Robotnik and Snively hardly moved from their computers that first week. They responded the occasional Freedom Fighter attack, but Snively let comp-Sniv handle routine work and the rest of their time was spent on the programming jobs.

            Or rather, on the programming contest; neither was making much progress on the job.

            Robotnik was looking over his list of possible maneuvers by Snively that he could counter. Everything from tampering with Robotnik's Swatbot proxy to constructing a virus to fill Snively in on Robotnik's progress—all had been duly considered by Robotnik. He'd come up with appropriate counters for all of them.

            And still his mind spewed forth ideas!

            Robotnik jotted down the new ideas and discarded the ones he considered beyond Snively's skill. For the rest, he set an upper time limit on how long he'd spend on each: one hour. Okay, maybe one and a half, but no more! He had to start work on the code!

            Snively's hands shook uncontrollably. He was sustaining himself solely on his coffee supply, and it was beginning to show. He typed in more commands, trying to uncover what Robotnik was trying to do. The dictator was establishing elaborate safeguards around his system. In order, no doubt, to prevent Snively from deciphering the truth about Robotnik's plot.

            He tried to covertly bypass the first firewall, but when he looked up at the large monitors he suddenly blacked out.

            Gravity took over and smashed him onto the metal floor of the command room. Thankfully, the impact and the cold combined to awaken him instantly. He let out a scream of surprise and pain; but as he did, the idea struck him.

            It was no good trying to prove Robotnik's cheating if he lost by default!

            He needed something worthwhile to bring to the competition, something of his own work, if there was to be any meaning to this whole exercise! Sure, Robotnik would cheat; who cared? That truth would be irrelevant if the competition never took place. Snively had to get to work, and now!

            He sprung back up, took a mighty swig of coffee, and plunged back into the brain bot program, cursing the lack of documentation yet again.

            The problem with their plans caught them at about the same time.

            "Sir, how are the Swatbots going to compete with each other if we're in control of everything?"

            "I'll randomize a city. Both sides will control that city and a 50-kilometer radius around it. That's what the Swatbot Commanders have to control anyway!"

            "And we should assume their borders connect?"

            "Of course. And the city is…" Robotnik gasped and paled in horror, but managed to clearly say, "Eastern Reach."

            Snively cut off the comm. system mere microseconds before laughter overtook him. The city where Robotnik's experiments lost him so much material and nearly cost him the city! There! Oh, this gave Snively quite a psychological advantage, yes indeed!

            Someone somewhere was smiling on Snively, that was for sure.

            He went at the program with renewed gusto.

            If the first week had made the humans unresponsive, the second week made them absolutely sedentary.

            Neither moved much from their posts. They had food sent to them. Robotnik slept on a lab table; Snively simply consumed caffeine. If either could have worn a catheter, they would have preferred it to the endless bathroom breaks their new lifestyle required.

            Even the Freedom Fighters' raids ceased to have the same degree of meaning.

            Sonic and Sally stood outside Robotnik's lab. "Whatever he's doin'," said Sonic, "he's way past into it!"

            "Well, there's no way to get in," said Sally. "We might as well forget about him. He isn't even calling security on us."

            Sonic laughed. "What a maroon!"

            They then proceeded to trash the Roboticiser and steal numerous parts from it, then leave quietly.

            It wasn't that the humans didn't care that the Freedom Fighters were there; they just weren't aware of it. Whenever the animals were found, Snively and Robotnik organized the pursuit from their computers, then immediately let their attention drift back to their programs as soon as the furries were lost from sight.

            It occurred to Robotnik one day as he was rewriting a major section of his program that something about this just wasn't right.

            Of course. The fact remained that he was preparing to defeat Snively with this program, not the Freedom Fighters. So even if he won, he would have to rewrite the Swatbot commander again to address the fact that it would be facing more anti-insurrection work than out-and-out warfare.

            So what? He would have his pride! And that would allow him to create the best anti-insurrection commander ever seen.

            The thought never occurred to Snively. He was too busy.

            By the third day of the second week, Snively had to order a replacement keyboard. His own keyboard had been worn down into unresponsiveness through his harsh and constant banging of it.

            Robotnik created in his mind the scenarios and strategies he expected. In his war strategies, Robotnik was the dagger and warhammer. Victory came through bleeding the opponent dry, through hitting him here and here and here and here, and then crushing his head in with one swift smashing attack.

            Robotnik took great pains to explain this to himself, numerous times. He believed it helped to organize his thoughts. That he'd never seen anyone try to use a dagger and a warhammer together is quite obvious.

            When the Freedom Fighters spied on them occasionally, it took all of their control to avoid screeching out at the humans,

            "Hey, aren't you fighting US? Because you're not planning for it, morons!"

            But it mattered little to them that they were eleven years out of date. The last real, full-scale battle had been the last battle of the Great War.

            That didn't matter. What mattered was PRIDE!

            "Ha," thought Robotnik, "Snively didn't know what he was getting into. No matter how good of a programmer Snively is, he has nowhere near my grasp of strategy and tactics!"

            "Ha," thought Snively. "Julian probably thinks his experience as Warlord gives him an edge. Well, I was better than Warlord; I was the Warlord's secretary! I know that the real war lies in the logistics and production, and that bouncing ball of butter could never win a conflict based on that!"

            "Logistics matter less when they're constant and identical," thought Robotnik. "And I know the importance of logistics; that's why my strategies involve slowly cutting them off from my opponent! A constant pressure will force that little mutant's production down, so he'll be unable to keep up with me!"

            "Let Julian waste his time and army with tactics. I'll be busy manufacturing oodles of Swatbots. Yes! Oodles! And those oodles will crush fatso the moment they're ready! I just need a big enough numbers advantage and I won't need strategy or tactics! Just more and more and more, yeees!"

            "He's no match for me! He has the imagination of a rock and the brains of a tree!"

            "Idiot! He's so large he's got his own moons!"

            "Hairless freak!"

            "Mustachioed masochistic moron!"

            "Needle-nose light bulb!"

            "Crisco addict!"

            And they both thought together, "DDDDDDIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

            So both were equally surprised when the bell went off.

            The computer voice told them, "Two weeks have expired."

            Robotnik waddled to the communicator, sweating. This wasn't good! He wasn't ready! He'd started his program too late, and it was non-functional! If he started the competition now, Snively would win, and he couldn't allow that!

            "Snively, I am authorizing an extension of the time limit! You have two more days!"

            "Thank you, sir." Ignoramus! thought Snively. I expected that from the start, wretched ruler! I knew your cheating would set you back in your attempts to actually write a program, so I knew you'd give me an extension. So my program wasn't ready either, because I've paid special attention to all the details along the way. Now I have two days to finish up, and that's more than enough. You're going down!

            Down the home stretch they thundered. Robotnik began hallucinating, his paranoia running rampant. He imagined constantly that Swatbots were tiptoeing up behind him and that mechanical flies with cameras attached were spying on him. He wasted four precious hours constructing a device to scan for any operable scanners and any functional robots in the area. The security camera that had clued Snively in about Robotnik's project had met a gruesome fate approximately thirty seconds into the competition. No part of it was intact; over fifty pieces of it were scattered around the back of Robotnik's lab.

            If he considered uncontrollable paranoia a horrible problem, he should have been thankful he wasn't Snively.

            "Y-y-yes… I am in-n-n-n-nvincible! Swatbots are natural-l-l-ly loyal to me! I built them! Yes, loyalty will d-d-d-determine this b-b-b-battle!"

            Snively's problems with stuttering were only worsened by his sleep deprivation and coffee addiction. He had to retype far more than he was used to, as his hands shook wildly while typing. His proofreading time tripled.

            Snively's dedication to efficiency had led him to cancel any breaks for sleep a normal person might take. As a consequence, his effectiveness in terms of progress per hour was dropping sharply. Snively realized this, of course, but there was no turning back now; Snively knew that he'd gone too long without sleep. If he were to sleep now, he'd be unable to wake up for at least a day. Probably two.

            Snively, too, was beginning to lose his focus, and it showed in his documentation.

            // For the past thirty minutes, I practiced my victory dance over Robotnik. I do

            // hope I get to use it.

            // This is the best line of code in the whole piece. Brilliant! Brilliant!

            // Can furries actually smell fear, or is that a myth?

            // Can Julian smell fear? I don't think that's a myth.

            Robotnik rushed through his programming, making heavy use of cut-and-paste to shave time off his operations. Sadly, you can't use a variable for more than one thing at a time, and Robotnik's corner-cutting measures ended up with the same set of variables being in use in multiple places throughout the program. It took almost an hour to hunt them all down, which made Robotnik's corner-cutting measure about as effective as adding dimension to a circle.

            If Robotnik's problem was trying to do too much with too little, Snively's was trying to do too much, period. His program was filled with exceptions for certain circumstances, taking into account weather, time of year, wind, everything—down to and including phases of the moon. That had an influence on the tides, right? And that might matter, eventually.

            (Forgetting that Eastern Reach was an inland city.)

            As the final minutes approached, both sought to tie up their programs so that they would actually work. Robotnik was trying to proofread and make sure his program worked; Snively attempted to cram in a few extra functions to deal with a few more problems he hadn't accounted for.

            "Time is up!"

            "NNNNOOOO!" cried the humans.

            Robotnik saved his program to disk. "Hurry up! Hurry up!" he yelled at it.

            "Hurry up! Hurry up!" said Snively.

            Robotnik ejected his disk the moment the file was done saving. Robotnik didn't even care to close the program.

            Snively left his compiler still running. It attempted a background save, found the disk missing, and crashed. Snively didn't care; the only version he needed was in his hands.

            Robotnik hastened to the elevator to the sealed room. He made a mistake, punched the wrong button, went in the wrong direction. He responded by ripping out the control panel and forcing the elevator to reverse directions. As soon as it reached the proper floor, he pried the doors open and in haste rushed out. The elevator's control panel shorted out and fried its systems. Seconds after Robotnik left it, it lost control and plunged the fifty-odd stories to the bottom of the shaft.

            Snively didn't care about what happened to the elevator. If he got to the room much before Robotnik did, he could claim Robotnik had worked past the time limit and claim victory by default.

            Robotnik tried to peer around the corner. He had to get there before Snively did so that the little mutant couldn't cheat!

            The two of them collided at the door to the room. They dropped their disks, then scrambled to recover them.

            "Don't try anything!" Robotnik snarled.

            "What would I try, sir, that you wouldn't?" Snively shot back

            "And what is that supposed to mean?" Robotnik said, grabbing a disk and pulling it to himself.

            "Oh, nothing, sir," said Snively in the same tone, also grabbing a disk.

            Robotnik checked the disk in his hand. Well, it did say what Robotnik had written on it to make it distinctive—

            TOP SECRET!

            TOUCH AT THE COST OF

            YOUR MISERABLE LIFE!

            (OR EXISTENCE, IF YOU

            ARE A ROBOT.)

            "Show me your disk!" Robotnik said.

            "Why should I, sir?"

            "Humor me, fool!"

            Snively sneered and showed the disk to Robotnik. Across it was written,

            HEREIN LIES THE FIN-

            -AL AND ULTIMATE

            EXPRESSION OF MY

            GENIUS.

            And under that were crossed out letters that might, if they were clearer, spell out,

            SUCK IT, ROBOTNIK!

            "Are you suspicious of something, sir?" Snively said, semi-mockingly. "Had a few too many ideas, perhaps?"

            "I will not take such idiocy from your mouth, Snively! Let's start this!"

            "Oh, yes, sir, I'm anxious to begin." Just to see the look on your fat face! It would be worth the inevitable beating just to see the way your chins would jiggle as you shook your head in denial!

            Robotnik pressed his palm to the door panel; the door slid open. There were the two Swatbots, exactly as the humans had left them. Robotnik and Snively once again squeezed through the doorway as one.

            This could definitely be bad for my health, thought Snively. Very tight squeeze with lardo there!

            What an annoyance, Robotnik thought. What, is he trying to get close enough to do something? Robotnik tightened his grip on his disk.

            They sat down opposite each other and inserted their disks into the Swatbots. Robotnik then activated the hologram projector.

            "Computer," he said, "create new scenario. Data entry:" Robotnik grimaced, "Eastern Reach."

            A map appeared.

            "Now duplicate, placing the duplicate contiguous with the original."

            Now there were two Eastern Reaches, sharing a common border.

            "Increase time index to one week per minute."

            He looked at Snively. "All is ready."

            The two stared at each other. This was the showdown, the face-to-face confrontation that would mean exactly nothing once they turned the battle over to their Swatbot proxies, yet was still vital to the performance.

            The tension in the air was thicker than granite.  Snively's hands shook for reasons other than caffeine shock. Robotnik's pacemaker was in real danger.

            "Go!" Robotnik yelled. He'd started moving a scant second before shouting. That wasn't cheating, he thought, it was my advantage for running the contest.

            The humans jammed their disks into the Swatbots and hit the power switch.

            The hologram flickered, then cut out. What was going on? thought Robotnik. That's not supposed to happen!

            "Warning!" said the Swatbots. "Sabotage alert!"

            Robotnik and Snively went off at the word 'warning'. They leapt behind their chairs and pressed against the wall. They did this with different amounts of grace; Robotnik landing on the ground rattled the floor.

            Twin explosions shook the room and blasted superheated air and shrapnel over the humans. When they looked up across the room at each other, all that remained of the bots and the programs were metal shards and a few metal feet.

            The humans' reaction was swift, loud, and predictable.

            "YOU SABOTAGED THE CONTEST, CHEATER!!!"

            Snively gave a hmph and folded his arms. "If I were trying to sabotage it, why would I destroy BOTH Swatbots, sir?"

            "Because you realized you couldn't win!"

            "Why would I challenge you in the first place, sir, if I thought I'd lose?"

            "You didn't, but you changed your mind!"

            "Sir, how about we look at the security cameras' recordings?"

            "Perhaps your first good idea, you lying, cheating lackey!"

            I would think he'd value me more if I were that bad, Snively thought. The two of them hurried back to the control room; the holo-projector in the strategy room had been folded in half by the twin explosions.

            Robotnik called out the commands to the main computer. "Call up the four security cameras' video recordings for the past two weeks for strategy room 5062. Search for any sign of motion."

            "Motion found," the computer responded in text on the monitors.

            "Access those files! Display all four cameras' files for that time index!"

            On four monitors, the video appeared. Snively and Robotnik gasped. It had been neither of them, nor a robot; it had been…

            "Those wretched Freedom Fighters!" they yelled.

            They were holding a conversation on screen. "What's all this about, Sal?" asked Sonic as the two entered the room.

            "Just wasting a lot of Robotnik's time. He and Snively are working on programs for a competition."

            "With each other? If there's ever a way where no one can win, this is it!"

            The humans blustered in outrage but kept focused on the video.

            "That's the idea, Sonic."

            "Hey, what're you doin'?"

            "When a computer powers up, it has a brief period when the settings are loading. Well, during that time, its firewalls are down, and it can be accessed by anyone. This includes the computers in Swatbots' heads. So since these Swatbots are shut down, I can upload any program I want into their heads by inserting a disk and powering them up. It's something Robotnik can't work around, that's why I'm not afraid of those cameras." She said this while pointing at one of the cameras.

            "Yo, Robuttnik, how ya doin'!" said Sonic, making rude gestures at one of the cameras.

            "Sonic!"

            "Sal, no one's watchin' or the alarms would've gone off already."

            "So why are you making a fool of yourself if no one's watching?"

            "'Cause they will after you're done, right?"

            "I suppose so."

            "So, what'll this program do?"

            "It'll cause the Swatbots to explode when they're powered up. That will take out not just the Swatbots, but the programs they've been working on all this time."

            "Cool! With luck Robuttnik'll get caught in the blast!"

            "I doubt it. The blast is just from overloading the energy cells on the bots, it won't do much damage."

            "Hey, a guy can dream, right?"

            "Dream on."

            "Hey!"

            "You walked into that one, Sonic!"

            "Robuttnik's better conversation than you, Sal. I'm gonna talk to him." Sonic turned back to the camera and blew a giant raspberry, getting saliva all over the lens. The humans were properly disgusted.

            "I'm all done, Sonic. Let's get out of here."

            "Nope, we're not done, Sal. Say hi to fatso!"

            "Sonic, have you no dignity at all?"

            "You don't have a choice," said Sonic as he pulled her in front of another camera. "C'mon, show some love."

            Sonic's gestures had been juvenile; Sally's was simply rude. The humans paled; Snively felt light-headed, though that was probably from his sleep deprivation.

            "Sal! Where did THAT come from? So much for dignity!"

            "You forced me into it, Sonic. Since I didn't have dignity anyway, why not make it something worthwhile?"

            "Remind me never to tick you off."

            The furries exited the room and closed the door; the camera feed froze, as there was no more motion after that.

            "Computer!" Robotnik was well and truly furious. "Why did you not inform me when those animals went in?"

            "Those were not this unit's orders," came the words on the screen.

            "WHAT? Well, then, what WERE your orders?"

            "To inform Robotnik if Snively or a robot entered the room, or to inform Snively if Robotnik or a robot entered the room."

            Neither had told the computer to look out for Freedom Fighters.

            The two humans slowly turned to face each other, faces turning redder and redder. Then they exploded.

            "You stupid, incompetent fool!"

            There was the briefest of pauses from shock, then Robotnik grabbed for Snively. "Misbegotten mutant! You'll pay for saying that!"

            Snively was already in deep trouble, so he decided to at least make a chase of it. "Sorry," said Snively as he dodged, turned, and ran, "I'm broke!"

            "Oh, you will be! Get back here! I order you to get back here!" Robotnik ran after Snively as fast as his legs could support his bulk.

            "If I'm going to insult you to your face," cried Snively, "why would I respect an order like that?"

            "Get back--Swatbots!"

            "Don't bother! I'll override them!"

            "I'll... override… your override… Swatbots!" Robotnik puffed as he tried to chase down Snively.

            Snively slowed a bit. "You can't chase me long! You'll have a heart attack!" said Snively, actually worried.

            "I have a pacemaker, twerp! I can't have a heart attack!"

            "Oh," said Snively. "In that case…" he started running again.

            Somewhere, the Freedom Fighters giggled.


FIN

Bryon Nightshade

Disclaimer: No, I do NOT actually own Robotnik, Snively, nor pretty much everything else in this story. Surprised? I knew you weren't. The above belong to one or more of the following: SEGA, DIC, or Archie Comics. This story copyrighted by Sam Durbin, a.k.a. Bryon Nightshade. Any attempts to profit from it, rip it off, or screw it up are prohibited.