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.