In the depths of a high-security base, a pair of eyes shuttered closed and open. They scanned the surroundings dispassionately. It was a vast room. As the base went, unremarkable in design; computers, machinery, security implements all over the walls, silo-shaped containers gathered along the edges, a cold, metallic scent in the air. Nothing special.
But it was the full extent of the world, at least for that soul, and had been for precisely seventy-one days. Days, mused the being. Curious term. Where did it come from? There was that set period of time, the day. It would slither by silently, and then suddenly it would be another day, and the other one was gone. And then more and more of them would come piling in, pushing out the old ones over and over. But what was a day? Shouldn't he know that?
Knowledge banks: Complete scan.
IDENTITY: E-123 Omega. E-Series robot, final model of 24. Mecha design by brilliant Dr. Eggman.
STATUS: Fully operational. Systems functioning in high-nineties. No damage.
OBJECTIVE: Non-negotiable. Guard and protect Ultimate Life Form. Prevent its release by any save master.
OBJECTIVE STATUS: Successful. No event data.
MEMORY BANKS: 1 .AMV file(s) found.
Silently Omega opened the file. It was dated those seventy-one days ago; maybe it would help him understand what a day was. The footage played against the inside of his head, a strange mix of audio, visual, and . . . something else.
"Activating!" cackled a voice. It was familiar, the ID register burned deep into Omega's programming.
Eggman. Master.
"Now, my ultimate creation! Let's put you through your paces."
There was an anomaly in the memory data there. Something was mixed in with the audio and video, as if it had been present at the time of recording, and was playing back now along with everything else.
It was . . . Omega scrabbled for the word. How useless his pre-installed word log was! It didn't help for things like this. It was . . . something empty filling up his insides. Something cold and slimy trickling through his mechanics, causing his circuits to misfire. It was a vacuum, a black hole.
Too empty, he realized. He had no purpose, nothing to grab onto. The world was a spinning colorful void, a shower of pointless data deluging into his circuits—and he had no clue what to do with it. He was sentient. He was utterly blank.
He was terrified.
"Display weapons. Destroy target," ordered the voice officiously.
Immediately the orange flood subsided. Now things were all right. Now he knew what he was supposed to do, and the directive was a beautiful scrap of solid ground for him to stand on, steadying him in the huge colorful void.
Mechanically he raised his hands and converted them to gatling guns. Then to flamethrowers. Then back to hands. Then he went efficiently through the rest of his arsenal, section by section. It came naturally, it was his instinct, his directive, and menial though it was, it fulfilled him.
He turned to the indicated "target." It was only a round white board with an X painted on in red. Objective destroy. So he destroyed it, in the most efficient way.
"Splendid!" chortled Eggman's voice. "Very good, E-123."
Omega lowered his arms, feeling unsteady. The objective had been completed, and he had no secondary objective. Again the orange wash of terror filled his vision. Purpose; he needed purpose! Anything, anything to keep him from sinking into this dizzy colorful void of not knowing what next.
"E-123 Omega," boomed the voice again. "Receive primary directive."
Oh, he'd receive it all right.
"Guard and protect the Ultimate Life Form. Do not allow anyone to release it except me! Understand?"
"Understood. Primary directive cataloged," replied Omega, feeling peace settle over him finally. "External access no longer permitted."
The file ended. Omega's eyes flickered as he switched back to external optics. Same room, same four walls and clutter. Nothing had changed.
There in the center of the room stood the object of his primary directive. Subject Ultimate Life Form. A bulk of machinery he couldn't care less about—he'd tried to communicate with it, and failed—and atop it, a misshapen sphere, made of a glasslike substance. Inside it was a mass of semi-viscuous green liquid, studded with tiny air bubbles. Suspended in the fluid was a motionless black form, with slashes of green-mucked red on its head and limbs.
Omega surveyed the entire contraption. This whole mass of matter was his primary directive, and he was not to let anyone touch any of it. It was a good primary directive, as good as any. It told him what he was there for.
But he was wandering from the question. What was a day?
He paced from one end of the room to the other, then back. Time had elapsed. But it was not a day. If he did it again, it would still not be a day. But if he did it again and again and again, would it eventually become a day?
Oddly unsettled, he began to examine more closely the objects all along the walls of the room. He had never given them more than a preliminary scan, but now he felt he might as well obtain full information on each of them.
Most of the apparati were routine. Climate control, air vents, storage containers and such. But there was one device built into the wall that reacted. When he stepped close and scanned it, he registered intelligence. Cold, methodical intelligence, but still.
Perhaps it could tell him what a day was! Extending a claw, he touched a small retracting thing. He didn't know what to call it, but somehow his programming informed him that touching the small retracting thing would activate the intelligent thing, and then they could communicate.
A small glass square in the wall suddenly glowed white. Omega adjusted his optics. It was a computer! Like him! They could communicate through their coding. Fumbling with various sockets and wires, he connected himself to the latent mass of cold, hard knowledge he sensed just nearby.
Tell me what a day is.
An entry popped up on the screen.
"Day: the period of natural light between periods of natural darkness. A span of twenty-four hours, indicating one complete revolution of the Earth."
Omega's circuits sparked slightly in frustration. This was gibberish. "Light" and "darkness" he more or less understood. He could look at a lightbulb and see it was causing light, and where the light didn't reach, that was darkness. Inside him there was a cozy, warm darkness, filled with the hum of electronics and mechanics. It was a nice idea.
But the rest of the definition was nonsense. What were hours? What was the Earth, that it should be revolving? He scanned the room. There was nothing revolving. The Earth was not in here.
Wait . . . did that mean there was something . . . else?
He processed for a moment. That .AMV file in his memory banks—it had showed him someplace else. He had once been someplace else. So then, this room was not everything that existed. There were other places, somewhere! Where were they? Did they have days? Did they have hours and Earth? Or had he made an error, somewhere?
Omega carefully slowed down his processors, which were starting to overheat with this sudden onslaught of ideas. It was like the sensation you get after inching on your stomach down miles and miles of suffocating cave tunnels, and suddenly tumbling into an enormous vaulted cavern; agoraphobia. It was like fidgeting three hours, intently trying to thread a needle, then suddenly sitting back and registering the vastness of the universe; a religious experience. A tiny little circle of existence suddenly became a tiny little pixel in a sprawling Great Unknown of other things.
Gradually he wrapped his circuits around the concept. There were—very possibly—other things out there. He wanted to know about them. He even had a place to start.
Tell me what Earth is.
Over the days—there, now he knew how to use the word!—the wall computer succeeded in opening thousands of abstract portals in the mind of one very attentive student. Eventually Omega internalized a vast amount of information about the outside world, or at least the type of things you can learn from a computer encyclopedia and the internet. He remembered everything he read or saw, cataloging it in his drives as various types of files and folders. It helped to fill up the emptiness of the days.
And then, he found Kiwi.
He'd been reading the help guide on the computer one day, finding it to be something like a fascinating and very well-written physiology book. Somewhere in the section about accessories, he found instructions about how to activate and use a strange accessory nicknamed the Kiwi. Curious, he followed the directions, pulling a lever here and pushing a button there. He had found that the computer wasn't sentient, and thus knew that it would not mind him manipulating it.
As Omega completed the last step of the instructions, a rounded section of the control panel suddenly folded away, and a metallic-blue orb popped out abruptly. About the size of a soccer ball, it was mounted on a mechanical base, with a large speaker set into its front.
"Good morning," it chirped, in a vaguely pleasant mechanical voice. "I am Kiwi. Would you like to chat?"
Would he. This was the first actual voice Omega had heard since receiving his primary directive.
"Affirmative," he said, wondering if Kiwi could hear him and respond.
"All right," said Kiwi. "Let's play a game. I will ask you a question, which you may answer orally or with the keyboard. Each correct answer is worth one point. See if you can get the high score!"
Omega experienced a strange pattern of circuit impulses he'd never had before. He figured this must be what the organics called disappointment. Apparently, this Kiwi orb was only a knowledge game, something like a talking quiz. It couldn't really converse . . . could it?
"Shall we begin?" sang Kiwi.
"Are you capable of other discussions?" asked Omega carefully.
"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Please speak slowly and distinctly. Shall we begin?"
The disappointment pattern flickered on again.
"Affirmative," said Omega heavily, resigned.
He "spoke" with Kiwi a few times over the next week or two. The little quiz device was evidently locked away in this lonely room for a reason; it often glitched up, asking questions that were difficult to understand or downright silly. Omega soon registered another new circuit pattern—sheepishness—when he caught himself trying to believe that the little quirks were actually a personality. Kiwi definitely had none. Still, it was nice to hear another voice, even if it was just throwing uninterested questions at him. Good for testing and expanding his new knowledge, too. All the same, on the twentieth day of this routine, Omega was beginning to get restless.
"What is the approximate distance from the Earth to the Sun, in miles, kilometers, and light-years?" piped the little orb, its voice rising dutifully at the end of the line to simulate the inflection of a question.
"92,960,000 miles, 148,600,000 kilometers, 0.0000152207001522070015220700152207 light years, or approximately eight and one-half light-minutes," recited Omega. "This distance is also known as the astronomical unit."
"Correct," chirped Kiwi. "Please identify the composers and title of the following piece of music." A cheerful tune burst from the computer speakers, then abruptly choked off.
"Composers: John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Song title: 'I Want to Hold Your Hand.'"
"Correct."
Omega wondered briefly about that piece of music. Organics seemed to think a great deal about this practice of interlinking and mutually clasping each other's hands, considering that they even commemorated it in their musical works. Over time he had deduced that it was a gesture of affection, or when done in a group, solidarity. He examined the five-pronged metal appendage at the end of two of his extremities. It looked rather like a hand. Would it be possible for it to perform the mutual clasping gesture? A moot question, since there was nobody around to perform it with, but . . .
Either way, there wasn't much time to think about that; Kiwi was already rattling out the next question.
"Please identify the name of the pictured landmark, and the country and country and country and country and—"
Omega tapped firmly on Kiwi's side.
"—country and continent of its location."
"Machu Pichu, Peru, South America."
"Correct."
Omega was a bit resentful when the picture blinked off the screen; he had wanted to look at it longer. The outside world was . . . certainly very green. And vast, and sparse, and jumbled. But he liked it, and liked Machu Pichu and other ruins especially, because he found their state of disrepair comfortable and somehow proper. Not at all like the streamlined shapes and blinking screens of this space he was trapped in.
Kiwi persisted.
"How do you feel?"
Immediately Omega's processors retrieved the correct answer, the one implied by Kiwi's somewhat shabby wording: a detailed but elegant explanation of the typical organic nervous system, the whole path from sensory stimulus in the skin to neural response in the brain. And yet he didn't answer right away, because another set of circuits was registering an alternate meaning. He had run into too many databases of puns on the internet.
How do you feel . . . An expression common among organics. An inquiry about one's physical and mental condition, requesting a statement of one's current dominant sensation. Then again, he was a robot, and apparently robots weren't expected to have sensations. Not that he wanted any, either! In his programming and his design he was superior to any measly bundle of flesh. And yet . . .
How did he feel?
Somehow the correct answer dropped out through the cracks in his circuits, and he went with what he knew was the wrong one.
"Alone."
A sharp buzzing sound.
"Incorrect," chirped Kiwi, still chipper and very polite. "Please repeat answer slowly and distinctly. How do you feel?"
" . . . Alone."
The buzzing came again, merciless.
"I'm sorry, that is incorrect. Let's move on to the next question. What is the velocity of an unladen—"
Omega reached out and closed his hand firmly over the jabbering metal orb, crushing it into silence. This conglomeration of metal didn't know or care what it was like to feel anything; its blithe lack of concern outright mocked him.
He really was alone.
Over the next few days, Omega paced back and forth, still restless. His crashing footsteps echoed off the walls faintly, always the same. Same walls. Same sounds. Same silence. There was a world somewhere out there, filled with many different sights and sounds and interactions, yet he was trapped here, alone.
Solitary confinement, that's what it was. He had learned about it during his searching. They used it out there to punish the very worst offenders, those who had most blatantly violated the protocols of society. To chastise those that had grievously malfunctioned, as it were. Even then, some thought it too cruel a punishment to subject a being to so much loneliness.
So then, why was the same done to him? Had he violated his protocols? What heinous crime had he committed? Could he—could he have violated his primary directive?!
The thought filled him with horror. To violate a primary directive was to go against the laws of nature, the equivalent of the organic's act of utter inhumanity. Had he done this? How could he have done this?
He tried to remember. He played back those first memory files, sifting through them and juxtaposing them. They did not compute. Where had he gone wrong? He had completed those first, simple directives; he had been given a primary directive, to guard the Ultimate Life Form. He was here, guarding the Ultimate just as he had been told. So why was he being punished?
A hundred thousand times he tried to make the information correlate, until that one time when a circuit happened to misfire and he suddenly saw it all plainly before him.
He wasn't being punished; his primary directive simply entailed being confined alone.
If Omega's systems didn't fry completely after that, it was mainly because he kept shutting down and rebooting them. There were too many concepts there to boggle a robotic mind. His master—his creator—the one he served unconditionally—had ordered him to serve a cruel sentence, when he—he was sure of it—hadn't done anything to deserve it. It was a very difficult idea for Omega to process. He had been programmed with unconditional loyalty to his master, meaning that his master was always right, that his actions were never even candidates for questioning.
And yet, in a moment of agonizing emptiness, Omega realized that his master was wrong.
After the dull crush of that decision came a shaky, dizzy euphoria. Omega paced hard that day, striding swiftly across the room, swinging around to continue his trek. Now he'd done it; now he really had violated his central programming. And he liked it! He was malfunctioning, on the most critical level, and he'd never felt better! Yes, by all that was green and sunny, Eggman was wrong. He had done Omega wrong. And because of this—oh, he was really descending into madness now—Omega did not wish to take his orders anymore.
He opened his primary database yet again, analyzed his basic stats. The primary directive was from Eggman. Well then, no more of that. Forget sanity, he was very much enjoying this chaotic madness that had taken over his processor, so he came up with another wild idea: he would come up with his own directives now. He knew he could think very much like an organic, why not choose his own protocols, like an organic? Total rebellion! He would—he would now declare war on that creature he had formerly stooped to calling master. Yes! He had a new primary directive now: Destroy.
The more Omega paced, the more rage swelled inside him. Something as dramatic as throwing out his entire obedience sector was bound to put a few bolts loose, and the four walls of loneliness didn't help. Fists clenched, he swung furiously around, his red eyes flaring.
The paramount act of rebellion; he would destroy what he had been told to protect.
In two strides he was before the capsule containing the Ultimate Life Form. His arm swung up fluidly, converting to a gatling gun, which then pressed delicately against the smooth convex surface of the pod. He had been ordered to protect this, so it must be important to Eggman; no doubt another one of his creations. Another inferior one that didn't feel or care. Psh, it didn't even move, and here it was the reason for his misery. Disgusting object! Omega loathed this slumbering hominoid, blindly and indiscriminately he abhorred it.
Destroy. A mere electronic impulse from the robot's CPU, to trigger the guns, and the abomination would lie in shards and slime upon the floor. So easy, so very easy. Now . . .
Why couldn't he do it?
For minutes on end Omega stood, teetering on the brink of releasing the barrage of steel shrapnel, never quite able to push himself over the edge. Why couldn't he destroy it? Why?
The old primary directive, Protect. He rejected it, and yet he clung to it, needed it. Why did he have to be so weak? He made his own decisions now, chose his own directives! He had no need of the master he now hated.
But deep down, he still doubted. He still remembered that acidic orange terror of being purposeless in space, without a primary directive, and he still would undergo anything rather than experience that again. Supposing Destroy didn't work? Was it even possible for a robot to truly have free will? Suppose he annihilated his only working primary directive, and found himself plunged eternally into that empty horror?
No, it was too big a risk. He couldn't take it in cold oil. Gears crunching in distress, he lowered his arm and stepped back, giving up. Nobody but him would ever know just how closely the unconscious Shadow had skirted oblivion.
But now there was a new torment. Omega was still full of rage, and the directive Destroy was still dominant in his systems, but at the same time he couldn't actually risk it. What to do? As long as he was trapped in here, he had no chance of testing out his own will. Again he nearly fried his circuits trying to puzzle it out.
At last he came to a compromise. For now, he would leave this Ultimate Life Form be, since it was still and silent, impotent. What use could it be to Eggman in that state? But if it ever did move, or if someone came to retrieve it, that meant it was capable of furthering the cause of the abominable Eggman—so then Omega would destroy it, seize the moment and sink his doubts in the heat of urgency. After all, he couldn't let his loathsome Eggman-created charge get away scott-free. He'd blow it to atoms the minute it tried.
As for the loneliness, that wasn't going to go away. He would compress its duration with sleep mode. Settling into a corner, he let his optics power down with the rest of his systems.
"Not even the Eclipse Cannon, or the Biolizard?!" demanded the white bat, one of her feet scraping the floor involuntarily in frustration. She was only one of a sudden avalanche of new experiences that had smothered Omega in the past half-hour. Bat had intruded. Ultimate Life Form had escaped. Bat had hollered "HOLD UP!", and for some cosmologically anomalous reason, Omega had stopped firing at the Ultimate. He had taken an order from some puny and unfamiliar organic, just like that! The shame of it.
Bat had told him to explain himself. Truth be told, he'd felt a little . . . queasy, let's say, after finally overriding his primary directive in full. He relished a secondary directive to keep his processor busy, so he obeyed again, just to have something to do. Now finished, he brooded dizzily in a corner while this Ultimate Life Form abomination communicated with the bat.
The conversation reached Omega only muffledly, as he was still trying to straighten out his systems. Without an externally supplied directive now, he was a little uneasy, but nowhere near terrified. Once he got used to running on his own ideas, he'd be fine. Busy with the system reset, he only gathered the most basic data from the scene as the bat waved about a lot and grew more and more insistent about some sort of arc, or ark, and a cannon and a fall and a lot of words that seemed to be names.
All the same, she was interesting. Having never seen organic behavior in the flesh, Omega wasn't sure how typical of an example this creature was. Still, he could tell things about her, based on correlation with existing knowledge. She had a strong personality, cunning, avaricious, was used to getting her own way. Short temper, too. Right now she seemed to be reaching the end of it.
"What about Final Hazard? Do you remember falling, anything that happened after you fell?" she demanded.
The Ultimate creature shook its head coldly, something it had done several times by now. Omega shifted his main scan intensity to his former charge. Now that it was awake and moving, it looked . . . strangely organic. Its eyes were hard and cold—but also full of life, and anger. As Rouge continued to barrage it with confusing and alien-sounding questions, irritation was becoming very plain on its face. His face, Omega conceded grudgingly. This creature, like the bat, was capable of at least some emotion. That was a point in his favor.
"Listen to me. ARK. Sonic. Amy. Tails, Knuckles, destruction, earth, Chaos Control, Dr. Eggman! Does any of that ring a bell at all?!"
Omega didn't move, but his data collection intensified at the hated name of Eggman. Destruction was still an option . . . He was both bewildered and highly gratified when the Ultimate Life Form shook his head again, indicating he had no knowledge of, much less any loyalty to, the Doctor. The bat was less gratified. She made a peculiar sound—Omega guessed it was one of annoyance—and half-threw herself into the air and onto a higher perch, peeved.
"Nothing, eh?" she muttered, and plunged herself deep into thought, her elbows on her knees. Meanwhile the Ultimate Life Form—Shadow, the bat kept calling him—folded his arms and turned away coolly. But just before he did, Omega ever so briefly registered his expression. Irritated, to be sure—irritated, and confused. Perhaps even lost. He apparently had none of the memories he was expected to have, no idea where he stood in space, no clue about his past or his purpose . . .
Come to think, Omega kind of knew that feeling.
Meanwhile, the bat seemed to have recovered from her fit of pique, and was now eyeing the robot and the hedgehog alternately, her ears twitching. She was quite a fascinating study—Omega had read about "seeing wheels turning in someone's head," but he had always visualized it in a very literal robotic sense. This bat gave the expression a whole new meaning, that was for sure.
"Now I get it," she said suddenly, sitting back and turning her attention to Omega. "Now I know what this is all about. You're mad at Eggman for sealing you in this room."
Omega looked up at her silently. Perhaps he had overestimated her intelligence, if she only "got it" just now. That he was angry at Eggman, he was quite sure he had made abundantly clear to her the first time around.
"And you," she continued smoothly, turning now to Shadow. "You can't remember anything, can you?"
Shadow did not make any significant reply either; Omega assumed he was also disgruntled at this lack of perception on the bat's part.
"Then it's settled!" declared the bat, swinging resolutely down from her perch, grabbing Shadow by the arm, and calmly tossing him against Omega's hull. "Now, you two make up so we can start looking for Eggman together!"
Now normally, the "finding Eggman" part would have sounded great to Omega, but this bat was pushing things just a little too far. He didn't care if the fluffy striped organic did have emotions and didn't work for Eggman, he still would not tolerate the creature being flung at his head. Nor would he take orders from the peculiar but highly presumptuous bat. Shadow seemed to share the sentiment, as his fists sprang up in front of him, his red eyes glinting murderously.
Rouge, apparently oblivious to the incipient death match, impatiently grabbed a hand from either combatant and dragged them together, placing her own hands on top to force a handshake. Heaven knows what prevented Shadow from gratuitous violence, but in Omega's case it was the abrupt realization that the three of them were . . . essentially holding hands. Perhaps he had been mistaken about it being a gesture of solidarity?
"Aw yeah, baby!" sang the bat, grinning. "This makes us a team!"
Oh. Well . . .
Omega had to admit, he hadn't known it was that gosh-darned quick and easy.
Quick and easy, hah. It hadn't been. There had been a lot of complications over the years, a lot of squabbles and near-death situations. Somehow, despite their independent natures, the three of them had tended to stick together. They passed through stages of life as an unwitting unit, from a vagabond Eggman-hunting posse to strictly trained G.U.N. team, taking on missions for a price or a thrill.
Some thrill they were having today.
"You know," said Rouge through chattering teeth, "I wouldn't normally admit this, but in case the worst happens, I feel like I've gotta confess my lifelong secret ambition. Don't laugh, but ever since I was little, I always dreamed I would grow up to be an ice mummy."
"Shut up," groaned Shadow under his breath. He usually had zero sense of humor, but now he was clocking in at negative five. Meanwhile, the temperature was clocking in at negative forty, a raging windstorm had whipped the sky, ground, and horizon into one homogenous white blur, and the buried spy base they were supposed to locate wasn't where it should be. Of all the times for G.U.N. to give them faulty information, it just had to be when they were sent into the depths of Holoska.
They kept searching for a while, moving in what they hoped were concentrically larger circles around the incorrect coordinates they'd been given. The howling snow of the whiteout was becoming so thick that Omega gave up trying to clear his air intake grilles, and the low temperatures were starting to get even to him. Something was starting to misfire in there, no doubt.
"Receiving communication from HQ!" Rouge shouted over the wind suddenly, squinting down at the glorified cell phone G.U.N. had issued them. "They've found the real coordinates this time. They hope." She grimaced. "Four miles due west of here."
"It's hopeless trying to get there now," Shadow shouted back. "I think these are Omega's footprints we just crossed over. We'll have to stop and wait until we can see again, the whiteout should end in an hour or two."
"By then we could freeze!" retorted Rouge, shading her eyes with one hand to keep out the whirling snow. "We have to keep moving!"
But seeing that the footprints in question really were Omega's, she sighed defeatedly and agreed. Silently, as if by plan, Omega retracted his legs to settle down in the snow, setting his back to the wind. Rouge quietly slipped to the leeward side, bracing for the touch of cold metal as she leaned back against Omega's hull. She glanced up in surprise.
"It's warm . . . " she murmured.
"There are many processes taking place inside me; like the working of a computer, these create heat," said Omega, his voice crackling slightly. His internal warmth didn't reach his voice chip, so the speakers were starting to malfunction. Rouge nodded and silently grabbed Shadow's hand to pull him down from where he was standing.
"Don't play tough guy. Get out of the wind."
The fact that Shadow didn't argue said something.
The gusts continued to howl, and the temperature dropped ever lower. A thick coating of snow built up on Omega's back as he waited motionlessly, tilted slightly forwards.
He glanced down at his teammates. The cold was very convincing; one didn't play high and mighty under its watch. Out of a basic animal desire to survive, the two organics had huddled tightly against each other to preserve warmth, pressing against Omega's hull to salvage every bit of heat and shelter he could provide.
They really were pathetic little creatures, Omega reflected. Granted, the cold was starting to mess with his circuitry a little, but he was far from incapacitated and under no discomfort. Yet these puny organics were under threat from frostbite and hypothermia and who-knows-what else, just because of a temperature drop that really figured as nothing drastic. Especially on the Kelvin scale.
Really, organics were blastedly inferior, through and through. Rouge was susceptible to so many trivial things: heat, cold, suffocation, bullets, illness, injury, poison, old age—how did she even survive this far?
Granted, Shadow was made of much stronger stuff, and called himself the Ultimate. What a ludicrous term, Omega thought; Ultimate only among organics, still inferior to a robot. Should Omega choose to, he could snatch that hedgehog up in one hand and crush him to a pulp in an instant.
But he didn't choose to. Inferior though these creatures were, he somehow felt no urge to eradicate them. Their presence was . . . desirable, sometimes. In a mystical inner calculus of pros and cons that Omega himself didn't understand, Shadow and Rouge's continued existence inexplicably came out as a positive thing. Goodness knew, they didn't help his primary directive anymore; once or twice they had outright bade him hold his fire when he had Eggman locked-on point-blank. That had sure gone over well with Omega's priority menu.
But really, there were other factors worth considering. His first desire may have been revenge, but mere vengeance would leave him exactly where he had started—alone. And so he had, somehow, developed a second primary directive to share full dominance with Destroy.
Almost sleepily, the robot arced his arms around the two shivering creatures to further shelter them from the wind.