Christopher slid his index finger across the glass console. The contact was cold, predictable, perfect. He stopped on a video archive barely six months old. He liked to watch it from time to time, not out of nostalgia — a feeling he considered chemically useless — but out of pure aesthetic pleasure. It was the testimony of his superiority engraved in silicon.
On the screen, the television studio seemed too small for him. Christopher stood there with an ease that bordered on pure arrogance, occupying the space as if the molecules of air belonged to him. Across from him, a renowned journalist suddenly seemed tiny, almost faded.
— Doctor Ashton, you are the youngest surgeon to hold three specialties. Some of your colleagues see you as an insult to experience. What do you say to them?
Christopher let a heavy silence hang in the air, savoring the discomfort that was beginning to cling to the set. His smile stretched, predatory.
— Experience is the name mediocrities give to their slow learning, he replied in a velvet voice. If it takes them thirty years to grasp what I understand in three seconds, that's a synaptic deficit, not a sign of wisdom. Saying that I insult them is a compliment… in reality, I simply make them obsolete.
The journalist paused, unsettled. She searched for a flaw, a more visceral angle.
— There's a lot of talk about your method. You operate from an isolated room, through a digital interface, without ever touching the patient. Is that a "God complex"?
Christopher let out a short laugh, devoid of warmth.
— God? Certainly not. God leaves too much room for chance and forgiveness. My method eliminates the background noise: smells, sweat, emotion. I'm not above humanity ...I'm above the flesh. In my operating room, I am pure intellect. If people need someone to hold their hand, they can call a priest. If they want to live, they should call me.
— Yet none of your assistants lasts more than a month at your side. Some say you're a tyrant…
He dismissed the argument with an elegant wave of his hand.
— They confuse tyranny with the demand for precision. If I ask for perfection and they offer approximation, they commit a technical sacrilege. If their egos are too fragile to handle the truth, they should go back to sorting bandages.
The present-day Christopher pressed the pause button. The image froze on that icy gaze, tinted with triumphant contempt. He leaned back in his leather chair, completely satisfied with himself.
What beauty! he thought.
— What a waste of time it would be to continue like this, he murmured. Excellence eventually becomes a tedious routine.
He stood up and smoothed his surgically white coat. This room was his kingdom: a space without scalpels where his mind could roam freely, and above all without witnesses to his only weakness. A sanctuary built to protect his genius from a world too "sharp," too direct. He glanced at the clock. His last day was beginning. His final demonstration of mastery before the golden boredom of retirement.
He activated the control screens. The image of the operating room, located at the other end of the hospital complex, appeared in high definition. In the dimness of his "white room," only the hum of servers and the electric blue glow of the monitors kept him company.
He tapped his long, slender fingers against his cheek, his mind already elsewhere — somewhere between the islands of Lérins and the shores of Hawaii. He had accumulated enough wealth to buy the silence of the rest of the world.
He turned on the microphone. His voice fell like a blade through the operating room speakers.
— Doctor Douglas, I hope you slept more than four hours. I have no intention of spending my last day correcting your motor approximations. Try, for once, to act like a surgeon instead of a first-year pottery student.
He crossed his legs, a satisfied smile on his lips. He was eager to see how they would survive without him. Probably in chaos — and that prospect delighted him.
Yet in a corner of his mind, one question lingered, as persistent as a distant alarm: did there exist, somewhere on this planet, a single intelligence capable of keeping him from sighing in boredom?