The Cello
Chapter 17

Martenot sat with his elbows on his desk and his face in his hands. He was exhausted. It wasn’t just the kind of tiredness that results from a bad night’s sleep or an early morning. This was the kind of run down it takes a man years to work up to. Hundreds of years to be precise.

He was slumped over so much that the glow of his computer screen filled his entire field of vision. Normally, he would move for the sake of sparing himself a headache, but today he was so far beyond headaches he couldn’t even bring himself to sit back in his chair.

It was an hour until the system reboot, and he’d already finished the long checklist of things he needed to do to prepare for it -- that’s the sort of man he was was. The lines of script on the screen were blinking happily green. Perhaps it was a flaw; always being too far ahead of schedule -- two steps ahead and beyond his time.

His work here had once been fulfilling. It had been adventurous and appealing to his scientific mind. But he had grown so tired of this. The update felt like the last breath of a dying mind. Why was there no appeal in this anymore? Perhaps it was because the delusion that he’d been ‘improving’ upon the humans was finally wearing off. He was not improving them. He was destroying them. This update would render them lumps of flesh, too numb and inhibited to be useful at all -- to Theremin or themselves.

That man had become something he feared. Not because he was intimidated by him -- for surely that had never been the case -- but because he represented the absolute regression of his kind. His civility had been erased and his motives reduced to the most basic primal instincts living things possessed.

He now saw that what he was destroying in the humans -- however primitive their genetic makeup -- was more civil than any faculty he had ever possessed. That was the reason he was so exhausted. It wasn’t that they were more advanced, for universe knew they weren’t. It was that there was simply more of them. He couldn’t pretend they were animals anymore.

He was tired of trying to justify himself. He was tired of Theremin’s madness. He was tired of this dried out, lonely planet. He was tired of the humans.

Martenot took a deep breath and straightened in his seat. He spun his revolving chair so he could look through the window of his study into the operating room.

Updating all of the humans would take months. But as soon as it was over, he was leaving this forsaken planet. He was taking to the stars again and never looking back.