Revisiting an important Sonic game I used to play, Sonic Adventure 2, I thought Shadow's backstory had potential as the setup for a military dystopian plot. Sadly, the backstory was riddled with contrivances, overuse of sentimentality and plot holes. So lemme try to fix that hot mess with a more involved story where both Sonic and Shadow are products of human genetic engineering. One of the hedgehogs is cloned from the other - can you guess who?
The setting is Earth but with a centralized global government in charge of the planet during a pandemic (thanks COVID-19 for the idea). The military organization G.U.N., which stands for "Guardian Units of Nations," has global overreach in canon so it might as well be a dictatorship army commanded by a group of elite politicians. Hence the general antagonist will be the H.E.A.D. council, or "Highest Executives of All Districts," where each member passes laws for the cluster of nations they control.
The title for this story, Hedge SS, is named after Sonic and Shadow and their role within G.U.N. They belong to the "Hedge Unit," which consists of them at the center, the scientists who created them, their combat trainers and psychological trainers.
Hedge SS starts from the perspective of a Hedge Unit science team member - a female doctor who becomes pivotal to Sonic and Shadow's lives. Her intro is a little brief and scattered but it's meant to be expository while leaving a sense of mystery for following chapters.
Teaser Prologue
"Dr. Vivia Peregrine, we could use you for our most ambitious project yet here at G.U.N. Biolabs. Pay will be increased. Are you on board?" - Signed, Elton Nowaki, Internal Recruiting Office
That letter, handwritten and sent to me, spelled out my final career advance. I was a G.U.N. geneticist at the time, studying the DNA sequences of immunity cells within different living organisms. I was a fifty-year-old woman born in a valley that was guarded by G.U.N. sentry robots. I remember losing a childhood friend to the Cerevirus, a brain disease which had ravaged the entire planet and put humanity under indefinite lockdown. I went to school and became a veterinarian, but couldn't find enough clients because G.U.N. regulations had made pet registration very difficult. Animals, even if domesticated, were considered potential carriers of the Cerevirus and so were banned in many places. In my old neighborhood, I wasn't allowed to own either a dog or a cat.
When G.U.N. military officials marched through my valley town, they paid my clinic a visit and tested my medical expertise by giving me one of their attack dogs to treat. After I returned the dog to good health, they requested I attend an elite college recommended by them to learn genetic engineering so I could join G.U.N.'s strategic science division and help develop a vaccine for the Cerevirus. I agreed to the request. G.U.N. Command funded half my schooling, told me to keep quiet about the deal, and assured me a number of times that the purpose of the science division's research was for global health.
Genetic modification had become their area of interest for vaccine development. It was wholly permitted for animals - "unintelligent life forms" as we scientists called them - but illegalized for humans after H.E.A.D. - the executive council of the world - passed the Dignity for Human Soldiers Act across every district of nations. The act was spurred by an incident where a G.U.N. Biolab security team caught scientists performing horrific secret experiments on veterans. While effective in ceasing human rights violations, the act didn't support animal rights. It was a silent yet universally understood truth that humans were above the animals; according to cold logic, animals were merely tools, born to bend to our will.
My position at G.U.N. Biolabs - my opportunity to work with some of the greatest scientific minds on earth - was supposed to bring me pride. It did at the start... but somewhere along the line, it got lost in the mire of rote development and testing. Our research on the animals... why wasn't it yielding the results we needed to combat the Cerevirus? Species after species. Gene modification after gene modification. Failure after failure...
None of the animals survived our attempts to create a "super organism" - one that would be immune to all viruses. Since the Cerevirus couldn't be isolated safely, a super organism capable of producing super antibodies to destroy any pathogenic threat is what G.U.N. Command ordered. But with each failure to build such a creature, our top authority, H.E.A.D., was becoming impatient...
Our hopes kindled when a colleague of mine discovered a hidden power within the DNA of a small, spiky, seemingly inconsequential mammal.
"Dr. Peregrine, we see you have not responded to our previous letter. If you have any desire to stop the Cerevirus and save the world, contact Dr. Howard Boyer and ask him about: Project H.E.D.G.E.H.O.G."
Signed, the Internal Recruiting Office's Auto-Typomatic Computer