Chapter 9: Reflection
___________________
"Sonic was right, I got nine stitches," said Tails, grinning. "They also gave me a tetanus shot, which wasn't so fun."
"Better than getting tetanus," said Knuckles.
Sonic fanned himself. "Why is it so hot in here?"
"It is?" said Zephyer, who preferred hot weather.
"It's sweltering," said Sonic. "Open some windows, why don't you?"
They opened the windows, but the air was still and no breeze moved the air. There was much complaining about this as one by one everyone went to bed. Sonic lay on top of his sleeping bag, spread-eagled, and thinking wistfully of the casinos next door to the hospital. It had taken a Herculean amount of effort to leave them alone. Among other things, they were air-conditioned.
Beside him Tails tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position for his bandaged arm. Finally Sonic said, "Can you hold still for five minutes in a row?"
"It hurts bad," said Tails through his teeth. "The stupid painkiller takes a while to kick in."
Talon, on the bed above them, sat up. "Do you want to trade places, Tails? Maybe it'd be more comfortable."
"At this point I'll try anything," said Tails, jumping up on the bed as Talon flopped on the sleeping bag. For a few minutes there was silence. Then Tails said, "I want to go home."
"Why?" said Sonic.
"It's not a million degrees at home," said the fox. "I'm tired of digging. I want to work on the Cyclone."
"That thing you found will probably pay for a chao," said Sonic.
"I hope so," said Tails, changing positions fretfully. "Oh my gosh, something's outside."
Sonic and Talon looked at the window in time to see something duck out of sight. For half a second Sonic lay in paralyzed terror. Then he jumped up and looked out the window. Something was disappearing into the darkness of the trees across the yard. "I think it was Mekion," he said. He sat down and pulled on his shoes. "I'm going after him.
"Alone?" said Talon, horrified.
"I've been looking for him all day," said Sonic. "He won't hurt me."
"What about Metal Sonic?" said Tails, for Knuckles had warned them about the robot upon their return.
"I just diced up Robo Knux," said Sonic. "I can handle Mecha. Toodles." He jumped out the window and bolted away into the night.
The minutes ticked by. The pain gradually left Tails's hand as the medicine took effect and he dozed, exhausted by pain. Talon lay on the floor in the sleeping bag, missing his bed but too polite to say so, straining his ears for any sound from outside. But there was only the chirping of crickets, and after an hour Talon, too, dozed off.
When Talon awoke the next morning Sonic was in the next sleeping bag, his face smudged and dirty with leaves stuck in his quills. Tails was snoring with the blankets kicked off. Talon got up and tiptoed out to get breakfast, feeling sorry for both of them.
center* * */center
Mekion had played an enjoyable game of cat and mouse with Sonic all night long. He could not get close to Sonic without Sonic seeing him, however. Sonic always saw him no matter how deep the shadows, and Mekion began to wonder if his white fur gave him away.
At two AM Sonic gave up and returned to the house, Mekion ghosting behind him all the way. He watched Sonic climb through the window with a sense of loss. Sonic was fun to play with. Mekion considered taking a picture of Sonic after he was asleep, but something in his organic mind spoke up that doing so was poor sportsmanship. Where had such a concept come from? His organic mind had too much control. He fought back with his robot brain, horrified at how Shadow was nearly as strong as Mekion.
When dawn spilled over the island and the red sun rose out of a bank of ruddy clouds, Mekion sought shelter in a small cave in the rocks outside of Mushroom Hill. It was ten feet deep and scarcely big enough for his body, but it was dark. The rock was cool, welcome relief from the humid heat outside. Mekion slept and woke and slept again, the weight of the air making him restless.
He wished he had a place to hide like the one he remembered: sheltered by walls, it was a yard of trees and cool grass. As he dozed, other memory fragments of this ideal place returned. A small blue creature had discovered him and wouldn't leave him alone. The longer he stayed the darker the creature became, until it resembled a black hedgehog with twisted spines. He remembered saying, "Since you have patterned yourself after a Shadow, your name will be Nox. Darkness."
So that was where Nox had come from. Mekion was not surprised--his robot brain stood back and watched with mild scorn as his organic memory pieced itself together. He did not need to know these things. At the same time the Shadow part of him was starved for more. It wanted to know, it would do anything to know, and the Mekion part held it in check. The result was an irritable mood, and fitful sleeping.
Near noon the air was so thick that Mekion left his hole in search of some place cool, preferably near water. The sky was a hot ceramic blue, and a mass of white thunderheads reared up in the east. As Mekion stole from tree to tree, avoiding the sun, he noticed with misery that there were no breezes or wind. Nothing to cool his organic side, which was damp with sweat.
He found the river and splashed water onto his fur, then burrowed into the damp earth in the shelter of some underbrush. A cricket chirped here and there, but no birds sang. Over the whole island was an oppressive stillness.
Nox could read minds, he remembered. It was disquieting to have a chao who could read you like a book. He remembered the look in Nox's eyes as he peered into his master's thoughts, reading his emotions and moods. Shadow had resented the chao's intrusion, but Nox continued to love him and tried to please him in bumbling ways. Mekion remembered kicking the chao, who got up and continued following him without a whimper. Why had he kicked Nox? Oh yes, because Nox caught him grieving over ... over...
Mekion began to pluck grass one blade at a time, eyes fixed unseeingly on the river. Maria. His adoptive sister who cared for him when he was little. Then he cared for her when he grew up healthy and she did not. And then that horrible day when They came, and he found her lying on the floor with a bullet through her chest...
He came to himself and realized he was tearing up grass in fistfuls. He stopped immediately, and his robot side kicked in. All this happened many years ago. There was no sense in getting angry over it. He wiped a hot tear from his real eye. Shadow, not Mekion, felt pain at these memories, and mere logic could not mend it. Blast Nox, still causing him pain even after his death.
Nox's death ... Shadow felt distress at this thought, but Mekion wrested his thoughts away from that topic. No more brooding. Stop thinking and go to sleep. Shadow obeyed, and the duel-natured hedgehog dozed under the oppressive atmosphere.
center* * */center
Metal Sonic stood in a bamboo forest surrounded by dense greenness like giant-sized grass. He had ripped a small clearing for himself and now stood there, hidden from all eyes in deep shade, his cooling fans purring to keep his internal machinery free of condensation. He had kept an eye on Mekion's logfiles ever since his arrival the day before, observing how Shadow and Mekion interacted. Metal Sonic had not expected the two to battle for mastery. Mutual cooperation between the two was becoming less frequent. During the periods that Shadow was in control, nothing was logged. It was not until Mekion returned to the surface that location and actions were noted. It precipitated a rebellion sometime in the future, and Metal Sonic studied it with a sense of disappointment.
Metal Sonic's mind was a nanite brain, alive in every sense. He had it programmed with his own data and installed, and it increased system performance 1000%. In fact his current body was now obsolete compared to the efficiency of his mind. A half-finished new body design was in his lab, but at the moment Mekion's development was more interesting.
With the advent of a new brain, Metal Sonic had thought through his original programming and found it lacking. His original creation had been that of an assassin, made to hunt down and kill Sonic. He still wished to complete this objective, but it was no longer imperative. Killing was too easy. The last time he had killed someone (a necessary murder, for it was a nosy reporter poking around one of Metal Sonic's hideouts), he had gazed at the fallen body, then at his own reddened claws, and reflected how pointless it was to kill without reason.
What was for more interesting was the act of creation; bringing an inanimate object to life. It was difficult and challenging. As a result Metal Sonic had taken to experimenting with building robots out of biometal, an alloy he had invented himself. He had not sworn off killing, exactly, but he saw it as a waste of time and resources, and decided that taking a life was squandering that which had taken much time on someone's behalf to create.
His first creation under this mindset had been Leviathan, the cybernetic velociraptor. From a scientific standpoint Leviathan had been a beautiful thing, self-aware and semi-biological, capable of healing and freewill. However, he had no restraints built into him, and ran wild after turning on his creators. In this way he was a failure.
For several years Metal Sonic had been afraid to wield his newfound power and create another robot. Leviathan had caused tremendous havoc before he was stopped, and another robotic creature must have safeguards and restraints built into it.
But his nerve had returned, and one day the perfect experiment literally fell out of the sky: Shadow, resurrected by the power of a phoenix, but still broken in mind and body. Metal Sonic retried Shadow and the dead chao and took them to his laboratory, and there he converted half of Shadow into a biotic, powered by the bioelectricity generated by Shadow's body. Safeguards were set in both sides of Shadow's mind to keep him from going rogue like Leviathan had done ... and now both sides of the mind were struggling against each other.
Metal Sonic observed Mekion's broken sleep-patterns and hoped that Mekion would remain loyal to him. He checked himself. What was he thinking? Had he developed an attachment to this creation of his? He thought of the two warnings he had given Mekion, and the reprimand about poison. All of them were unnecessary. But Metal Sonic had given them anyway because he did not wish any harm to befall Mekion. The fact that he wished to protect Mekion revealed that he cared for him.
Metal Sonic, in giving himself a semi-real brain in quest for efficiency, had sabotaged himself. He now had the ability to feel. Lacking experience with this concept, he did not know how to guard himself from growing attacked to something, and now found himself open to pain, another concept he did not understand.
He knew Mekion would rebel. And yet he fell back on illogical hope, calculating the odds that Mekion would remain loyal. And beneath it all was that unfamiliar feeling--pain.
In the east a storm was gathering. Metal Sonic observed its progress with the same foreboding with which he observed Mekion. And in both cases, he was helpless to stop it.
center* * */center
"Good grief, Tails," said Sonic, stepping outdoors into the damp heat. "Look at this storm out here."
Tails stepped outside and followed Sonic's gaze. Half the sky was black with clouds, and they were massed behind the mountain range in the center of the island. Other forerunners of the storm ranged out to the east and west, but the bulk of the storm had hung up on the Floating Island.
"Oh, that is weird-looking!" Tails exclaimed. "Is it a hurricane?"
"I don't know where Knux is or I'd ask him," said Sonic. "He said these are hurricane conditions, though. And you know, down here it's the rainy season."
The pair gazed at the violent purples and blues of the massing thunderheads. The air was still, and humidity condensed on the leaves and grass, dripping as if from a rain.
"Knux has got to get some air conditioning," said Sonic, fanning his face. "Maybe he'll get Zeff one when they get married."
"She likes the heat," said Tails. "And I don't think she'll marry him."
"Want to bet on that?"
"Sure. I bet the Cyclone."
"And I'll bet the Tornado."
"But they're the same thing!"
Sonic grinned. "I know. Whoever wins gets to drive it for a month."
Tails shook hands clumsily. "You're on."
Lightning flashed behind the mountains, and after a while they heard a low, soft roll of thunder. "This is going to be a colossal storm," said sonic, watching it. "Want to find some place to watch from?"
"Sure," said Tails. "But not near any tall trees."
"Hey, I'm not that stupid."
The pair set off at a trot toward the hills, watching the clouds mass and sweating in the heat.
center* * */center
Knuckles stood on a hilltop, watching the roiling of the clouds as the massed behind the mountains. The storm was colliding, compressing, building into a monster. When it exploded over the mountains its strength would be awesome, and Knuckles was worrying that everyone should have stayed in the salt cave after all. From what he could see, three storm cells were combining into one supercell, and the sky had a dark, angry look as if it meant to take on the island and win. He thought about lowering the island into the ocean, but there was twenty-foot swell down there, and it would damage the island. No, they had to stay put.
But at least it wasn't a hurricane.
center* * */center
Mekion crawled out of hiding and looked at the sky. Shadow's instincts were telling him to find better shelter, and Mekion wanted to know why. He checked the weather satellite and saw a massive storm system was building on top of them, and waterspout watches had been issued for Casino City. He looked up the definition of 'waterspout' and discovered it was a kind of tornado over the ocean. He guessed this was bad, and began to walk southwards, brushing off water that dripped from the tree canopy. The air was still, and no insects chirped. All of creation held its breath, waiting.
___________________
"Sonic was right, I got nine stitches," said Tails, grinning. "They also gave me a tetanus shot, which wasn't so fun."
"Better than getting tetanus," said Knuckles.
Sonic fanned himself. "Why is it so hot in here?"
"It is?" said Zephyer, who preferred hot weather.
"It's sweltering," said Sonic. "Open some windows, why don't you?"
They opened the windows, but the air was still and no breeze moved the air. There was much complaining about this as one by one everyone went to bed. Sonic lay on top of his sleeping bag, spread-eagled, and thinking wistfully of the casinos next door to the hospital. It had taken a Herculean amount of effort to leave them alone. Among other things, they were air-conditioned.
Beside him Tails tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position for his bandaged arm. Finally Sonic said, "Can you hold still for five minutes in a row?"
"It hurts bad," said Tails through his teeth. "The stupid painkiller takes a while to kick in."
Talon, on the bed above them, sat up. "Do you want to trade places, Tails? Maybe it'd be more comfortable."
"At this point I'll try anything," said Tails, jumping up on the bed as Talon flopped on the sleeping bag. For a few minutes there was silence. Then Tails said, "I want to go home."
"Why?" said Sonic.
"It's not a million degrees at home," said the fox. "I'm tired of digging. I want to work on the Cyclone."
"That thing you found will probably pay for a chao," said Sonic.
"I hope so," said Tails, changing positions fretfully. "Oh my gosh, something's outside."
Sonic and Talon looked at the window in time to see something duck out of sight. For half a second Sonic lay in paralyzed terror. Then he jumped up and looked out the window. Something was disappearing into the darkness of the trees across the yard. "I think it was Mekion," he said. He sat down and pulled on his shoes. "I'm going after him.
"Alone?" said Talon, horrified.
"I've been looking for him all day," said Sonic. "He won't hurt me."
"What about Metal Sonic?" said Tails, for Knuckles had warned them about the robot upon their return.
"I just diced up Robo Knux," said Sonic. "I can handle Mecha. Toodles." He jumped out the window and bolted away into the night.
The minutes ticked by. The pain gradually left Tails's hand as the medicine took effect and he dozed, exhausted by pain. Talon lay on the floor in the sleeping bag, missing his bed but too polite to say so, straining his ears for any sound from outside. But there was only the chirping of crickets, and after an hour Talon, too, dozed off.
When Talon awoke the next morning Sonic was in the next sleeping bag, his face smudged and dirty with leaves stuck in his quills. Tails was snoring with the blankets kicked off. Talon got up and tiptoed out to get breakfast, feeling sorry for both of them.
center* * */center
Mekion had played an enjoyable game of cat and mouse with Sonic all night long. He could not get close to Sonic without Sonic seeing him, however. Sonic always saw him no matter how deep the shadows, and Mekion began to wonder if his white fur gave him away.
At two AM Sonic gave up and returned to the house, Mekion ghosting behind him all the way. He watched Sonic climb through the window with a sense of loss. Sonic was fun to play with. Mekion considered taking a picture of Sonic after he was asleep, but something in his organic mind spoke up that doing so was poor sportsmanship. Where had such a concept come from? His organic mind had too much control. He fought back with his robot brain, horrified at how Shadow was nearly as strong as Mekion.
When dawn spilled over the island and the red sun rose out of a bank of ruddy clouds, Mekion sought shelter in a small cave in the rocks outside of Mushroom Hill. It was ten feet deep and scarcely big enough for his body, but it was dark. The rock was cool, welcome relief from the humid heat outside. Mekion slept and woke and slept again, the weight of the air making him restless.
He wished he had a place to hide like the one he remembered: sheltered by walls, it was a yard of trees and cool grass. As he dozed, other memory fragments of this ideal place returned. A small blue creature had discovered him and wouldn't leave him alone. The longer he stayed the darker the creature became, until it resembled a black hedgehog with twisted spines. He remembered saying, "Since you have patterned yourself after a Shadow, your name will be Nox. Darkness."
So that was where Nox had come from. Mekion was not surprised--his robot brain stood back and watched with mild scorn as his organic memory pieced itself together. He did not need to know these things. At the same time the Shadow part of him was starved for more. It wanted to know, it would do anything to know, and the Mekion part held it in check. The result was an irritable mood, and fitful sleeping.
Near noon the air was so thick that Mekion left his hole in search of some place cool, preferably near water. The sky was a hot ceramic blue, and a mass of white thunderheads reared up in the east. As Mekion stole from tree to tree, avoiding the sun, he noticed with misery that there were no breezes or wind. Nothing to cool his organic side, which was damp with sweat.
He found the river and splashed water onto his fur, then burrowed into the damp earth in the shelter of some underbrush. A cricket chirped here and there, but no birds sang. Over the whole island was an oppressive stillness.
Nox could read minds, he remembered. It was disquieting to have a chao who could read you like a book. He remembered the look in Nox's eyes as he peered into his master's thoughts, reading his emotions and moods. Shadow had resented the chao's intrusion, but Nox continued to love him and tried to please him in bumbling ways. Mekion remembered kicking the chao, who got up and continued following him without a whimper. Why had he kicked Nox? Oh yes, because Nox caught him grieving over ... over...
Mekion began to pluck grass one blade at a time, eyes fixed unseeingly on the river. Maria. His adoptive sister who cared for him when he was little. Then he cared for her when he grew up healthy and she did not. And then that horrible day when They came, and he found her lying on the floor with a bullet through her chest...
He came to himself and realized he was tearing up grass in fistfuls. He stopped immediately, and his robot side kicked in. All this happened many years ago. There was no sense in getting angry over it. He wiped a hot tear from his real eye. Shadow, not Mekion, felt pain at these memories, and mere logic could not mend it. Blast Nox, still causing him pain even after his death.
Nox's death ... Shadow felt distress at this thought, but Mekion wrested his thoughts away from that topic. No more brooding. Stop thinking and go to sleep. Shadow obeyed, and the duel-natured hedgehog dozed under the oppressive atmosphere.
center* * */center
Metal Sonic stood in a bamboo forest surrounded by dense greenness like giant-sized grass. He had ripped a small clearing for himself and now stood there, hidden from all eyes in deep shade, his cooling fans purring to keep his internal machinery free of condensation. He had kept an eye on Mekion's logfiles ever since his arrival the day before, observing how Shadow and Mekion interacted. Metal Sonic had not expected the two to battle for mastery. Mutual cooperation between the two was becoming less frequent. During the periods that Shadow was in control, nothing was logged. It was not until Mekion returned to the surface that location and actions were noted. It precipitated a rebellion sometime in the future, and Metal Sonic studied it with a sense of disappointment.
Metal Sonic's mind was a nanite brain, alive in every sense. He had it programmed with his own data and installed, and it increased system performance 1000%. In fact his current body was now obsolete compared to the efficiency of his mind. A half-finished new body design was in his lab, but at the moment Mekion's development was more interesting.
With the advent of a new brain, Metal Sonic had thought through his original programming and found it lacking. His original creation had been that of an assassin, made to hunt down and kill Sonic. He still wished to complete this objective, but it was no longer imperative. Killing was too easy. The last time he had killed someone (a necessary murder, for it was a nosy reporter poking around one of Metal Sonic's hideouts), he had gazed at the fallen body, then at his own reddened claws, and reflected how pointless it was to kill without reason.
What was for more interesting was the act of creation; bringing an inanimate object to life. It was difficult and challenging. As a result Metal Sonic had taken to experimenting with building robots out of biometal, an alloy he had invented himself. He had not sworn off killing, exactly, but he saw it as a waste of time and resources, and decided that taking a life was squandering that which had taken much time on someone's behalf to create.
His first creation under this mindset had been Leviathan, the cybernetic velociraptor. From a scientific standpoint Leviathan had been a beautiful thing, self-aware and semi-biological, capable of healing and freewill. However, he had no restraints built into him, and ran wild after turning on his creators. In this way he was a failure.
For several years Metal Sonic had been afraid to wield his newfound power and create another robot. Leviathan had caused tremendous havoc before he was stopped, and another robotic creature must have safeguards and restraints built into it.
But his nerve had returned, and one day the perfect experiment literally fell out of the sky: Shadow, resurrected by the power of a phoenix, but still broken in mind and body. Metal Sonic retried Shadow and the dead chao and took them to his laboratory, and there he converted half of Shadow into a biotic, powered by the bioelectricity generated by Shadow's body. Safeguards were set in both sides of Shadow's mind to keep him from going rogue like Leviathan had done ... and now both sides of the mind were struggling against each other.
Metal Sonic observed Mekion's broken sleep-patterns and hoped that Mekion would remain loyal to him. He checked himself. What was he thinking? Had he developed an attachment to this creation of his? He thought of the two warnings he had given Mekion, and the reprimand about poison. All of them were unnecessary. But Metal Sonic had given them anyway because he did not wish any harm to befall Mekion. The fact that he wished to protect Mekion revealed that he cared for him.
Metal Sonic, in giving himself a semi-real brain in quest for efficiency, had sabotaged himself. He now had the ability to feel. Lacking experience with this concept, he did not know how to guard himself from growing attacked to something, and now found himself open to pain, another concept he did not understand.
He knew Mekion would rebel. And yet he fell back on illogical hope, calculating the odds that Mekion would remain loyal. And beneath it all was that unfamiliar feeling--pain.
In the east a storm was gathering. Metal Sonic observed its progress with the same foreboding with which he observed Mekion. And in both cases, he was helpless to stop it.
center* * */center
"Good grief, Tails," said Sonic, stepping outdoors into the damp heat. "Look at this storm out here."
Tails stepped outside and followed Sonic's gaze. Half the sky was black with clouds, and they were massed behind the mountain range in the center of the island. Other forerunners of the storm ranged out to the east and west, but the bulk of the storm had hung up on the Floating Island.
"Oh, that is weird-looking!" Tails exclaimed. "Is it a hurricane?"
"I don't know where Knux is or I'd ask him," said Sonic. "He said these are hurricane conditions, though. And you know, down here it's the rainy season."
The pair gazed at the violent purples and blues of the massing thunderheads. The air was still, and humidity condensed on the leaves and grass, dripping as if from a rain.
"Knux has got to get some air conditioning," said Sonic, fanning his face. "Maybe he'll get Zeff one when they get married."
"She likes the heat," said Tails. "And I don't think she'll marry him."
"Want to bet on that?"
"Sure. I bet the Cyclone."
"And I'll bet the Tornado."
"But they're the same thing!"
Sonic grinned. "I know. Whoever wins gets to drive it for a month."
Tails shook hands clumsily. "You're on."
Lightning flashed behind the mountains, and after a while they heard a low, soft roll of thunder. "This is going to be a colossal storm," said sonic, watching it. "Want to find some place to watch from?"
"Sure," said Tails. "But not near any tall trees."
"Hey, I'm not that stupid."
The pair set off at a trot toward the hills, watching the clouds mass and sweating in the heat.
center* * */center
Knuckles stood on a hilltop, watching the roiling of the clouds as the massed behind the mountains. The storm was colliding, compressing, building into a monster. When it exploded over the mountains its strength would be awesome, and Knuckles was worrying that everyone should have stayed in the salt cave after all. From what he could see, three storm cells were combining into one supercell, and the sky had a dark, angry look as if it meant to take on the island and win. He thought about lowering the island into the ocean, but there was twenty-foot swell down there, and it would damage the island. No, they had to stay put.
But at least it wasn't a hurricane.
center* * */center
Mekion crawled out of hiding and looked at the sky. Shadow's instincts were telling him to find better shelter, and Mekion wanted to know why. He checked the weather satellite and saw a massive storm system was building on top of them, and waterspout watches had been issued for Casino City. He looked up the definition of 'waterspout' and discovered it was a kind of tornado over the ocean. He guessed this was bad, and began to walk southwards, brushing off water that dripped from the tree canopy. The air was still, and no insects chirped. All of creation held its breath, waiting.
