[ WP ] Time travel exists , and a new form of capital punishment is introduced : Transporting the convict back to the worst , practically unsurvivable , places in human history to find yourself in . You are such a convict , and just got sent back . You will do anything to try and survive .

The first time I was born, I had nothing. My childhood memories were tinted in gray, and it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth to this day, perhaps residual contaminants from the decaying society I was birthed into. 
 
 I can remember when I left. If I was a little younger, the warmth of Mississippi might have removed the chill from my skinny body, and the memory and tongue of my dead Mother from my mouth. 
 
 Maybe I was just old enough to hate the fact that the only reason I enjoyed the relative opulence of life in lower-middle-class America was because my new parents wanted benefits for adopting a child. My paperwork was easy, and I had white skin. I hated that thought, just like I hated my classmates for mocking my accent. 
 
 I dragged my way up. First in sports, I desperately competed, each year packing pounds onto my bony frame. I mowed lawns for money, and, when I got older, sold drugs. Every job I had was an opportunity to skim money from registers, pocket whatever I could, and claw myself a little farther forward, to become something that I could n't quite articulate, but knew that I needed to become. 
 
 Years go by, and I finally lost the gamble of my life on a street corner, clutching a Soviet-made handgun, watching my partner, an undercover cop, bleed to death in the back of a U-haul packed to the brim with cocaine. 
 
 But luckily we live in a civilized society. Why do now what our ancestors could do in a parallel universe? It's a sick society that lacks the integrity to commit murder. 
 
 The second time I was born, I had nothing. The soldier found me, huddled in a ball, clothing torn and covered in mud, on the side of a riverbank. I woke up, a deep throbbing in my head, and stood, cold mud oozing between my toes. I straightened, and took a deep breath, the fishy rot and coal smoke filling my lungs. 
 
 The soldier was a perfect mirror of what I would have been had I not been adopted. Skinny and mother-of-pearl pale, wearing a loose-fitting brown uniform, clutching his rifle with spidery hands, staring at me with very round blue eyes, speaking the language I grew up with. I stood a head taller than him, my skin tan and bulging from muscle. 
 
 I pushed his face deep into the mud until he stopped breathing. 
 
 In the years since, I have killed many men, but he stood out to me, and I owe him, because he was the first step in my long journey upwards. Some people must push inexorably to the top, or else flame out spectacularly, and it is a condition of their existence, just as unstoppable as breathing. I have charged through cobbled streets in rags, men falling around me form snipers bullets. I have marched through bitter cold to bayonet men in their sleep, and executed my own compatriots without blinking. I basked in every award, every honor, every day that my name was n't on the executioners list, and every day that I woke up without having to take a bullet to the brain on account of venomous whispering, every day I woke up starving but alive, or screaming in pain from a sucking chest wound, bandaged by illiterate peasants without a drop of morphine, every single day I was alive and able to rise inevitably upwards. 
 
 Today I hold the power of life and death in my hand. The same model handgun that ended my chances in the last life has just ended the life of Chairman Khrushchev, and my fellow KGB officers are destroying his cabinet with bursts of gunfire. I can ignore this, as I draft a memo on stationary embossed with the symbols of high office in the Party. I smile as I write. 
 
 `` From the Acting Chairman of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: 
 
 This is a General Order to All Forces of the Red Army: Conduct an immediate mobilization, and prepare for battle with the Enemy'' 
 
 Absolute victory was my only option in this life.
