To anyone who finds this note:

I have much to apologise for, and I don't know how much time I have. So I shall try to explain the important details first.

My name is Zonic. I am a Zone Cop from the No Zone, which sits…

Which sat…

…which sat at 90 degrees to the other Zones – other dimensions representing alternate versions of each other. Because of this 90 degree tilt, our Zone intersected all the other Zones; rather than standing parallel and separate as the other Zones did.

Because of this, travel from the No Zone to other Zones was simple and easy – and we figured out how to do it very early on. In our travels, we learned much about the structure of the multiverse, and how our Zone was special for how easily we could travel to other Zones. We saw this as a travesty, and began construction on a 'Cosmic Interstate' that would let those in other Zones travel to each other as easily as we could visit them.

We thought we would bring enlightenment and prosperity to all of the worlds.

And then our construction efforts reached the edge of the multiverse… and we realised that there was more beyond it's borders. Therewere other multiverses out there.

Some didn't resemble ours at all.

Some very much did.

Our whole society went into a panic. We had considered ourselves the learned – the special ones who knew more about the cosmos than anyone else, albeit because of a quirk of cosmic placement. But the discovery of other multiverses proved that there existed, if you will, a multi-multiverse.

And what scared us the most about this was an ancient legend of a mysterious gemstone known as the Paradox Prism.

See, the legend stated that once upon a time, all worlds were one. Then the power of the Paradox Prism shattered that original world, creating a series of smaller worlds from its remains. This story explains why Zones have a different, much older name: in ancient times, they were called 'Shatter-spaces'.

We had thought that our world was the result of the Paradox Prism's shattering. But the existence of other multiverses like our own disproved that. Now we knew that, at best, our world was caused by the shattering of a shard of the Prism, not the full original. Our world was not created by a shattering of the original world – but of the shattering of one of the worlds created by that first shattering. A shattering inside a shattering.

This was important, as it meant that there existed fragments of the Prism in places that the No Zone couldn't see.

And because of that, the possibility existed that one day – without us being unable to notice until it was too late – someone could restore the Paradox Prism, and with it the world that was twice-shattered to produce ours.

Our society's focus pivoted overnight. No more would we focus on enabling travel between the Zones – on the contrary, we formed the Zone Cops with the express purpose of preventing such travel. At all costs, we had to thwart those who might one day try to gather the shards of the Prism.

But in our fear – of one day losing our independence, of being merged against our will to form some other version of ourselves we didn't recognise – we thought this insufficient. Preparations were made for the worst case scenario, of a complete failure of our mission.

We decided that we had to prepare for the day that the Paradox Prism was reassembled.

Our greatest minds devised a solution… and this, I am sorry to say, is where I come in.

If things have gone as I hope, the Sonic who knew me – the one I called 'Sonic Prime' – will be the most stable of the Sonics from our multiverse, if not all of them, and will be the one to read this note. He will remember that he once asked me why the Zone Cops did not try and apprehend the Eggman in his Zone, as he was actually an immigrant from another Zone, and thus within our mandate. I told him at the time that his world 'needed' an Eggman.

What I did not tell him was why. And what he did not ask was why he was Sonic Prime, not one of the hundreds of Sonics from all across the Zones.

It wasn't that his world was the oldest – they were all created at the same time. It wasn't that his world held some kind of central position – if anything, that would have been the No Zone.

No, his world was designated as the Prime Zone because we, the No Zone, had determined that it was the closest Zone to that hypothetical 'first world' that was shattered to produce the others.

We were wrong, as it happened. Our determinations were based on averaging the two other multiverses closest to ours, and later observations of multiverses further away revealed just how different they were from the worlds we were familiar with.

Thus began "Project Support Beam". The theory, pushed aggressively by the Zobotnik family, was that worlds that were nearly identical to each other could be merged into each other with little resistance, even if they were nested inside another shatter-space.

The hope, as it were, was that several key worlds could be made to resemble those in other multi-verses – other worlds made by the shattering of that first world. If the Paradox Prism was ever assembled, those worlds would be subsumed first and with no fuss – and the No Zone, riding on their metaphorical backs, would survive the maelstrom separate and unchanged.

That was my job in the Zone Cops. My focus was not, nor ever was, on apprehending those travelling to other Zones. My job was ensuring those key worlds resembled those in the other multiverses as closely as possible.

That is how Shadow Prime found a world where another Sonic had befriended a human boy named Chris, much like a world that sat an entire multiverse away.

That is how the monster later known as Scourge stumbled on a world with a Sonic and a Manic and a Sonia, despite the astronomical odds.

And that is why your world 'needed' a Robotnik. Not for the safety of your world – but for the safety of ours. If your world diverged too much from the world we had arbitrarily designated as your twin, then Project Support Beam was in jeopardy.

Ultimately, of course, none of this mattered. We knew of Eggman's experiments with Genesis Waves, and stood ready to step in should he attempt to construct a Super Genesis Wave. What we did not anticipate was his world becoming somehow linked with one from another multiverse entirely. By the time we realised the existence of the Skull Egg Zone – one that sat between multiverses, outside of the overlap of the No Zone – the Wave was already in progress.

Our institution had been a complete failure from beginning to end.

…my tempro-spatial stabiliser is nearly out of power. Soon I will be subsumed back into the uncountable variations of the variations of Sonic the Hedgehog.

So, with what are likely my last moments as an independent existence, let me say this:

I am sorry, Sonic. I am sorry for you, for your world, for all the worlds we tampered with. We had no right, no divine edict. We were just people scared of a disaster we could see coming with no way to avert – but that did not justify our meddling, nor the damage we did across every world we touched.

I am sorry that I did not speak up in time.

Signing off,

Zonic the Zone Cop.