The long silence of the ARK was broken with a heavy hiss of hydraulics and air, the double-layered airlock sliding twice open. Dim lighting only provided by red luminescent circuits between wall plates was barely enough to make the two mecha visible as they strode in side-by-side. Eggman, of course, piloted the Egg Walker, while Tails drove the Cyclone with Cosmo, now feeling better, in the spare seat behind him. Behind them, Shadow and Rouge followed as the door slid shut once they were all through. Decoe, Bocoe, and Bokkun had all been left behind to watch the ship, just in case the space colony wasn't as abandoned as it still appeared to be.

The party of five paused only a moment before continuing down the entryway, maintaining the formation of walkers in front and those on foot behind. The clang of metal footfalls echoed around them in the otherwise complete silence, adding an unpleasant sense of eeriness that pressed in on their senses like the lack of light strangling their vision.

Another set of doors and they arrived in the boarding station, a larger room with a few more passages that branched off further into the space colony. Eggman directed his mecha over to a counter on their right, not even pausing as it crashed through the side rather than waiting to go around. Not giving a chance for complaints from his cohorts about a lack of subtly, the Doctor maneuvered over to a console on the remaining portion of counter. The old device reacted to another's approach for the first time in decades, buzzing in a low key as a holographic interface materialized before it.

Stretching his long fingers, Ivo typed a few short keystrokes on the input device made of light. "Alright," he began, turning his attention to the other four, "Let's consider how to go about this. I propose we head for the central control room first; it has the most direct access to the security network aboard the ARK as well as most of the database. If whatever was responsible for bringing the colony into our Space-Time is sentient and still aboard, that is where they are most likely to be."

Shadow nodded. "Sound, Doctor. But there are many ways to reach the central control room, and some may be blocked from a lack of maintenance over the years. The last time I returned to the ARK and was headed for there to wait for you, I had to backtrack more than once due to collapsed or blocked passageways."

"That's why I'm accessing what I can of the database from here," returned Eggman, once again typing into the hologram, "to see how many routes we can- Hmm?"

Tails tilted his head as the Doctor scratched his own. "This is… odd." said the self-proclaimed genius. "According to the station logs, the system archives were accessed just a few hours ago."

"By who?" questioned Shadow, the black hedgehog suddenly alert as he quickly jumped over the counter and looked at the screen from beside the Egg Walker. "What were they looking for?"

"The data is password-protected," said Eggman, his hairless brows furrowing. "But that didn't stop me last time." He typed in the familiar letters: M – A – R – I – A. "Access… Denied? How? Gerald never used anything else as a password… Someone must have changed it."

The Doctor growled as he began typing faster. "Fine then, I'll just revert back to hacking. Try the Eggscrambler 2.0, you lousy administration network. Aaaand… Success!" He stopped typing suddenly, lowering his face over the Egg Walker and closer to the screen.

"Destruction through Perfection," Ivo quoted from the monitor.

"What?" asked Shadow.

"It's the password," said Eggman. "Bit long for me, and I'm not sure what it means or who would use it, but whatever. Let's see what our intruder was looking at."

He pressed a key a few times, his finger halting as his eyes dilated behind opaque lenses. "I… Don't believe it."

"How many more times are you planning on being surprised today?" asked Rouge sarcastically from over the desk.

Amazingly, Eggman ignored her as he pressed the key a few more times. "It's… It's another diary. From my Grandfather."

Shadow jumped up on the right side of the Walker, crouching as Rouge joined the two of them seconds later on the left. None of them even noticed Tails as he brought the Cyclone clanking up behind so that he and Cosmo could also read the text now slowly scrolling up the screen:

My name is Gerald Robotnik.

I write this second diary as both a backup and as personal memoirs, one to record my research and ideas upon for future members of the scientific community also looking to benefit mankind. My team and I are about to begin on a new assignment aboard the space colony ARK: Project Shadow. The ambition of the project is immense; to discover the secret of biological immortality is a dream that has been chased in futility as far back as historical records go. Like chasing one's own shadow, hence the name.

But we have quite the budget: the funding is coming directly from the government, and apparently they aren't even applying a cap to it. Normally, I'd have passed it off. The possibilities of such technology lean toward immoral capabilities, and if there is one thing I have always strived for it is to make all of my creations better humanity, never to undermine it. But I have a Granddaughter. She means the world to me… And she is dying.

The Doctors call it "NIDS": Neuro-Immuno Deficiency Syndrome. Between my own research on the disease and the confirmations of other medical experts, there is no known cure, and immensely unlikely there will be one in what time she has left. But Project Shadow is about completely defying death, in any and all forms. The data gathered from our research would provide exactly what is needed to create a vaccine, and that is an opportunity that I simply cannot afford to let pass by.

We begin the initial phase tomorrow. But there is something that I still have on my mind, something I am having trouble putting behind me. One of my colleagues and I had a disagreement over this endeavor, with him refusing to work on the project and trying to get me not to as well. He said that, "perfection is an envied thing, but also dangerous. For if you make a being perfect, what use does it have for the rest of us?" His logic is sound, but he also doesn't have a life riding on the line. Still, it makes me think: could he be right? By creating an ultimate being, a perfect individual, does that render the rest of us obsolete?

I don't know. I just don't know.

[ENTRY END. PLAYING NEXT.]

[ENTRY UNRECOVERABLE. PLAYING NEXT.]

The prototype, "Biolizard", is not coming along well. A Bio-synthetic fusion has been implemented to keep the nervous system feedback from destroying further tissue. Removal of genome 3347 from the genetic sequence has also had the unforeseen effect of leaving the growth plates indefinitely open, causing the prototype to continue expanding to enormous proportions. The implants have had to be changed three times already, and we had to move it to a new containment facility to in order to accommodate the growth spurt. Still, the data we're collecting is extensiv'-e, an^d. tUe f)in(*l

[DATA CORRUPTED. Skipping to next available section...]

a%s str+etching my morals to their limits. The sickening truths about our universe, about what we as human beings are capable of, it's all coming to light with Project Shadow. I can taste the bile in the back of my throat, looking over all that we have wrought here. The organisms... The test subjects... The abominations we perform in the name of science, of the good of humanity...

I went down today to get the requested tissue samples I needed to compare with the Biolizard's blood work. Doctor Ridean hadn't got the memo I sent him, but he said it'd only take him a minute. I watched as he pulled a leopard gecko from a cage on the far wall, slapped it down on a sheet of surgical tissue and cut it open with a scalpel. Forceps, Clamps, they all came into play as he sliced out the components desired and washed everything else out with a hose. And after sealing up the samples with latex and plastic, he left the thing there, still twitching, until he'd finished cleaning his other tools and proceeded to toss the barely living lizard in a hazardous waste bucket.

I took what I needed and left, but I felt nauseated by the surgical precision, the pain I saw in that animal's eyes as it was vivisected. What is wrong with us? We think nothing of the animal's lives we toss away by dozens, hundreds, thousands at the time no more than an ant accidentally stepped on. If that had been a human on the table, an ordinary person witnessing it would have purged their bowels right there. But things like fish, pigs, and chicken? We'll kill and clean them while holding a casual conversation.

What kind of monsters are we? What kind of monster am I?

[ENTRY END]

"That's it?" asked Rouge.

Eggman snorted as he typed a few more commands. "That's more than most could get. There's a great deal of data corruption in the archives, and this is all I can access from here. We need to get closer to the central control room in order to retrieve more entries."

Shadow, meanwhile, seemed lost in thought. Understandable, Tails thought himself, watching the black hedgehog while Eggman and Rouge continued to bicker over the definition of quality hacking. The kitsune knew little about Ivo's Grandfather except for what the younger Robotnik had told them. Apparently Gerald Robotnik had been one of the greatest scientific minds ever back on Earth, and a peer even to Eggman in the capacity to create and tinker. He was also a more or less father figure to Shadow, being his creator. Gerald's opinions and musings would carry great weight for the ultimate life form… And Tails couldn't help but feel a little afraid of the psychological backlash they all might find in the records of a man as he slipped slowly into insanity.

"Bah!" said Eggman, bringing the kitsune back to reality. "Stick to looking at your jewels, and keep your opinions where they have weight." He pointed a gloved finger on the monitor, trailing dust as he traced a path. "This isn't the fastest way to the inner colony, but it is the most likely to maintain system functionality. It's our best bet."

Shadow squinted, coming out of his thoughts. "That leads through a lot of the old labs. They might have emergency power, but there's no telling what might still be lingering there after all this time; malfunctioning equipment, loose contaminants, or even live experiments."

"Sounds perfect!" said the Doctor, patting the front the Egg Walker. "Wouldn't want the trip to get boring, now would we? And I need to run some live ammo tests on my latest creation anyway, so hopefully we'll run into something to shoot on the detour."

Tails turned his head and shared a look with Cosmo. The two nodded to one another, the kitsune returning his vision to Eggman. "Alright then," said the twin-tailed fox, "let's get going."