A Shadow Story
By:
Spencer Hughes
Chapter 1
I slowly open my eyes. All that I see is a curved glass cylinder surrounding me, with a man in a white lab coat standing by a control panel. He looks up from the screen, sees me, and smiles. He reaches down, and hits a button on the control panel. The glass cylinder rises up, and white gas spills out of the rim. The man walks around to a set of stairs, and steps onto the platform beside me.
He says, "Welcome to the space colony ARK, Project Shadow."
He turns around and walks back down the stairs. I follow him as he walks off the platform, and a pathway lights up as we walk on it.
He continues, "I'm Dr. Gerald Robotnik, you creator. You, my black-haired friend, are the ultimate life form. The government asked me to work on a perfect being, and now I have created one. But, now arises the question, what should be your name?"
We continued down the hall in silence, while Dr. Robotnik continued to think of a name for me. I looked this way and that, observing and learning all that I could at one time. People walked this way and that, all wearing the same grey clothes, all of the seams covered with dark blue material. We seemed to be walking down a residential hallway, because names were on all of the metallic doors that we passed.
Finally, we came to a door labelled, "Government Office of ARK. Employees only."
Dr. Robotnik said, "This is it. It's time the government saw the result of my research and their funding."
Dr. Robotnik reaches forward and touches the door, which in return sends down a long arm with a lense on the end. Dr. Robotnik steps forward, and the lens scans his eye.
A robotic voice replies, "Retinal scan affirmative. Match found for Dr. Gerald Robotnik."
The door slides open, and we step inside a room which looks nothing like the rest of the space station. The room's walls were painted white, and the only pieces of furniture in the room were a wooden desk and a chair behind it, where a man with a suit on sat, apparently working on something.
Dr. Robotnik walked to the centre of the round room and said, "Mr. President."
The man sitting there looked up startled. Apparently, he hadn't noticed that we came in. He sat up and asked, "Ah, Dr. Robotnik. What would you like?"
"I would like to introduce to you, Project Shadow."
Dr. Robotnik pointed at me, and the president looked at me for a second, as if he was analysing me.
The president said, "All right, Project Shadow, show me what you can do."
Dr. Robotnik said quickly, "No! You see, Mr. President, he has only been physically created. He still has to be taught and trained before he can use his own potential."
"All right, then. Put him into training immediately. As soon as it's done, I want to see what he can do."