Eggman Generations

(O)(O)

The white abyss with no end, where he, and his irritating, if nevertheless brilliant counterpart, were trapped. They had scoured the abyss for what had to be hours, and both were getting tired.

Tired of walking, and tired of mulling over their dozens of defeats, world domination at their fingertips, snatched away from them by the world's most annoying hedgehog. It had started as a game, discussing their most brilliant plans and comparing who had the worst luck when it came to Sonic disrupting them. Eggman of the future, of course, had the worst luck: Chaos had run rampant and destroyed his Egg Carrier, Dark Gaia refused to be docile and flooded the planet with its energy, and then there were Shadow and Emerl, even if they weren't his creations per say.

His younger counterpart reminded him a lot of... well, himself. Eggman of the future grabbed his forehead, his big, beautiful mind growing weaker. He wished Orbot or Cubot were here with them, of all things. He'd never finished working on their onboard sandwich dispensers, but had they had the consideration to quit dawdling around in the exploded fragments of his interstellar theme park (another wonderful present from that infuriating hedgehog), and get sucked into the time distortion with him, he'd have started work on that ingenious function immediately.

"So," his other self went on, though he'd long ago ceased caring. "I think I might be a calculus teacher, or maybe physics? Tell me, other me, how did you manage to build a space fleet over the planet without Sonic noticing? I mean, I kept the Death Egg underground-"

Eggman of the future groaned, and wiped his face, too exasperated to yell. The nincompoop kept talking about abandoning conquest, going back to college and finishing his teaching degree, and that couldn't be allowed to happen. If his younger self pursued teaching instead of world domination, then the future that he came from wouldn't come to be. He, the Eggman of the future, would no longer exist.

Or at least, he assumed so. Time travel was a tricky business, even for a genius. If the effects were instantaneous, as he assumed judging from the way that areas like South Island and Angel Island began to fade from existence the moment he changed something there, than he should have disappeared the moment his counterpart considered teaching. But that hadn't happened. It was his eternal hell that he be subjugated to this nonsensical change of heart, forced to walk the white abyss until his bones were all that remained, and they would vanish too, he imagined. There was heat in this void, somewhere, and that was what made him and his counterpart keep going, following the direction of the heat source.

There had to be something.

"If you're not going to answer, I'll just keep my thoughts to myself then, hmph!"

Finally he shut up. Eggman took a huge breath, relieved, and they kept at it, walking into the abyss. He wiped more of the sweat gathering on his nose. He was sweating, somehow. There had to be a source.

"Look!" his other self shouted.

It was there, as if from a dream. He'd gazed the horizon before, maybe even prayed a little, asked whatever back-stabbing gods or deities that might be listening. Maybe one of them had answered. There, a gray surface, a tower pricked the white horizon. He wondered if it had been there before, mocking him silently as he was too delirious from hunger and aggravation to notice it.

"You think it's the way out?"

Eggman looked back at his other self. "I think it's my way out!" Then, without warning, he jogged ahead, arms pumping up and down from the exertion.

"W-wait, wait for me you fat loser!" Eggman of the past shouted, but he already had a good lead on him. He didn't want to take any chances, not after all he'd been through. That was the advantage of being from the future, being aware that providence wasn't always kind. They could have made it together, sure, and there'd be a machine, a device of some kind, capable of sending a single person back to... anywhere else but here.

He might have been older, but it was his cunning that mattered. His body wasn't in any better shape than his younger self's, and he remembered being quite the athlete in his early years.

A fact evidenced by the fact that a red shape bulleted past him, arms splayed behind him.

"What? I don't believe this! G, get back here! Don't' leave me!"

Eggman of the past didn't spare him a passing glance. His voice carried, even as he gained several meters ahead of him. "Sorry Eggman, but this egg's not getting stuck in this abyss!"

His breath caught, and he had to slow down. "You," he said, heaving. "You don't even know what that thing is! What if it takes two people to operate it, huh?"

"Then you can't operate it alone either! You needed me to control the Time Eater, and wherever that thing's destruction brought us, I bet you can't figure out how anything works here either!"

Curse it all. One of the many times he had to be perfectly right about something, and, it meant eternal imprisonment in the void, a place beyond science and beyond reason.

No. He scorned that, that tumor of a thought. He was the Eggman. His first forays into world domination involved dirtying up alternate dimensions, alternate timelines! The white abyss wasn't his first trek into another dimension, and it wouldn't be his last, but Eggman of the past had never gone that far, not yet.

Eggman remembered the laser pistol, he'd started keeping one on his person ever since that blasted fox got the better of him at Station Square. No more relying solely on robots to do his bidding. Eggman of the past would never go on another interdimensional adventure, he'd make sure of that, and he'd figure out how to get out of here.

(O)(O)

They stopped before a single gray tower, a mysterious mark upon the void. It stood an impressive height, clearly mechanical and designed with the finesse of an engineer, perhaps on the caliber of Eggman himself. The aesthetic was a bit more chrome than he was used to, but definitely the work of a master.

Eggman of the past hopped backward defensively, and pointed. "You were going to shoot me in the back with that, weren't you, you dirty coward!?"

Eggman saw him, glanced at the pistol in his hand, and then shrugged. "I would've shot Mother Teresa in the back if it meant getting out of here. You would have too, don't lie."

"You are the worst!" cried Eggman of the past, stomping his foot. "How do I ever grow up to be like you! No wonder Sonic's always thwarting my glorious plans! I grew up to be the world's biggest as-"

"Quiet," demanded Eggman of the future, his voice oddly soft.

"What do you mean 'be quiet'? We're in the middle of nothingness, trapped for god knows how long, and this is the first sign of human life we've located!"

"Not that," he said, squinting. He pointed at the front of the tower, near what appeared to be an entrance door. "You see that? That symbol look familiar to you?"

Eggman of the past tilted his glasses as he examined it, the black face on the front of the door. "It's some kind of face. Should I?"

Eggman sighed. "Of course you wouldn't, you haven't embraced your title as Eggman, yet. I plucked you from a point in the timeline before I realized my true destiny as the ruler of the Eggman Empire! That symbol," he said, a finger pointed at the mustached, black logo, "is our calling card."

"That name, come to think of it, it's really stupid," his infernal counterpart said. "Where on earth did you get the idea to theme yourself behind eggs?"

Just as Eggman started to correct him, the voice bellowed toward them, a bowling ball slamming into the pins. "Because eggs are perfection, you simpleton! An egg is the Mona Lisa of evolution, the purity of biology harnessed into physical form!"

The voice blew through a loudspeaker somewhere on the tower, and a giant television screen lit up on the front, above the entrance. On it, a man with dark sunglasses glared at them.

"Eggs are the capsules that hide the extensive mechanical processes of life, creation, the universe itself. If all life in the universe was the product of dust from shattered comets and asteroids, think of the asteroid, the container that broke apart, unleashing the ingredients that allowed life to exist in the first place!"

The man on the monitor... gods darn it, Eggman knew him, knew him as well as he knew himself. His vernacular, the finely groomed mustache, right down to his speech, they were the same. The man raised a white-gloved fist before them, elevating himself.

"Eggs are the model for which all life was formed. He who masters their shape, their perfection, is the world's true master, he who stands above the wild animals that hatch from the eggs!"

"You," said Eggman, his voice a whisper. He said, louder, "You're... you have to be..."

"Yes," his other self said with a nod. "And you both appear to be me as well, from alternate or parallel timelines, I would guess. You meddled with the powers of time and space, and now you've found yourself here, as I have. Come in, we have much to discuss."

The front entrance opened with a mechanical precision, inviting the Eggmen into the tower.

(O)(O)(O)

"Welcome, my other selves. I call this place White Egg, my sole base of operations in this pointless, endless frontier of space!"

The aesthetic, Eggman noticed, was a lot more chromatic and shiny than he'd expected. Silver, gray-lined walls and ample lighting; there were two floors, and a winding staircase for access between them. Monitors embedded the walls, beeping and processing elaborate displays, calculations and graphs that flickered by, and terminals stuck out from the walls, glowing keyboards and a low, internal humming. The tower's insides emanated with a modular, energy-efficient design, a key sign that they were dealing with, shockingly enough, another Eggman.

He ushered them to travel up the stairs, and Eggman cursed under his breath. They found him sitting in front of a massive supercomputer, with nearly twenty different screens facing them. Already, he could tell that their new acquaintance was going to be a difficult person to work with, but seeing him up close as he spun around his chair, that did it. They talked alike, but they didn't look it. The Eggman before him was thinner, certainly, and his outfit somewhat sleeker, polished and pressed.

There was an exercise bike near the left wall, along with a half-eaten burger and an empty French fry carton, not far from a bench and a clothing iron that was still plugged into the wall.

Eggman looked at his other self, hiding his disgust.

"Greetings," he opened with, "I am Doctor Eggman, from the future. The gentleman beside me is my partner, the Eggman of the past."

"Doctor Robotnik, if you please," said his younger counterpart, raising his finger. "I am in no way associated with that jerk over there!"

Eggman scowled. "Whatever! We are, um, well, lost."

"I can see that," said the other Eggman, nodding. "My sensors detected your arrival in this dimension hours ago, but I couldn't spare the power to send out a scouting party."

"This is an incredible base," said Eggman of the future. He crossed his arms behind his back. "I mean, I've built bigger, more room to stretch the legs, but, given the circumstances, I'm quite impressed."

"Especially given that we found ourselves here without any tools or machines," added Eggman of the past. "We couldn't build anything like this. We would've starved!"

The other Eggman's eyebrow lifted curiously. "You mean, neither of you thought to simply build a particle accelerator and transmogrify the particles into a food source, like I did?"

Eggman of the past blinked, and Eggman of the future, dumbfounded, tried not to lose face. "Oh come now, you can't be serious. That's not how a particle accelerator works." As far as he knew, it wasn't.

He saw a flash of teeth, the other Eggman smiling superiorly. "It would seem that you are, to say the least, a few decades below my level of intelligence."

Anger seized Eggman of the future. "What did you just say?"

"Don't get your bootlaces twisted." That blasted smile stayed right where it was. "All I'm saying is that I long ago messed with the fabric of space and time, and I paid my price for it in isolation. But, I used that isolation to study the fabric of the universe, and I have come to a stark conclusion about the nature of my existence. I have been here longer than the both of you, yes, long enough to construct a refuge from the nothingness outside. But, I am not from the same timeline as you both."

"What do you mean?"

A pause, as if he needed to prepare. But the other Eggman spoke, his voice firm. "I am from a different timeline, one that no longer exists. It was the destruction of this apparent timeline, through events I have yet to decipher, that resulted in my existence here."