Yuri Ilyich, a researcher at an academic research institute, during the years of perestroika, became the object of recruitment of a certain organization, calling itself the “editorial office”. The “editors” who came to him directly to work, Igor Vasilievich and Sergey Ivanovich, demand that he use his unusual abilities on their instructions: Yuri Ilyich is an extrapolator who can transfer to the future.
Moving in time, Yuri Ilyich finds himself in 1993 - in an era called the Great Reconstruction. It is dangerous to move around a dark Moscow pierced by an icy wind without weapons; the hero’s coat, like other passers-by, protrudes the Kalashnikov. Tanks rush about in the middle of Tverskaya, explosions rumble at Strastnaya Square, and raids of fighter squads of the Ugolans, fighters for sobriety, pass through the streets. Occasionally, a hero turns on a transistor, saving precious batteries. There are news on the radio about the congress in the Kremlin of countless parties whose names sound phantasmagorically - like the Constitutional Party of the United Bukhara and Samarkand Emirates, information is also being reported from the American Communist newspaper Washington Post ...
Fleeing from another raid, Yuri Ilyich finds himself in the dark entrance of the house where he spent his childhood. Here he meets a woman from Yekaterinoslavl (former Dnepropetrovsk) who came to Moscow for boots. Through the back door, they manage to escape from the detachment of "Afghans", killing passengers of an old "Mercedes", and from the raid of the People’s Security Commission, which cleans Moscow houses of bureaucrats. They walk past the black ruins of the Beijing Hotel, inhabited by Moscow anarchists. Recently in one of the windows hung on the chain the corpse of a “metalhead” guy executed by executioners from Lyubertsy. Near the house with a "bad apartment" described by Bulgakov, pickets of the "retinue of Satan" in cat masks are on duty.
Upon learning that Yuri Ilyich has invaluable coupons for which essential items are issued, a woman does not lag behind him a single step. She tells an unexpected companion about what a rich life she had before - until her husband, who worked at a car service, was killed by his own neighbors. The woman first crouches in front of the owner of the coupons, then surrenders to him right on the frost-covered bench, and then, swearing from class hatred for the “Moscow journalist”, she tries to shoot from his machine gun - all for the same coupons. Only the next raid of the People’s Security Commission, from which both are forced to flee, allows the hero to escape death.
He describes all these incidents to his "editors", having returned to the present. Finally, they explain to Yuri Ilyich what the main goal of recruitment is: in the future there is an extrapolator “on the other hand,” whom they are trying to identify.
The hero plunges again in 1993. Having avoided the Commission’s round-ups (the captured “residents of the house of social injustice” are sent to the Moscow Art Theater on Tversky Boulevard, where they are being destroyed), Yuri Ilyich and his companion immediately become hostages to the Revolutionary Committee of the Fundamentalists of Northern Persia. They define their enemies by the presence of a cross on their chest - in contrast, for example, from the “knights” -antisemites in black undercoats, for whom the sign of baptism is to know by heart the “Words about Igor's Campaign”.
Miraculously leaving the fundamentalists, involuntary companions come to a chic night tavern to a friend of Yuri Ilyich, a young Jew, Valentin. Music is played in the tavern, visitors are served delicacies: real bread, American pasteurized ham, French pressed cucumbers, moonshine made from Hungarian green peas ... Here Yuri Ilyich finally finds out that his companion is Julia. Once again in Strastnaya Square, they watch the restoration of the Pushkin monument blown up by the Stalinist terrorists for the poet's non-Slavic origin.
In the subway, Yuri Ilyich manages to buy a Makarov pistol instead of a machine gun lost in the raids. In the cars of night trains, naked girls dance, people in chains, in tailcoats, in spotted combat uniforms who have won paratroopers in Transylvania; teenagers sniff gasoline; ragged people from starving Vladimir and Yaroslavl sleep.
Having got out of the subway, Yuri Ilyich finally drives away Julia, who is ready for anything for her boots. Immediately a strange, luxuriously dressed man approaches him, treats him to cigarettes, and starts a conversation about what is happening in the country. By his free gestures, by his old-fashioned habit of building a phrase, Yuri Ilyich understands from what time his unexpected interlocutor arrived ... He believes that the bloody nightmare and dictatorship are the result of unjustified social surgery, with the help of which the anomaly of Soviet power was destroyed. Yuri Ilyich objects: there was no other way to recover, and now the country is in intensive care and it is too early to make a final forecast. The interlocutor gives Yuri Ilyich his phone number and address, offering help if he wants to change his life.
Returning to the present, Yuri Ilyich again falls into the clutches of the ubiquitous "editors". They are sure that the hero’s night interlocutor is the wanted extrapolator, and they demand his address and telephone number. On the next trip in 1993, the hero sets off with his wife. At the Spassky Gate, they see a white tank of the dictator General Panayev rushing into the Kremlin, accompanied by riders on white horses. On Red Square they give out coupons for products: yak meat, sago groats, bread produced by the Common Market, etc.
Yuri Ilyich and his wife go home. They are overtaken by fugitives from Zamoskvorechye, Veshnyakov and Izmayilova, from the working districts where the militants of the Social Distribution Party take everything from their shirts and give out a protective uniform. Yuri Ilyich throws out a card with the phone of his nightly interlocutor, who suggested he change his life, despite the fact that he understands: his wife would be in place only where he called the “night master” - where “they drink tea with milk, read family novels and do not recognize open passions. " At this moment, Yuri Ilyich sees his "editors" threatening him with a pistol from passing "Lada". But in the nightmarish future tense, in which he decided to stay of his own free will, the hero is not afraid of these people.
