Chapter 4
The call came as expected. Dr. Robotnik did not have to wait long for his gently planted seed to take root and flower. Three days after paying his visit to Angel Island, the doctor's transceiver lit up. For a second, there was the briefest moment of silence as the caller on the other end had one final debate with himself. Dr. Robotnik knew that it was pointless. He had come too far already. Knuckles was not the type to second guess himself so close to the precipice.
Robotnik feigned surprise as the echidna's voice issued out of the transceiver. It was important that the doctor pretend that he had not pulled the puppet's strings as he had done so many times before. He concealed his mirth and victory as Knuckles bid him to meet him on his island the very next night. Dr. Robotnik listened closely and used his sweetest and most placative voice as he agreed to every term on the echidna's list.
The Eggcarrier was not to hover over Angel Island, he was to bring no machines other than his transporter and computer, and most importantly, he was never to touch the Master Emerald. Dr. Robotnik haggled in places but made sure to eventually give in at every turn. By the end of the call, Knuckles probably felt more assured in his decision, while Eggman had not actually given up anything on his end.
When the call was over, he set to his final preparations. The first and most important instrument to his plan was the transporter. He had created blueprints for such a device years ago only to scrap them when he discovered that while it was relatively easy to bend space it was almost impossible to force another opening. All of his test subjects had ended up stuck in a spaceless limbo and the doctor would not risk sharing the same fate.
The breakthrough this time came from Aurora. With her help, the doctor was able to further flesh out his initial prototype. The new transporter consisted of a standing platform encased within a set of large brass rings that interwound through each other like a living wheel. At a press of a button the rings would start to move and shift, locking and interlocking like a puzzle. Meanwhile, the engines would fire up as the rings moved faster and faster. This perpetual motion and heat would create a fabrication of a collapsing star, producing a scaled down mirror of a black hole.
To cool the barrier and make it solid long enough for the doctor to travel through it, a liquid paste would drip down from pores in the brass. For less than a minute, the doctor would have a stable wormhole through which space would bend, folding great expanses of distance and turning light years into the briefest step.
Powering his teleporter would be small but extremely powerful ion batteries. Fission powered with a design of his own making, they far exceeded the output of entire nuclear facilities. The doctor had created five of them, each one providing the primary power flow for each of his bases. Using them for the transporter meant sacrificing two of his bases and forcing the other three to supplement power supply.
"We won't last long." Aurora reminded him as her face flashed onto the massive screen in his central lab. "With only three batteries, bases will start to shut down within months."
The doctor ignored her. He was more fixated on his new device. So far, whenever he had a chance to harness the power of the Master Emerald he had used it to power huge doomsday machines. Now he needed to hone its great output on a small scale. To do so, he needed to build a modulator that he could attach to the Master Emerald and then hook up to Aurora's mainframe. With the extra boost provided by the Master Emerald, Aurora could then survey data from throughout the universe, bubble universes and perhaps the multiverse itself to find the perfect planet.
"It doesn't matter." The doctor said, "They can all rot. As long as I am able to rebuild on another planet I can come back here later."
Aurora vanished from the main screen and appeared on a tablet closer at hand. "Without power I could start to slip into rampancy. Necessary energy redistribution would cause great losses."
The doctor turned away from her. "As I said. It doesn't matter. When I return I can rebuild. Once I have taken over another planet and achieve ultimate power I can travel where I wish in an instant."
"But how long will that take?" She asked as her image switched to a different monitor. "I could be shut down by then."
"Then I will turn you back on."
Aurora paused. "Once I am powered down. My memory banks will deplete."
"Make copies." He suggested.
"Affirmative." Her voice had changed. She sounded solemn, almost sad.
The doctor wiped the sweat from his brow. He pushed away from his machine. "Run diagnostics."
"Yes master." Aurora's screen turned blank. Numbers and various calculations flashed on after the other. "Neural uplink complete, running test scan." The numbers transformed into an emerald. Making calculations with regard to the emeralds was always tricky. They seemed to always have more or less power than the doctor expected. "Within these parameters." Aurora continued. "Scan distance and data shifting can increase…totally." Her screen turned green and displayed a green wave washing over a black void. "In one shot my data streams will reach the edges of the universe and bounce back. Chances of finding a world with the idle stated conditions…100%."
Delighted with the successful test, he spent the rest of his evening making final preparations. Knuckles would not allow him to bring an entire egg armada through the transporter. Instead, the doctor could only bring what he could attach to his belt. Nanotech allowed him to minimize some of its greatest machines, including the Eggwalker and Egg Mobile. However, without access to his full armament and without the ability to request aid from his bases, the doctor would be temporarily exposed in his new world.
Dr. Robotnik did not fear the danger. In fact, part of him anticipated the thrill of having to scrap technology together as he made his initial insurgence into a brand new theater of war. After so many years developing new weapons and machines for his contests against Sonic, a new world, with new adversaries to combat, previewed the perfect environment for fresh innovation and invention on the doctor's part.
His final tool was one he would need most on his travels. The universal translator was a device he had started working on when he first stumbled upon the legend of Chaos. He had worried that he would be unable to communicate with the creature and had developed a device that could interpret inputs from an almost infinite number of possible languages. The device had not helped him control Chaos, but it would help the doctor communicate with the locals in his new world.
"That's it Aurora. I'm turning in for the night." He said with a yawn.
"Good evening master." Her screen flashed and the monitor turned blank, but it did not mean that the A.I would rest that night.
Dr. Robotnik started for his bedroom, but on the way took a wrong turn. His feet guided him without real input from his mind. Eventually, he reached the central elevator which he rode to the top of Egg Tower. His sliding doors opened with a hiss and the doctor stepped outside. The Egg Spyre ascended over the entire breadth of Zone 5. His newest and most advanced base rested on the eastern slope of Red Mountain, rising from near the summit of the volcano and descending down in the deepest valley.
When he had first arrived here, the slopes were dominated by lush forests. A myriad of waterfalls pooled into a river which carved through the valley and flowed out into the surrounding countryside like a long blue ribbon. The forest was the first to fall. Its trees and greenery burned away in his massive industrial furnaces. The waterfalls turned sick with the run off of fumes and waste and eventually the water flow died in earnest. Dr. Robotnik emptied the river and turned the dry bed into a graveyard of spare parts.
In the past that would have been enough. His old bases simply consumed the local environment, transforming entire swaths of green country into colorless deserts. The scope of his factories and the relish with which he utterly decimated the environment allowed the doctor to build his machines and power his industry at an incredible rate. However, the trade off was that his bases could never be powered for long. Eventually, he either sucked the area dry or his smoke rings would trigger the alarm and bring Sonic and friends to destroy all his labor.
Over the years, Dr. Robotnik had become more refined and delicate in his approach. Though the technology that allowed him to take animals and turn them into Badniks appeared to offer him a permanent solution to powering armies of robots, his subsequent battles with Sonic taught him otherwise. Though the lesson took him some years to learn, eventually he realized that it wasn't his designs that were failing, it was his reliance on mechs.
Sonic too often and too easily sped by, trampled and fooled his mechanical creations. With a focus on hard exteriors and power cells meant to drive their physical capabilities, his machines had no real ability to think. They were powerful, but without the true moment to moment thinking power of a living thing, they could not match their speedy blue rival.
Therefore, the doctor decided it was time to shift away from mechs. He downsized his operations and instead focused on how to transfer his largest asset, his mind, into his creations. This shift in strategy led to the creation of Aurora and his other A.I powered machines. Unlike his mechs of old, these new pawns had no individual processing power. Their cpus were all remote operated and all their functions were carried out by their regional A.I's which were all in service to Aurora the grand central computer and hive mind of his entire system.
As it stood, Zone 5, codenamed Shell, was the first base the doctor had built from the ground up with A.I interface and control in mind. His former bases were amalgamations of divergent ideas, and building styles all layered on top of each other with no synergy. Shell, on the other hand, was clean, each building and processing plant was coated over with white polyester plastic, every pawn functioned uniformly with no divergence in their character or utility. Its production lines met their quotas perfectly everyday, with little to no variance.
The doctor surveyed the base and his chest swelled with pride. Here was an image of the future, a future that would only be possible if Doctor Robotnik was successful. "And I will be." He promised himself.
If Zone 5 was the good future, Zones 1-3 were the perfect emblem of the bad. Beyond Red Mountain and across miles and miles of distant islands, rested his oldest still standing bases. Compared to Shell, those zones were absolute disasters. The doctor had not shown any restraint when he built those. The lands were so depleted that the air itself had turned a fiery orange color. Dr. Robotnik himself could not visit the locations unless preserved within a protective bubble.
Mechs controlled those bases and without the doctor there to guide them or give them orders, they would likely collapse into chaos. There was only one ion battery for all three bases, and the doctor figured it would not be long before a war was fought for control of the battery. He did not relish leaving a legacy of broken parts and robot war in his wake, but there was nothing he could do about it. Dr. Robotnik took a last deep breath of the salty, slightly metallic scented air. He expected to feel depressed about leaving all his works behind, but as he considered his base he was surprised to note that he felt nothing. Though he was proud of all his accomplishments he felt no connection to them. "Such is the burden of the strong." He thought solemnly. "Our love is destiny and that which remains frozen in the void of time cannot be loved by those who drift freely through its grasp." The doctor turned aside and walked back into the elevator.