“If you’re hearing this, I am Doctor Robotnik! Or as my most formidable nemesis once called me, Doctor Eggman. I am the greatest genius this world has ever known, unparalleled engineer of my brilliant robot army, and mastermind that is unrivaled across the planets! If you’re seeing this, then you no doubt am aware of why this tape has been revealed.”

“Unfortunately, I am now dead. Pity, I know. Forgive this footage’s primitive age, I’ve certainly developed cameras and microphones that make it look practically prehistoric now!”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this tape will be played at my illustriously prepared funeral, one that throngs with followers and every citizen who has seen my good, my genius, and has thanked every star that shines that it was I, The Great Doctor, who saved you from life that should have been without me.”

“I should live to be well over two-hundred! So here’s to birthday three-hundred and one! Though it was simply my last, just know that I’ll miss every one of you, and wish I could bless you for thousands of years longer. I know my life is finite, but with my grandfather’s secrets…”

The Doctor paused, lifting his chin.

“Which I have no doubt obtained! If my genius is to proceed before me as I know it will, then the world is mine to own, and this tape will be entirely unnecessary! I may even have it destroyed one day, perhaps on my six hundreth and first birthday…hmm.”

The Doctor looked down, at eye level with the camera now. Nothing could penetrate those glasses. Still. They are damn flimsy things.

Chapter 2 - A New Age

Shadow

The video has been running for three minutes already. Only after the fanfare of some kind of anthem to himself did the Doctor actually start talking. The music looked to be his own interpretation of what the most popular genre that the world had developed six hundred years from now would sound like.

It made no sense. It was just noise. Just like what the Doctor was spouting from his mouth now. I know because the disk I found barely worked, in the remnants of what used to be one of his Egg Bases. Like the TV, the entire building is themed after a carnival.

The Doctor was always so thematic in his presentation. But they confirmed it. He’s gone. Or that’s what that he told me, rather. No use trusting anyone else’s opinion when it’s usually only Sonic that ends up being right.

Maybe that was his edge against the Doctor. That kind of tenacity is going to be the end of him one day.

The Doctor just keeps on talking.

“Despite your loss, my people, you must keep building! Rise the Eggman Empire to its fullest extent! With the precious sap of my mind that I’ve left you, my lifetime of memories will be the things that guide you straight into the stars, to conquer your own planets in my great image.”

The camera shakes. The Doctor does not, but his glasses have moved. He readjusts them. By the time I’ve pulled my arm back to take off a chunk of the screen, things have died down, and he’s begun talking again.

No doubt for another three minutes about how omniscient he is. Sad.

“Seeing as this is ancient history by now, I’ll bless you with a bit of old knowledge, something you may be familiar with! It’s a notable event in history after all, my greatest victory that led to the building of this great empire!”

I freeze, the curiosity making me pause far more than it should. He’s a delusional old man, not a true genius unlike those who came before him in the family line. Yet something in me, the curious pitying part, wants to hear the ramblings of this sad, delusional old man.

They were his final ones after all.

“If all should go well in the very near future, I would have developed the project that spanned my consciousness across all of time,” the doctor raps his gloved fingers together, from index to pinkie. His middle finger’s glove has a singed hole in it.

His calmness astounds me. Compels me to see the madness in his method.

“The Adumbration Chair.”

He treats those words with reverence and recites them with pure glee, a laugh hijacking the ends of his voice. It bubbles up, and soon he’s laughing into the remains of his last room of an abandoned Egg Base that has no power. His glasses slip, and his eyes laugh right into me. They are nothing but red dots in his pitiless, endless skull.

I slam my fist into the monitor, the steel on the back of it bending around my hand. She comes up from behind me and retrieves the disk, pulling it out of the computer’s console next to me. Without a sound, she turns away and I feel nothing of it. Only when I look at her does she slip the disk into her top, giving me a look.

I don’t know what that look is for. Rouge is an impossible creature to read. When I pull back my fist, I have to shake some of the bits of monitor screen away off of the threads in my glove. The inhibitor ring on my wrist glows faintly. Then the shine fades, and I pick out a particularly stubborn piece of glass from my knuckle.

“I’m keeping this,” Rouge says in a high tone, casual and warm, “For memories. Plus, someone might want a copy, and I love it when inflation just begs to get in my way.”

As I make my steps toward the door of the room, Rouge’s other hand grazes my shoulder. Maybe once she used to grab me and stop me, but she knows better now. I stop, nevertheless. Perhaps I know better now, too.

“Aren’t you at least a little bit curious about how this ends?” she tilts her head at me, mouth pursed in a smile, wings extending eagerly, “Like I said, you may have to buy it back to get the full video file again. Or, worse, you’ll have to pay me a visit, check up on your precious insightful friend is doing.”

Her fingers rap my shoulders, from pinkie to index. Just the opposite of the way the Doctor does it. She does it the normal way. I look back at her, and what she reads in my face covers up all of hers. The teasing eyes are gone, replaced by that same thoughtful glance that came to me when I found thousands of androids that looked just like me in the Doctor’s main base.

Failed creations. The Doctor’s best attempt at reviving a true genius’ work. The last genuine try at creating someone who could look eye to eye with the Ultimate Lifeform. Yet here Rouge is now, looking at me equally in the remains of his craftsmanship. I know this look that she gives me now, and I sigh. Her hand rests on my shoulder, then squeezes.

“I already know how his story ends.”

Three months later.

Five AM. That’s when the general finally wakes up, dresses himself, and gets his coffee. The bastard takes night showers. That’s disgusting.

Still, I watch him throughout his process from the hill just beyond his villa. I watch him through the window as he leaves an empty bed, one three times his size. I always thought that was one of the most absurd things that the mainlanders do. No matter what they do, no matter how social or lonely they are as people, they always buy a huge bed. Even if there’s no one to share it with, they always get a King sized bed. Why have something that big if one side of it is always going to be cold?

He walks from his lavish bedroom, across the parlor and into the open kitchen. I would hate to live in a place like this. The floors, even the tiles, they’re too damn quiet. The fat man moves like a cat, not because he’s actually agile, the monkey, but because his floors are carpeted so densely. Anyone could sneak around in that room. Rouge could tap dance and he’d never even notice her.

Kintaro bites at my shoulder, making me take off the goggles. The dark chao, babbling in his usual way, softly talks to me while the orb above his head spikes and floats. It goes very sharp as he keeps talking, pointing at the window.

“No, we aren’t going to break the window. You could get hurt. And his expensive ass alarm system probably sounds awful. I want to talk in private, in a nice place…a fireplace. I could use some coffee.”

I put the goggles back on, and the general takes his first sip from a mug that’s obviously designed for tea. Idiot. Kintaro babbles more in my ear.

“Fine. You’re on. If he doesn’t even have a fireplace I’ll get you something from the market when we get home. If he does, you sort the Halloween decorations in the storage room.”

He garbles in protest, tugging at my ear. I bat him off lightly.

“You were the one who made that room a mess in the first place so you had it coming. Even if I lose…that needs to get cleaned up this week.”

Kintaro pouts, now slumped on the top of my head.

“I’ll get you something from the market. Tomorrow. You’ve been good…enough.”

I already regret my decision, knowing the little scrap is going to pick Sugar Fruit again, when the general starts waking up, moving around like less of a corpse. He’s grabbed a book from the counter in the kitchen. Can’t tell what it is.

“Who keeps their books in the kitchen?” I say to Kintaro, getting up.

He babbles. Of course he would bring it up.

“That was once, and I specifically told you to wake me if I fell asleep.” I say, “And it was the kitchen table, not the counter.”

He babbles something else equally stupid and probably rude, but I ignore him. Putting the goggles back in my prep bag, I zip it closed and tighten my gloves. It’s a nervous habit, one that I never could really stop doing. I was able to stop popping my knuckles, I was able to stop bouncing my legs, but the gloves never feel like they’re on quite right.

My own inhibitor rings feel loose on my wrists. For the last few years, it’s felt like they could just slip right off. Tonight, they feel lighter than air, as if they could disintegrate. Above us, the moon is large, probably the largest it’ll ever look this year in this part of the world. Due to the peculiar orbit of the satellites, for a few nights the ARK will pass under the moon’s face.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I look at it again. It drifts in the dark. No one breathes inside it, learns and lives inside it anymore. So much time and love was wasted up in the stars. So much of me was taken. And now all that stands as evidence is too far away for me to reach.

Not that I should. Not anymore. I can’t. It would…it…

Kintaro lands on my shoulder, flapping his wings and looking deadly serious. He always knows when it’s time for me to stop thinking. I pat him on the head.

“Right. Let’s get going.”

Kint is outside, probably ripping grass out of the earth since he lost. I can hear his fit from here. Did he already forget that I said I’d get him some Sugar Fruit? I love him dearly, but he can be very, very stupid. Poor little guy never noticed the gigantic genuine chimney sticking out of the top of the general’s mansion.

I land in the hearth of the fireplace, crouched over the wood. He never cleans this damn thing. Oh well, it’s his couch. I get out of the hearth, dust myself off and recline on the long, white sofa, one leg across the cushions, one bent as I stretch. Normally I’d respect a fellow man’s things, but this pound of flesh is no man.

When the man walks in from the kitchen, he’s already drifting back off into a daze, despite the cup of coffee that would be burning his hand if it wasn’t for the dainty yellow handle that he could only hold with a single finger.

“That mug’s meant for tea, asshole.”

As if I’ve shot a jolt of electricity through him, the man goes rigid, dropping the cup and taking a huge step back. He can’t see me. I give the remote in my hand a click, and the fireplace lights the room. I see his terrified, rubbery face, and he sees me on his sofa, dusting off the top of my quills to be rid of the soot.

“Good morning, General Graboski.” I say, swinging my legs over the end of the sofa. Before the man can blink, I’ve let my left ring fall. Before it hits the ground, I’ve pinned the man to the other side of the room, just inches away from his towering window. The average person working a modest wage would kill for a window like that. I’ve seen people that live their entire lives without making as much as this scumbag does in a single year.

His face is ugly when it chokes, all the fat curls up and bulges, and I can barely see his eyes. He sputters something incoherent and some of his spittle lands on my face. I put actual pressure on him then, instead of just merely holding him there. He starts kicking at the wall, his hands scratching at my arms. When I lean on my back foot to let him take a breath, he gasps and starts his yammering.

“Y-you! I know you-you’ve got nothing to worry about—with-with us!” He pulls himself up, an impressive feat considering the gut that now sticks out of his robes, “The p-people that killed your creator are gone-d-dead! The old president, almost all the staff-th-they’ve been gone for years—”

I dig my fingers into his bulging neck and heft him over my own head. He lands on the sofa across the room, sliding to its end and making it coast into the wall next to the fire. By the time I’ve walked to him, he’s scrambled to his belly on the couch, holding his neck like it’s been cut open. I chuckle. It’s not.

“I’m pleased that I don’t need to make my authority apparent, Graboski,” I say, now walking across from the end of the couch where he clamors to a single arm chair. I sit, noticing the book on the end table. Infinite Jest.

“Do you even…nevermind.” I cross my legs, holding the inhibitor ring I retrieved of the floor and spinning it for a loop around my finger, “Graboski, you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve been out of the loop for about fifty years or so. I can only memorize so much history at a time.”

As I look at the ring rolling around on the tip of my finger, I feel its lack of presence on my wrist very, very strongly. When the inhibitor rings come off, it feels almost as if the limb it’s attached to comes alive for the very first time. That sense of newness, that massive wave of adrenaline that I would naturally have without these rings, it’s enough to make someone want to scream. When I take them all off, I can feel my senses heighten to an almost painful degree.

There’s a ringing, stinging pain in my skull that only goes away when I start ripping something apart.

By the time I’ve finished doing whatever needed to be done, all my energy is spent, and I become a puppet with no strings left to hold itself upright.

Sometimes that pain, that rush, and the danger that taking the rings off presents to me, is cathartic. Up until recently, I honored a rule with myself that I never take the rings off without someone nearby that can put them back on, should I pass out from the overflow. But recently, I’ve just stopped caring. That gentle exhaustion after having one of the four off for awhile helps me sleep at night.

Sometimes it helps me float in the ocean. Sometimes, if I float out there long enough without putting them back on, I feel the current drag my weakened body out into the sea. Sometimes I sink, hold my breath, and think about how long the current can rock me into a different kind of sleep.

Considering the kind of day I’m scheduled to keep today, a good night’s sleep this week is just what I need.

“General, I’m afraid I have a problem.” I say, taking my ring in one hand and sliding it gently over my other. Then, I relax, my voice going deadpan.

“I’ve been in suspension tanks for most of my life. And even though I’ll outlive much of the people on this planet, time lost is something that I can never gain back. I have to study cultures I don’t understand. An entire lifetime of history, gone.”

I lean forward, then look back at his end table. A proper coffee mug sits on the table. It holds nothing but a tea bag, and I sigh.

“I’ll just be quick about it, general. Being a GUN agent, while it has paid the bills, is becoming tedious. I demand a few things from you and your agency.”

The general barely moves, as if movement would make me activate like a trap. Finally, he swallows, adjusts his pajamas to cover his gut, and sits upright on the sofa.

“I’ll make it plain, so that you understand what I want out of you, general. You and the president of this fine company have an interesting relationship.” I fold my hands together, “Not sure how. She makes more money than you. Anyway, I want a pension, one that’s sizable. I want specific equipment, my list is well within your ability to provide. I want benefits and support from GUN, the full employee treatment.”

My legs feel jittery, but I don’t bounce them. Instead I stand, trying to get myself to fully relax. The ring has an aftershock of adrenaline, one that doesn’t fade for at least an hour. When I took all four off last time, I felt the effects for days. Then after, a great coma, one that I enjoyed immensely.

“General, my modest needs being met are hardly an issue for you.” I say, walking past his place on the sofa and to that open, soundless kitchen behind him. Now that I can see it in the light, I notice that everything’s white. Soulless, lifeless, sanitized. I find a mug in his cabinet, a clean one, one meant for coffee, and put it under the single serve machine, “The money you will give me hardly compares to the many lives that you cut short. ARK could have been a great colony, and the Doctor alone would have been a great addition to the world.”

The machine works, whirring softly. It pours coffee. I take it in my hand and sip before I continue. The silence of the room feels heavier as the energy inside me dies down. Thinking about her always does this. It’s like it puts me to sleep. Shuts me down.

“Maria herself was gifted, and would have brought much needed sense and light into the world. What I can offer as betterment to the world is a poor representation of all the ARK’s benevolent gifts.”

I drink my coffee, waiting for the general to respond. He doesn’t. His neck is drenched with sweat, gleaming off of the orange of the fireplace. Clearing his throat, he sits back down and shuffles, his eyes trained on me. He doesn’t think I notice his hand slipping between the couch cushions. Strange place to store a gun. I stop him.

“General, please. You must know, I’m not out for revenge.”

I walk to the couch just as his hand stops. With him sitting there and me standing, we’re eye to eye for half a second before he stiffens.

“If I was, you would be dead already.”

Out in the cool night air of his villa garden, I place the empty coffee cup on one of the small stone, rose covered pillars. Something stops me, halts me in the daze I had only just now recognized. A rose, in the dark. I have no idea what color it is, so muted by the night. It looked to be blue in this bright, early morning hour. I reach for it with my hand, holding it to reflect more of the faint light.

Underneath the base, a thorn pricked my middle finger. I hold it gently, letting the thorn stay, until I’ve had a good look at the rose. When I let go and pull the thorn out of my fingertip, I feel Kint flap up to me and rest his head on my shoulder, babbling something about going home, eyes closed.

Sound came back almost immediately. My entire sense of touch, that came back too, the instant the thorn came out. I felt more weighted on the ground I stood on, more here in the beautiful garden of GUN’s highest generals. Despite the slime that he is, this garden of perfectly pruned roses is a sight to behold. The morning light makes it feel ageless, peaceful. The moon hangs over me, and I pinch my fingertip.

I look up at them. The ARK shines underneath the moon. I shift the glove around where the thorn entered.

You’re doing it again. Do you even remember the rest of that conversation with the general? Stay awake. Stay present. You can’t fade out. Not when you’re finally making progress.

I let my fingertip go. Looking away from the moon, I rouse Kint from sleep. He’s starting to slide off my shoulder.

“C’mon. Sugar Fruit or something less absolutely awful for your teeth?”

He grumbles, curling on my shoulder tightly.

“Fine. Sugar Fruit it is.”

Looking up at the moon, I blink and let Chaos Control take me away.