He used to be a painter - SCP Foundation

He used to be a painter.

He used to be a painter, so he began to paint once more. The first time with paste and bits of food, the second time with charcoal. It made him miss the comforts of home, his cramped nook, the crumpled sheets, the unfinished works. His hosts, shaking their heads, told him he would never see it again.

It didn’t occur to him what that meant, then.

His hosts told him where he was, took him on long walks around the beaches of his island. They told him who they were. They were his cooks, his assistants. His angels. He had been rewarded, and their gratitude would last for eternity.

They were people who would never shame him, who would never break what he had made. They told him they would always be there for him, and he believed it.

And that made everything that followed so much worse, because he had felt safe here.

His hosts were clever, and had a sharp wit.

They were clever, and made sure he was never bored.

He spent a few days walking, finding the perfect spot for his very own cabin, where locks would never be needed. He spent his days building, learning how and what to plant. He began to cook again, and relished in his newfound skills. He asked his companions to teach him the plants of the island. They were delighted to show him them all, their names and what they needed to grow tall and strong. One day (for it was always day) he looked up at the glowing sun from a campfire, and saw it had been almost a year. The sun had greeted him every day, a loyal friend who would never stray from his side. He looked at his house – no longer a mere cabin, he had added rooms and floors, but they still lacked something.

And then it struck him; the walls were barren and unpainted, the floors rough and undecorated. He remembered how, years ago, he had been a painter. And so he began to paint once more.

He started small, re-learning how to sketch, and began to remember the finer points of architecture and the human body. He drew cities and he drew bodies and animals to fill them. He drew what he saw around him, and he drew what he saw inside himself when he slept at night. He painted first the walls, and then the ceilings. He painted every pattern he could think of, every fancy that struck him he indulged, and he filled the spaces in between with mirrors of every shape and size. He built dozens of personal museums and funhouses, all made to delight and amuse no-one but himself.

But one day he couldn’t sleep. He began to wander the halls, the feast of colors and the famine of company, and began to wonder when he would move on.

He had never bothered to ask his companions about this, as he had been busy filling his time with everything he had never had the chance to do in his old life. He wondered if there other islands, other guests staying on them. He still thought of himself as a guest, even then.

He didn’t want to be there anymore, so he asked his companion if he could leave. She smiled and shook her head.

He shrugged this off. He used to be a painter, and now he began painting with words.

He wrote from what he thought was his memory. Poems. Stories. History. Couldn’t separate the real from the memory from the fantasy. Didn’t care. With time, he created, deconstructed, and re-constructed entire genres.

And as he whittled away at his work, the island whittled away at him. He stopped noticing the paintings, and he stopped reading his works. He took down the mirrors, and didn’t care how many of them he shattered

He didn’t want to be there anymore, so he asked her if he could leave. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

He tried to move on. He really did. But there were only so many rooms he could build, only so much paint he could spill until he remembered he couldn’t leave.

He remembered what he had been taught by his da and ma. What was there for him if he broke the rules, what was waiting for them if he followed them. He had broken more than a few rules in his life, but maybe the island’s creator had turned the other cheek.

He remembered the parrot he had kept. He hadn't fed him in years, and in his mind he could see the starved ribcage, the once vibrant feathers graying and covering the floor. The smell - oh, the smell, chocking the apartment. What had his name been again? He couldn't remember.

He didn’t sleep that night. Not that he needed to. He felt refreshed as ever the morning (oh, but noon had never left) he broke his neck.

The way he thought about it, it was just another exotic dish to try.

That night he drowned. It was something new, worth more than all the dishes he could cook in a hundred years put together, worth more than filling the island with buildings.

The tenth time he woke up again like this, he was on his way to a new type of accident – he hadn’t decided which kind yet - when he saw something that caught his eye. That didn’t happen often – he was hemmed in by clear water and trapped beneath a breathtaking blue sky. But today his eyes caught something he didn’t use anymore. He saw a mirror lying on its side on the other half of the island. That wouldn’t be odd in and of itself, except he had left it facing the sea to the south, and he was staring at it on the north of the island.

He wondered about that during breakfast. He wondered about that while on his morning walk around the island. When he walked down to the mirror he wondered some more.

He didn’t want to be there anymore, so he stayed outside and thought.

And the next day he found something interesting – if he hung a rope around a tree trunk and carried it in a straight line, the rope wouldn’t snap, not even when he looped it around the same trunk he had tied it to, as long as the rope was long enough.

His mind began to pull. It began to pull on threads he thought he had forgotten along with his old apartment. It hauled visions and memories back into his mind, visions of steel pipes and men who were not his companions carrying something that wasn’t papyrus, closing doors with electric locks and walking through a building that wasn’t made of wood.

Now, he wasn’t some kind of genius mind you. What he did had never earned him any prizes, even if he did achieve some recognition from his peers. But he had time. Time to learn and space to make mistakes. And if he didn’t learn he could always guess until he learned enough to get to the next stage.

He had been a painter, and now he painted with numbers.

One of the first lessons was that he didn’t have infinite space. He created a sailboat. He built a compass and an octant to make sure he was sailing straight on ahead, but regular as clockwork he would arrive back at the island. He tried rowing, he even tried building a crude woodstove engine. The island would always be there, waiting for him, like a dead parrot he couldn't bury.

Still, it was a mystery to be solved. A puzzle that took years. He began to have hope he could even leave someday. The food began to taste good again, and he even began to paint once more.

Decades passed. He had always been a hard worker, and he was always on holiday. Still, there came times when he would give up. His mind would throw everything he had learned back up and try to tear itself apart. But that just another puzzle he could solve, every hundred years or so.

He used to be a painter, and now he painted with machines.

He filled his world with whirs and whistling. Those were his lessons. He then filled his world with pipes and valves that lay silent. Those were his teachings. Finally he filled the machines with other machines, and those became his lifeboat.

He made some tools and began to dig. Beneath the sand, beneath the rock. He turned the entire island upside down, but finally found a small vein of copper. It would take him another year to find the uranium.

The only miracles this place had left for him.

His machines became massive, far larger than the island itself. He used the water around him for cooling stations, and pumped away what he didn’t need to make more room. He built machines towering above into the sky and tunneling underneath.

He dug deep enough to make the Devil afraid, and high enough to make angels dizzy.

After a century or so, he paused to look around him, and couldn’t even tell where the island had been. All he saw was a maze of iron and steam, not even knowing for what purpose he had built most of them for.

It took him two centuries to build his first particle accelerator. After he did that, everything happened a lot faster.

He amused himself by instantly vaporizing and re-assembling, small pebbles, then moved on to larger stones. He moved on to nuts, fruits, and meats. And when that wasn't interesting enough, he vaporized pieces of himself. His limbs, his trembling hands. That wouldn't always work either, and that was all right too.

Eventually, he found out why he couldn’t die. There was a new kind of element that couldn’t exist, filling his prison. That was there with him, an invisible guest, keeping him alive. Keeping him trapped.

He isolated, picked and pulled at it until he understood that, too. The next day he pulled apart his dinner. Day after he pulled apart his companions. They didn’t come back. Finally, he was by himself. But he knew that he had always been, so that didn’t bother him much.

He ate his last dinner on a patch of land he had used to dump sand on, next to a large lake he had used to store the water to cool his machines. He looked up. Before he had started to work his machines, he had tried to map constellations, before realizing they changed with the waves.

The next morning, he finished the machine. He had tested it on his last host, cursing and crying and screaming as she disappeared into the stars.

He wasn’t himself anymore, hadn’t been for the last few millennia. But he would be damn sure no one else would lose themselves. That no one else would become a rotting parrot with its wings clipped.

He used to be a painter, and now he was gone.