Vengeance.
He cringed over the one faux-pause in the order of things. Maria never could have even thought such bitterness. It was a one slip, a one out-of-character moment.
"She would want them to be happy," he thought, lapsing into imagination of his granddaughter's true last moments.
"To be happy. Just the smallest chance," he sighed. And as he dreamed, data piled on the computer screen. The Professor's subconscious disappeared when he hit the clear command, but not before automated sub-routines had snatched a copy, tucking it away in a neat little corner should it ever be needed.
Gerald had to press close his nostrils and flatten his nose as Cliffs and half-a-dozen guards escorted him down to the medical center. He panicked with thoughts of infection and defilement, which he channeled into his mutterings and cursing. The long corridors reminded him of his former workplace and home, so he repeated the same outrages he had unleashed when such military grunts first escorted him off the ARK. The fool Edward responded brilliantly, guiding him by the hand and patting his shoulder in an act of comforting pity.
"There, there, Gerald," he would smile condescendingly. "Just keep walking; we'll be with Shadow soon. … That's it … good, good." And all the time Gerald shuddered at his touch.
Two guards moved to sentry duty at the swinging doors to the hospital wing. If only all entryways opened as easily as these, Gerald sighed. They moved through the corridors to the extended care unit, where they left the four remaining guards at the entrance
The medical wing was very much like the Starlight City Health Sciences Center, Gerald reflected. Same long rooms divided by curtain-encircled beds, same cool hum of air conditioning and sterile floors. It was so quiet; the patients must have been asleep. He hoped she was awake; he so wanted to talk with her again, see her smile again…
Cliffs stopped at a corner-side bed, curtains drawn. "Here we are, Gerald."
"Thank you, Edward," he sighed. "I really appreciate this. Could … Would it be too much if I asked you to wait outside?"
A laugh. "Gerald, it would drive me mad to miss this. You know how much these sessions fascinate me…"
"Fascinate!" Gerald snapped in a reserved voice. The room had a powerful impression with its silence; it was something holy, like a church, and made him whisper in a hiss. "You sick animal! Is there something entertaining about this? About death and sickness?"
He would not give Cliffs a chance to interrupt him. "Is she just another lab mouse to you, Cliffs; just another subject to test your bullets and bombs? Hmm? Or are you just ecstatic to see me cry, to watch me loose the woman you couldn't have!"
Edward had his face twisted up in confusion. "Gerald, what are you…" Then his face unscrewed itself and his eyes pleaded with the light fixtures. "Gerald, this really isn't necessary; you can stop pretending."
"Pretend!" he raged, remembering to keep his fury silent in respect of the ill. "I love Sasha!"
"Stop it, Gerald," Cliffs sighed wearily. "I'm getting tired of playing babysitter."
"Oh you ru…" Gerald gave up on his threats; there was nothing he could do about this death-worshiping weapons maker. With a sneer he turned away from Cliffs; Sasha's bed was second from the end; he moved lightly and slowly pulled back the curtain. He gasped. The bed was empty.
Down the other end of the hallway, the doors opened and a man in green walked through, keeping one hand on the entrance. "You! What's that noise about?"
Gerald ignored the soldier. He threw off the bed's blankets but found no body. Impossible! He'd been sure … no, wait, she must have been on the other half of the room.
Cliffs grabbed his shoulder before he could move. He squirmed and ordered to be let go, but Edward had strength greater than his. "Nothing, sir," Cliffs reported. "The Professor is just a little excited – nothing serious." The soldier's face gave no response. He turned and let the door shut after him.
The grip around his shoulder released and Gerald spun around, intending to unleash a storm on his young and disrespectful colleague. But it was not Edward that held him down. It was an older man, tall like Edward but with wild, black hair beginning to gray and a face that showed the lines of age. Who was this?
The tall man looked behind him and gave an excited little pant. "Whew! My apologies, Gerald; I never thought they would be eavesdropping. Well done. … I think they'll leave us be, now."
His mouth dropped and he looked about the room. The man knew his name! Was he visiting as well? The hall was awful quiet, as if there were no patients. Why, it was just as unused as the medical wing on Prison Island!
"Cliffs? …"
"Yes, what is it?"
So it was. "You've gotten old."
Edward just cracked a grin and slapped him on the back. "Old is such an ugly word, Gerald. Now, distinguished; there's a title to be proud of. Ripened, perhaps. But I'll entertain your ears later; we need to finish this."
Yes. Prison Island. Cliffs. The Plan. "Yes, let's," he nodded, moving out of Cliffs revolting touch.
Behind the last curtain was a bed with white blankets. Around it were white machines giving off a steady hum of fans and beeping in intervals. Leading out of the computer boxes and fluid sacks were hoses and tubes and intravenous cables, all of them guided on to the white bed where they laid, and sometimes sunk into, the still body of a black anthropomorph.
"Shadow," purred Gerald in a soft voice of admiration. He raised his hand, which wavered in the air, looking for a spot free of wires, and touched the soft forehead of midnight fur, stroking the crest of red that highlighted his ticklish spines. To the gesture of affection, Shadow made no response; he only continued his rhythmic breathing and rested – his gentle, round eyes in a peaceful sleep.
A coma. A five-year coma. It hadn't been impossible to convince the officials; they were well aware of Gerald's late sister, whom family had cared for seven years before releasing her spirit from life-support. The military linchpins suspected that this creature was somehow connected to the Immortality Project, though what this hedgehog truly was or whether the experiments were successful was vague as mist. They kept him here, and now he was long forgotten to even the oldest supervisors of the ARK prisoners. The new staff only knew that this was a casualty of the raid and that Robotnik and Cliffs visited every several months to pay their respects.
"So peaceful," Gerald sighed, looking into the creature's calm and untroubled face. Did he dream? He knew there was some basic form of brain activity running a screen-saver – Shadow was most likely thinking about colours or sounds, or perhaps reviewing the basic functions such as walking or eating that had already been installed. But dreams? Doubtful, because there were no memories, no experiences for the subconscious to draw upon. This unit was a blank. They'd worked with his older brother for maybe two months on the ARK, making startling advances with chaos energy manipulation, but that experiment and the second copy had been exterminated in the raid.
All his hopes hinged on this little thing: an animal half his size who had never before seen the light of day.
Gerald motioned at Cliffs, who drew the curtains around the bed while he peeled open his organic computer. Edward was supposed to play sentry while his secret was exposed, but the physicist was always too amazed by Gerald's smuggled lifeline to concentrate fully on the activity of the guards. But no matter, he had become fast at the operation and this would be the last time.
He prodded a few soft buttons on the lengthy keypad and the device began to warm against his forearm. After one minute of dangerous vulnerability, all the data he wanted was transferred, and he could take his fingernails to the thin, white stick of memory that pulled out of a slot on the side. With the self-replicating magic of biologicals, he was ensured a limitless supply of these disks, given the time needed for regeneration.
The data wafer went to Cliffs, who marveled at its brilliance, while Gerald folded over his false skin. Now there was one last part: underneath the bed mattress was a sharpened piece of metal – they had pulled out one of the springs from the adjacent bed and uncoiled the length enough to make a pointed hook. Gerald took the makeshift scalpel to Shadow's left shoulder, where below his fur laid the waning signs of a scar, and reopened the wound.
"Towel, Towel!" he hissed as clear fluid seeped out and threatened to stain the bed. Cliffs bounced over to his side, where he was trying to catch all the sticky liquid in his palm. "Right, right, ahhh…" Cliffs looked about and grabbed Gerald's lab coat, which he used to dab off the bleeding.
Gerald gave him a scowl.
After the initial fluid was all out, Shadow's wound became obviously dry. Gerald could pull the incision wide and find a delicate, pink tissue underneath – slightly slimy, but free of ruptured veins. In the middle of the internal flesh was a black cavity: the input port.
His mouth dried up now that he could see how close he was. "Give it to me," Gerald demanded in a sharp rasp. Cliffs toddled over far too slowly and offered the vital component with a flourish. Arrogant Insect. …
Gerald was so excited that his hands were shaking. Good Lord! He nearly dropped it! He had to calm down, work carefully. With thumb and index finger prying the skin apart, Gerald took his second hand and moved the rectangular disk with a surgeon's precision. His gnarled fingers gave a tremor as he worked, and he feared his overgrown nails might tap the case too hard and crack the thing.
"Steady now," Cliffs coached him on. "No worries, its no difficulty…" Finally the old man with the crumbling hands of a witch reached his mark and the data wafer dropped halfway in the receiving slot. Gerald gave a broken cackle and used his yellow fingernail to push the thing in.
Professor Robotnik ascended from his hunched position. He raised himself high and confronted his assistant with coal-black glasses gleaming mad delight. "It's done," he rasped.
Cliffs had known this was the final session. Cliffs had known Robotnik was too cautious for any errors. And yet he still had to blurt back and check. "It's done?"
Robotnik grinned his teeth, white as the devil's charming smile. "It's done. Shadow is complete."
And suddenly they broke into laughter and whoops of joy! Cliffs grabbed the shorter man and embraced him, and for once, Robotnik found the strength to endure his pestilent species and held the fool close to his heart.
"So he knows everything?" Cliffs double-checked once their ecstasy had run its course. "The whole truth?"
"Everything down to the last casualty," Robotnik confirmed. "They will have to believe him."
"And this one is capable of reaching the ARK?" Edward asked. "To find the security tapes if need be?"
There, Robotnik fumbled. "Well…" He coughed in discomfort. "That is, provided he has the energy means for a teleport."
"Oh … of course. But, oh, what does it matter! Gerald, he's complete! Our voice from beyond the grave; a prophet to set the ignorant masses straight! Gerald, this is our savior!"
"Yes," Robotnik hissed. "Yes, we'll be avenged for everything those ungrateful humans have done…"
"Ooh, how dark," Edward teased. "I think of it more as education: this is our Second Renaissance! Think of all the lies and deceit we'll expose! Think of the reform this could bring! The Revolution!"
"It will end everything wrong," Robotnik agreed.
Cliffs glanced at the clock hanging above the doorframe. "My, we've finished early!" He seemed ready to add more, but a sudden fit of proud laughter overtook the man.
"We actually did it!" he grinned once he had settled down. "We actually kept under their noses all this time!" He paused to chuckle some more and to wipe his spectacles on his coat. "Then again, it really was no great feat. Gerald, these apes think the Periodic Table is something you eat from! I'm not surprised we've fooled them this long."
Robotnik simply smiled at the grand irony only he understood.
"By the way, that was a marvelous performance you did back there."
"What? What are you babbling on about?"
"Oh, don't be modest," Cliffs grinned. "The hospital? Sasha? Gerald, for once you fooled me entirely! It was such a gradual shift, and you didn't jump scenes: you stuck with it, as if you really were back at Starlight. I think that's the way these people really act … Yes, it has to be a casual, almost natural slip."
Robotnik grew cold. "I have to go," he told the physicist.
"Go?" Cliffs exclaimed. "Gerald, we've not been here twenty minutes; they'll be suspicious if we leave now!"
"Suspicious if you leave," he fired back. "I'm just the doddering old fool who's loosing his mind!" And he turned and stomped for the door. His haggard voice echoed through the hall, yelling at the guards to get out of his way.
Edward Cliffs stared at the doorway waiting for a remark that his great mind could not invoke. When it was clear Gerald would not be dragged back in, he let out a frustrated puff of air and fell into a bedside seat.
"Wonderful," he griped to the resting Shadow. "Stuck here for who-knows how long with you." His hand ruffled through his tangled hair and his elbow propped up against the armrest. "Well, how long should I wait and observe how you're not going to wake up? Two hours? Three?"
The hedgehog remained as he was. Even now the data stick was dissolving into his bloodstream, becoming microscopic bits of information that would travel all the way to the creature's brain, stimulating and bridging neurons to the formation of memory. Edward wondered a moment whether there really wasn't a way to "activate" Shadow short of the lightning crack of chaos energy. … Maybe he could find the confiscated stash of chaos drives, waken the agent now and have a partner to help him escape?
Yes, escape – and become the Herald of Truth himself! Well, now that this last resort was ready, he had time to spare on that. "Loose air vent…" he muttered to himself, stroking his chin in an intellectual manner. "Pity I'm not fast as you're hypothesized," he sighed, giving the creature an envious look over.
Edward frowned. He sat tall in his chair and looked over the sleeping Shadow. He looked away and his face furrowed with a thorough puzzlement. He leaned up from his seat to get a better look at the monitors, beeping off the creature's vital stats, then – slowly – sat back down, no less relieved by the uniform graphs, identical to everything he had seen first approaching the bedside.
Through their spectacles, Edward's eyes dropped back to the creature. Nothing of his mannerisms had changed; he was still lying there like a sleeping newborn: open palms at his sides, nose raised at the ceiling lights, blankets rising up with every calm, restful intake of air. So why did the thing seem so … different?
Edward tapped his upper lip as he applied his vast mind to the problem. There was something there … something he hadn't seen before Gerald's withered hands had finished the last implant. What was it?
And then he was struck, like a clock on the hour, with realization: where once had rested a face so soft and so pure was something else. The change was subtle: his eyes were raised, pointed perhaps, to a small degree; his mouth seemed to contract slightly, as if biting, and all over his face, Shadow seemed to have grown hard, like a pool of water frozen over.
Why, sitting up and stepping back so to gain a fuller view … one might say there was an air of cruelty overwhelming that fresh face…
Robotnik stormed away at a pace that forced his guards to liven their mechanical step. Morbid as it sounded, he wanted to be back in his cell, alone. Away from that idiot Cliffs and the creature that had driven him to this state!
He pretended, he still did, that every action was deliberate; that every step into the past was a thespian's illusion – a ruse to keep attention away from his mad scribbling and nightly screaming. But in his mind, it was becoming all to clear that he was slowly beginning to live the lie he had carried out nearly five years.
Shadow, that wretched beast! Even his flesh and blood had turned against him, growing strong in purpose and memory while feeding on his Creator's own life! No writer knew their characters as he knew Shadow; every sleepless night was a session of planning and compiling flashes of memory worth sixteen years! From the dawn of life in the incubation tank, to the visit to the medical wing and the first glimpse of that silken-haired angel, all the way to her tragic end; no typewriting twit could imagine what it was to suffer out every injury their creation knew; to see everything from the eyes of the created order and let the terror and hatred infect their mind!
He sometimes woke with a sweat and tried to remember who he was: The creator? The creation? Or was he just a webwork of memory sown together by the unifying purpose of vengeance, the double-edged sword that consumed its wielder?
"Good afternoon, Gerald."
It was Howards. Robotnik hissed out a curse. "Traitor! You told them, didn't you? You've ruined everything! They think the reptile is a menace, a danger!"
"Feeling all right, Professor?"
Memories surfaced: meetings with military brass. Questions. Concerns. Accusations. Threats. "All right? They already want to turn my project into some super-soldier program, and now you've convinced them The Prototype is "feral"! You imbecilic ass!" He lunged.
Strong arms seized his own, tearing him from Howard's collar and pinning him between two guards. Guards? No, stop! Stop! Prison Island; this was Prison Island. He had to remember! "Prison Island!" he gasped.
The Rat seemed only to enjoy this display of crazed outrage. "I see you've finished your visitation with Shadow," the chryogenist observed smugly. "I do hope your little pet is well. Research only goes so far on non-humanoid animals."
Howards gave another dark smile and spun away, leaving a dumbfounded Professor to be dragged kicking and screaming down the long gray corridors.
Knowledge made him surrender quickly, and when they threw him in the cell, Robotnik just laid on the floor, his eyes open wide and his lips trembling. "No," he hissed, trying to convince himself, "No… no, he wouldn't … no, no, no…"
A new voice: meek and scared. "Could he?"
Yes he could. He could, and he would if the time came.
Robotnik tore the air with fits of swearing. NO! No, no, no, this could not happen! He could not allow it; not now, not when the creature was finally complete!
He had every confidence in Shadow – no question. His creation would be unrelenting in purpose – driven by the same purpose of the creator – and had the blessing of eternal life. Immortal: too much robotic to succumb to disease or starvation and far too real and regenerative for the deterioration of old age to even touch him. Immortal.
BUT, immoral provided that he avoided the unnatural deaths Man had created. Shoot him, bludgeon him and you might rip one of the vital organs that sustained him. And Robotnik saw the future falling to pieces under the cut of a surgeon's scalpel.
Something had to be done. Some other contingency. Not he, not now, with a fading mind. Cliffs was a slim hope to escape and reveal truth. Who else, if not Shadow? Who would take up this task?
Fool, his mind hissed back, there can be no one but Shadow, for this is his purpose!
Then it was settled, he answered back to the insanity. Shadow would replace Shadow. Robotnik dived to the corner where he kept his possessions. The military allowed all of their pawns a cell computer and everyone was returned his or her old data files and notebooks from the ARK so that, even during nightly confinement, weapons research might continue. Gerald had put this foolish gift to better uses – he composed a diary chronicling the deception of five years past and the hope of Shadow unleashed.
The journals were all in codes of varying difficulty, so that only the dedicated would know his greatest secrets. These next entries, he reflected, would need triple-encryption – yes, by then his reader would be immersed in the truth and obey his every instruction. He began to type.
Congratulations, dear reader.
To have made your way this far demonstrates an intellect far removed from the ignorant ordinary; a brilliance devoted to the order and purity of science.
To read this also means that something has gone horribly wrong, some unforeseen variable I could not purge and that Shadow has failed. It means that I truly do need your help.
I have told you the story of my life, of my research and I have told you the truth of the Space Colony A.R.K. Now that you have demonstrated your devotion to my work and your own thirst for knowledge, I am about to reveal my true secrets.
I will tell you the secrets of life. Of the Ultimate Life.
Gerald shuddered and massaged his worn fingers. This would be his greatest risk, to expose everything to some ghost of the future. What if his captors made the discovery? What then? He bit his lips, looking for the words that would appeal to conscience and duty. His hands dived to the keyboard.
Know here that life and purpose are forever intertwined and that the Force of Perfection is fit for none but the greatest of tasks.
Finish my work, dear reader. If not the earth, then finish the tyranny that brought me to this end. Finish the injustice of this world. Project Shadow is the means. Finish my work.
I have every faith in your success.
Robotnik opened a new file and began typing DNA sequences…