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In a darkened room bristling with bleeding-edge technology, the small amber fox types away at the keyboard. Sophisticated sapphire blue eyes reflect off of the console screen, radiating a sense of incompletion, feeling that communicated that something was missing.
Tails is managing a load of incoming information that a local observatory had collected on the planet, several hundred lightyears away. He feeds this collected data into the vast storage array behind him, which is then sent to the main server and processors which works to simulate the weather patterns and climate of Cosmo's home planet, Green Gate. Cosmo's small sapling resides behind him, in an atmospherically-sealed dome, wired to hundreds of various sensor arrays, constantly feeding Tails and his supercomputer information about her growth.
The door creaks open as Sonic enters. For a few moments, he just stands in the doorway, watching the fox drag files and manage parameters of the simulation, with ears and unique pair of tails hanging low in a salute of sorrow. Sonic understands why he's in a somber mood; today marks a year to the day since Cosmo sacrificed herself to stop a scheme that would've ended all fauna in the universe.
Everyone was in a somewhat somber mood today, with some even shedding tears over her memory, but Tails is different. Her memory has yet to leave the forefront of his mind, as someone who's left a permanent mark on his life, someone who he's worked all this time to bring back to life.
In his own words, "She gave us all our lives back, and I need to give her own life back."
The hedgehog lays a hand on the kitsune's shoulder, watching him work, still awestruck at the sheer scale and scope of the operation. Data racks and servers lined the rear wall, and two large computers with almost entirely custom hardware stood tall to their right. Scientific equipment, including a scanning electron microscope, took up the right side. Finally, his little brother had established connections with a multitude of observatories and astrologists, which in turn beam a near-constant stream of data and information about the Green Gate solar system. All of this, inside a mere converted master bedroom of Tail's two story workshop.
Sonic bids him goodnight, and leaves to return to the house in which he and Amy live. Tails is alone now, left to his own feelings. He finishes the data transfer, makes a backup to his offsite storage, and finally shuts off the terminal. He gently places a hand on the glass hemisphere before him, inside which is the sapling, with two buds on either side. He looks out the window, towards the full moon, and is transported back to the bridge of the Blue Typhoon, staring at a beautifully vast tree with a sea of dazzling pink leaves, the very tree responsible for the continuation of life in the universe. A lone tear runs from his wide sapphire eyes. He blinks. He knows what he must do now.
He leaves the server room, heading downstairs towards the attached workshop. He ignores the engineering candy shop of various equipment and technology, and continues across the garage into another door, taking more stairs down into a tunnel that takes him deep into the foothills.
Amy wakes to a low rumble. Sonic wakes up just moments after, as the sound crescendos into an incredibly powerful roar. They both rush to the window, and see a bright yellow source of light rise slowly rise above the foothills into the night sky. They watch in awe as the moonlight reveals the unmistakable shape of the Blue Typhoon, its ice white silhouette arcing a path over their house as it accelerates on a trajectory out of the atmosphere.
"Is that Tails?!" Amy exclaims, her hands pressing against the side of her head in shock. She makes a move to scramble to her phone, but Sonic stops her.
"I think he needs to be left alone."
"But what he's doing is dangerous. There's no one to help him if something goes wrong!"
"I'd prefer it if I was up there too Amy, but Tails clearly just wants to be alone. Today has been hard on him. He barely spoke at all, and he looked like he was deep in thought all day. We have no choice but to let him do what he needs to do."
"You're right. I have no choice but to trust his judgement, because even if I didn't, there's nothing I can do about it now."
"Yeah."
Tails sits in the command seat of the vast Blue Typhoon, surrounded by the stark white bridge interior. He pushes the throttle close to max, and the lumbering vessel accelerates at an even faster rate. Within minutes, he leaves the atmosphere, and the gentle bucking of air resistance dies away. He continues accelerating on and on, until the display tells him he's clear of Mobius' gravity well. He rotates the ship around and uses the thrust to arrest his momentum over the course of several minutes. He rotates around once more, activates the warp drive, and is shot at the speed of light several million miles away, where he finally stops. The vessel is once again rotated 180 degrees, and he finally leaves the command seat.
The fox grabs a red backpack leaning against the seat, and heads down the stairs to the leading edge of the bridge. He sets the pack down, and sits, crossing his legs. It appears the curved glass before him are the only thing that separate him from the great beyond, as it seems to surround him. He looks forward again, to a Mobius, reduced to a mere dot, surrounded by a blackness dusted with stars of unimaginable scale, also reduced to mere pinpricks of light.
He reaches into the red backpack, and pulls out a book that was a gift to him from Chris. That was a year ago now, or over 12 years ago for Chris on earth. He wipes several tears from longing sapphire eyes, and opens the old book, titled Pale Blue Dot, to a page that featured an image bearing striking resemblance to the sight before him right now.
He begins to read out loud, as if someone were there, listening to him, in the endless void. "Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives..." He methodically continues through the book, through emotional, powerful paragraphs about life, philosophy, and obscurity. At the end of page 50, he closes the book, and puts it back in the bag.
His ears fall to the side of his head, and he closes his teary eyes. He speaks out loud, to no one but the vast darkness punctuated by the pale blue dot before him.
"Cosmo, this... this is what you've done. This is what you've saved. People may lament over what we lost, but I focus on what we didn't, not as a species, not as a society, but as the entire universe. We've saved a gift, a cherished, rare thing in this endless, chaotic darkness. We've saved untold trillions of lives from a demise they never saw coming. I've come all this way, all of this distance, to say thank you. Thank you for preserving the imperfection of the universe, and for everything you've done, for everyone."
Finally, he stands up from the bridge floor, wiping tears from his wet muzzle. He breathes a sigh, not of sorrow, but of relief and remembrance. Gazing at the small form of his seemingly vast planet, he feels a great weight lifted from his shoulders, and as he makes his way back upstairs to the command seat, a truly warm smile curls the ends of his mouth, for the first time in a great while.