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[Alexandr Korol]

this disappeared… Well, “disappeared” — it would switch on for me, but for
me to be the way I am now, as strong as I am now, it’s hard to keep track of
when I lost it and why. Purely theoretically, I’ll put it this way: I was always
like this, and I told of it in all my books, when I spoke about how I have no
thoughts, how I have no intentions of any kind, how I pursue no goal at all —
that is, I can’t lie.

I never lied, that I say everything as it is, that I need nothing from people. But
people, all of them, in the measure of their own corruption, tried to pin some
kind of labels on me. And on top of that they also wanted, later, when they did
nasty things, they wanted to say that I’d taken offense — that is, to accuse me of
that. I say: “I can’t take offense.” They answer: “Oh, so you’re lying too.” And
people all the same wanted to drag me all off into that little swamp there. And I
remember this my whole life. But then this thing happens — to call it a turning
point, or, after all, that destiny and purpose for the sake of which I came here.
Better to call it that, so it sounds more beautiful. But the path begins that up
until 2023 I was learning to write books, and was magical like that, and got
acquainted with various worlds, and got carried off to many places, but at the
same time I never lost myself, this Spirit, and always returned to it. But then
something crazy happens in the world starting from 2020, that it’s as if the
light goes out. But all the same my memory doesn’t fail me — all my records,
memories, my diary don’t fail me, so as not to get lost in this darkness, but it
sets in, a very protracted darkness, winter, night. And so in 2023 I begin, as
it turns out, to write the novel “Alternative History,” and now I’m on the 11th
volume. And this is a path straight out of the darkness, from the very bottom,
up to the very top, right up to today’s 11th volume — that I was simply lowered
into all of this, or everything somehow got lowered, so that I’d come out of there
like this and return, or the world returned into this. So this is what’s happening
now, as it were — that I needed to live through each step from the very bottom
to the very top. I needed to. And I captured all of it, as it turns out, in this novel.
I don’t know what will happen next. As Neo says at the end of the first part of
“The Matrix”: “I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re
afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change.”