The novel is an attempt to compare alternative versions of the history of Russia and the people operating in them. The three main characters - a writer, an astrophysicist, a politician - get the opportunity to realize themselves in modern Russia, in the USSR, which survived 1991 and continues to develop successfully, and in Russia, which does not know the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. But how do the same people behave when they are in different historical settings? What changes in their fate? What constitutes the “fabric of life” in each version of history? This is what the novel is about.