Watched Marion Wyling disappear into Bergen's hectic night and turned to face the sea. Perhaps he had helped save the world but he couldn't help wondering if Sitnikov had been right. In the end we might be nothing more than shitting, eating and sleeping machines and that the luckiest of us leave the world the same way we enter it; as an isolated cell of raw need. He remembered the moment in Sitnikov's laboratory when he first picked up the test tube containing the skin virus. He could easily have let it slip through his fingers; for no better reason than an arbitrary and momentary indifference. Perhaps, he thought, there is a little bit of Sitnikov in us all; which sees some extreme sense in drawing a curtain over the whole mess of human existence. As it was, and thanks to him, the world would continue but he couldn't dispel the suspicion that he had saved humanity to find new ways to destroy itself. The appointed round of each eating, sleeping and shitting machine would continue and the majority of the machines would be made to endure misery by the minority. Those who won't be starved, tortured, displaced, robbed, murdered or raped would be taken up by madness and disease and those that survive all these things will forlornly gather threads of meaning from their family and associates, gaining a momentary and vain status only to pass into the night which devours everything. Sitnikov had said that by introducing the skin virus into the water supply he would just be adding a new player into a meaningless game and that the skin virus was just a more efficient and less painful way of arriving at the inevitable. It was Sitnikov's evolutionary end game. He remembered his petulant, peevish voice piping: "I wanted to kick over everybody else's sand castle".