The Cello

“Good morning Master Theremin.”

The pleasant passionless voice of the slave girl nudged the man from sleep. He shifted in his bed pool and let his eyes adjust to the light in the room as she continued.

“The time is eight o’clock a.m., January twelfth, in the year two thousand six hundred and eighteen, earth years,” Her voice recited from outside the thick curtain that surrounded him. He took a deep breath and rose from the warm pool of water, steeling himself against the brisk feel of the air on his wet skin.

The girl had hardly finished her warning of stormy weather and less than average yield on the cactus plantation before Theremin had slipped into his protective suit and was drawing back the curtains. The truth of the matter was; he rarely actually felt the outside conditions, and didn’t much care how confident the girl, or perhaps her programming, was about the production of his small but lucrative place in the expanse of space. What he cared about were the numbers; particularly the numbers that meant wealth.

He quietly paced to the glass wall of his quarters as he listened to the girl droll through various reports of the stability of his organization. The view from his window was framed by the huge extending arms of the mothership; the outer wall of which was a maze of lazily flashing lights and moving robotic parts. Through the closer viewports he could see that it was already alive with the activities of the day. So too was the outside world. Programming would have woken the humans at five this morning, and he could see the specks of movement between the endless rows of cactus that covered the landscape.

Though it seemed like yesterday, it had been nearly a hundred years since he had first discovered this depreciated planet on the edges of known space. It was not his conquest of this place that was his greatest source of pride. In fact, it was a convenient strain of viruses that had done most of the conquering for him. Neither did his growing of cactus for it’s juices give him any significant sense of accomplishment. There had been other wealthy merchants before him who had cultivated planets in the same area for raising copious amounts of cactus.

No, none of these were what he would be remembered for.

Realizing the girl had dutifully finished her reports and then gone silent, he turned to look at her.

“Come here.” He said.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she approached him, mismatched eyes respectfully avoiding his gaze. When she’d come to a halt a few steps away, he took to studying her appreciatively.

This one was especially aesthetically pleasing. Martenot knew his tastes well.

The girl’s assigned code was engraved in the metal between her mechanical right eye and adjacent ear. D5. The right side of her scalp had long ago been replaced by a sheet of metal, and beneath it, he knew, lay what was truly his greatest accomplishment.

After most of the native population had died of what they called the second Black Death, he had discovered that even the weakened remainder of them were still beyond his capacity to control. But a combination of his own genius, Martenot’s experience, and a surgical procedure that had since been simplified and perfected, had rendered the natives of this planet ideal for subdued labor.

Although, Theremin corrected himself, the technology’s perfection was not entirely complete. There were still holes; holes and weaknesses that threatened to drive him to madness. The next weeks would be critical.

No, they had not yet achieved perfect control, but they would. Soon.