The Destroyer

Chapter Seventeen

Sala, in all of his intellectual greatness, was burdened by an unhealthy obsession with power and ambition. It had come from his adopted father, Stuart, a man who none would have suspected to harbor these traits. Yet, they did simmer and ultimately boiled over and grew once nested in Sala's twisted psyche. But regardless of his detractors, Sala was at his core, an intellectual giant, able to monitor and direct nearly countless activities, all while formulating planning, dreaming and discovering.

He knew there were more. Two by his calculation, as he was aware of the entirety of the human population, dating all the way back to Sahara. In all likelihood, none could have been lost. He knew precisely the number he had captured. Simple arithmetic. How fun. He also knew that one of the two, having so far eluded capture, was Lola. The other, he wasn't absolutely sure, but sifting through his new, acquired memories, he had a high probability candidate. Abigail Shoreham. Now. Where are you two ladies? Sala was playing games with himself. Of course he knew where they were. How could there be something at this point, that he did not know?

Abby and Lola were not only the last two independent protohumans in existence. But they were down to a single replicate each. Those were the two replicates still pinned to the through hole, stuck up against the forces of space, powerless to move. The rest of the replicates pinned there, former comrades, were now Sala. As Lola and Abby's comrades fell, one by one, they could sense it. There was a sub vacuum signature that suddenly disappeared. This was the case when poor Laszlo was taken. For the first time in centuries, Abby had felt true sorrow. In the end, Lola and Abby could only sense each other. The rest were eerily silent, like zombies. But they feared that these were still Sala's ears.

Because Lola and Abby were close together compared to the rest, and had a direct line of sight between them, Lola controlled her sub vacuum beam to a narrow path, aimed directly at Abby. Abby did likewise. By using low power and careful precision, they were relatively confident that no one would be able to detect their communication, hence their presence. But this was all in vain. Sala knew. But he also suspected that Lola would not have left herself with only a single replicate, forever pinned to the wall of space. So he foraged the universe, with his armies of trillions. But the math governing probability was daunting. No matter how many replicates he had, trying to hunt them down, his odds were worse than playing the lottery. His patience was now running thin.

Sala had foolishly destroyed all of the other nearby replicates he had acquired. He considered them primitive and useless at this stage. Now, there was nothing even remotely close to that area. And his own replicates stranded with Lola and Abby, were also hopelessly paralyzed. Sala scolded himself for his lack of foresight. It was a lack of anticipation that was rare and he surmised that it was his rising ambition and pursuit of dominance that had clouded his normally perfect logic. It was a problem, as there had to be very close proximity for the Destroyer program to work its magic. There was only one solution. New replicates and more wasted time, probably days or weeks. Eight days, he realized as the calculations completed a second later.

*****

"I'm sure he will be coming for us." Lola, created a lanai with serene tropical surroundings, a way to relax them as they contemplated. "He must know about this place. The fact that he isn't here already, means that he hasn't any bodies around. I don't really understand that. There were so many."

"A miscalculation?"

"We should hope he is capable of making mistakes. There is so much we don't know about him."

"I wonder if Laszlo is still Laszlo, somewhere inside Sala. Or is he totally gone, just a bunch of memories, taken."

"I wonder the same thing. I hope our friends are still there, somehow. Although, it would be like a prison of sorts. Maybe it's the worst of all possibilities. Why did I say that? I'm sorry."