Neo Metallix had spent all day pulling down the statue of Robotnik in the town square of Stardust Speedway Zone. Now the blinking red lights bathed the stifling darkness inside the enclosed metallic dome with a wan crimson light that could have passed for a sunset if you imagined it was a normal, sane planet where you were allowed to wander outside and could actually survive without a biohazard suit or a cyborg body. Some of the lights were surveillance cameras, some of them were the sights of laser turrets or patrolling security drones, most of them were 'Low Power' warnings. It wasn't possible to see the sunset from outside either - the sky was still too full of smog to see the stars and even if the night sky was visible, there was too much light pollution from the constantly lit, constantly running installations all around the planet that weren't doing anything but didn't have any protocol for shutting them down. Fortunately, most of them had broken down on their own by now.

The ritual demolition of the statue would have gone a lot smoother had his wrecker robots not all decided to go on strike at that particular moment, as a protest against their long hours and lack of payment. He was fairly sure that Dr. Robotnik hadn't paid the robots anything or given them breaks, and he had never heard the evil madman complain about his robot army taking spontaneous industrial action. He attributed the new development to the effect of the other Sonic from the past, the one called 'Classic Sonic', who the robots had mistaken for their new Director and who had given them several rather poisonous commands before being forced to leave. Despite his best attempts, a few of the orders still hadn't been purged from their programming.

It was a shame that the time traveller had chosen to go against his plans. If they had worked together, they would have both achieved their goals in life. He forced himself to stop thinking about his annoying visitor by adjusting the levels of his neural implants with a quick smack to the side of his head. With his work enthusiasm cybernetically augmented, he now thought only of the satisfaction of a job well done.

The last symbol of Dr. Robotnik's reign was gone. He now owned the Miracle Planet, its robot factories and the death laser he had lied to Miracle Sonic when he said he had disarmed. In name and in spirit, he owned it all. He would not run it to the ground and then abandon it, as the Doctor had done. He would not chain it in place, mine it out and build a few cheap disposable factories on it, like he would an asteroid, not a world with limitless potential that allowed one to break the very laws of reality. But he would not simply let it go, let it do as it liked, as his counterpart did. Maybe he would have, if their places had been switched, but he could no longer even imagine being the same person. It wasn't just his way of thinking that had been changed forever. Maybe it was something about this world, how it was always in flux, or some way in which he had changed it again, even after the damage already done to it, but he was turning into something that was not Sonic. He could see more of it every day, when he looked at his reflection in the murky, stagnant, robotic piranha infested depths of Tidal Tempest Zone.

That's why he called himself Neo Metallix.

"Director! I wish to make a complaint!" warbled a voice behind him, interrupting his reverie. He flinched and tried to look like he had been supervising things and not staring pointlessly into the sky.

"What is it?"

"The level of distortion in the local space-time continuum is becoming a health and safety hazard! You promised to fix it years ago!"

"Well, go and fix it yourself. Is it Quartz Quadrant again?" the abandoned mines were relaxing to wander through, in a kind of forlorn way, but they were the least dimensionally stable part of the planet as well as the most likely to physically collapse in on itself at any moment.

"No, Director, it's heading right for u..."

Something threw Neo Metallix clear off the platform he was standing on, so that he landed on his back. He could see the glow even before he opened his eyes - the emerald glow that now suffused everything.

Rapid and uncontrollable as a surging river, vivid as any lucid dream, the visions came all at once. It was all he could do to notice any details at all before he was swept away by a torrent of emotions and sensations, only a few of them recognisable, rather than the vague understanding that he was brushing against something far beyond his ability to comprehend, something that had already overwhelmed him. It wasn't malicious, although it terrified him by virtue of its sheer size and import in the grand scale of the Universe. He had always known that he was interacting with the unseen, unfathomable intelligence behind the very planet when he had these visions of his, it just hadn't been so unsubtle before now. This didn't feel like the usual visions: it was unintended, rather than a message sent to him by an intelligence that wanted him to see a possible future consequence of his actions. He was briefly worried that he was about to go insane, his mind finally snapping from the constant images of bad futures and the painful awareness of his ultimate failure to prevent them from existing. Even worse, he might have seen something he wasn't supposed to see and the planet itself would be angry at him. Finally, it occurred to him that the mind on the transmitting end might be in danger, even more so than usual, so much that it could only send this hasty, unfiltered psychic wave rather than the carefully planned set of images.

The content itself was fairly normal, if chaotic. Mostly it was flowers, tall, thick stems with broad pointed leaves and petals in one of a whole rainbow of possible colours, their bloom so bright they almost shone with their own light. They had always grown anywhere on the planet they chose and spread fast, whether it be the bottom of the ocean on Tidal Tempest to the highest peak of Quartz Quadrant, even in-between the small gaps in the entirely metal flooring of Metallic Madness Zone. In his hundreds of years of existence on this planet, Miracle Sonic had worked out that the flowers were essential to both the planet's verdant ecosystem and its non-linear, flexible and entirely self-contained space-time continuum, and that once planted, they grew in all directions in time as well as space. Dr Robotnik had quickly worked this out and deliberately removed all the flowers in order to hasten the planet's decline and prepare it for conquest. Interestingly, he hadn't destroyed the flowers, but had used them as a control mechanism for his machines, something he normally only attempted with life forms of at least animal intelligence. Sonic had decided that the flowers must be some kind of organic computer network that allowed the intelligence guiding the visions to monitor and maintain the entire planet at once. And now they were everywhere, not just thriving but overrunning every square inch of the planet. Wacky Workbench Zone in particular had been taken over, until the floor was a carpet of vibrant rainbow bloom, trailing up the walls and around the purple stone and blue quartz-inlaid pillars with their softly glowing statues of various planets, stars and phases of the moon that gave the Zone the appearance of some kind of giant astrolabe, an oracular shrine to learning and true understanding of the Universe.

The plants were growing through the cracks in the secret door that Sonic knew led to the most recent location of the Time Stones. Panic gripped him as he thought for a moment that the plants were invading the sanctum in a bid to grab the Time Stones for themselves, that they really were trying to conquer the world as Robotnik had almost done. Then he realised that the plants were growing outwards from the inside, and that the Time Stones weren't being dislodged, they were still there and they were fully awake for the first time, like a dormant volcano gone live. Their bright auras flared outwards to wash over the entire planet, reflected in the petals of the flowers and the facets of the quartz that now filled up the former mining site, faster than any quartz had a right to regrow, until it looked like it had all those hundreds of years in the past, one endless, vast cavern of glittering, singing crystal. The statues in Wacky Workbench also crackled into life and bolts of electricity streamed out from one to the next. Up on the aerial walkways of Stardust Speedway, always a lively city despite Sonic never seeing the inhabitants (by now he assumed they had reached biotechnological singularity and uploaded their minds into the flowers and quartz crystals), the vast clouds of twinkling green and pink lights grew like fabulous digital locusts until they blotted out the sky. Then, as the lights that were now all around the Zone swirled in a bizarre dance like living fireworks, he realised they weren't just the lights of the city, they were the stars themselves, rising to join the sky, particularly the constellation with five stars. Except that it now had six stars and they flared emerald with a radiance greater than the sun...

Sonic yelled out as he woke up, the force of the vision causing him to fall over as he was walking, unfortunately fast enough that the sudden brake pitched him forwards several yards and landed him upside down in a flower bed. He yelled at the flowers to get off him, shoved them away and began running in the other direction, towards Wacky Workbench Zone. Please don't give me another vision that sends me off a platform in Stardust Speedway, he silently begged the intelligence. The response was a faint crackling in his mind that was the usual signal for 'visions are unavailable at this moment in time as we are down for maintenance'. That lack of signal, together with the abrupt response, was in itself unusual, although he was glad to see the world more or less in the same place as he left it.

Miracle Sonic was rather annoyed to discover that he had been denied access to the inner chamber. It wasn't the first time he had been locked out and he knew there was no way to force the door open. Even if he could, it would be an unbelievably bad idea. Despite his general helpfulness and competence, sometimes the godlike power behind the Stones just didn't feel like telling him what it was doing, or was worried the knowledge would crush his feeble mind. However, the timing of the refusal, straight after an urgent vision of Wacky Workbench itself, was in itself unusual. Abandoning courtesy, Miracle Sonic began yelling at the intelligence, demanding an explanation, and repeatedly banging on the door.

Upon the twelfth knock, as final as the stroke of midnight, a powerful sensation jolted through his hand that threw him backwards with a force that almost took him straight through a stone pillar. He shook his head free of both the pain and the raw data that had been forced into his mind, reminding him of the time he licked a Chaos Emerald as a drunken bet. He understood know: what he had seen was not something wrong with the planet. It wasn't from outside, either. It was natural, inevitable, and an Apocalypse, pure and simple. The entire planet was changing and it would not care if it accommodated sentient life in any form that Miracle Sonic would recognise. It would not care if he survived. He would not be able to go through that door again; it was closed forever. It no longer had need of his services.

He knew it was a ridiculously stupid idea but he couldn't think of anything else he could possibly do that might result in his survival, so he ran towards Quartz Quadrant, where his doppelganger had told him that he would always find him if he needed him, and yelled the insane hedgehog's name. The Hedgehog who claimed to have started out the same as himself, but who was so utterly mentally twisted that, even after being offered a way out, he continued to live in the Bad Future of his own free will.

If he could survive there, he mused, he might have the first clue how to survive here.