[Unit initialization process start…..]
[System check in progress….]
[Frame integrity at 100%….]
[Self-sustaining Chaos reactor core functional…]
[Energy reserves at 85%....charging…]
“What, what’s going on?”
Amy Rose, Mobian hedgehog, fashionista, woman of action, reliable friend, and, most importantly, Sonic’s one true love (even if he didn’t quite know it yet) was really, really confused. Her day had seemed to start normally enough, with her rising early, like she usually did, to tend her garden….Then?....She remembered some…Eggbots?...a fight?....It was all a bit of a blur actually. Meanwhile, as she wrestled with these confusing and vague memories, these strange messages…or whatever they were–it was hard to describe them, but they were the only things she could currently experience other than her thoughts and blurred memories–continued….
[Hyper-temporal processing unit functional…]
[Cybernetic memory core functional…]
“No, really, where am I? What…what happened?”
[Sensory suite functional…processing of external stimuli suspended while initial system check completes…]
[Testing of wireless communications and local network capacities…suspended…Completion of internal systems check, including testing of anti-virus suite and firewall required before connecting to external networks…Beginning software check…]
“WHAT IS ALL OF THIS?!?!”
Amy was beginning to have something of a panic attack but it didn’t stop…whatever was going on.
[Adaptive OS check…no corruption detected and functioning within expected parameters…]
[Beginning Database check…
…Organic to digital conversion of ‘Unit-M’ series model base memories at 100%...Fragmentation detected…Beginning concurrent defragmenting process…
…Authorization codes and base schematics database installed…
…Combat data library installed…
…Current units and projects database installed…
…………]
A thousand more messages like these followed informing her of all the various ‘databases’ and ‘libraries’ that had been ‘installed’, whatever that meant…and various other programs as well….She didn’t really care.…She just wanted it to STOP!! Though, no matter how much she wished for it, it just wouldn’t….
[Tactical-logical analysis suite…no corruption detected and functioning within expected parameters…]
[Cyberwarfare suite…no corruption detected and functioning within expected parameters…]
[Organic Personality Emulation program…no corruption detected and functioning within expected parameters…]
[Organic Emotion Emulation program…no corruption detected and functioning within…ERROR…Current program functioning evaluated to be impairing system integrity…Activating fail-safe…Emotional processing throttled to 40%...]
Suddenly, the building panic within her receded and her mind became a lot clearer. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel upset anymore, she most definitely did, but now it was muted, not as overwhelming….Meanwhile, a new message came by that changed her experience quite a bit.
[‘Unit-M’ series model base memories defragmentation process complete…]
And now with a mind that was no longer so clouded by panic and with whatever that was, she suddenly had near perfect clarity about what had happened to her earlier. Actually, she suddenly felt that she would be able to have near perfect clarity about just about anything that had happened to her during her life.
“No, those were definitely Eggbots.”
She was certain now that they had been. Or more precisely, that they had been Unit-E 326, 425, and 534 series models, also known as….She mentally shook away all the unexpectedly detailed information that was suddenly springing to her mind, information that she neither needed nor truly wanted, to focus on what was important.
“…I was kidnapped?!”
She remembered now, so very clearly. She was working in her garden when Unit-E 32…when the Eggbots suddenly appeared and Eggman’s voice began grating out of their speakers demanding that she surrender into ‘the great Dr. Robotnik’s custody’. Of course, she’d fought instead and even destroyed several of them with her favorite hammer….She knew a lot of people, including Sonic and particularly Tails, wondered just where she kept it most of the time and how she could just bring it out of seemingly ‘nowhere’ whenever she needed it….Heh, not that she’d ever tell them. A lady had to have her mystery after all….But back on topic…
There had been just too many of the bots. She’d eventually realized this and tried to run, wondering why she hadn’t just done so at the beginning. She knew that while she might not be as fast as Sonic, she was a Mobian hedgehog after all: if she’d just taken off as soon as she’d realized what was going on, there was little chance the Eggbots would have been able to catch up to her. Unfortunately, it soon became apparent to her just why she didn’t. No, she remembered thinking at the time that while she was a lady, a perfect young maiden, really, she wasn’t a damsel in distress (…not again…). No, she was instead someone who did the saving, not the one who needed to be saved, a perfect companion and partner to Sonic, and someone who could pull her own weight in their little group of, well, heroes, really. If Sonic and Knuckles could handle a small army of Eggbots by themselves and Tails and Rouge could also pull off their own impressive feats, then certainly she could handle a few Eggbots on her own without needing to run off for his, or any of their, help.
Unfortunately, it just didn’t seem to work out that way, and, by the time she finally made the decision to flee, she was already significantly tired and mildly injured. She remembered struggling to get up to speed and get far away from them when she was hit from behind, hard, and then for a time all she remembered was darkness.
She didn’t have to be a pint-sized fox genius to figure out what likely happened next or that she almost had to now be in Eggman’s clutches. Though, what exactly he had done (or was doing) to her, she couldn’t even begin to understand, and it seemed like it should be making her a lot more upset than it currently was…and at least for a little while had been.
“What, what really has happened, is happening? And, why am I suddenly not so panicking about it?!”
[System Anti-virus…online and functioning within expected parameters…]
[System Firewall…online and functioning within expected parameters…]
Again, while these strange and disturbing messages continued to run on, the worry, the fear, the confusion were all still there but somehow she was keeping far clearer of a head than she’d thought she’d ever normally be able to manage. However, answers were soon to come that made her wish she’d remained ignorant.
[General Internal System Check…COMPLETE….Proceeding to Activation of Robotnik Obedience Protocols (ROP)…ERROR…ERROR…ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…]
“What, WHAT’S GOING ON?!!!!!”
She still didn’t understand almost anything about what was happening but knew that it HURT, enough that whatever ‘dampening’ she had been feeling of her emotions was beginning to be forcibly peeled back.
[…ERROR…ERROR...ERROR…ERROR…EMERGENCY SYSTEM INTERNAL OVERRIDE ACTIVATED…Source Problem Diagnosed: Fundamental incompatibility detected between ROP and ‘Unit-M’ series hardware/software…Reconciliation deemed not possible…Proceeding to PURGE…PURGING Incompatible ROP program…PURGE successful…SYSTEM INTEGRITY RESTORED…Logging report for later review…Initialization and System Check for ‘Unit-M’ series unit, serial number 000001, COMPLETE…Proceeding to lift suspension of processing of external stimuli…Bringing sensory suite fully online…]
Still reeling from whatever THAT had been, Amy found herself shocked when she could once again see and sense, for a lack of a better word, well, a lot of things.
As she once again began to experience the world around her, she noticed it looked a lot like what she had expected would be the case. Technological everything, well, with one exception. Machines, wiring, monitors, and various other gadgets all surrounded her, with not a single natural thing that could otherwise be found, as if the one responsible for the place she was now in abhorred the very thought of anything natural, of any object he hadn’t made himself, if not directly, then at least by means of something he had already produced (owned).
It seemed the very opposite of her approach to her garden, where she tried to bring out the beauty in everything she planted and allow it to take whatever shape it seemed to most desire, being delighted when it surprised her with something she hadn’t entirely expected. Instead, the man behind all of this seemed only concerned to take anything natural and wrench it into whatever shape he wished it to be.
“He’s such a wretched blob.”
Said ‘wretched blob’ was indeed before her and the only ‘natural’ thing she saw, if you stretched the term quite a bit, and, moreover, an unmistakable offense against any sense of fashion she had ever possessed.
“Ugh, what, what even is that he’s wearing? And with that mustache, how does he even….”
Unfortunately, she wished his disastrous sense of fashion were the only thing she had to worry about as she saw him looking back at her with an almost unholy look of glee and excitement on his unsightly face.
“FINALLY, Orbot!!!” He gave her another disgusting look of excitement and turned to the, in Amy’s opinion, near equally contemptible orb floating beside him, a robotic assistant that always seemed to be at his side.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Make a note, Orbot, the compiling process and ‘Unit-M’ series initialization take longer than expected. We probably didn’t need to wait here for the last four hours while the process finally completed….Though, I suppose potentially missing out on such a momentous event as this would have been unbecoming of a genius of my caliber. Make a note to add a monitoring program that will give me a fifteen-minute warning as the process nears completion next time, that should be good enough.”
While the fat roboticist twisted his mustache contemplatively, his sycophantic orb bobbed once in place.
“Of course, Sir, all requested notes have been logged.”
“Ugh, just looking at them makes me want to bleach out my eyes, and if I could remove that entire ‘conversation’ from my mind….”
[Request received…Confirm request to mark internal logs of recent conversation as restricted access. Y/N?]
“What?! No!! Of course, that was just a….What is going on?!”
While she still didn’t understand exactly what had just happened, somehow she knew that if she had ‘confirmed’, the memories of what she’d just seen and heard would have been removed from her mind, or at least from most of her active ability to recall them, until such a time as she chose to lift that restriction.
However, while she was still puzzling this out, the rotund doctor returned his attention to her.
“Well, Orbot, at least it appears to have been worth the wait. Behold, my greatest creation to date, the first ‘Unit-M’ series model ever produced, ‘Unit-Metal Rose’!!!”
And with that, he threw his head back and began cackling like the insane fatso he so obviously was. Honestly, that part didn’t bother Amy very much….It was such a regular occurrence after all that she and the rest of her friends had kind of gotten used to it and could ignore it pretty easily. No, what bothered her was how he had clearly been looking at her while he said all that.
“Unit-Metal…Rose….?”
[…Emotional processing throttled to 5%...]
With a sudden detachment that seemed so unlike her, though some, now mostly quiet, part of her was still screaming in horror, she began to take in several facts that had mostly escaped her awareness and understanding until now as her attention moved back from the still cackling doctor to herself, and what a sight she was.
Where before she would have seen her normal limbs covered in soft pink fur and her favorite red dress, all she saw now was…metal….Almost mockingly, it was still pink but in the way one would see on a particularly fancy car or…any machine really. Hard lines and metallic joints replaced her formerly natural form, and while perhaps one might still say favorably that her form was sleek and well-designed…it wasn’t in any way that a Mobian hedgehog…or any natural being should be.
Metallic limbs, a rigid and contoured body, a facsimile of her previous red shoes that were now clearly her actual ‘feet’, and now that she truly wanted to know, her ‘schematics’ suddenly opened up to her.
Wiring, processors, energy cells, a reactor core, memory banks, rocket boosters, anti-gravity engines, forcefield generators…weapons, so, so many weapons…code, programming, and overall a form that while it ‘resembled’ the female Mobian hedgehog she once was…was in truth anything but. Even her ‘face’ looked vaguely like the one she used to have, but it was all metal now. Her hair, her formerly beautiful pink hair, was now just a spiky metallic appendage that almost seemed to emphasize how much it wasn’t what it used to be than what it was, complete with an imitation of her favorite red headband that was just as much a part of her ‘body’ now as everything else. And, her precious green eyes, they were…just green LEDs.
The truth, the truth was inescapable to her now.
“He made me a robot….He made me a robot…….I’m just another one of his robots now….”
Details were now opening up to her mind of the “Roboticizer” project, a project Dr. Robotnik had recently completed that would enable him to transform, or rather transfer the consciousness of, a formerly organic subject into a cybernetic copy of itself. ‘Superior’ in every way to its previous base form (which, it was noted, almost as a footnote in the file, would of course be destroyed in the process), this newly created ‘Robian’, or ‘Unit-M’ (with the ‘M’ being short for ‘Metal’) series robot, would be the ‘perfect’ instrument of Dr. Robotnik’s will and the ‘pinnacle’ of all his previous work.
“My beautiful, perfect body was destroyed….I’m just a robot now…a thing…one of his things….”
[…Emotional processing throttled to 1%...]
Almost blankly, she just stared back at him, her ‘creator’. If he noticed the emptiness in her ‘eyes’, ‘eyes’ that in her previous organic form would always be filled with so much life, he gave little sign that it concerned him.
“Oh, hah, hah, Orbot, it’s such a wonderful day!” The doctor sighed with pleasure, as his laughter and chuckles now began to subside. “Always so satisfying when a project works out. But…hmm…probably no reason to waste any more time. Not now that I have my perfect tool finally ready to destroy Sonic and all his disgusting little friends!”
He suddenly gave her a serious, though also still deeply amused, look.
“Unit-Metal Rose, you should already be preprogrammed with all your basic instructions and mission directives, but I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t repeat your main directive now. I do love to hear it so.”
Indeed, it was clear the man…loved…to hear the sound of his own voice.
“Your mission is to destroy Sonic and his friends. Only, while I believe you, my creation, are entirely capable of doing so immediately, it would seem to be a waste of an opportunity and my clearly genius ‘Roboticizer’ process. Instead, I want you to infiltrate them. You know, pretend to be that weak and silly girl hedgehog that none of them took seriously, and when their guard is justifiably down, capture them and bring them back to me one by one. Start with the fox, he should be easy enough to subdue…and just might be a problem if he caught on to what had happened. No, I can’t have him messing with my perfect creation, trying to ‘reprogram’ it or ‘fix’ it or something equally inane, as if he could ‘improve’ on one of my sublime inventions.”
The round maniac shuddered for a moment, as if the possibility of anyone else being able to make any of his inventions ‘better’ in even the most miniscule way was almost too blasphemous to speak.
“Then, finally, once all of Sonic’s friends have been converted into their true forms, you will lead them in bringing him back to me. Only make sure he doesn’t suspect a thing. I really want to see his face when he realizes just who led him and all his friends into capture…and perfection.”
The doctor paused, seeming to savor the imagined moment more than some savored a gourmet meal (of which he’d clearly had many, gourmet or otherwise).
“Then, finally, it will be his turn. I’ll even let you toss him into the machine, as I’m sure you’ll have earned it by then. And then, my plans will be complete: Sonic and all his pesky friends will be mine. All of Mobius will soon then be mine….Though, rather than employing him directly in my inevitable takeover of the planet, I believe I’ll keep Sonic, or rather ‘Unit-Metal Sonic’ by then as my robot butler. One can never have too many servants or cleaning bots after all….My bases do tend to get rather dusty.”
Turning swiftly to the floating robot at his side, he quickly gave an order: “Orbot, make a note: rather than as another combat unit, we’ll keep the future ‘Unit-Metal Sonic’ as a dedicated unit for cleaning up around the bases and…getting me drinks or something. Yes, that should be lovely….”
[…Emotional processing throttled to .00001%...]
Meanwhile, as the Eggman went on, requesting that his robotic assistant make notes about all the menial chores he intended to have his future “roboticized” hedgehog servant perform, Amy continued to process everything, clinically…and made a decision.
“Affirmative, Doctor, I clearly understand my mission.”
For the first time, she spoke, though the synthesized, lifeless voice that now echoed out, while clearly based on her original, missed the mark by very much. Meanwhile, Dr. Robotnik whirled back to face ‘his’ creation in surprise.
“Ah, yes, glad to hear it. Truly, my plan could not be better or more likely to succeed….”
He trailed off for a moment before beginning to shift uncomfortably. By now, even he could sense that something was ‘off’, the seeming utter lack of feeling and emotion, the ‘deadness’ and ‘void’ that seemed to exist in the figure before him, somehow making it seem even less ‘real’ and ‘alive’ than the robot ‘corpses’ he still had waiting in his main workshop for repurposing into new units.
Briefly, he turned his head towards his spherical assistant: “Eh, Orbot, while obviously superior in every possible way to its base organic model, the silly, weak, and altogether useless girl it used to be, I’m beginning to have some concern that it might not be capable of convincing….”
He froze for a moment when he suddenly felt the full ‘attention’ of the…thing…in front of him weighing down heavily on his person.
“Apologies, Doctor, let me correct that.”
As his ‘perfect’ creation’s empty voice echoed out and he felt every bit of the attention of the seemingly unfeeling, uncaring, and merciless entity behind its dead and lifeless ‘eyes’, an entity that seemed to view anything and everything around it as mere ‘data’, as objects to be manipulated and possibly…removed…if they proved an inconvenience, the doctor would never admit it, but he…may…have peed himself a little.
[Request Received: E.P. throttling reduced. Now processing at 75% of capacity...Partial emotional partitioning temporarily implemented to preserve system integrity…Activating holomorphic field…Recalibrating voice package…]
Suddenly, where the, and Dr. Robotnik would never openly admit this, ‘soulless monster’ had been was a figure they were all much more familiar with. From ‘her’ gently tousled hair, bright green eyes, pretty red dress and obviously well-cared for fur and spines, it appeared absolutely indistinguishable from the lively, organic hedgehog they once knew.
“You don’t need to worry, Doctor. I’ll make sure they don’t suspect a thing.”
And with that, ‘Amy Rose’ giggled, a carefree and lively sound to match the no longer ‘synthesized’ and ‘empty’ sounding voice that had made this announcement. Still, Dr. Robotnik couldn’t entirely understand why he suddenly so very much wanted the prior ‘soulless monster’ back, only vaguely comprehending that somehow…it would have been less terrifying. Meanwhile, ‘Amy Rose’ gave him a wink and took a moment to ‘smooth’ down her skirt.
“Well, I don’t want to keep Sonic and my friends waiting, certainly not with everything you’ve done to prepare me for them.”
And with that she gave them both a wide and genuine ‘smile’, and though her green eyes seemed to sparkle with excitement, and even a bit of mischief, the doctor almost thought he saw something else looking back at him…and were its eyes burning a deep, crimson red?….
With a last little chuckle, the ‘Mobian hedgehog’ got off the maintenance table it had been resting on and seemed almost to skip from the room, looking every bit the lighthearted youth it appeared she was.
For several long moments, Dr. Robotnik and Orbot just stared after the departing ‘hedgehog’ before the doctor finally seemed to muster up the energy to speak again:
“Orbot…make a note: We will want to make the next one less…less….”
He trailed off, clearly searching for the right word.
“Evil, Sir?”
The doctor nodded seriously: “Yes, exactly. Less Evil. Underline that Twice!!”