Silas Reed

He saw a homeless man pushing a cart full of his belongings and decided to follow. The man led him to a large encampment underneath a massive bridge. A fire burned in a metal drum at the center, its light casting flickering shadows on dozens of huddled figures. The air was thick with smoke, but it was a living place.

Silas found a broken patio chair and dragged it toward the fire. He didn't particularly care about his current living situation. He had lived in the grandest of palaces and had already lost any desire he had for such vanity.

Though the raw, chaotic energy of the camp was a jarring contrast to the silence of his last complete memory: standing in the sky above his previous Earth, watching the destruction he had wrought.

He remembered looking at the planet swallowed by darkness. There was no sun anywhere; all he saw was a world decaying under the darkness. Hours ago, his lab, buried deep beneath the ocean, had exploded. This explosion was so horrific that it took most of the Pacific Ocean with it. With this explosion came various energy and material poisons. These poisons were responsible for mutating the atmosphere of the planet, resulting in this darkness.

He remembered his complicated feelings as he slowly landed on the blackened surface of what was once the Pacific Ocean.

His memory was interrupted. A man with a scarred face wordlessly handed him a tin cup of watery stew and a hard loaf of bread. Silas nodded his thanks but made no move to eat. He watched the others around the fire, his eyes tracking who ate and who didn't. In a life of 174 years, caution had become an instinct for him. As he waited, his mind drifted back to that dead world.

He remembered his excitement and glee. He was beyond happy, but the finality of the destruction he had caused was still a bitter pill to swallow. He was happy because he had managed to save his latest creation—the time machine. Right at the moment of the explosion, Silas had taken the machine and teleported to Mars, saving both himself and the machine.

But he was feeling complicated because he was out of chances. He had effectively destroyed Earth and everything he had built there. If his new creation failed him, he would never have the opportunity to try again.

Silas remembered looking at the devastation he had caused. He knew that Earth was beyond salvation now. The fallout from his experiment had done catastrophic damage to the Earth's atmosphere.

After seeing several others eat from the same pot without issue, Silas finally raised the cup to his lips. The stew was bland, mostly water, but it was warm. He ate it slowly, the meager meal doing little to stop his shivering. As he ate, he went into introspection.

He had been too excited before, so he hadn't paid much mind to his actions, but now, as he recalled past events, he realized that he had been incredibly rash. He couldn't believe that he had no backup plan. He really staked everything on one gamble.

While his mind dwelled on his past foolishness, his eyes were already active, scanning the layout of the camp. He continued his survey of the area, looking for a defensible, sheltered position.

Perhaps this was old age. Maybe it was the age that made him so desperate, so rash, or it was his growing frustration at not achieving his ultimate goal. Silas, fifty years ago, would never have been so rash. Perhaps this long journey had taken a greater toll on him than he imagined.

His eyes settled on an empty, broken tent near the edge of the encampment, close to a large concrete support pillar. A good spot. He finished his food, stood up, and walked over to the man in the neighboring tent.

"What happened to the owner of this tent?" Silas asked.

The man grunted without looking up. "Went out two days ago. Hasn't come back."

In the language of the homeless, the tent was now his. Silas claimed it, dragging the broken patio chair with him. Lying down in the slightly torn tent with a brick wrapped in cloth for a pillow, he recalled his final thoughts as he looked upon his ruined home.

He knew that Earth was beyond salvation. Of course, not everybody on Earth would die; people who were already in bunkers had a chance of survival. Humanity, under his leadership, had already terraformed most of the Solar System, so they could still exist even without Earth. However, the colonies outside of Earth were not self-sustaining. So, if Earth were destroyed now, Silas knew that the extinction of humanity was not far off.

After declaring humanity's end, he continued onto the next topic. He didn't have the mind to care about these trivial things.

Simply put, Silas had exchanged humanity's fate for his time machine. And he had been successful. There was nothing else to discuss. He found no absurdity in this.

He had single-handedly elevated humanity from mere barbarians fighting each other to the masters of a star system. So, he was qualified enough to play with its fate.

Silas was taken out of his reverie by the constant aches his body produced. He hated that. Once upon a time, Silas could survive in a melting building with just his body, but now, just a short fight had caused his body to break down.

Luckily, he had enough mental fortitude to plow through this pain. But he still decided to sleep. After all, it wasn't a good idea to have a sick body, especially in an unfamiliar environment.

It was a pity that he couldn't heal his body. He actually knew a breathing technique, developed under his reign, that promoted natural cell regeneration and subsequently healing. But the problem was that he had not trained his body for it.

Breathing was an involuntary process. To manipulate breathing to a certain pattern requires training to develop muscle memory. Silas couldn't do so now. So, he had to choose between sleep and healing.

In the end, he chose to meditate for a few hours, while maintaining the breathing technique, before sleeping, because his mind was too exhausted to 'breathe' through the night.

He could do all this safely because of the nature of the camp. Silas observed the insignia on the tents in the middle of the camp and the perimeter around it. These told Silas that this camp was either government-regulated or NGO regulated. Plus, he observed that no one in the camp had a weapon.

This meant that everyone here felt safe enough to lose their vigilance. So, Silas decided to trust this apparent safety, too.

Of course, he was still holding the bloodied knife that he got from the assailants. He knew it was dangerous to keep a weapon close because of his untrained body, but he still felt it was better than being unarmed in a strange environment.