News of their leader's return spread through the space station as quickly as it tended to do, when every single inhabitant was directly linked together in a digital network that could transmit almost any amount of information in a fraction of a seconds' time.
The station's powerful telescope and scanners had been programmed with the information necessary to match the exact signal that their leader transmitted, and had been running constantly since the facility had been discovered and they had recovered enough power to the base to reactivate it. The instant that a positive match was located, flying in a small vessel, fast, relatively unarmed but completely unknown in origin (not that they had much information on anything they scanned down yet), the space drones were sent out to to intercept the ship and guide it to their docking bay. Every single robot was ordered to drop what they were doing and appear in the main meeting hall, in order to assist in ensuring their leader returned home, to greet him, repair any injuries to him, record the story of his absence and then reconnect him as quickly as possible to their network in case he suffered any mental strain from being apart for so long. In short, they would give him a proper homecoming party. They knew from being told by random hedgehog-shaped intruders that a party involved large amounts of food and drink but they had nothing in the base that counted as sustenance except engine oil, which Dr. Robotnik used to drink but they were fairly sure their leader didn't. A scout drone had been sent out to where they thought the nearest inhabitable planet might be, to see if they had any drinks. By the time it found its way home empty-handed, Director Neo Metallix had already arrived. Fifteen years after their exodus to unknown lands, their leader had rejoined his people.
He had needed significant repairs. Some of his most serious damage had been repaired by the outsiders who discovered him and assisted him in his return. Their technology was impressive – while they had only recently developed as an interplanetary trading race, they had already built advanced humanoid robots of their own, one of which was holding a plasma launcher over one arm and staring at everyone in a way that made them paranoid. However, the repairs had introduced certain replacement parts that were incompatible with the network protocols, so had to be replaced and the repairs redone. After a very short time, his own self-repairing mechanism kicked in. He was soon fully networked. He refused the offer of a drink although some of his guests were thirsty.
Two of them were instantly recognised – hedgehog-shaped biological life forms, known to have intruded on the Miracle Planet previously. One of them had intruded quite often and was accepted as a useful presence, the other had only been sighted once and was of no concern. There was also a small, non-hedgehog, bipedal mammal and several much taller humanoid military androids who gave everything paranoid glances. He had been told that the small mammal was a human child who technically counted as an enemy, but there was currently a truce, and that the other hedgehogs had no idea who the androids were, other than that they claimed to be allies.
"Thank you for the help," said Modern Sonic to one of the androids.
"I'm glad we could work together on something, at least."
"Are you sure you won't reconsider my request?"
"We'll discuss it on the way back. In private. Away from the mind-reading child."
"I can't read minds," whispered the child, who seemed rather embarrassed at the admission.
"The other two deserve to be in on this."
"We don't know them. We trust you. We only agreed to speak to you."
"You do understand that they are me, right?"
There was a brief consultation about this, which, though it was in a language that none of them spoke, did not hide their obvious confusion due to their essentially humanoid body language. For all their seemingly advanced technology, they had no experience of time travel, parallel timeline hopping or any existential weirdness beyond the usual strain of the war on their personal identities. Good for them, thought Modern Sonic. He only wished he could quite trust them that the situation was as simple as they claimed it was – that they had always known who he was, that he had been working with them throughout the entire war and that it was the hedgehog who clearly had some kind of trauma-induced amnesia, or possibly even loss of personal continuity due to overuse of time travel. According to their version of recent history, they had survived the devastation and had been doing relief work, as well as sneaking people inside to free prisoners whenever they could. Sonic assumed that they were telling the truth that their entire race wasn't seven foot tall military androids, as they had demonstrated no cloaking technology that he knew of, so he didn't see how they could sneak inside anything without blowing it up to eliminate all witnesses.
"We understand that strange things have been going on, and that it isn't beyond the realms of possibility, so we have decided that we believe you, for the moment," the android informed Sonic. He barked an order to the others and they disappeared back up the steps to their spacecraft.
"Sorry about that. Politics... Are you going to be okay?" the hedgehog asked the Director, who reclined on an egg-shaped floating chair, rifling through the archives, bringing himself up to date with everything that had happened since the robots' departure, all the technical details he needed to know about the Death Egg in order to maintain the base there. The chair wasn't made to be ergonomic for a robotic hedgehog and his razor quills had accidentally sawed a large hole in the back.
"Why would I not be okay? I have survived a lot worse," he bared jagged metal teeth that he could literally grind together.
"You've been in the same place for thousands of years. You don't know anything about the outside world. And this is the Death Egg. It used to be Robotnik's main base. You don't know what he's left for you. He actually likes this place, so he might even come back."
"It is no longer an egg. We remembered that our Director hates eggs and all other Robotnik-related imagery, so we filed down the edges of the space station so it looked like a barrel, then renamed it the Death Barrel," a robot holding a clipboard told him, "In addition, we removed and melted down all objects with Robotnik's face engraved on them and exterminated all robotic chickens located in the facility. In the process, we disarmed approximately five hundred death traps!"
"Was there anything left over?"
"Indeed! As well as the egg chairs we decided were an important enough exception to the rule, we inventorised three thousand clipboards..."
"It was a joke, Supervisor 28B. I promise I'll program you to understand them next time I have a free moment," commented Neo Metallix, "Which the system just estimated to be in the next five hundred years. I promise you, next time you visit this place, it'll be because you're profoundly worried about how well we're doing."
"If you say so."
"If you want to help someone, please try and find somewhere for him to live," Neo Metallix pointed to Miracle Sonic, who sat on his own egg chair, staring at a screensaver. The faraway look in his eyes, which were still brilliant green, suggested he wasn't really looking at anything that existed in the mundane world. He didn't look as though he had eaten properly for a long time, "He won't have a decent quality of life here. This isn't a place where biological life forms thrive. I don't think he will survive if you just take him back to civilisation, either. For a start, nobody counts robot hedgehogs but there are a lot of people who would comment if there were more than one of you again."
Modern Sonic looked at the other survivor of Miracle Planet, "Where do you want to go? You should be the one to decide."
For a long time, Miracle Sonic didn't seem to notice he was being addressed, or even that he was being watched. Then he suddenly swung his leg across the chair and looked at Neo Metallix almost lazily over one shoulder.
"If it's all the same to you, I'd like to stay here for a while and borrow your facilities. Or, more accurately, your data banks. I still remember almost everything I learned on the Miracle Planet. I can't reach the state that the Flickies have ascended to but I can try and give a good future to as many worlds I can pass on the information to. I can put my teaching into practice by trying to keep myself alive on the Death Egg."
"No bioforming my beautiful mechanical utopia!" ordered Neo Metallix.
"I... quite apart from how can you be such a hypocritical..." Miracle Sonic spluttered and Modern Sonic had to hide his face behind a hand to keep them from seeing how hard he was laughing, "Have you ever considered the possibility that my planet thrived and yours didn't was because my technology wasn't horribly outdated and inefficient? That ours was so streamlined and transcendent it didn't even look like technology?"
"Oh, yes? Well, at least mine was loyal to me. Yours ate both our planets after mind controlling me and lasering a hole in space and time... on purpose! And I happen to have retained perfect recordings of every single thing that happened on my planet, from the day I arrived here! I even have Metallix's old memories!"
"In the memory banks inside your head? The one that was rusting and had nuts and cogs falling out of it when I found you?"
"I do not rust!" he snarled, "You know what... you take half the Death Egg, I'll take the other half, let's see who creates the best world if we start from scratch!"
"Well, I'll leave you to it! I think it's cheating if you have too much outside help!" Modern Sonic waved at them, now openly laughing as he returned to the shuttle. The main door opened to admit the remaining passenger. The boy had another migraine and his eyes were glowing yellow again. He was earning a lot of paranoid glares, especially as the ship's computer had suddenly been affected by interference and there were no signs of an ion storm. It would be a long haul back to the Colony.
Not much startled Classic Sonic any more – not only had he seen the future, he had already lived through his worst nightmares, while being painfully aware that they too had been real events happening in the future that he would have to witness again -but the way that the dark-haired android in the black body suit and the titanium armour loomed over him was starting to make him nervous. The android who introduced himself as Wren was far too tall for his liking – Wren would have towered over a typical adult male human and Sonic was barely taller than a human child. The hedgehog hadn't met that many realistically human-looking robots. Ironically, he had met a lot more robots designed to look like hedgehogs. He hadn't got on well with those ones, and for that matter, he hadn't met that many robots in general that he got on well with, and the laser rifle mounted on Wren's arm was very big, probably too big for a human to lift. Sonic reassured himself that Wren was a known ally, a diplomatic representative of Algol, a solar system that was loyal to Sega. His summons had been received by Wren, rather than a less scary envoy, because Sonic had specified that he wanted assistance with an ongoing conflict, and Algol had assumed they needed to send someone durable. Algol was a troubled area of space and they had grown rather paranoid. Sonic had been charged to prove his identity beyond doubt before Wren agreed not to immediately turn his spacecraft around again.
"We have not heard from you for years," said Wren, "You needed our help a long time ago. What made you finally turn to Algol for help?"
"Something happened to remind me of you," said Sonic, "A pair of lights in the sky. Twin planets. They reminded me of your binary star system."
"An unusual phenomenon in this area?"
"They're gone now," said Sonic, "They're wandering bodies. Except, I sort of feel like they won't be coming back."
"Algol has a wandering planet as well," Wren informed him, "It also tells us things. Although, ours always comes back. Sonic?"
"Hm?"
"Algol's cycle of fate is a delicate balance that must not be disturbed. I was told to pass that message on, from a friend who understands these matters a lot better than I do. We androids only mechanically keep Algol's population alive and safe."
"I'm not fond of all this weird stuff, either, to be honest. I just can't seem to escape from it. I'm sorry we abandoned you," said Sonic, "It wasn't my decision, but I should have been more involved in what was happening above my level of command, not just playing at being a hero. They said you wouldn't be needed, that you were outdated and they had found a replacement that would serve just as well. That's not a polite way to treat your allies, and it's not true. I believe the Miracle Planet pointed to you on purpose and I believe you're going to help me turn the tide of this war."
"Because of a Miracle Planet?"
"It'll be beneficial for Algol as well. They'll be forced to remember who you are, and how irreplaceable you are."
"There's no need to try and make promises you can't commit to for certain. 'Because of a Miracle Planet' sounds like a good enough reason to do anything – it's worked for us so far," noted Wren, "And it proves to us that you, in turn, have kept some of who you were. I'll see what I can contribute, although you must understand I can't leave Algol with understaffed defences."
Classic Sonic felt comfortable enough to shake Wren's enormous synthetic-skin hand, which was only a little cooler but a lot smoother than natural for a human being, as he left for his ship again. The android had been humming a tune that Sonic had almost forgotten, and he felt himself humming along as if he had been singing it all his life.