The world of Looking at the Big Sky careens away from ours on the 18^th of February, 1980. A Soviet security officer in Kabul is taken to hospital, having developed tuberculosis. An outbreak soon spreads amongst his comrades.

Four days later — 22 February, 1980. The streets of Afghanistan's capital erupt into riots, in our timeline as in theirs. A mob of citizens overpowers the Arg's weakened security, and protesters stream into the presidential palace in their thousands. A small cohort of them find the soon-to-be-late Babrak Karmal, the USSR’s favourite puppet leader, and his staff, cowering in the basement.

All twelve — from a sixteen-year-old son of a baker to a 58-year-old HIG member who has come all the way from Kandahar — are interrogated, tortured, and in some cases killed. None reveal who fired the fatal shot.

It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. The commissar has no clothes, and the Red Army knows it as well as their enemies. The mujahideen push back on every attempted offensive, and before they can process it, Soviet Afghanistan is a distant memory.

Brezhnev, Andropov, Ryzhkov, Romanov; nobody in or out of the country can keep up with the Kremlin’s cast of caretakers. None of them can stem the tides of unrest that are brewing on the Warsaw Pact’s western front. By 1989, a hole has been torn through every red flag in Europe — the Soviet Union is no more.

As the twentieth century comes to a close, you have to wonder — where are we headed next?