Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys

One of the more extreme examples of the confusion that was caused by the templating of human beings and the resulting creation of millions of duplicates was, of course, the case of the sylphadese. The sylphadese were hedonist polynomials who occupied a floating river settlement in the Dealveerd sector. Almost by chance, they developed a system of life extension that, while the treatments were maintained, appeared to be a reasonable facsimile of immortality. There was, however, one drawback. The process required a freshly killed human as the basis of the treatment. After some contemplation of the fine shadings of morality, it was decided that the use of specially produced duplicates, provided that they were terminated quickly and humanely immediately after their synthesis, was ethically permissible. A single template was used, and all the victims were reproductions of a healthy young male named Mythlon Mysed.

Nobody knows exactly how the template was switched, but suddenly, in the middle of an otherwise routine morning, the Mysed replicas started coming out of the receiver cage with a foreknowledge of what was going to happen to them. The first few slaughtered the operators of the stuff center, and then, as their numbers grew, they went on to massacre the entire population of the settlement and finally to sever all contacts with the outside world. When, after a prolonged period of isolation that produced a volume of strange and lurid rumors, relief teams from other settlements in the same sector finally fought their way in, they discovered that an advanced sacrificial blood cult had developed in a society of identical and dangerously deranged males.

— Pressdra Vishnaria