night. On my desk, a half-glass of ice-cold Coke was still fizzing—the holy water of my people, the only true comfort after a long day of debugging code written by sadists.
On screen, the neon-drenched world of Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition exploded with light and sound. My character, V, was being hunted by a squad of Maelstrom gangers, their chrome bodies gleaming under the streetlights of Night City. Laser fire seared past my head.
“Seriously? Give it a rest!” I growled, my left hand dancing across the keyboard while my right slammed the mouse, whipping my character around 180 degrees. Time to introduce these metal-plated psychos to my Tech shotgun.
My adrenaline was pumping. In that split second of frenzied excitement, my elbow connected with the glass of Coke.
“Shit!”
The brown liquid arced through the air. Some of it soaked my pants. The rest of it, with the kind of cruel precision only fate can deliver, poured directly through the ventilation slits of my PC’s power supply.
Time seemed to slow down.
I watched the liquid vanish into the dark guts of the machine. A wisp of blue smoke curled into the air, carrying the acrid smell of burnt plastic.
POP!
A muffled explosion erupted from the computer case.
My world went black, as if someone had yanked the master power switch on the universe. I was gone.
…
U.S. Eastern Time, 2:41:25 PM.
The trigger was squeezed.
The hammer fell, the firing pin struck, the primer ignited. Gunpowder combusted in a contained, violent fury, launching a 5.56mm round out of the barrel at nearly a thousand meters per second.
It spun, it screamed, it tore through one hundred and thirty-seven meters of superheated air, aimed at its preordained destination.
It was a kill shot.
And yet, in the last few milliseconds before it would have drilled through the target’s temple, the man’s head, without any warning, snapped violently to the right and back.
It was a bizarre, unnatural movement, as if his neck had been yanked by an invisible hand.
A hot sliver of metal screamed past his ear, taking nothing with it but a few strands of golden hair and a deafening sonic boom.
The next instant, Liang Jian’s consciousness was slammed into a new, foreign shell.
He opened his eyes.
There was no ceiling of a cramped apartment, no beloved 4K monitor, and no goddamn spilled Coke.
There was only an endless blue sky, a blinding sun, and a sea of thousands upon thousands of faces, twisted in shock and terror.
A deafening roar of screams and slogans hammered at his eardrums.
Several large men in black suits tackled him, burying him under a wall of their own bodies. The hard, cold floor of the stage dug painfully into his side.
Where… is this?
Who… am I?