The Beginning

Illustrated Sci-fi Short Story

By: Lyubomir Nikolov

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Beginning is an illustrated philosophical tale about a man who nearly dies in his own bathroom—and instead begins to wake up.
Vladimir Petrov lives a perfectly adjusted life in a perfectly disoriented world: successful, exhausted, compliant, and quietly hollow. When an accident brings him face to face with the ghostly presence of his former schoolteacher, the familiar logic of reality fractures. Soon, a mysterious machine arrives—part solarium, part cosmic reset—promising not transcendence, but a return to something forgotten: the original human program.
Blending dark humor, social satire, metaphysics, and speculative science, The Beginning explores identity, conformity, and the cost of living without meaning. This is not a story about escaping the world, but about seeing it clearly—after the signal noise is stripped away.