003 – This Was How I Started My New Life
Entering New Mobotropolis was a hell of an experience for me. I'd never seen a city so large that was also bustling with life. The walls stretched far around the city, with a sandy color that somehow seemed to give the impression of both technology and nature at the same time. They looked natural, but I could feel a small hum about them, as though they were alive somehow. This differed from how the forest felt that I'd just left. I couldn't explain it.
Just beyond the open gates I could see a bustling highway leading towards the city center. The highway was made from the same sandy-colored substance as the walls, and although a motorized cart was parked here and there on the side of the road, most of the traffic was on foot. The buildings that lined the road were tall and squished tightly together. While a majority of them had a color scheme to match the road and city walls, almost all of them had some instances of greenery growing on, around, or in some cases, inside them. It wasn't uncommon to see a tree branch sticking up out of a wall, as though the building had been built around the plant. The amount of foliage near the rooftops was staggering for such a large city. Green light filtered down between the leaves and shaded the people on the road, as they went along with their hustle and bustle.
My first task upon entering the city was to find out how to patriate myself there. It occurred to me that the identifications I had on me all had a wildly different fox than the one I currently was. I asked around and was directed to the Citizen's Bureau. The building was near the city center, where the roads became wider and the buildings more ornate. In the distance, I saw something that looked almost like a castle towering above all of the other buildings. The Citizen's Bureau was a smaller, more utilitarian building, and the inside was designed to make efficient use of space. The line was long to get to the attendant, but it seemed to move swiftly. I soon realized that the war with the Eggman Empire had driven many people in smaller cities to come seek refuge here.
My number was called and I approached the desk. A chipper looking squirrel greeted me. I looked down at her name on the plaque on her desk.
"Um, hi, Sam. I have two issues I need taken care of." I said.
"Sure thing. What can I do for you?" She asked smiling.
"First, I want to know what information you have on a citizen. Ivan Romanof?" I spelled out the name for her as she typed it out into her computer terminal. As she accessed the information, she told me politely that the only things she could tell me were facts that were open to the public. Date of Birth, employment status, and things of that nature couldn't be shared with me. I told her that was fine. There really was only one question I needed answered, and I tried to keep my wits about me as she found the information.
"Oh. It appears here that he died in the line of duty some few years ago." She said, frowning slightly.
"Is there any more information than that?" I asked.
"Nothing I can give you, sorry. Was there something else I could help you with?"
I forced myself to focus at the task at hand, even though I had just been told that I had died.
"Yes, actually. I am looking to become a citizen of New Mobotropolis."
Sam frowned a little more.
"Do you have any identification? Passports, birth certificates, city issued ID?"
It was my turn to frown. I didn't have anything like that. Or, at least, nothing that didn't report me as having a dead fox's identification. The red flags that would raise wouldn't likely get me anywhere.
"Uh… no…" I admitted, letting the apprehension show on my face. Sam gave me a sad smile.
"Have you started any of the paperwork process? What is your name, I can see if there's anything."
I hesitated, then blurt out the first name that came to my mind.
"Tekk Lanyang." I said. This was the name of a super hero from an old science fiction novel I'd read shortly after I was liberated. The story was interesting to me, involving a group of time travelers as they tried to save all of time and space from some evil corporation. I'd identified heavily with the character and thought his name sounded cool, with the two 'k's in his name. I spelled it out for Sam, knowing full well that she wasn't going to find anything.
Sam shook her head sadly.
"I'm sorry mister Lanyang, but I don't-" her computer beeped.
"Oh. It says here that you've finished the enrolment process already. You've been assigned housing in the following district." She handed me a slip of paper that had an address on it. "If you follow that line over there, someone will help you obtain your New Mobotropolis identification documents."
After an hour of filling out paperwork and waiting in line, I left the Citizen's Bureau in high, if not confused, spirits. I found a bus that took me to the district where my new house awaited me and puzzled over how I was already in the system. I started dreading the concept that I may have just stolen a house from someone who actually was a refugee from the war. Or maybe they were already living there and a computer error had stolen their identity for me.
The bus dropped me off and I made my way towards the address listed. The houses were set further apart since they were further from the metropolitan areas of the city. The houses were still being constructed, I assumed, as my house was sitting at the end of a street without any other houses on it. I could see the wall of the city off in the distance beyond my house. I was really out in the boonies, it would seem.
The house was small. From the outside, it looked like a cube sitting on the grass, with two windows upstairs and two downstairs. A walkway ran from the road to the side of the house where the door was located. I approached the door and saw a small black box hanging from the doorknob. A small, grey plate was on the surface with a note that read, "Thumbprint here". I pressed my thumb to the plate and the box opened up to reveal a set of keys. I used them to unlock the door and entered my new house.
The house was furnished sparsely. A table with four chairs sat in the kitchen, which also doubled as the entry way. Beyond that was a living area with a sofa facing a small television mounted on the wall. Above the living area was a loft with a queen sized bed and a dresser; a bathroom was built just off the bedroom. The walls were white and the floors appeared to be hardwood. There was very little personality in my home.
As I entered the living room, the TV came to life.
"Hello and welcome to your new home, Tekk Lanyang." The TV said. My name was said in a stilted way which led me to believe that everyone got this message when they first moved in.
"Your housing has been selected for you based on your criteria listed in your profile at the Citizen's Bureau. Home customization options are available thanks to nanite remodeling. Please choose your selection on the screen."
The screen displayed several options about customizing my home.
"Nanite remodeling?" I said to myself quietly as I chose the top option.
As it turned out, nanites were small molecular computers. Evidently, they'd been acquired during the war against Eggman and a computer entity known as "Nicole" had built the entire city out of them after Knothole had been destroyed. I seemed to vaguely recall a "Nicole" with the Freedom Fighters, but I thought it was some palm-pilot computer, not an actual artificial intelligence. Things had certainly changed since I was away.
The home was built out of nanites as well, which meant that most commodities and furniture could be assembled out of the nanites. Any additions to the house, within reasonable limits, could be added on by selecting it from the menu and submitting a request to "Housing Development". The nanites would then reshape themselves to fit whatever the user requested. New furniture could be ordered for a small fee and even the aesthetics of the house could be changed from here as well. It turned out I had a free remodeling credit so I could change the theme of my house once without payment. I selected a "woods" theme and the white walls around me shimmered and shifted until it felt as though I were living inside a hollowed out tree. The furniture took on a wood-worked quality and even the loft had a wooden bannister running across the railing that made it feel almost like I was living in a cabin. I liked it.
I sat down and started browsing through the other options I had on the terminal. I found an internet search function and set about getting myself brought up to speed. I researched everything I could about the history that had passed me by, about how Nicole grew in scope and in scale until she pretty much single-handedly ran the city. New buildings were being built all the time as refugees came pouring in and what used to be a massive drain on resources to accomplish was now done in a few minutes thanks to the miracle of the nanites.
I also discovered more about what had happened to me. First of all, I was dead. Definitively. Ivan Romanof had died when he entered that fissure in the quarry. In fact, I found out that there was a monument with his name on it somewhere in the city. Not dedicated to him, of course, but his name was listed with all of the Freedom Fighters who had died in the past few years. There was no real data on who he was other than a brief quip about how he died while on a science expedition. There wasn't even a picture of him. That was fine with me, I concluded. He no longer existed. I had the rare opportunity to remake myself however I wanted.
I also came up with a theory on how I came to be how I was. See, I grew up in a world where magic existed. Beings had special powers that were often left unexplained. How Sonic could run as fast as he does or how Tails could fly were both heavily researched, yet no actual concrete explanation was ever published. It was a mystery. Related to those kinds of beings were something called the chaos emeralds. These were chunks of rock that had some strange and mysterious powers.
This power came from the very core of the planet and used to bubble up to the surface in the form of these emeralds, though no one had ever seen one appear. I hypothesized that what we had discovered that day was raw chaos energy before it had a chance to coalesce into a chaos emerald. When I came into contact with it, it fused with my body, giving me powers beyond my wildest dreams.
Now, originally, it seemed as though there were dozens of chaos emeralds on Mobius. But something I found in the darker, seedier parts of the internet talked about a "chaos convergence". It claimed that a super-planar being named Feist had pulled all of the chaos emeralds from all corners of the galaxy and condensed them into seven larger and more perfect stones, which he kept in the Special Zone for safe keeping. Apparently, I had somehow escaped from this convergence, leaving me to be the only form of chaos emerald on Mobius.
The closest being that had ever existed like me was a semi-deity named Enerjak. His power was drawn from the master emerald which was guarded by the echidna race. The guardian would temporarily take the master emerald's energy into their own body, but the host usually died afterwards. The most terrifying part of this story, to me at least, was that Enerjak was usually seen as a god of destruction in the lore of the echidnas. Everyone was frightened of its power and small groups of believers trembled at the day when Enerjak would return.
But as far as I could tell, Enerjak only borrowed the energy from a chaos emerald. I, on the other hand, was a living, breathing chaos emerald. There was never a being like me before. And with Feist gathering all together all the rogue chaos energy in the universe, there never would be again.
I eventually forced myself to switch off the screen and go to bed. Not that I needed sleep, but I couldn't keep looking things up without taking time to process what I'd read. I needed to come up with a plan of what I would do now that I was living here. The mystery of how I was able to become a citizen and find a place to live without any paperwork or identification stay floating in the back of my mind, but I tried to ignore it for now. I had more important things to worry about.