Chapter 1

The man opened his eyes.

Everything around him was completely white. An endless white expanse, without objects or boundaries. He was lying on a white floor, and as awareness slowly returned to him, he began to rise.

He was completely naked.

Once on his feet, he looked down at himself and noticed a paintbrush in his left hand. When he opened his fingers, he saw that the brush had left a burn mark across his palm. Yet the burned hand didn't hurt.

He took the brush in both hands and examined it. It looked like the most ordinary paintbrush imaginable.

He surveyed his surroundings once more, but saw nothing except endless whiteness.

The man didn't know where he was.

Stranger still, he didn't know who he was.

He had no memories at all. Who was he? How had he gotten here? How could he get out? He had no answers to any of these questions. Equally strange was the fact that this absence of answers—and of memories—didn't trouble him. On the contrary, he felt an inexplicable certainty that everything was all right.

After examining the brush one more time, the man set off to explore the white expanse. He walked, looking from side to side as he considered his situation.

“Is anyone here?” he called out, turning around and searching for any sign of something in the emptiness.

There was no answer.

So the man continued deeper into the white expanse. Minutes passed, then hours, and eventually, it seemed to him, days. He simply kept walking. But nothing came of it.

Except that he noticed he felt no fatigue, thirst, or hunger.

Wanting to test this observation, the man began to run. He ran and ran, paying close attention to every signal from his body.

His body was silent.

There was no exhaustion. No strain.

The man was beginning to understand that there was something extraordinary about his situation.

“Anyone!” he shouted. “Anyone! Answer me!”

He stopped and realized that even after running for so long, his breathing hadn't quickened.

Then the man looked at the brush again. He brought it close to his face and studied its texture, its every detail, searching for some kind of clue.

There was nothing remarkable about it. No writing. No logo. No signs that it had ever been used.

But when the man transferred the brush to his right hand, he felt it come alive.

He sensed an immense power within it.

And then, surrendering completely to his intuition, the man swept the brush through the endless white space.

The brush left a mark behind.

A thick black line.

He stopped and walked around it. The line hung motionless in three-dimensional space. The man reached out and touched it.

It was solid.

Stable.

He continued drawing black lines through the white space. At first they were random, without meaning or order. Then he drew a square, turned the square into a cube—and the cube immediately came to life. The object he had drawn materialized in the white expanse and dropped to the floor.

The man experimented with the cube, testing how sturdy it was. The object was light, almost weightless. But he could feel it. He could sit on it. He could kick it, and the cube, obeying the laws of physics, would fly off in whatever direction he sent it.

The Painter began drawing more and more objects. Geometric shapes of every imaginable kind. He filled the white expanse with countless new forms outlined in black. At some point, he stopped even thinking about what he wanted to draw and simply let intuition guide the hand holding the brush, creating shapes without knowing what they were supposed to be.

Suddenly, a sharp electric shock struck his right palm, and he dropped the brush.

The Painter froze.

He briefly touched the brush where it lay on the white floor. There was no second shock. Carefully, he picked it up and once again examined the burn on his left palm.

“What the hell are you?” the Painter asked the brush. “And what the hell happened to me?”

The burn troubled him. Trying to understand what was going on, he took the brush in his burned left hand and swept it through the empty space.

Nothing happened.

The brush left no mark.

He tried again and again, but the brush refused to paint. Then the Painter decided to dip it into some of the color that already existed—in one of the short black lines suspended in the white space.

The brush began erasing the line.

The Painter immediately stopped. He touched another black line with the brush, and it began erasing that one as well. He moved on to the three-dimensional objects he had created and discovered that the brush could erase them completely from existence.

Puzzled, he transferred the brush to his right hand and swept it through the white dimension.

The brush left a black line.

“So that's how it works,” he murmured.

He continued painting.

After a while, the Painter began wondering why the lines were black.

Could they be red?

Instantly, the brush began painting in red.

Soon there were objects made of red lines, then green, blue, yellow, and purple. The Painter began playing with colors, filling objects with different shades. As he did, the colored objects came to life, gaining physical properties and materializing before him.

He drew a table, and another thought immediately occurred to him: textures.

The Painter imagined the grain of wooden planks and began painting that texture onto the table. After completing only a small section, he knocked his fist against it.

The sound that came back was unmistakable.

Wood.

He laughed. He was getting good at this.

The Painter was beginning to understand.

Excited, he picked up the pace, trying to cover the table in its wooden texture as quickly as possible.

The brush suddenly sent a powerful electric shock through his hand.

Sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped it.

This time, the shock had left a mark on his right palm: a small patch of reddened skin.

He kicked the brush, sending it flying several yards across the floor.

Angry, he began pacing back and forth, trying to decide what to do next. His options were limited: either face an endless white expanse of absolute nothingness or continue creating things with the mysterious brush.

The Painter walked over to it, biting his lip, and stared down at it.

“All right. All right,” he said.

He picked up the brush, bracing himself for another shock. Then he imagined an apple and painted it.

The apple came to life and dropped to the floor.

The Painter picked it up, brought it to his nose, and smelled its fresh, fruity aroma. Then he took a bite.

It tasted extraordinarily sweet—exactly as he had imagined it while painting it.

Now he was beginning to understand what was happening. Or at least, he understood it better than he had before.

The Painter painted himself clothes and shoes. He painted a lavish feast with all kinds of food, then a bed and chairs. He painted an entire house and filled it with furnishings. He created a garden overflowing with plants, a small forest with mushrooms and berries, and a little stream running through it.

He spent what seemed like several days creating his own little paradise.

To some extent, the Painter even found satisfaction in the work, taking his time and creating everything slowly and patiently.

And although the brush had stopped shocking him, he painted himself a pair of rubber gloves as protection against possible electrical burns. But the moment he put them on, the brush stopped working. Apparently, this strange instrument required direct contact with his skin.

Once he had provided himself with everything he needed, the Painter spent several days in his house beside the garden and the forest.

He kept waiting for something to happen.

For other people to appear.

For someone to make contact with him.

But there was only silence.

Silence and the endless white expanse.

Then he made up his mind.

He would paint a person.

A woman.

The thought filled him with nervous excitement. Would she be real? Would she remember anything about her past? Did he even have the right to condemn another human being to the same incomprehensible fate that had befallen him?

He paced back and forth across the green lawn outside his house, rehearsing the moment when the second person appeared.

“Hello. Don't panic. Everything's all right. We're just in a very strange situation. I don't really understand what's going on either. But look—I have this brush. Whatever I paint with it becomes real. Here. Take it. Try painting something.”

Eventually, he told himself to stop stalling.

The Painter picked up the brush from his doorstep and began painting another human being. He had only a vague idea of what the woman should look like, a hazy image of her appearance in his mind. And as he created this second person, he noticed that the brush was adding details of its own. It seemed capable of filling in everything he had left unspecified.

But throughout the entire process of painting this completely new human being, the brush sent a continuous stream of painful electricity into the Painter's palm.

Gritting his teeth, he kept going.

When the woman was complete, he froze, unable to bring himself to lift the brush from her white dress.

The Painter knew that the moment he pulled it away, the woman would come to life.

His heart was pounding. His hands were trembling. Logically, he understood that he had to do it—that he had to create another person—but emotionally, he was panicking.

“Ah, screw it!” he said, and pulled the brush away from her body.

The woman instantly materialized and fell to the ground.

The Painter froze.

He waited for her to open her eyes, for the two of them to begin talking.

But the woman showed no signs of life.

His anxiety took on a different form.

What if she didn't wake up?

He approached her and touched her wrist.

No pulse.

He pressed his fingers against her neck, but again, he could find no heartbeat. Her body was warm, but there was no life in it.

“No, no, no, no, no,” the Painter kept repeating.

He began performing CPR, giving her chest compressions and rescue breaths.

“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!” he counted with each compression.

The Painter spent nearly ten minutes trying to revive the woman, but in the end, nothing worked.

Only the faint scent of her perfume lingered in the air around them.

He found that deeply strange. When he had painted the woman, he hadn't thought about perfume at all. The brush had added that detail on its own.

But what was the point of such a detail if the woman was dead?

“I'm sorry,” he said, overcome with guilt.

A single tear rolled down his cheek. The Painter wiped it away with trembling hands.

He was beginning to realize that, in all likelihood, he was condemned to be alone in this incomprehensible reality. No matter how powerful the brush was, there was one thing it could not create:

A living human being.

He took the woman's hand and simply sat beside her until her body grew cold.

Afterward, he placed the brush in his left hand and prepared to erase her lifeless body. But for some reason, it felt wrong.

He felt that she deserved better.

So he transferred the brush to his right hand and painted a shovel. It materialized before him, and he went behind the house to dig a grave.

Later, after burying the woman, he returned home and crawled into bed. He had endured enough stress for one day.

He fell into a deep sleep.

When the Painter awoke and remembered his failure, a wave of despair washed over him. Taking the brush, he went outside and began painting himself a motorcycle.

Not a single electric shock came.

He no longer cared.

He shoved the brush into one of the motorcycle's saddlebags, climbed on, started the engine, and rode away, leaving the house, the garden, and the forest with its little stream behind.

The motorcycle accelerated past sixty miles per hour. The powerful engine roared beneath him. He felt the air rushing against his body.

The wind—and nothing else.

The perfectly flat surface of the white expanse, with no road markings, no landmarks, no objects of any kind and, most importantly, no people, made the journey feel utterly empty.

He rode until the motorcycle ran out of gas. Then he climbed off and looked around, though he didn't even know what he was searching for.

Only the tiniest dark speck was visible in one direction: the forest beside his house, now far behind him.

The Painter laughed.

An amusing thought had occurred to him.

He pulled the brush from the motorcycle's saddlebag, took it in his left hand, and erased the speck from the white horizon.

It really did disappear.

At that very instant, the brush struck him with a tremendous electrical discharge.

He saw a flash.

He heard a deafening crack.

And he felt as though his entire body had burst into flames.

The shock was so powerful that it hurled the Painter several yards through the air, and everything went black.

When he regained consciousness, the first thing he did was look at his left palm.

It had been blackened by the shock.

The Painter got to his feet and looked around, even though he knew there was nothing to see. Again and again, he searched to the left, then to the right.

The tiny dot that had been his home was truly gone from the horizon.

He took a deep breath.

And then he began to cry.

Now he didn't even have anywhere to go back to.

The Painter cried for about twenty minutes.

When he finally calmed down and had some time to think, an interesting idea occurred to him.

He stepped away from the motorcycle and, taking the brush in his right hand, painted a stone arch while holding one thought firmly in his mind:

A magical portal to a world where there were people.

The arch came to life the moment he applied the final strokes of the brush.

The Painter sensed an inexplicable, invisible force within its center. Even the air around the portal seemed charged with electricity.

He looked down at the brush in his hand and discovered that it had completely lost its color. It was now entirely black and white.

He tried to paint a simple black line with it.

Nothing happened.

The Painter wasn't sure what had caused the brush to lose its color, but he didn't throw it away. He simply slipped it into his pocket.

He wiped away his tears and took one last look at the strange white world.

Then the Painter stepped through the portal.