Preface to the English Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the author (permission may be obtained electronically from the author's emailing addresses below).

Any references to historical events, real people or real places are used for artistic or creative purposes only.

First printing edition 2025 (in Russian).

This is the English translation of my third book, it was prepared in the fall of 2025.

Published in electronic form on the Litres digital platform and in paper by Ridero in December 2025, ISBN 978-5-0068-7861-7.

I do the translation by myself, since I know English and French to some extent, I studied them at school and university.

Initially, a machine translation source from Yandex-AI was used, which was read twice and all found errors were corrected. The English translation of the book contains 437,102 characters (76,684 words).

The original book (in Russian) was published on September 2, 2025 in electronic form on Litres platform; in paper in October 2025 by Ridero, ISBN 978-5-0068-2032-6.

Link to the Russian edition of the book in electronic form:

https://www.litres.ru/book/vasily-lasovsky/mnv-72450709/?lfrom=665747706&ffile=1

Link to the author's page, where you can download the original Russian versions of my books and their translations:

https://vasilylasovsky.livejournal.com

Author's email:

vasilylasovsky@yandex.ru

91tenet19@gmail.com

Best wishes to my occasional rare readers ;-),

Vasily Lasovsky.

Preface

“Night, street, lantern, pharmacy,

Meaningless and dim light.

Live another quarter of a century —

It will be like this. There is no exit.

Would you die, you'll start all over again

And everything will repeat as aforetime:

Night, icy ripples of the canal,

Pharmacy, street, lantern”.

– an excerpt from the poetry cycle “Dances of Death”

(Alexander Blok, 1915)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT77q3_Wrp4

On December 4, 2023, at 4:30 pm, I got the idea that a plot for a new book was emerging. On December 16, 2023, at 3:58 pm, I got an idea for a title for the book.

1st stage of writing: December 16, 2023 5:04 pm – March 12, 2024 10:30 pm, 185,744 characters.

As a preparation for the 2nd stage, in May – July 2024, the book grew by 40%, as of July 9, 2024 it was 248,853 characters long. My previous books were 355,820 and 344,955 characters long.

2nd stage of writing: February – May 2025 – 397,501 characters.

Finished editing on September 2, 2025 at 2:08 pm, electronic publication on Litres – 412,829 characters in the book.

When published by Ridero, after correction, October 8, 2025 – the book contains 400,160 characters, 70,203 words. Also on this day, the book (with corrections) was re-published on Litres. The number of characters is pointed as shown by the MS Word program.

The time specified in the text of the book is Moscow time, UTC+3.

Important! If you haven't read my first two books, 19+ and especially The Last Da Vinci, then you can hardly enjoy reading this one. The book is very specifically written, it is far from the classical understanding of a literary work.

In the course of the book, there will be references to works of fiction by other authors, which you should read if it is a book, or watch if it is a movie. But this is easier, because it will be beautiful works of the best representatives of humanity, which cannot be said about me and this boring and uninteresting book.

The book contains a large number of quotations; they are the basis of the book. Of course, all quotes are enclosed in quotation marks. If the quote follows immediately after the link to it, then it goes in the usual font. If the citation is not preceded by a reference to the source, then it is indicated in italics.

I write this work mainly for myself, because it is my personal diary and workbook, and some episodes of my biography are described – for a period of 3 years, starting from the fall of 2022, when my second book The Last Da Vinci ended – and until the end of summer 2025.

The publication (in Russian) is planned in electronic form in the fall of 2025 on the Litres platform, in paper form (4 copies) in the Ridero; then, in December 2025, it is planned to publish an English translation.

The idea to publish the book not in the fall of 2026, but in September 2025 (i.e. a year earlier) came to me on May 19, 2025 at 10:34 pm.

“Omen (latin. ōmen, also called portent) – among the  ancient Romans, a favorable or unfavorable sign, especially a word accidentally heard, since the person who heard it referred to himself and considered it as a sign for the future.” – Wiki.

“A good Technician was rarely wrong. A top Technician was never wrong. Harlan was never wrong.

‘Now the M.N.C. recommended,’ said Harlan (he spoke coolly, evenly, pronouncing the Standard Intertemporal Language in precise syllables), ‘by your Section involves induction of an accident in space and the immediate death by fairly horrible means of a dozen or more men.’

‘Unavoidable,’ said Voy, shrugging.

‘On the other hand,’ said Harlan, ‘I suggest that the M.N.C. can be reduced to the mere displacement of a container from one shelf to another. Here!’ His long finger pointed. His white, well-cared-for index nail made the faintest mark along one set of perforations.

Voy considered matters with a painful but silent intensity.

Harlan said, ‘Doesn't that alter the situation with regard to your unconsidered fork? Doesn't it take advantage of the fork of lesser probability, changing it to near-certainty, and does that not then lead to—‘

‘-to virtually the M.D.R.’ whispered Voy.

‘To exactly the Maximum Desired Response,’ said Harlan.”

– The End of Eternity (Isaac Asimov, 1955)

The First Interstellar

“Voy went on after a moment's pause. ‘Of course, in view of the alterations in personality to be induced by this Reality Change, the death of a few men as preliminary is of little importance.’”

– The End of Eternity (Isaac Asimov, 1955)

The book 19+, the idea to write it came to me when I found out that the supposed Face on Mars, according to one version, was discovered 13 years before the Chernobyl accident.

The book The Last Da Vinci, the idea to write it appeared when I found out that some events from my first book, which took place on September 6–10, 2017, occurred immediately before the astronomical event Rapture of the Bride on September 23, 2017 (which also mentioned the date of September 9, 2017).

The idea to write a third book arose on November 3, 2023 at 9:52 pm, when I discovered information that on September 9, 2017, another astronomical event occurred – a mysterious meteorite named 1I/’Oumuamua, passed perihelion – the closest point to the Sun on its trajectory.

This stage marks the invasion of the provincial world of our Solar System by a foreign object that came from somewhere outside.

1I/’Oumuamua

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/ʻOumuamua

“1I/ʻOumuamua is the first confirmed interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. Formally designated 1I/2017 U1, it was discovered by Canadian Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September.

[In terms of fixation time, it is the second, after CNEOS 2014-01-08. Meaning that 1I/’Oumuamua was discovered as an interstellar object first, and then they began to look for similar objects in old digitized images and discovered another, much smaller – about 1 meter, which was registered earlier in the records of 2014, but was not then identified as an interstellar object.]

The name comes from Hawaiian ʻoumuamua 'scout' (from ʻou 'reach out for' and mua, reduplicated for emphasis 'first, in advance of'), and reflects the way the object is like a scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to humanity. It roughly translates to 'first distant messenger'. The first character (not a diacritic) is a Hawaiian ʻokina, not an apostrophe, and is pronounced as a glottal stop; the Pan-STARRS team chose the name in consultation with Ka'iu Kimura and Larry Kimura of the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.

Indications of origin

Accounting for Vega's proper motion, it would have taken ʻOumuamua 600,000 years to reach the Solar System from Vega, although it was not in the same part of the sky at that time. Astronomers calculate that 100 years ago the object was 83.9 ± 0.090 billion km; 52.1 ± 0.056 billion mi (561 ± 0.6 AU) from the Sun and traveling at 26.33 km/s with respect to the Sun. This interstellar speed is very close to the mean motion of material in the Milky Way in the neighborhood of the Sun, also known as the local standard of rest (LSR), and especially close to the mean motion of a relatively close group of red dwarf stars. This velocity profile also indicates an extrasolar origin, but appears to rule out the closest dozen stars. In fact, the closeness of ʻOumuamua's velocity to the local standard of rest might mean that it has circulated the Milky Way several times and thus may have originated from an entirely different part of the galaxy.

It is unknown how long the object has been traveling among the stars. The Solar System is likely the first planetary system ʻOumuamua has closely encountered since being ejected from its birth star system, potentially several billion years ago. It has been speculated that the object may have been ejected from a stellar system in one of the local kinematic associations of young stars (specifically, Carina or Columba) within a range of about 100 parsecs, 45 million years ago. The Carina and Columba associations are now very far in the sky from the Lyra constellation, the direction from which ʻOumuamua came when it entered the Solar System. Others have speculated that it was ejected from a white dwarf system and that its volatiles were lost when its parent star became a red giant. About 1.3 million years ago the object may have passed within a distance of 0.16 parsecs (0.52 light-years) to the nearby star TYC 4742-1027-1, but its velocity is too high to have originated from that star system, and it probably just passed through the system's Oort cloud at a relative speed of about 15 km/s (34,000 mph; 54,000 km/h). An August 2018 study using Gaia Data Release 2 updated the possible past close encounters and identified four stars – HIP 3757, HD 292249, Gaia DR2 2502921019565490176, and Gaia DR2 3666992950762141312 – which ʻOumuamua passed relatively close to at moderately low velocities in the past few million years.

Classification

Initially, ʻOumuamua was announced as comet C/2017 U1 (Pan-STARRS) based on a strongly hyperbolic trajectory. In an attempt to confirm any cometary activity, very deep stacked images were taken at the Very Large Telescope later the same day, but the object showed no presence of a coma. Accordingly, the object was renamed A/2017 U1, becoming the first comet ever to be re-designated as an asteroid. Once it was identified as an interstellar object, it was designated 1I/2017 U1, the first member of a new class of objects.

On 27 June 2018, astronomers reported that ʻOumuamua was thought to be a mildly active comet, and not an asteroid, as previously thought. This was determined by measuring a non-gravitational boost to ʻOumuamua's acceleration, consistent with comet outgassing. However, studies submitted in October 2018 suggest that the object is neither an asteroid nor a comet, although the object could be a remnant of a disintegrated interstellar comet (or exocomet), as suggested by astronomer Zdenek Sekanina. <…>

ʻOumuamua was compared to the fictional alien spacecraft Rama due to its interstellar origin. Adding to the coincidence, both the real and the fictional objects are unusually elongated. ʻOumuamua has a reddish hue and unsteady brightness, which are typical of asteroids.

Trajectory

ʻOumuamua entered the Solar System from north of the plane of the ecliptic. The pull of the Sun's gravity caused it to speed up until it reached its maximum speed of 87.71 km/s (315,800 km/h; 196,200 mph) as it passed south of the ecliptic on 6 September, where the Sun's gravity bent its orbit in a sharp turn northward at its closest approach (perihelion) on 9 September at a distance of 0.255 AU (38,100,000 km; 23,700,000 mi) from the Sun, i.e., about 17% closer than Mercury's closest approach to the Sun. It is now heading away from the Sun toward Pegasus, toward a vanishing point 66° from the direction of its approach.”

Perihelion (Greek περί ‘peri’ – around, near, Greek ἥλιος ‘helios’ – the Sun) – the closest point to the Sun in the orbit of a planet or other celestial body of the Solar system, as well as the distance from this point to the center of the Sun (more precisely, the perihelion distance).

Also on the link above there is a picture of its orbit, at first it flies almost directly to the Sun; after flying next to the Sun, it turns at an acute angle (about 70 degrees by eye) and flies further, turning along a hyperbolic trajectory.

Observers: Interstellar asteroid is unlike anything else in the Solar System (link in Russian)

https://smotrim.ru/article/1047112

“As the observations showed, the object has a dark red color. Experts believe that this is the result of millions of years of exposure to cosmic rays. The asteroid rotates around its axis with a period of 7.3 hours, while its brightness changes tenfold.

This means that the shape of the unexpected guest is not like a ball, but like a chip or potato. It is elongated, its length (at least 400 meters) is about ten times the width. Therefore, when an observer sees an asteroid ‘from the end’, he receives ten times less reflected light than when the celestial body is displayed full-length before telescopes.

As stated in the release, ʻOumuamua is not like any other body typical of the Solar system.”

Interstellar object