by George Tome
“I don’t think that’s going to help much,” one of the girls said, shaking her head with feigned sadness. “Check this out: duplicate!” she ordered aloud. Immediately, the two Sandaras began to divide like the licants did, quickly becoming four Sandaras. The plan was working flawlessly.
Ugo’s jaw fell in astonishment, his throat suddenly drier than the deserts of Antyra II. Eventually, he found his voice, muttered, “Damn! Damn!” and turned back to run away from the hollowed tree.
The jure was running through the forest as if the shadow of death was chasing him, convinced that he’d soon end up with a horde of nieces piling up on his back. And to his chagrin, he was still able to hear some Sandara’s crystalline voice shouting, “Duplicate!” He didn’t need much creativity to imagine what happened next.
He had to win a bit of time by any means, now that time was flowing against him.
More and more guvals materialized around the jure and rushed to the heat of the battle. But if the number of his soldiers was growing arithmetically with each guval programmed, the Sandaras obviously multiplied in a geometrical fashion. Soon, her copies crowded the forest, filling it with the clamor that only an army of females could make.
It didn’t take long for his guvals to finish an avatar, especially when they attacked in packs. The ugly wounds gaping in the Sandaras’ flesh healed quickly, but the jaws of the beasts were moving so fast that eventually someone died in a flash of light. When that happened, the forest’s fabric became ripped apart, absorbing the gored matrix of the victim. But the Sandaras didn’t care about losses, each fallen clone being replaced by a whole pack.
At the site of the carnage, the destruction became so extensive that even the island appeared affected. White foamy patches dotted the grass where the reckless guvals accidentally tore the fabric of the world. Of course, the island’s algorithms were growing back the meadow over the decimated areas.
Seeing that, without weapons, they didn’t have a better chance of stopping the bloodthirsty monsters than a swarm of myopic licants, several Sandaras called their portals to program various weapons and armor. Meanwhile, the others were fighting bare-handed, which was little more than offering their bodies to keep the guvals busy with tearing them apart.
One of the Sandaras was able to materialize a rudimentary laser lens and hurried out of her portal, opening fire on the nearest guval. Its fur caught fire in a spectacular orange blaze, the shock freezing the monster in place. But in a few seconds, the genetic algorithms healed it, the fur growing back as if it had never burned.
Other armed Sandaras joined the first one, attacking the guvals with various laser lenses, sarpans, trilates, falchies, gorgs, and other—more or less—blunt weapons, only to find that the guvals regenerated like them.
“They can’t be destroyed!” the females realized, dismayed. The same algorithms that protected their integrity made the monsters almost immortal. They needed weapons with the same functions as the teeth of the guvals, but it might take them years, or rather, centuries—Ugo wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to throw in the word millennia—to program such a code. They had no other chance but to divide and offer their bodies to the slaughter, hoping for… what?
Their initial optimism turned into bitterness, even though the bright side was that Ugo seemed too busy to be able to attack Gill. Yet the Sandaras had no idea how long they could hold him like that. After all, the jure knew where Gill was heading. He probably had a few days to catch his ship and blow it to pieces, given the superb qualities of the Sigian destroyer.
They were fighting with incredible ferocity. Death, even virtual, was no less painful than the real one, and none of the clones was less Sandara than the others. With each disconnection, Sandara died one more time. Nobody, not one of Antyra’s daughters, was cursed like her, fated to die again and again in an endless, absurd nightmare. But those left alive didn’t care—they refused to care, determined to sacrifice themselves as many times as needed to give Gill a chance to stay alive.
A real battlefront formed in the forest. Thousands and thousands of Sandaras arranged in grah triangles, most of them now dressed in shiny blue armor, were fighting a pack of hundreds of guvals. And the number of fighters on both sides kept growing. Other females behind the front line were testing more or less bizarre methods, hoping that something might work against the savage monsters. One of them found that the drughira95 was a pretty efficient weapon. She spun it over her head as she knew the ancient soldiers used to and slammed the snout of the nearest guval, smashing its teeth. The monster, howling in pain, stepped back and covered its snout with its hairy paws until it regenerated. Soon, more and more Sandaras got the idea, abandoning the grah falchies.
Getting strength in their growing numbers and powerful weapons, a large group forced the right flank of the guvals, hitting them thirstily. They were trying to breach the line and reach Ugo, who was hiding behind his monsters.
After a while, they reached the abyss at the edge of Uralia’s only floating island, and a familiar view greeted them below: the hideous clouds draping the sinister world of the damned, Kaura—fully restored. If they managed to throw Ugo in the amnesic smog, their problem was as good as solved!
Ugo glanced, terrified, over the hairy backs of his guvals and saw the battlefront approaching quickly. The unexpected retreat of his army took him—again—by surprise, forcing him to create more and more guvals to resist the push and hampering his attempts to change the libraries that held the ‘duplicate’ algorithm used by the savages to increase their insane numbers.
“Lo, they ride on moulans now! They never had a single bit of decency,” he snorted, angered by his niece—or rather, nieces, for he now had thousands of them. As if their insane dividing didn’t burn enough resources already, they felt the need to consume them on moulans as well. He made a raw estimate of the functions required to render a moulan and was struck with horror. We’re going to run out of resources! He suddenly remembered that he didn’t have time to activate the destroyer’s memory, except for a small unit.
He would have liked to shout at them to stop before they ruined everything, to scold them like disobedient children, yet he knew all too well that they wouldn’t listen—Sandara never listened to him—and that the only thing that could really arouse their interest was to see him dead at their feet…
At a glance, he decided he had no time to freeze the ’duplicate’ algorithm—after all, it wouldn’t help even if he succeeded. There were already too many clones, and his guvals had reached the edge of the island. A few more steps and they’d fall to Kaura. The only way to change the tide of the battle was to make them divisible, too. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to help the resources problem… on the contrary.
With a deep sigh, he turned his back to the lost battle. The time had come to run away—and quickly!
“Island!” he ordered aloud to the nearest red architect.
A patch of rock about ten yards across, barely visible, materialized about half a mile from him. He stared at it, unable to accept that the thing he feared most had already happened.
“That’s not what I ordered,” he exclaimed with feigned anger, hoping that the virtual architect had lost its electrons and didn’t get his simple command. “Larger!”
“Insufficient resources,” the display replied.
“What do you mean by that?”
Ugo turned around and found the reason. The army of Sandaras had reached an insane size, larger than the whole Ropolis population. He had to do something—immediately, before they burned all the resources available in the other levels.
“Red level at one hundred percent usage,” answered the interface.
“Transfer the other levels!”
“How much?”
“Everything!”
“Level V can’t be used without the council’s vote,” the display replied in a smug voice.
“All right, use what you can!”
He turned back and shouted, �
�Island!”
The island reached several hundred yards.
“Bridge!” he ordered.
A narrow strip of rock stretched over the abyss, and Ugo ran toward the islet, closely followed by a cohort of red screens. After reaching the destination, he made a hand sign, and the bridge disappeared.
He whistled for his portal and jumped inside. I should have done this from the very beginning, he chided himself. On the displays around him, thousands of functions were flowing like the water of a raging river. There, my little, soon you’ll be able to divide, too! Let’s see what they will do then, he thought, then laughed like a mad grah.
The line of beasts finally crumbled. On the entire length of the island, hundreds of guvals were falling into the abyss in a hairy waterfall, dragging along scores of Sandaras on their battle moulans. In a matter of minutes, no monster was left alive.
The tired grahs couldn’t afford to enjoy their little victory. They had to find a way to stop Ugo before he killed them all.
No one had any clue how to do that, but surprisingly, although they were identical, they were able to think of different solutions. Maybe the short time since they began an independent life was enough to change their perceptions in subtle ways, perhaps the neuron synapses followed rules too complex to hit the same pattern, or maybe their copying didn’t make “identical” clones. No matter the explanation, the sum of their collective imagination was larger than one.
“Anyone tried to program something for flying?” yelled a Sandara.
“Flying is for games only,” replied another one. “Oh, you’re right—we have all the codes,” she blushed, embarrassed.
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” said one while typing hastily on the displays. “It’s so slow!”
“I don’t know how to move a function from the blue to the yellow area,” complained one nearby.
“Hurry up, will you?” exclaimed the first one, exasperated, while spying the jure’s moves on a screen through the eyes of the licants sent to follow him.
The noise of their heated discussions filled the forest. One of them ran to the edge of the island and made a sign; right away, a patch of earth materialized on the shore, extending the land a few feet. Others, seeing her success, started to work on the bridge to Ugo’s lair.
It was hard work, much harder than when Ugo had done it, but still, the work progressed. More and more Sandaras came to the edge of the abyss and expanded the land.
“Encrypt the bridge so that Ugo can’t erase it from under our feet!”
“I thought of that,” exploded the one with the idea. “Why do you think it’s going so slow?”
“He’ll run to another island,” complained the third.
“Oh, shut up!” snapped the fourth. “You always grumble!”
“Soon, he’ll run out of resources,” exclaimed another clone. “Perhaps we should speed up that moment,” she smiled. “Dupli—”
“Hey! You want to run out of space on our island?” a sixth clone admonished her. “Isn’t it enough how many of us died already?”
While her “sisters” were working hard on the bridge between the floating islands, a Sandara spotted something glimmering in the discoidal grass. Even though the grah wasn’t the kind of female attracted by sparkling trinkets, this time she made an exception: she pushed the grass out of the way and saw a tooth—or rather, a fang. A guval fang “extracted” by a drughira. With her hearts about to break her chest, she realized that the tooth distorted the air around it, hurting the island, which tried in vain to heal itself. The guval teeth had the delete algorithm embedded in them! The finding left her speechless… She tried to touch it, but it burned like molten metal. And yet, the root didn’t seem to be dangerous. Of course! That was the place where the killer function modulated on the beast’s jaw and had to protect it from self-digestion. She took the fang and ran to the nearest Sandaras.
“Look what I’ve got here!” she shouted over their chatter.
From the first glance, all of them understood the implications of the discovery.
“Search everywhere! Recover every single tooth!” she ordered.
Before she had even finished the command, the Sandaras dropped in the grass, carefully picking out every guval fang. And there were plenty of them!
The purple luster of a sarpan materialized like a thin llandro, chased out of nothingness by Sandara’s imagination. When it touched the fangs laid on a table in the portal sphere, the metal flowed voluptuously and embedded them symmetrically, turning the weapon into a monstrous jaw. More and more sarpans and drughiras swallowed the teeth found by the other grahs.
With a joyful battle cry, the confident horde launched the attack on the newly built bridge. Meanwhile, on the other island, Ugo also had reasons to rejoice: the updated code of his guvals was ready for use.
“Let’s see, let’s see,” he exclaimed, delighted. He materialized a guval in front of him and ordered, “Duplicate.”
Right away, the guval turned into two. After several more orders, more and more surrounded the small hill raised by Ugo on the islet, from where he was surveying the future battlefield as any good commander was supposed to do.
Meanwhile, the grahs had reached a tail’s distance from his island. His nostrils quivered, waiting for the slaughter. Ugo shouted in derision, “You arrived just in time, my dear nieces!”
At his sign, the last gap of the bridge disappeared, the two islands becoming connected.
“Rip them to pieces!” he ordered the newly bred beasts, which rushed to attack.
The two lines slammed ferociously on the shore of the islet, and right from the beginning, Ugo sensed that something was wrong. The Sandaras punched through the line of guvals as if it was made of seafoam, armed this time with equal weapons and still enjoying a crushing numerical superiority. They smashed the guvals’ snouts mercilessly with their drughiras; they cut them to pieces with their sarpan saws and pierced them with their falchies. And for each fallen Sandara, more and more riders charged forward with blind rage, carelessly stepping over the swarm of fighters in front of them. Along the whole length of the bridge, a column of tens of thousands of Sandaras crowded, on their way to exterminate him.
A giant melee was taking place near the islet. Every second, hordes of creatures were falling over the edge. The Sandaras were trying to push the monsters out of their way, without caring whether they, too, were falling into the sinister abyss. And even though the guvals became more numerous, the ones in the front line were pushed back, their vicious fangs flying all over the place, pounded away by the mighty drughiras.
For the jure perched on top of the hill, even more alarming was the finding that his indestructible guvals seemed a bit, well, killed by the weapons of his savage nieces. At first, he hoped his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the blinding flashes left no doubt that massive creatures disembodied in the islet’s fabric, much larger than the feeble bodies of the grah females.
This can’t be, he thought, trying to calm down. It took me years to program it, and they managed to develop a delete algorithm so quickly? Ridiculous! Surely the flashes had another explanation…
More and more Sandaras crowded on the islet, pushing the front line to the middle of it. But despite the speed of their advance, Ugo felt a crumb of hope, seeing that the line of guvals was thick enough to slow them down.
Unfortunately, his hope didn’t last long. Although he usually knew how to turn things around even in desperate situations, this time Ugo had to concede that the revelation he just had—namely, that his guvals had stopped dividing, despite his commands—wasn’t exactly the best finding to keep his optimism flying.
“Duplicate!” he screamed, terrified, at the surrounding guvals, but they didn’t seem to have any intention of multiplying in the foreseeable future. “Duplicate!” he yelled again.
Driven by a gloomy feeling, he tried in a faint voice, “Extend the island.”
“Insufficient resources,” the display repli
ed. “All levels are full.”
“Build a bridge, then.”
“Insufficient resources.”
That was it! He had no more resources. The Sandaras, in their reckless dividing, had swallowed them all. Seeing the end coming, an icy chill ran along his tail. He wanted so badly to delete his islet and kill everyone, but the islands couldn’t be deleted without the council’s express consent. Forbat’s masterpiece, the fool—if he was good at anything, it was inventing ridiculous rules to make life miserable for honest architects like him.
The last lines of guvals gathered around him, suffocated by the sea of females. With a mental command, he became invisible. He knew his effort was wholly useless because he had no way of crossing their lines, but it hardly mattered now. Blinded by rage, he jumped on the first niece coming his way, a female perched on the back of a guval and busy with beheading it. Ugo stuck his mental claws deep into her spine, seeking to extract pain, atrocious pain that only he could find, to bring it to the surface, multiply it, and set it flowing through her veins.
“Aaaiii,” screamed Sandara and fell to the ground, writhing in pain—in a totally peculiar way for a grah, but Ugo was a master when it came to inflicting suffering.
Immediately realizing what was happening, another fighter hit her back bluntly. Sandara was almost cut in two, but the sarpan blow caused agonizing pain to Ugo, too. More and more Sandaras started to hit blindly with their weapons, even though they couldn’t see their target. Pierced from all sides, the monster had no alternative but to become visible.
“I give up,” he screamed, terrified.
He looked in horror at the sarpans and falchies pointed at his mug, seeing the air trembling around their edges.
“Guval fangs! You used the fangs of my guvals!” he shouted madly.
Ugo knew that he had underestimated his niece’s motivation to defeat him and that they now were stronger than him. He lost all his pride, all the earlier arrogance, and collapsed to the ground, broken, devastated by the unforgiving attack, unable to say anything.