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[Alexandr Korol]

myself to drink at all, barely ate. I hardly drank, barely ate, but now I allowed myself to. I was told it was important and necessary for a reset. I thought, “Well, alright, so my mind can truly rest because I’ve become wild from working on the first and second volumes.” I needed to be around people. And now I am sitting right among people, surrounded by crowds — where else could be deeper into the crowd than Las Vegas? Just people, people everywhere. It’s New Year’s Eve, December 30, and I am sitting with my friend, talking, discussing the first and second volumes. And then an African American woman sits down next to us. What’s funny is that she sits behind my friend. We are sitting at the bar, she also sits at the bar, but he is turned more toward me at an angle, and I am facing him, while she sits down behind him at the bar. And I say to him:

– Listen, it seems like she’s a messenger.
– What-what-what?
– Wait. Don’t do anything unless she starts first.

Well, of course, she started. But you can feel it immediately. And if you go back and recall all the stories of messengers in the first volume of “Alternative History,” it follows the same pattern. It’s as if the person arrives with a different rhythm, as if they exist in a parallel reality. And you can see that something is inside them — imagine as if... Think of “Harry Potter,” remember that funny little character, the ugly one who ran around calling the one with the sock his master? Now imagine that such a creature has inhabited this woman. Outwardly, she looks like an ordinary woman, but inside her, there’s some kind of small creature — slightly clumsy, perhaps even untidy, something that doesn’t judge things because it understands nothing, like a child. It doesn’t judge people, doesn’t care what others think of it, doesn’t distinguish who is who because it lacks focus, even thoughts — it has no attention to such human details. And so, this woman walks into the bar, sits down, and starts a conversation just like that. I can’t recall word for word everything we discussed at the very beginning. But she starts talking about... At first, she just introduces herself, but immediately everything feels like a vacuum — my friend has no thoughts, I have no thoughts, as if all sound has been turned off, as if we are underwater, unable to hear people. And it’s clear that the people around are scared by the way she appeared,