The sky above earth had long since gone dark - swallowed not by night, but by smoke trails. Dr. Silas reed, the sole ruler of earth, stood alone on the blackened surface of what was once the pacific ocean.
His lab - buried deep beneath the ocean, had exploded. This explosion was so horrific that it took most of the pacific with it.
Fortunately, Silas was able to save his latest creation. Right at the moment of the explosion, Silas had taken the machine and teleported to mars.
Now, back on earth, Silas looked 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.
In a week all life on Earth will die. It is fortunate that under his leadership Earth had already terraformed the Moon and Mars, so humanity can still exist even without Earth.
However, the colonies outside of Earth were not self-sustaining. So, if Earth is destroyed now, Silas knew that the extinction of humanity was not far off.
Of course, not everybody on Earth will die, people that are already in bunkers and are not directly affected by the plethora of energies released by the explosion have a chance of survival on Earth.
Maybe if these people survive underground for the next 100,000 years, one day they could rise to the surface again.
But Silas didn't have the mind to care about that now. He had succeeded...
He had accomplished what he set out to do. Still, the effects of his actions sent him into introspection...
He was not always this obsessed.
Once, Silas was a theoretical physicist. He was a man that had decided to find out the secrets of the universe.
But perhaps it was his lack of capability or the almost barren level of resources in the Milky Way galaxy, he never even came close.
Of course, he made significant progress, enough to ensure that if any human survived, they would never forget his contributions.
He had accomplished so much that when people remembered him, they will not think of him as a demon incarnate but as a great man that eventually turned into a demon and destroyed the world.
At least, that is what Silas hoped. Perhaps this was the last shred of vanity Silas had left. He subconsciously wanted people to remember his achievements.
On the other hand, Silas was not satisfied with his achievements at all. This was the key reason for the catastrophe.
Even though Silas himself will never admit it, the reason humanity was going to become extinct was because Silas was not satisfied with his progress. So he decided to gamble the fate of humanity to achieve his goals.
And humanity had lost the gamble but Silas had won...
Silas had spent the last 131 years of his life in search of the truth but he didn't find anything significant.
What lead to his current despair was the absence of any significant breakthrough in any scientific field. Even with the brightest minds of humanity working in unison for close to eight decades, there was no qualitative breakthrough...
Sure, humanity now had control over the entire Solar System, there were life-extension methods that increased the life of an average male to 200 years, scientific theories were compiled over the last 8 decades to form the Unified theory that explained the entire working of the universe and much more.
But Silas knew that these improvements were superficial. The Unified Theory was Silas's life's work. This was why he knew how incomplete it was, there were too many exceptions. Any exception was just a nice way of saying there was a flaw.
A flaw meant that he had not achieved the goal, he spent his entire life on. This revelation was killing Silas internally, he couldn't bear the weight of his own failure.
Of course, Silas was unaware of these truths about his actions.
Nothing achieved by humanity was complete. Their exploration didn't find any other life in the universe, their life extension methods had no way to extend life without permanently giving up the potential for further growth. So naturally, Silas was dissatisfied.
He had scoured most of the galaxy himself but he found no other intelligent being.
He even sent signals to the rest of the knowable universe but there was never any response.
In despair, he shifted his focus to exploring other dimensions but even there he found nothing...
There was no god, no heaven no hell, humans were there all alone. Or perhaps Silas had never reached a level where he could interact with such beings.
In any case, he had exhausted all his options. He was so obsessive in finding other life because he was looking for a way to extend his lifespan.
Silas had no problem with dying, but dying like this without accomplishing anything was not something he could tolerate.
Sensing his thoughts, Silas chuckled 'perhaps this is what every coward that is afraid of dying says'.
In any case, he refused to give up just yet.
In his youth, he had developed a super serum that will elevate his genes to the next level, but it was flawed.
It gave him unparalleled strength and adaptability but it also locked his genes forever.
Now even a 100 years later, he couldn't unlock these genes.
He could still upload his conscious to a computer as a last case scenario but Silas was not that desperate to live.
He refused to let go of his potential for further advancement even if it meant death. To Silas growth meant an elevation in life level, he wanted to become a perfect being free of any flaw.
And his gamble had paid off. Silas had created a time machine...
By scraping together all the resources of the solar system, Silas finally created this machine.
Bit by bit, he had absorbed the solar system's resources, oceans turned to reactors. Moons were carved for their minerals.
Every planet and asteroid was stripped bare of any resources. Under his lead, humanity had destroyed the ecosystem of the Solar System beyond repair.