Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you must be,
Prepare for death and follow me.
—A common epitaph
Chaos was a bust, no two ways about it. A spectacular failure that came at what should have been my reigning moment of triumph. No doubt Sonic and his friends pointed and laughed as that stinking beast shot down my auxiliary ship. Station Square thought they'd been dealt a bad hand? Try crash-landing miles from civilization and having to slog through humid, bug-infested jungle with just the clothes on your back. The mosquitoes enjoyed their feast, I'll leave it at that.
After about a month of stewing (and therapeutically blasting a horde of Sonic ragdolls in the process), I decide to pull myself back up by the bootstraps. No use just lounging around feeling sorry for myself; I've got to get back in the game, somehow, some way.
Where to start? With the government busy playing janitor, their intelligence is likely to be distracted. I feel particularly reckless hacking into their mainframe without using a proxy server to mask my location. What can they do, arrest me for compromising national security? On top of everything else that stamps my name bold-print on their most wanted lists? Ha. Just charge my tab.
Besides, they owe me one after that little two-tailed brat intercepted my dud missile. Surely they wouldn't miss a few nuclear warheads from their armament. Nor, I'm certain as my fingers fly over the keys, would they protest such volatile devices go to far better care than rotting in the ground, under a remote island in the sea. I'd even go the extra mile and promise to give the others a good home. Never say I'm not one for public service!
In a matter of minutes I bust through their firewalls as easily as if they were saloon doors awaiting my grand entrance. Soon the screens flow with more private records than anyone should have a right to see (excepting me, of course, as a supreme ruler ought to know all his future subjects' comings and goings).
That doesn't make them interesting to sift through, however. In order to drill through the digital bedrock guarding the military's secrets, my computer first runs a plethora of minutiae I've no patience for: bank transactions, emails, schedules and itineraries, yadda, yadda. Look, do I really seem like the kind of man who cares what the President is having for lunch?
Come on, show me the money. Test sites. Satellite codes. The missiles. Oh, those shiny new missiles, how I can smell their gaseous fumes already!
I lean back in my king-sized chair and drum my fingers in rapid beat against the console. When it becomes clear this venture is going to take more time than I'd initially anticipated, I wheel my legs over the console and kick my feet up, prepared to nap it out if need be.
Unfortunately, my heels hit the wrong key combination. And that's when the screen freezes. All the data I've mined flickers, wavering like a paused video feed.
Before I can make heads or tails of it, another window opens: a command prompt. An ancient one I would never in a hundred years be caught dead using. The words spell themselves out, snowy white on velvet black, one painstaking letter at a time.
I h a ve de s
ig ne d
its mi nd per fect
p u r e
I shoot up in my chair, straight as a rod. The cursor blinks as if to test me. What is this? Someone's idea of a practical joke? To compound my bewilderment, my primary monitor crashes and the damned thing starts to whine an ear-splitting shriek. I clap my hands to my ears to block it out; as bad as Amy's squealing over Sonic.
Neither text nor noise respond to the usual methods of circumvention. I batter the keys in the hopes something, anything, will unstick it and restore my hearing: "No! No, no, no!" My foot crashes into the overheating CPU with a resounding bang. "Don't pull this on me now, you steaming hunk of junk!"
Despite the crash, the words continue their slow onward march. How is this possible? What branch of GUN is messing around with my systems—
Disc. Get it on a disc. I have the feeling the message will erase itself if allowed to run unchecked, so I vandalize my disc drawer and cram a blank into the whirring writer. Hopefully I can use the copy to track this idiot's location and—
"What in the blue blazes is going on here?"
The fragmented message vanishes before my eyes, taking all my precious data with it. Apparently it was the plug in the dam; new messages flood in faster than I can track them, filling my screens with utter nonsense.
Jagged words flash surreal neon warnings: BIOLIZARD ECLIPSE CHAOS ULTIMATE LIFE REDIRECT MEMORY SUBPROGRAM DEBUG CANNON ASTRONOMERS ARE CONCLUDING MONSTROUS BLACKS. Maps unfurl, revealing twisted machinery. Statistics streak past in bits and pieces, most notably a timestamp of twenty-seven minutes and fifty-three seconds—is that how much time GUN has left before I hammer my fist through their IT department? It might as well be. The whine shrills its mocking laughter, slamming my blood through my temples as I pound at the keys in vain.
Then it stops. Stops dead. I wait for the other shoe to drop, my tattered breath scraping the air.
One last window emerges.
"Oh, what now?" I growl, dragging a hand down my mouth. "What is this? What… "
Slowly, I peel myself from my chair to lean in closer.
It's a diary.
My grandfather's. I scour every word, my blood running ice before fire. An attachment arrives, one which opens without my input once I reach the end of the journal. Classified document. A medical record for G. Robotnik.
According to the front page, it was a psych evaluation conducted by GUN officials. Other than a bit of sleep deprivation slowing his psychomotor responses, he seemed to be in tip-top shape.
For a moment I stand frozen, bathing in the glow of my overworked monitors. This is all… very sudden, for lack of a better phrase. Calculated, but I don't believe in that kind of synchronicity. If someone intended to grab my attention, they certainly have it now. As far as I knew, Grandfather passed the year before I was born. Of old age, my father said.
Liar. Later he changed his story and claimed the government had involuntarily committed him toward the end of his life. Naturally, this made a much younger me curious. What for? An accident. Always an accident, no more and no less. He remained tight-lipped on the nature of said accident, much to my supreme irritation, but his evasive silences seemed to imply my grandfather had brought it on himself.
Of course, you never knew what was truth and what was fiction with that blustering fool. He'd tell you one thing today and claim you heard him wrong tomorrow. He was always trying to frighten me with that skeleton shoved in the back of our closet: You don't want to copy Gerald someday, drooling mad, crushed by the weight of your own brilliance, do you? Behave, Ivo, or else you'll wind up just like your looney-bin grandfather, wasting away in some padded cell.
Bah, what did he know? I'm still a free man, my mind sharper than a steel trap. They haven't gotten me yet. And if this record is any proof to the contrary, they hadn't gotten Gerald, either.
Shadow…
I have designed its mind to be perfect, pure. I will leave everything to it.
If you wish to fill the world with destruction… Release, and awaken it.
The screen darkens.
I fold my arms over my chest with a satisfied smirk. Fill the world with destruction, eh? Well, well. Perhaps my self-righteous father was wrong, and the apple of genius doesn't fall so very far from the tree.
I eject the finished disc and wave it once in the air to cool it off, then shove it into my pocket and stride down the corridor toward the weapons room. I'm going to be needing it where I'm headed, and if you ask me? Our little friend Shadow's slept past its alarm.
Shadow, my son.
Gerald works himself ragged. Under the guise of ironing out bugs in GUN's rudimentary AI, he loads the program that maps Shadow's dreaming brain. Spots of light glitter throughout the cortex, his jewel, his most precious work. The twinkle it emits is gentle, unlike the harsh beams the guards shine into his bloodshot eyes to wake him from his scant slumber each morning.
He doesn't know why they must treat him this way. (He does.) He speaks softly. (He screams they are murderers and traitors.) He complies with every order. (He thrashes his fists raw.) He offers his bound wrists and goes peacefully with the guards who escort him to the interrogation room and then back to his cramped stone cell, the one where no natural light comes through, the one beset by frantic scratches in the walls.
No one knows it yet, but he is the most dangerous inmate on the island. The stormy waters that crash against the bay's high-towered cliffs are meandering streams compared to the roil brewing in his mind.
Reaching forth, he strokes the back of one knobby, trembling hand against the screen. His voice breaks as he speaks. Shadow, hear me. Don't be afraid, my son. It is time to dream something different now.
(he will sanctify the vessel he will purge its mind he will break this world will feel his loss and despair)
In an ironic twist, Maria presents the only flaw in an otherwise perfect plan. (she is always in my thoughts locked in every breath behind every heartbeat I can't escape it can't bear it any longer) She is too deeply embedded in his psyche—he runs the tests and finds traces of her in every groove and every pinprick of light—damn it, why can't he extract those memories without incurring deep-tissue damage? Are the memories that firm? What will he do now? Will he stain his son's memories, or will he betray Maria's dying wish?
Lucidity once more fades from him as his throat closes its dry walls, making it hard to breathe this chilled, salt-ridden air. Gerald shivers and hugs his thin ribs, as much a prisoner inside himself as the cell containing him.
Shadow, his madness whispers, let me sing you a lullaby.
Sonic returns to the colony. Only Sonic. When Rouge asks for Shadow, his ears dip a little, his gaze sinks to the ground. So too our spirits.
We should be cheering, hugging, dancing in celebration along with the rest of the planet: the colony avoided a near-fatal collision with the Earth, almost ending life as we know it. But the room has fallen into introspection, each lost in his or her own thoughts.
I don't believe in synchronicity but I do believe in missed opportunities. The tragedy isn't that Gerald lost his mind; it's that he died early and I was born too late. And right now I'm finding it borderline impossible to reconcile the hateful man in the execution video with the memory of my cloudy childhood.
Honestly, I don't know why the sudden sentimentality. Could it be, as slowly as the ARK orbits the Earth, I'm turning into my father? How horrifying.
Tails wanders close. He doesn't have guts enough to hurt a fly, but I must admit, he fought as well as Sonic would have given the circumstances. Someone had better teach that boy not to get himself caught in any more easy traps, though. For a fox he lacks an alarming amount of cunning.
A hand taps the small of my back.
Take now, for instance. I make him watch his best friend perish in a fantastic explosion, and here he is gazing up at me, sins forgiven, seemingly, just to check in on me. This grueling half-hour must have rankled some suspicions. Yes, everyone, let's watch the mad old scientist, lest he snap like his grandfather.
I ignore him and watch him lean over the sill of the observation window, squinting at a distant constellation. I shake my head at his guilelessness.
He stares long into space, his tails flicking behind him. "You ever think about the stars?"
"What about them?" My shoulders hitch. "They're just flaming balls of gas."
"Yeah." He rubs the back of his head. "But do you ever, er… "
"Just where are you going with this, Tails?"
"I dunno. Was just thinking about how us and the stars exist in different times." Reaching out to touch the cold glass, he traces the shape of a constellation on its smudged surface. "Some of them ran out of fuel long ago. I always wondered what it would be like to go back those billions of years and see them up close."
"You'd be dead, Tails. Torn to pieces by a black hole while it dazzles you with some light that no longer exists."
His fingers swirl patterns I can't see. It's as though we're having two deeply different conversations here. He blinks sleepily, yawns into his palm.
Myself, I press a hand to the small of my back and feel it crack as I straighten my posture, a twinge deepening into an aching flare. Out of my peripheral vision I glimpse Sonic walking away, having given Rouge Shadow's ring. I don't particularly feel like talking to him right now. Tails may be bad, but Sonic's downright insufferable.
Quiet, battered and tired. How long had Gerald languished in his cell, alone with himself until his mind turned steel and his heart into ice? I don't want to dwell on that. I refuse to.
"I looked up to him, you know." Remember him as he was. Remember the professor who explained everything with a light touch of humor as if no question were insignificant. The man who kept his childishness and his good nature well into his twilight years. My father didn't hate him; he feared him. And he saw him in me, perhaps too much.
That's what I really want to say to Tails, but I doubt he'll understand. How can he? Such young minds can't conceive of evil in anyone, much less their heroes.
"He was my hero, and I wanted to be a great scientist just like him."
As I watch him doodle over a handful of stars, I wonder if someday Sonic will break his heart. If he betrayed his trust, discarded him and turned his back on the world, he'd be devastated. Of course, Sonic would never do such a thing. He gives everyone reasons to keep on looking up to him, even if those reasons aggravate me to a constant seethe. Must be nice.
The question on my mind doesn't have a satisfactory answer. "Did he really mean to destroy us?"
"I don't know." His response is so sure, so simple, but it warms his face as he turns with a beaming smile. "But I do know one thing: we all did it together!"
Even I know when to concede. "You're right."
By now you might be asking, does this tale end a happy one? Bittersweet? Somewhere in between? I'll let you be the judge of that. It's another ending, one of many. I'm merely glad it also wasn't the last.
You played a good game, I'll give you that. Clad in chains, your grayed face plastered on every screen in the world, proclaiming your greatness in the same breath as your bitter condemnation. Cheers, Gerald. I can only hope to go out with half as much style.
But in your scheming and your planning, you forgot one critical detail: you didn't lose everything. If you'd held on, if just for a little longer, you'd have seen things weren't so dire as you'd made them out to be in your cracked head. Instead you wasted that future, our family legacy, on some sickly waif. She was the black hole that tore you apart, and all the while you basked in her light you ruined your magnum opus without a second thought.
You didn't care, did you? Like your granddaughter, you too became a black hole that collapsed upon yourself. When your goodness ran out, your madness reversed polarities and you no longer knew what you became, only that that madman would destroy everything for destruction's sake. Too tightly wrapped in the straight-jacket of your grief to value the survivor. Well, he's dead now, so you can rot in your grave knowing he did exactly as you asked.
Don't patronize me. I looked up to you. When I pictured my future as a child, it was to follow in your footsteps. Now that I know precisely where that path leads, I've decided to make a hard turn in the opposite direction and start running from the precipice. Not dishonorable, Gerald. Practical.
Still, I've got to wonder if you'd use this against me. The diary, the Cannon, Shadow: was it your hatred that tainted them, or were they tainted from the beginning? Was this all just your way of attempting to frighten me straight? My father would be proud. You're welcome to try again, of course, but I don't know well you'd succeed. Sadly, your best was no match for us.
Give up the pen, Gerald. Let me finish this story. Only after I've raised my Empire will the world see what we—no, I—have in store. As they say, the best is yet to come.
For I am Dr. Eggman, roboticist extraordinaire, just as much as I am Ivo Robotnik, grandson of a madman. No longer will I rely on anyone else… nor will I stand in another's shadow.
I press my hand to the humming glass of the android's capsule, where it leaves an imprint.
Rest easy, Grandfather, you tired old fool.
A/N: Had SA2 on the brain. This is somewhat of a departure from my usual writing style, but I hope it worked nevertheless. I'm not sure what I aimed to accomplish with this, er, let's call it a character study? Yeah. But hopefully Eggo wasn't too OOC. If he was, you know where to find me :P