Consciousness returned from a black, formless void.
Donald J. Trump felt like he’d had a long and very, very bad dream. He was on a stage, the crowds were tremendous, the best crowds, and then there was a loud noise, and… nothing.
He groaned, pushing himself up from what he assumed was his custom-made, impossibly comfortable mattress.
But his hands felt wrong.
The surface beneath him was hard, with a faint, damp smell of mildew. The air was thick and humid, not the crisp, climate-controlled air of his Mar-a-Lago estate.
He forced his eyes open.
He wasn’t greeted by the gilded, baroque ceiling of his Florida mansion. He was staring at a stained, yellowish-white ceiling with cobwebs in the corners.
“Good God…” he rasped, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting up.
This was a… room? No, this was a closet. A terrible closet. A very, very bad one. So small he could practically touch both walls with his arms outstretched. The walls were covered in posters of cartoon girls with giant eyes and strange outfits.
A cheap desk was cluttered with two glowing computer monitors, surrounded by a graveyard of empty Coke cans and instant noodle cups. A wrinkled t-shirt and a pair of jeans were slung over a chair.
Where was he? Some disgusting motel? Had the Democrats kidnapped him? Was this one of their dirty tricks? A Chinese trick?
He stood up, feeling the second thing that was wrong.
His body.
It felt… light. Incredibly light. The chronic ache in his knees and the stiffness in his back were gone. He moved his arms and legs. They felt impossibly limber.
He stumbled toward the desk, steadying himself, and glanced at a small mirror propped against a monitor.
In the mirror, a face stared back.
A young, strange, Asian face. Yellow skin, black hair. Dark circles under the eyes, a bit of stubble on the chin. A tired face. But undeniably young.
Trump stared, mesmerized. He reached up and touched the cheek of the man in the mirror.
The stranger in the mirror mimicked the action perfectly.
He opened his mouth, trying to unleash his signature, powerful bellow.
“What the hell is going on?!”
But what came out was a string of high-pitched, bizarre-sounding syllables he didn't understand. It sounded like… Chinese.
At the same instant, a flood of memories that weren't his, like a corrupted zip file being forcibly extracted, exploded in his brain.
Liang Jian… thirty years old… IT engineer… Beijing… rent… 996…
He saw images of this body’s life: squeezing onto a horrifically crowded subway, typing code in a soul-crushing cubicle, returning late at night to this tiny apartment, his only joy found in the glowing virtual world of a computer screen.
“No… NO!!!”
A desperate scream, in a voice he didn't recognize, tore from his throat.
He looked around the ten-square-meter room, a space that felt more like a prison cell than a home. And for the first time in his seventy-plus years, Donald J. Trump felt a sensation he had only ever read about.
Helplessness.
He, the 45th President of the United States, the billionaire real-estate tycoon, was trapped. Trapped in the body of a loser, one of the very people he despised.
In a faraway, hostile country.
Broke, and unable to speak the language.
Outside the window, the night was dark and deep.