Prologue
If you have read my novels — "The Arrivals from the M31 Galaxy Are Among Us", "Sissi the Alien", "The Stars’ Promise of Rescue" — you have already met her, though in those pages she walks in the company of extraterrestrials, under strange suns, and in worlds only partly our own.
But Rose is no invention. She is as real as the streetlamp light in which I first saw her, as real as the decades we have lived through together.
This is not just her story, nor mine alone, but a record of the times that shaped us — a half-century that has swept humanity from the flicker of early television to the shimmer of artificial intelligence.
I have been both witness to and, in my own small way, a contributor to that transformation. And yet, for all its technological marvels, the truest constant has been the quiet, sometimes stormy, bond between two people.
Every novelist draws from the “material” life offers. Mine has always returned to Rose. She is the living thread that runs through my imagined universes, the pulse beneath the fiction.
And now, at last, I want to set down the real story—the one without the masks and disguises — so you may know the woman who has been at the heart of it all.
This is only a fragment of a larger journey I call "My Journey Across Two Astonishing Centuries – From Iron Curtain to Learning Machines". But fragments can be telling. In them, you can glimpse not only a person, but an era: the hopes of youth under the Iron Curtain, the taste of a world just beyond reach, and the unrelenting march of progress.
And so we begin — not in some imagined galaxy, but on a street in 1965, under the glow of a lamp, as a young man steps out of the cinema and sees, for the first time, the woman who will change his life.
