In the early hours of the morning, the robot would be jolted awake from his slumber. With his system adding yesterday's events to his permanent records as well as completing a wide slew of maintenance tasks, sleep was off the table, much to his chagrin. Without the arbitrary limitation, he'd be able to sleep in and be up and about right around the same time as the owner of the house world. But alas, he had to think of something productive to pass the time.
An idea would come to him right away, but before he could get started on it, there was another, pressing matter to deal with first.
Unbeknownst to him, the owner's pet motobug had jumped up the sofa and nestled itself on the robot's chest while he was resting. Even after the larger machine had whirred back to life, Wendy seemed content staying where she was, only giving Metal an aside glance. But on its double-take, it had no option but to blankly stare ahead as it was with the larger machine's deathly glare.
Instead of causing her any harm, however, the robot would take the initiative and mimic what he had seen Honey do prior - lightly scratch it behind the ear and then grab it and gently place it down on the ground.
With a finger wag, he'd tell her 'Stay' and the motobug complied. Not in a literal sense as would be expected from a badnik, as she still continued to excitedly zip around the living room instead of remaining motionless in one spot. However, she did stay clear of Metal and didn't follow him as he made his way across the room, which more or less aligned with what he wanted. With an affirming nod, he'd leave her to her devices and make his way to the machine workshop.
Any corner would be suitable, but the one in the blind spot of whoever entered through the door seemed the most advantageous. Short of employing lesser badniks or turret guns, concealment was his only line of defense. An attack was highly unlikely in a home base, but the robot preferred to err on the side of caution given how precarious of a position he was about to put himself in.
The Advanced Memory Imager, often abbreviated to 'AMI' in internal documentation, was an experimental piece of software developed by Eggman for the express purpose of letting Metal experiencing past events with greater accuracy, clarify and to make him less likely to repeat any actions that ended in failure. The last part was one Eggman seemed to focus on the most, as the simulations went to absurd detail to render environments, people, wildlife and even the weather, all from a single video file of ten seconds or longer. Anything not explicitly shown was extrapolated, or, in less fanciful language, filled in based on an educated guess.
It was also an incredibly debilitating resource hog, eating up most of the power generated by Metal's fusion reactor and left him virtually defenseless while it ran. Metal had used it sparingly in the past, but it rarely proved useful.
Nonetheless, he hoped that with it, he'd be able to take an even finer comb through those two weeks he spent training with the other Metal robots and pick up on any details that may have eluded him on ordinary playbacks. Barring some new method or discovery, this was the last ace he had up his sleeve.
As the first iteration began, Metal would fast forward through it, only slowing down during key moments. Of course, even without changing the speed in any way, it was still many orders of magnitude faster than most Mobians could perceive, lot alone make heads or tails of. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary during this simulation, the next or the one after that.
Only the fourth would finally bear fruit and even then, it was only at its tail end. They trio had just completed their last and most difficult task of their training and were celebrating. Even Metal himself was heaping praise upon his two teammates and taking pride in his and their accomplishment. Most of the time, this was where the file ended, but in this particular simulation, it didn't.
It and the footage it was based on were only one hundredth away from an exact match. A change small enough to be written off as just an acceptable error rate, but the robot wasn't happy with that explanation and dug deeper.
Seven frames. Despite AMI still running off of its default configuration, it had somehow produced a sliver of extra footage that neither it or the robot could adequately explain. Looking through the footage itself wasn't very helpful either. A jumbled mess of numbers and letters would show up in the top left of his heads-up-display and that was it; the frames were completely static otherwise. Comparing the glitch to other things that had shown up in that exact spot revealed the possibility that it might be an order of some kind, but whatever it was, Metal had no record of it.
For now, the anomaly was lugged and the simulation resumed. If this was more than a fluke or a malfunction, the badnik needed more data.
Two more instances of the same event would occur on the seventh and twelfth iteration, though the amount of extra frames amounted to five and four, respectively. Now that he had all of them on screen, he'd notice something about the glitches that he didn't see prior - though the position was always the same, they always took a different shape. And yet, parts of it seemed to be the same also. By running the files through a scrubber that would eliminate all parts that weren't present in all frames, he could finally make out legible text.
'Debrief with Eggman.'
Of course, now it all made sense. After proving themselves capable of standing toe to toe with the worst Mobius had to offer, the trio debriefing with their creator on their next course of action was only logical. However, if that were the case, why was the debrief nowhere to be found in Metal's records? Something fishy was going on and now that the robot had a new lead, he wasn't keen on letting go anytime soon.
Yet, he was now standing on a precipice and hesitated on whether to make the leap. Thirteen was seen as a bad omen, not just amongst Mobians who'd go out of their way to exclude the number from hotels and elevators, but also amongst Babylonians and even humans. Not even Eggman was above this superstition. However, Metal believed such symbols only held sway over the foolish and irrationally fearful.
He couldn't have been more wrong.
On the thirteenth recollection of those two weeks, more oddities would rear their ugly heads. Events would happen out of order, differ slightly from what really happened or end up missing entirely. Each time he'd notice these errors, the simulation would correct itself and then jump ahead in the timeline. Metal made attempt after attempt to shut the whole thing down or quit out of it, but the program didn't respond, effectively holding him hostage until the end of file was reached.
Eventually, he'd reach the end, though he wouldn't quit right away, despite how enticing the 'quit simulation' button was. It intrigued him why, despite there being no more footage to adapt, AMI still kept running.
The timer would briefly pause and then skip forward by roughly twenty minutes.
Him and Metal Tails now stood alone in a featureless black void, facing each other. The program desperately tried to render the environment by drawing the trees and rocks as wireframe models before trying to texture them, but for one reason or another, the process kept failing.
"So, what'd he say?" Metal Tails asked, leaning towards Metal. "Am I finally gonna go up against the other me?"
Though as simple of a question it was, the robot couldn't answer. Not for a lack of trying; there simply wasn't a valid response to choose from for this particular event that would advance it. Instead, he would try approaching his teammate.
A large crack would form across the yellow armoured robot's visor. Silently, for seemingly no reason at all.
When Metal tried to get a closer look at the damage, AMI would finally shut down and take the simulation down with it.
Back in the real world, he'd be met with a very concerned Honey standing over him with a screwdriver in one hand and a toolbox in the other. A flood of error messages streamed down his HUD, but before he could read any of them, everything went dark