“You intended to kill all of us if we blocked your expansion! The immortality chips you invented were a trap! You took our shells hostage so that you could kill us along with the avatars!”
“You’re unbelievably keen today,” he said, giving her a mocking bow. “I admit, it crossed my tail, but what did you expect of me? I was attacked from all sides! My best friends became my enemies; I was threatened daily to be exiled back to Kaura. You have no idea what it’s like to live in such conditions! I had to take some precautions!” he whined.
“How blind we were to ignore your madness!” she exclaimed, horrified.
Ugo’s mug froze in a grotesque grin.
“I’ll forget what you just said,” he said, gnashing his teeth. “I’m telling you for the last time: if you leave me alone, I’m not going to kill you… right now. My guvals guard the dome. Just try to approach…”
“Then you have to kill me!”
“So be it! Kill her!” he ordered scornfully.
He returned to his hollow tree while the guvals jumped on her, each biting one arm.
Yes, he thought, it is better this way. Even though Sandara often annoyed him, he respected his niece—with all due respect for a formidable foe—and wanted to offer her a proper death for a grah (at least the second one, if the first wasn’t much of one). Sandara had no idea that he could have killed her with his bare hands by jumping on her ganglions, like he parasitized Gill, and manually deleting her synapses with his miraculous function built for his beasts’ fangs. But why mess his tail instead of leaving the dirty job for the guvals when he had bothered so much to program them?
He felt obliged to use them… especially now that he had the entire red code. Ugo could have never imagined that there, in the grove of a virtual forest stored in the belly of an alien destroyer, he would finally have the chance to test the secret plan on which he had worked for so many expanded years…
The discovery of the way to control one’s neurons wasn’t a trivial thing. On the contrary! Surely it could be considered his greatest creation. And nobody knew about it…
True, some parhontes suspected something. Especially that scoundrel, Forbat. I read it in his eyes, he remembered. But he knew I defeated him. He knew they were at my tail’s mercy after the other fools believed my lies about the bracelet and voted for me in the council. He smiled happily, remembering his little victory on the last day of Uralia’s existence.
Death only brought him benefits after they had woken him up from the amnesic smog. After all, the genetic chains didn’t really matter when he had Firalia’s expanded time at his disposal, along with the war algorithms he and the other architects created for the city’s defense. It took him many years—much more than an Antyran life-span—to change the programs intended to control the fighters on Firalia 9—algorithms that allowed him to see what they saw, to transmit orders and information directly to their ganglions. That’s how he could read Gill’s memory and find out about the Sigians; that’s how he programmed the guvals and analyzed the bracelet to copy Uralia into its memory.
And of course, there was his secret island, which he mockingly named ‘Forbatina’. The council never discovered how much he “borrowed” from Firalia’s resources because he learned how to make things invisible. His structures hidden throughout the swamps of the black forest couldn’t be found as the whole island was invisible, except for those who knew how to reach it. Yes, Ugo was the best architect, and he deserved to become a god.
The fangs pierced Sandara’s arms, and yet not a single muscle flinched on her face. The stem algorithms were trying to patch the damage but obviously were unable to keep up with the task.
Following Ugo’s order, the bloodthirsty monsters pulled each arm in a different direction to dismember her… But then, a strange thing happened: Sandara started to stretch.
It wasn’t the normal behavior of an avatar about to be pulled out of its matrix functions. She was dividing!
Her head widened, and then it split down the middle, followed by the other organs. Soon, the separation was almost over, except for a common foot.
Ugo was about to step inside the hollow when he deigned to glance over his shoulder to make sure he had gotten rid of the meddlesome niece. The view filled him with horror, seeing the two Sandaras—each grabbed by a guval—pulling their common leg to separate it. His problem with Sandara, instead of being solved, had just doubled! And something whispered in his gills that the grah female wasn’t going to stop there…
It took a few moments until his voice came back, during which the females fully separated. Ugo wasn’t dumb—he didn’t become the jure of Uralia/Ropolis for nothing—he knew all too well to appreciate a disaster when he saw one. And what he saw in front of his eyes was nothing short of a monumental catastrophe.
“Curse your tail! What have you done, crazy female?” he exclaimed, horrified, an ugly grimace twisting his face.
“I did what a five-year-old could have done,” one of them mocked him. “Before I came here, I took the small precaution of changing my algorithms so that I can duplicate. Something you can’t do,” she said with a smile, happy to finally see him scared to death.
“Stop pulling!” he ordered the guvals, terrified. I totally forgot she can copy herself, he thought, cursing his bad luck. “Rip them to pieces!” he shouted hysterically. “Rip their flesh without pulling them apart!”
“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.