End of XX century. A young programmer and engineer, El Goar, who has lost his memory, wakes up in a hospital on the territory of an enemy power as a prisoner of war. In his dreams he sees fantastic worlds similar to the past and the future. Discovering his supernatural powers, El manages to escape from captivity. He is trying to restore his memory and find out the origin of superpowers. But the answer turns out to be much more unexpected than he could have imagined. In one of his dreams, El sees a picture from the past: in a mysterious laboratory, a reptilian alien is experimenting on him. Rumors reach him that the Reptilians, through vaccinations, want to chip children and make them infertile so that the planet becomes suitable for conquest after a lifetime of one generation. After El acts, he is taken into circulation by the special services. Naturally associated with aliens. At this time, the persecuted people are waiting for the Messiah, who will put an end to the injustice reigning in the world. Elbecomes intimate with the daughter of a prominent dissident scientist and is torn between loyalty to the System and ideals of freedom. On special assignments, he crosses paths with a mysterious environmental activist girl from the northern regions, with whom he once had a relationship.
Tropes found in the novel include:
- Phlebotinum Rebel: El, who rebelled against the alien System, which gave him the powers of a super soldier.
- Only Mostly Dead: El's condition when he was found by the military after his helicopter crashed. The spine was broken, the stomach was gutted, a quarter of the brain was damaged. At the same time, breathing and pulse remained.
- Obfuscating Disability: The book begins with the real disability of the protagonist - paralyzed legs. But with his self-healing abilities, he soon bounces back. And he is not in a hurry to share this information with others.
- Einstein Hair: nuclear physicist Ben Ahad. He is in his early sixties, mustachioed, with tousled hair.
- Sitting on the Roof: El and Zura are sitting on the roof of El's house and with his ability to nerve contact and see the glow of radiation, they observe this very glow over the Pirrenian Heights.
- Blood Knight: special forces unit "Sabertooth cats".
- Running Both Sides: aliens present at the goverments of both superpowers.
- Muggle–Mage Romance: if the psionic powers owned by El are considered magic, then his romance with Zura falls under the trope.
- Redhead In Green: Alva. She wears either homemade foliage clothing, black and green camouflage, or green dresses. Owns the forces of nature.
- Commie Land: Confederation of Socialist Republics. An analogue of the USSR, located on the islands of the New World, mainly tropical and subtropical.
- Soviet Superscience: albeit not quite the USSR here, but culture based on USSR, the paths are open to all fields. Nanotechnology in vaccines, homing automata stuffed with electronics, reading memory from the brain, combat robots that are encrypted as people and much more.
- I Ate WHAT?!: The protagonist, suffering from amnesia, eats a bunch of lamb dishes in a fast food place. Then he remembers that he is a vegan.
- Tall, Dark, and Handsome: protagonist El Goar, dark-skinned black-eyed brunette. The representative of the southern people of Gasta.
- Anachronism Stew: The year on the calendar is 1988. The Confederation of Socialist Republics, in its structure and the presence of camps, is reminiscent of both the Stalin and Brezhnev eras, and the ideas of world revolution - the early Soviet regime. Everyday life is also similar to Khrushchev’s Thaw, and partly to modernity. In the field of information technology and communications, it looks like the early to mid-nineties (mobile phones in cars, pagers, Pentium-1 level computers and the Internet without Google, Wikipedia and social networks). The empire simultaneously resembles Tsarist Russia, modern Russia and the USA, and both superpowers also resemble the countries of the Romanesque world: Italy, Spain, the states of Latin America. At the same time, within the walls of State Security, secret technologies corresponding to the beginning of the 21st century and even later eras are created and used.
- Clark Kenting: - inversion - Zura says that she saw a masked superhero under the pseudonym Red Avenger. And she's sure it’s El. By voice, posture, gestures, gaze and non-verbal communications.
- Beauty Brainsand Brawn: Alva, Zura and Taira. The first is a beautiful forest maiden, the second is a post-graduate student and the daughter of a great scientist. The third is an assassin.
- The Chosen One: The chosen ones here are the assassins to whom the mother abbess revealed the main secrets of their order.
- Space Orcs: The ranadons are Blizzard-like space orcs.
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Life Imitates Art: El, being a special agent, on one of his missions is looking for a killer at the Hotel called Crown (Russian: "Korona").- One of the central themes is the reptilian conspiracy theory. And microchipping, which reptilians carry out through vaccinations of a new type. The book was mostly written in 2019 and completed at the very beginning of 2020, when Covid-19 was already known, but the pandemic had not yet been declared. And before the creation of vaccination, around which a whole bunch of conspiracy theories formed (the most famous about the connection between the vaccine, chipping and 5G), there was still a year left.
- Alva is like a grown-up Greta Thunberg. Only when the author began to describe Alva, Greta was not yet so well known. At least to the author.
- The old dictator, who has gone off the rails and began to fall into insanity, gives the order to treacherously attack the neighboring young republic, with which his power once had a common history (reference to Russian invasion to Ukraine. Two years before it happened in real life).
- Trickster Mentor: the man, who was El's mentor (he's name is a spoiler).
- The Ending Changes Everything: not quite the end, but when about 20 percent of the text remains, many storylines unfold 180 degrees, and completely unexpected spoilers are revealed.
