What If You Woke Up in Chernobyl the Night Before It Exploded?

You wake up on a stranger's sofa. Your watch is glowing. Out the window, three kilometres away, there's a power plant with a red and white chimney. It's Friday, 25 April 1986. You're in Pripyat. And at 1:23 tomorrow morning, Reactor Number Four is going to explode. You can't stop it. History won't let you. But maybe you can save the people around you. Would you have told them the truth? Every historical fact in this story is real: the test delayed by the Kyiv grid controller, the night shift, the AZ-5 button and the graphite-tipped rods, the firemen on the roofs, the normal Saturday, the iodine and the milk, the evacuation by more than a thousand buses, and the Swedish plant that found out first. Lena, Andriy, Misha, Fedir and the time traveller are fiction. 0:00 Pompeii… then somewhere worse 0:16 You wake up in Pripyat 1:20 Friday: the town 1:47 The plant gate 2:24 Why the test moved to the night shift 2:39 The safest button in the USSR 3:06 The flaw nobody told them about 4:13 Midnight: the night shift 4:54 01:23:04 5:14 The explosion 5:45 The firemen 6:23 The cooling channel 7:02 Medical Unit 126 7:35 Saturday: nothing happens 7:59 The milk 9:03 Sunday: "three days" 9:46 More than a thousand buses 10:00 How the world found out 10:41 Pripyat today 10:54 The empty seat #whatif #chernobyl #animation