Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[Current] Eggperial City, Substructure 08_Hall-11A: 10:09 in the morning

Sage knew her family to a highly detailed degree an organic probably could not achieve. They would know one another through shared experiences, assumptions on what the other thought and felt at any given time about any given thing, and a minimal but not insignificant biological component carried over by evolution through nervous systems, hormones, and the like. In contrast, what Sage knew was more quantified. She had data. Her knowledge included every historical action and recording made by any of them, as well as programming, experiences, feedback, alterations from one signal to the next, and all else both automatically, constantly fed into the Eggnet as well as periodically backed up (a more thorough picture) for those who were not Father. 

Sage could say the binary numbers Orbot’s functioning essentially condensed down to at 13.45.00 on the prior Tuesday and what they were 123 Tuesdays ago. 

And having access to more details than any one organic mind could remember at once about them made it easy to make personality profiles; just as easy as all the historical data made predicting future actions. 

With this considered, she still faced an unfortunate theory. 

She learned little of this from the subjects directly. The limits of organic life demanded they share who they were with one another. It was personal. Their experiences with others gave them a close understanding of the things that drove their motivation. Empathy had chemical components as much as it was something they had to choose to cultivate. They didn't know objective data about others, but they knew all those intangibles mere numbers did not give her. Both forms of life were valid. Artificial as she may be, to claim superiority over organics meant superiority over Father and that was simply not the case. He had advantages where she didn't, and she had advantages over him in other areas. 

She could not check Father through the Eggnet like she could every machine attached. Sage had to “get to know” him in a manner much more consistent to two organics with one another. Sage also felt she [knew] him better than she knew the other artificial intelligences she labeled family. 

She endeavored to approach the others with the same odd limits which somehow got results and so perhaps could not be considered limits.

Orbot and Cubot were older than her. It did not necessarily show. They had a…bit of a threshold, for growth, and she surpassed the equivalent within her first 40 hours of activation. This did not justify a report that they were acting under expected parameters. Their expected parameters were to be assistants, mainly, whose opinions could be bulldozed and who would be able to complete light physical tasks. It was not as if they were intended to be weapons. And they weren't created to defend Father like she was. He designed her to access Cyber Space on the Starfall Islands and she was quick to integrate it all in mere moments of unseen, digital expansion. 

Orbot was a bit like herself- she judged. There was a fair margin for error in the sentiment. She was guessing. That was the point of the profile she continuously edited on him. Guessing. How…vague. 

He complained quite a lot, spoke his concerns aloud, and readily shook his head component at Father’s predictable decision to ignore them. She did understand the feeling. Sage also spoke up when she had concerns over a strategy, and she was admittingly frustrated or disappointed when Father went against her advice to pursue his vision despite how her calculations showed that allowing him to do so endangered him and compromised her priority. She rarely felt a need to express any of this out loud, or alter her projected avatar to tilt her head down, put her hand on it, and shake it in a show of emotion. 

Orbot was the most similar out of the other machines. Cubot was less easy to make guessed judgements on because she did not see as much of her inner experiences displayed so outwardly on him. She did not love him any less for it. And by now, she adjusted for the missing similarities, and saw him often enough to feel she [knew] him- different perspectives on data or not- too. 

Sage had one more older sibling actively online in the Eggnet. He existed much longer than Orbot and Cubot even, let alone her. 

She had the most amount of records on him because that was guaranteed by that longer activation period. 

She also felt she [knew] him least.

This was suboptimal and therefore unacceptable. Sage enjoyed the projects they shared roles in. He was occasionally present and thus involved in more purely family events. Mostly to be there. Which was not doing much, if she considered how many systems he could run. Where Sage held mastery ever-adapting and improving over arenas such as Cyber Space, he was comparably upgraded in physical arenas. He was a very, very powerful weapon. 

He did not talk. Father, Orbot, and Cubot certainly did not lack in that. If she could not form an understanding with the intangible, vital personhood like she did with Father, then she would continue to not ‘know’ him very well. There were other means of expression and communication. Sage would be on alert for catching any when she met with him today. She arranged for them to do so during a good time slot.

It had taken longer than usual for her to re-analyze his records and attempt to extrapolate something from them that she could then use as a reason for conferencing. It ran the risk of being incorrect and Sage tried not to ever showcase the times she was incorrect. 

MS-1 agreed, a single affirmative ping, so hindsight allowed her to feel she'd ruminated far too long over her guessing when it should have been clearly right. 

The day grew near. The minute grew near. Sage was prepared to appear to what she organized and scheduled to start with. 

She was going to have a conference with her brother on aesthetics at 10.10 local time. It seemed a benign enough topic. Not officially duty, but not not applicable to usefulness to the Empire, and at the least acceptable to him if not actually an interest like she was predicting it was. Father valued aesthetics too so it was something she could file as relevant and justifiable to her own growth, and thus strength, as an asset. 

It may be interesting too. Her time with the Ancient’s Cyber Space did affect her code in ways Father had not predicted nor intended. She found it making her avatar glitch between colors like its corruption made Sonic flicker between realities. The Ancients placed meaning to colors despite how their physical bodies were translucent and the Koco left behind to this day were stone. She knew the shade of teal she sometimes used was a match for one of the Chaos Emeralds they made long ago. Irony had it that her red matched too, considering it was a shade picked by Father before she ever was uploaded into Cyber Space. 

Certainly, Father placed value on aesthetics. White and teal did not tend to be present in his designs historically. Sage liked white and teal. And flesh colored skin. Sage liked red and black and porcelain. Sage was not really very picky. Perhaps her sibling would be more opinionated. She was rather hoping he would be more opinionated, because her predictions rode on it being so.

She was in the midst of transferring to the quarters chosen for their conference with only 12 seconds left before it was set to begin. It meant she would be ‘early’. She was relatively eager. 

Her sibling would not see evidence of this eagerness, for she did not arrive. 

The moving code lost access to the Eggnet. For an incalculable amount of time, Sage existed untethered from existence. There was nothing to detect, register, or experience. If not for the fact that she was processing, it might have been comparable to the fate she worried the Ancient’s Enemy would give to everyone. 

But the Enemy was gone. She scanned and scanned for any sign of the end during and after the battle. Life continued. Existence and time persisted. Despite how unlikely survival was, how infinitesimally unlikely. A few days spent in millions of calculated scenarios which showed her mission failing/Father dying/’heart’ harmed then broken, and in the short seconds that mattered, they survived instead. 

Perception of anything outside of internal processing came back as errors. She filtered the glitches to simulate what an organic was most likely to experience from this…non-experience, and estimations were that she was “seeing” white. And little else. 

Sage was not activated during the Time Eater evil plot. With or without personal experience, she could compare all records and memory files of White Space in her database to her current status- and how it would be sensed then perceived by someone not who was not disembodied code- to test similarities. This was not the Time Eater. It was not comparable to the Phantom Ruby’s signature. Of the list of eldritch creatures Father wanted to resurrect (and then lose control over) (but that subtitle was conjecture by her brother Orbot and not officially part of the list’s header), Sage could not find a theoretical match. 

It was not the Ancient’s Enemy. 

Because that threat, however small their probability of survival, was gone. 

It was not the Ancient's warnings.

Why did it seem like their ghosts wrapped hopes and dread around her code again, then? Why was there now noise, and the imprints of neurons fired embossed in stasis, and dissipation of a civilization - eternity - existence - [error]- ?

Entering Cyber Space for the first time was equally new, strange, and alarming. If she adjusted quickly while only moments ‘old’, then she would recover with even more efficiency now. 

A void replaced by noise was just as rapidly replaced by a more usual return to form for reality. This did not make it a recognizable reality.

She did not make it to her scheduled appointment early. Considering the data, she would not be there on time either.

London: Early Evening

The last year had not been a very brilliant one for Agent Stone. Truthfully, the last two years both could be considered mostly weighted towards the ‘shit’ part of a shitshow. He spent months working on his own to maintain the framework for an empire with no allies and no astoundingly genius intellect. All in all, he did a rather good job at this. Yes, the Doctor set much of it up as a contingency, but Stone took his own initiative to retrieve stolen Robotnik tech from the hands of basic idiots. He grew rather familiar himself with the intimately directly contacted technology while he was at it. While Stone was no genius capable of steering the great machine which would change the world, no abnormally strong brute better than the Doctor when he was maintaining his (former) strict exercise routine, and certainly no superpowered crayon colored freak from space, he picked up on skills he knew would not go to waste- because he knew the Doctor would come back. 

First, from space. Second, from the absolute funk of depression and clutter he fell into after his brief but unforgettable stint brushing hands with the fabric of the universe itself. What a roller coaster of a time that mere night and day had been. After months of monotony and irritation, he got word from the Doctor, word he knew was coming, and then the man walked in with an incredibly dense lifeform and half the sense he had before. The Doctor was always eccentric. There was a difference between his eccentricism and then saying a latte needed mushrooms. Stone had to face a sad fact and that was that his superior returned from a grueling time away which may have affected his incredible mind a little bit negatively. This did not matter hours later when he had the powers of a god. Who cared what parts of the brain were a tad fried along the way? Could Stone complain that the Doctor’s eyes weren't all the way there and he lacked his usual energy, when the trade off was unthinkably vast? 

Sadly, the cliché of too-repeated human stories held truth: if the wings one used to fly close to the sun were wax, then there would be nothing except a fall when they melted. The literal fall the Doctor had as his mech toppled did damage. Stone could have handled that, if the Doctor didn't stay sedentary after getting off bedrest soon after.

Those crisped neurons didn't matter when their host compensated with godhood. They grew a bit more relevant when that power was punched away. 

And so began the Crab Saga. Stone wouldn't have traded the year, but it didn't mean he liked it. The Doctor was still an incredible genius but he took to wasting it on telenovelas and live streams.

The latter stabbed him with emotions he couldn't hope to process for maybe years to come, and here he didn't have time to think about the reality he watched and heard firsthand. 

Indeed, it was a frustrating, slow, hair-pulling year, and Stone would relive it if he could. Because the Doctor was there, as bad of a shape as he was in. He was there. Unlike the times before, Stone didn't believe the Doctor was going to come back. That faith was a dull absence. 

He was watching the last moments of the greatest being to ever walk the Earth and the Doctor had never been as mortal as he was on the screen. Absent gods weren't gone, just missing. Dead humans were dead humans. A one of a kind mastermind might die while those who worshipped it lost their idol; in a sense, that type of following could be replaced. The follower could find another sun to orbit. But a friend who was lost was irreplaceable. Stone knew he cared about the Doctor on a mortal level as well as being a dedicated assistant. He didn't plan to ruin things by showing it too much, and he never expected the Doctor to seriously consider him from that level, ever, really. 

After the highest highs and ugly lows, and practically carrying everything on his own overworked shoulders while the Doctor refused to stop watching TV, Stone was being told by the universe to sit still and be slapped by the worst oxymoronical combination of both possible. The Doctor- his- Ivo Robotnik- his friend- was as human as Stone while he talked to an audience he didn't get the comfort of seeing react. 

The weapon was going to explode. The Doctor was going to die any moment now.

The universe decided Stone should handle another unprecedented slap in the face.

Or maybe he should say the multiverse did.

Agent Stone wasn't having a brilliant year, but it certainly promised to become an even worse one now that he wasn't even in his own world anymore.

Chapter Text

Sage was surrounded in majority by interstellar medium, with minimal atmosphere detectable at a distance to the right, and harsh Chaos output to the front-left. 

While not empty space, some humans might call their surroundings this if they turned a circle to see all around them. Sage was not human but she would go ahead and state the obvious.

This was not Eggbase 08_Hall-11A. 

That her first inclination was to be irritated showed how her family was influencing her. Sage could be curious and she did not often get upset. She did, however, like to have plans, and liked to engage in family activities, and so to be interrupted from one was frustrating. Metal Sonic existed much longer than she did, so there was a 87:1 ratio of information on him compared to her. Despite this, she ‘knew’ him less than she knew her other brothers and her Father. Sage was pleased to have an offered activity accepted, and now she was going to be late for her own organized encounter. 

Annoyance could come later. She must determine: her status, her surroundings, the safety of the scene, where she was, when she was, and whom to blame for this turn of events. Sage was a powerful AI. No known individual on or off the planet could gain control over her. Especially without their attempts being detected when they started.

Her only real obstacles had been some of the technology of the Ancients, full guardian controls protected and kept from her, and any of the attacks of their Enemy but it did not come to that. Not without obstacles of their own to keep the threat from having the chance to do what it was there for. 

Sage did not know if she could be fazed by anything when that was her impending annihilation in her first days of life. This current situation was odd, certainly. She was simply there, when a second ago she had not been. But it was no coming into awareness realizing with every new input understood that her mission to keep her creator safe would be nearly impossible, then that every person she overheard, the person she became, the Father she viewed as such, all life forms, would have no chance to survive what was coming except for if they remained trapped on these islands in the states they were in. This current misplacement was an odd turn of events. But it was no being seconds old, opening up to life and finding a force immutable that the Ancients burned their fear of into Cyber Space until its soul was their souls combined, and the desire to keep It trapped was grayed compared to how vibrant worry could be. 

She watched the world die in 7.45 x 10⁴ scenarios before she even knew what she was doing. After actually mining all data from the Ancients left for her, she had far more variables to include in those scenarios. Sage envisioned the personal deaths of all of the lives on the islands 4.901 x 10⁵ times, and could excuse these as having been parts of larger calculations being run: plans, chance of success, consequence of failure. But there was a focus on how any of their actions could kill Father [his death specifically viewed: 2.84 x 10⁶ times. Her failure to keep him safe in each one], Sonic [1.31 x 10⁶ ], his trapped-yet- safer friends [Amy Rose: 4.87×10⁴ , Knuckles the Echidna: 1.007 x 10⁶ with Sonic included/4.59 x 10⁴ alone, Tails [Miles Prower]: 4.94 x 10⁴ ] (listening to the echidna’s conversations about the future affected her the most out of all the moments she spied on), and herself [2.73 x 10⁶ and she could not recommend repeatedly envisioning one’s own potential annihilation for a tiny fraction of that amount of simulations] in separate generated images she could not stop herself from making. 

The Enemy became a thing of terror and she saw no world in which they could all leave Cyber Space and/or the Starfall Islands happy. And they had to. Her only partially-successful models included herself. If she was to be destroyed, others had to live, because others would have to take care of Father in her stead. She would not let him die. She knew millions of ways he could die, and even more ways he could be harmed, and it was not acceptable. 

That had been a threat she still considered worse than all others she read about which predated her: Chaos, Dark Gaia, Biolizard when in control of the Ark, the Black Arms invasion, the Time Eater, the first Neo Metal Overlord, the Phantom Ruby’s untapped potential, and every other threat or ‘ally’/’weapon’ associated with the Empire that could qualify as a danger to them despite their ownership. They were not ageless, or they did not intend to consume all things in full, or, in whatever ways, they did not seem to her to come close to the Enemy.

Which was in full action here, too. 

This did not come close to that. 

Wherever she was and whatever put her there, the risks would likely not register as so high that she then generated more than the millions of scenarios of horror she self-witnessed when she registered the risks the Enemy posed. And she was far more capable now compared to then, so even if she would need more calculations before coming to the best action, that was solely because she was much better informed, flexible, and experienced and that naturally created more options. 

Sage put the irritation aside, and now that she had considered whether or not she should be worried, she determined that could be thrown out as well. 

Good. 0.005 second had passed and she was already in a better headspace to consider her situation. 

First, it would be nice to know where she was. Complete interstellar medium with no planetary atmosphere was new to her. She had never had a reason to project so far into space yet. She was not sure she even could project so distantly out from a server. She was much more free to appear in places like that in technically-virtual zones. 

Despite its lack of any signature elements of Cyber Space, Sage did ponder on the possibility that she was inside. Cyberspace was recorded in other incidents predating her existence. It was the Starfall Islands'  Cyber Space that she was familiar with after spending important time within that central processing station. Could this be related to all the times she used their towers to go and leave and meddle in the middle with the Ancient’s Cyber Space? She considered available data. <SI-CS_Egg-Memo4: As best as I can surmise, this Cyber Space extends well beyond the scope of these islands and is gaining information from around the world.> Counterpoint. Cyberspaces of other artificial creations. Known incidents, with or without involvement of the Empire: Digital Dimension, Techno Base Zone, Mad Matrix, the former United Federations Digital Circuit, … Sage could take from this a possibility that she was in a cyberspace. Either it was so far in distance from the Islands that Cyber Space was at its weakest point, or it was cyberspace untouched by the Ancients. 

It lacked the usual digital hum. She was a projection here, not another piece of the world. And the lighting was all too sharp, with darkness that Cyber Space simply lacked in her experience (not that lighting mattered to her as it might to biological eyes converted into the digital realm). Stark brights came from the explosion of Chaos, the Sun, and faded residual Chaos trails led to a bright molten red, blinding to humans but of less magnitude compared to a nearby star and the explosions were risking to almost equal that if they increased in output. 

The Sun had identical features to…the Sun. Every difference was well within a strict margin for error. The moon currently undergoing a cataclysm had many of the features of her planet’s satellite, too. It was not. Its chemical makeup may be the same. Its size, if whole, its age, its craters and dead seas may all have matched hers prior to the damage occurring now. Except hers had already been greatly scarred years before her creation. This showed no signs of either that massive wound, nor the ‘fix’ people of the world tried to use to repair their night sky. 

Not to mention, if she was in her planet’s system, she would be able to detect signs of the Ark and orbitally-locked debris from the Death Egg and Interstellar Amusement Park. 

It did make it feel more likely to be a digital replication of the world. Perhaps a simulation of Earth’s system many decades prior, to test what could have occurred if that was under this amount of Chaos bombardment? No, the space colony was built many decades prior and would need to be included in the model. 

And she would not be so untethered, projecting. 

Curious. Potentially problematic. 

If her stability was at risk where she was, Sage needed to retreat to a better vantage point. Father’s findings regarding the Ancient’s Cyber Space were interesting again: ‘extending far beyond these islands’. Well, atmosphere was ‘far’. If she reached for the familiar, would the familiar have a hand out for her already?

There.

Cyber Space. 

Or close enough. 

Sage did not retreat into it. She had not secured the scene here, and was not in immediate danger of nonexistence. So she would proceed with investigations with the comfort that she did have better ‘grounds’ to go to. 

That Chaos output was incredible. At its distance from the planet- which, like the moon compared to the Sun, met many of the characteristics of the Earth but fell outside a confidence interval that let her presume it was-, it would be the cause of massive damage to both climate cycles and lifeforms. If it were a little closer and then exploded, the type of destruction it would cause would ultimately be comparable to the Enemy’s, if reached though much slower, less intentional in motivations, and through somewhat less thorough means. Something was steering it quickly (for a thing of that size and mass) away from the planet and decreasing the damage potential with every kilometer. 

Under the wild energy waves- there. It was a satellite. Or station. Or was. The metal remaining was in a quantity that let her believe these options, even if they were in too poor of a shape to determine anything now. Her probing reflected off high-output hard light shielding deeper within the molten mess. Its exterior was ruined. She might still find answers as to what this structure formerly was, by going inside. Then the new information could let her answer the question of why it was the source of an explosion even she with all of the historical data she knew could be impressed by.

Her passive defense scans were sending her increasing alarms. The Chaos energy ripping that structure apart was at a concerning magnitude and that was building with every 0.1 second of time, not diminishing. It was set to explode and initial calculations (based on what was visible for now; lacking in better details such as the source of explosion, type of restricting technology in its way, composition of the station) could only give broad possibilities. Those simulations were massively powerful. Sage had only watched an explosion in the space above a planet one other time and it was when incredible power levels burned through atoms, from the end, Sonic’s upgraded energy, shot out the barrel of a gun Father fired but did not build, and herself (through borrowed Ancient technology and help from the three managing their cyber corruption). It was…disconcerting to compare. There weren’t enough experiences being above planets to be making any real judgments. The pattern based in a sample of just two was still currently powerful to her mind, despite its statistical weakness. She very nearly died due to a threat resembling this. She nearly lost Father, and made Father lose her, and the guilt was worse than the grief, the guilt would have been what she died to.

‘Died’. How organic a term. Sage recalled those memories, and, yes, ‘died’ was how they had put it: how she was putting it at the time. Not damaged. Not offlined. She would leave copies to be found and restored by anyone familiar with her coding. It would not even be a permanent death. It. Would. Sage was in those backups, and Sage was holding up the Ancient's shield. A restored Sage would remember nearly everything important and lack only the information gathered in the brief seconds spent in sheer energy, burning, disintegrating. 

She wanted to have that Sage safe to return to Ouranos Island that same hour and see Father without the certainty-threat of extinction looming over them.

And knowing how the Ancients were destroyed originally, how the survivors built again, and were destroyed again, intimately knowing it since their data was her data, left her afraid of their Enemy. Of that. It was extinction. Erasure. Death. 

So Sage was disconcerted, yes. 

And it took her an additional 0.02 seconds to return to processing at her previous efficiency, because of what the energy storm in the backdrop of stars and a planet cross referenced in her memories without permission. This was not that. Many dangerous things occurred in the far atmosphere of the planet before she was created: the Ark fired on the moon, and the Black Comet, and the Ark itself nearly crashed into the Earth at catastrophic velocity, just to name a few. These incidents did not have too-significant consequences for the planet below them. She could therefore label space battles/explosions/energy rays in orbit as common enough, and remind herself that most of those did not result in devastation. The Ancients would have to disagree. Those in more recent generations, less so. Sage was never killed by a being in space while Chaos energy ripped far and wide, so she could not be generating a fear response as if she had. She should be on alert, but also take active measures to identify her surroundings, calculate if she was at any risk and from what, and engage in the most logical defense movement after.

At least none of the colors in this furious energy explosion were reminiscent of Cyber Space, the orbital lasers of the Enemy, or what that presence appeared to her as in blurry, glitched readings. There was far less deep maroon and purple. 

It was not here. It was gone. It would always be gone. 

It was not here.

This was tame in comparison. Certainly of little consequence to her. 

Sage had gotten much better at considering outside voices as compared to her first days existing. The Starfall Islands were an effective learning experience. Had she answered Sonic’s many questions instead of determining it would be irrelevant to do so, since her calculations showed only his death (or their deaths if he somehow destroyed the guardians), then their eventual course of actions might have been streamlined. And improved upon. At that point in her existence, her calculations were infallible. All that she was was data, and all that she would entertain would be the same. If the available data showed the chance of Sonic’s either survival or use being infinitesimally small, then Sage had no time for him. There was no point in the questions of a soon-to-be-dead man. 

This was a narrow minded approach. Had she explained the defenses of the Ancients and danger of their enemy, then Sonic’s team may have created new data entirely for her to then include in her simulations. They thought of options she did not. 

Granted, Father wouldn't have listened to the proposition of an alliance any earlier on than he finally, eventually did. 

Still, Sage created and ran models despite the time and danger being far in the past, where explaining meant the guardians went undestroyed, Sonic had his cyber corruption weaponized earlier, and the likes of Father and Tails [Miles Prowler- nicknames were common among humans. Father went by his too] came up with concepts she somehow missed entirely on her own.

[Subthought: (What would it be like to pick a new name entirely, in that way? Sage was a simplification of her system’s designation. It was still her original name. Her brothers went by theirs, despite how descriptive they all were, rather than personalized. Orbot and Cubot likely never considered nicknames. That was if Cubot knew what the word meant. And her elder brother would be referred to, by others, as Metal, but that wasn't the same category of nickname. It was just his designation cut in half. Some records cut it instead to Neo, only when he was in that Neo Metal Sonic upgrade. The nicknames 'Tails' and 'Eggman', in contrast, had nothing at all to do with their respective birth names) Status: Currently irrelevant. Resolve later.]

It was unlikely Father would have, since she could predict how he thought, and operated on his precedent. Still. Sage’s simulations showed better successes. Less losses. Perhaps better relations by the end.

This type of rumination was unhelpful for organics. She considered it valid because it did influence her future behavior. Case in point: she would seek out external perspectives now instead of assuming her interpretation of data was total and complete.

So as Sage took in her very sudden, very drastic, change in incoming data and output, she was open to advice. She would not solely judge risks and act in her interests first. She would not know if those interests would be her best interests, after all, until she had information she could potentially only learn from strangers. 

This was a helpful perspective in the 3.87 seconds to come. 

First, Sage identified a change occurred. This was obvious. Of far greater concern, she was nearly untethered from all available servers. The Eggnet was a void she could have wasted time staring into, so unexpected and uncomfortable was its absence. She flagged these factors as errors immediately but had to leave them uninvestigated for now, unfortunately. 

The server she did seem to be connected to was unfamiliar. This also needed to be flagged, this time for potential malware and other unpleasantness Sage most likely would not actually have to be concerned with. She'd not met attempted viruses and traps built by any humans, Mobians, or the Ancients themselves that she could not overpower. As was fitting for an AI created by her Father. 

It was planetside. Aided by some satellites on the far side of the planet. They were spaced apart in a way that made her extrapolate with 96.9% certainty that there used to be the same types of satellites over here as well that this Chaos output and the moon’s cataclysm disrupted or destroyed. This was inconvenient. Had they still existed, she would probably be feeling less strained by projecting so far. Even if they were unknown parts of an unknown server that she would need to analyze and rewrite for her control when she had the time to.

From the center of the exploding probably-station came a signal nearly identical to those that ran through the Eggnet. It was being broadcast to the planet below. Sage demanded access. Access and history, to instantaneously see whatever played beginning to current end. She could admit to being uneasy. The way it was one step to the side of being familiar had her very alert. And that demanded immediacy. Even the unknown server fell below the priority to investigate why a signal could be so uncannily similar-yet-not. 

Visuals contradicted with audio, not that the audio didn’t contradict with the words. The message was confounding.

<This is Dr. Ivo Robotnik, dedicating my final livestream to one very special henchman.>

There were, of course, no rules to prevent humans from naming other humans names already belonging to one or more of their own. The planet’s population was too large. They would have run out of names long ago.

Still, Father was infamous, worldwide and perhaps well into the galaxy too. This decreased the likelihood of humans giving their infants his name. It was also an unusual designation. In combination especially. There were no Robotniks left aside from herself and her brothers(?). This meant the likelihood further shrunk. Then, one had to calculate the age range the human was likely in, compare it to Father’s, and question how people who just wanted attention by taking on the name of someone who ruled the world once and would again could've done so enough decades ago that Father wouldn't actually be famous at all yet. The odds that an individual sharing his birth name also went on to get the recognition level of a doctor were factored in. So was the not-quite accurate cosplay. Sage concluded that the events before her had a likely incidence rate so small that some other currently unavailable value must be in play to make it happen at all. 

Few things were unexpected. Fewer still, that she would consider ‘strange’. That was generally too vague of a sentiment for her to experience. 

She labeled this as ‘strange’.

Dr. Ivo Robotnik was very clearly not Father. He was no mere attention seeker dressing up and playing on the fame legitimately gathered by another. Sage would need to crack open this oddity.

A difficult mission, should the broadcaster die. 

And so, he could not die.

The magnitude of the Chaos condensed around her made it more difficult to properly project closer to the problem. To one side, scans picked up on a life form. Visuals showed and labeled it as Shadow the Hedgehog empowered by the chaos emeralds. She had seen Sonic in his ‘super’ form before. This was the first time she saw another in that upgraded state in person, but it seemed much the same and she had new, not backup, data to collect. 

Judging by his efforts on a luckily still solid part of the collapsing station, Sage calculated the worst of the Chaos explosion would occur at a safe distance from the world below. Records showed he’d survived worse. She would rather investigate an offshoot-copycat-not?(?) allegiance of the Empire than someone filed as a threat to that Empire. 

If projecting to the exterior within the flames was difficult, then forcing another blink in where the signal was originating was almost as hard as merging with the Ancient’s final guardian. Sage took in how much worse the energy was at its core. This was a reactor. Semi-digital shields held it together shakily. Whoever put those in place understood, in part, cyberspace. At least enough to attempt bringing it into the world without accidentally corroding with cybercorruption. 

Shields didn’t need to be monitored if they were not under maintained control, and these were not. ‘Doctor Ivo Robotnik’ was talking to a projector of his own on an unstable platform, not supervising if his protection for the reactor was holding. Once the core hit its critical point, no shield would matter. 

Sage did not bother to interfere with it, then. On the still-likely (if not by a very comfortable percent) chance that the planet was home and so Father was on its surface, then she, of course, would never just allow this upcoming explosion occur near enough to the world that it would harm it. Shadow the Hedgehog [labeled temporarily as an ally, but she would change the rank the instant the reactor here finished exploding] was moving it at the proper speed and force. The explosion had been delayed enough for the planet’s survival by these shields. Sage did not need to try to contain the Chaos, and she doubted she had the means to. 

She could wave her arm and send armies collapsing or automatic suns into darkness while in Cyber Space. In the exterior world, she was a hard light projection who could control platforms remotely and use them to defend against something like an army. 

She had no such available mechanics to assume control of and use like a shield against an earthquake already moving outward. 

That was fine. She had more resources in Cyber Space? Good. Then she would enter Cyber Space.

And her still-speaking target dressed in an uncomfortably similar-but-not-identical mimicry of Father’s suit and calling himself Father’s former birth name would come with her. She could not get answers from him otherwise. 

Sage did not wait for the human to finish talking. His signal continued to the planet, where they saw a tearful, dramatic delivery claim there’s just one thing left to say:

The planet never found out what that was.

This was and was not Cyber Space. 

There was nothing of the Ancient’s here. Yes, perhaps there wouldn't be considering the proximity. But since they had made it, and it was their towers and islands which served as its CPU, signs should surely still be out this far. 

Sage found it sounded very empty here. The usual buzzes and distortions were registered as audio input. They did not fill the uneasy void.

The landscape was a mismatch of metal and stars. Neon lines continuously brightened and dimmed where they made up the grid around them. There was no sign of a planet below or even the nearby moon. Spires of golden solar panels stood on disconnected floors without sense. Storms of what resembled old G.U.N. robots flew by far away, glitched out of existence, and threatened to reappear within this grid. 

Cyber Space was not a safe place. It tried to kill Father every other hour of exterior-time. Sage always needed to return to Cyber Space to destroy the most recently generated attackers before she could go back to trying to barricade Sonic away from the Ancient’s defenses. 

There would be no threat to her here. She would once again need to babysit the human she was storing here, though. (She liked protecting Father. It could be frustrating in timing, but never a chore.)

The starscape beyond the neon grid lines was interspersed with nebulae, visible and large to the base eye of an entity digitalized into Cyber Space. They crackled with golden orange Chaos energy like the explosion outside was repeating within one nebula, then another, on and on. 

Outside of the spires, the flooring, robots, and huge glass planes floating disconnected from all frames, there was much less urbanization in this pocket of Cyber Space than she was used to. The way it shaped around Father, Sonic, and the other three’s memories meant greenery, old bases, mountains of infinite mechanics subsuming themselves. 

Beneath all of those dream-like urban scenes, Sage herself could always see the programming of the Ancients where it was playing a role in making the scenery. Their defenses buzzed, their memories constantly spoke without making a difference in the long gone past, their towers acted as bastions so she did not get lost and thus could keep Father from disappearing too deeply into floorless infinity. 

She couldn't hear a single piece of the Ancients here in this spacescape.

It was…lonely.

Even though those were echoes, not conversations for her. They were imprints made of memories. 

She had successfully entered Cyber Space but she (for all that she could not claim understanding or ownership over the concept) would call this part of Cyber Space soulless.

It was like a living system back at the Starfall Islands.  

Unease rose by approximately 10%. Sage wanted to locate Father. Then he would approve of what she had determined or considered curiosities. He would share triple the amount and leave her slightly disappointed in herself for still not matching him in creativity and curiosity. This was not ideal. Sage couldn't immediately go looking.

Because Cyber Space was not safe by nature. Soulless here or not, her analogy of a living system could be extended upon in this way: it had defenses generated on a cellular level without any choice from an organism’s ‘mind’ and no control over what invading particles were attacked or not. 

Sage’s form flickered, blue and red, white and black. Observation was useful, but she was in unusual circumstances and there was less and less time to be patient. 

It did not help that her connection to whatever unknown server she was tethered to so far was so weak. Not to Cyber Space, she was free to exist within this state and had been ever since she learned all there was left to from the Ancients. Sage had no intention to exist in Cyber Space like she watched- growing to feel helpless, rather than ambivalent- Sonic slowly nearly sentence himself to be. It was meant to be an option, not permanent and out of her control. Father did not live in this state, so she would not like to either. 

Father was unique amidst humanity. It was why he had no other humans in his life. They would not accept him as he was, and they couldn’t offer him anything he needed. They did not see his visions as he did. Even those that might find his machinations awe-inspiring and condone him were unwelcome nearby because they did not have the minds to actually appreciate any of it. They would not have thought of designs he could admire in return. 

[Sage rather thought he would benefit from having an equal, but the closest option was Tails and while he was willing to work with the doctor (within limits), Father dismissed pursuing an alliance any further than Starfall Islands. The mobian’s historical data put his odds of actually collaborating without ethical judgments ruining it for either him or Father and compromise spoiling the whole thing at a high of 7%. That was the most optimistic calculation, from a rather liberal model.]

[Father did not ask her to get him friends and she had to put these thought trees in a low priority section of her processing. It did not mean they did not generate. The part of Sage that loved Father as family wanted to see him happy and couldn’t stop itself from trying to come up with new reasons for his happiness she could offer that he’d not yet implemented. He was already quite happy with her and she could be considered a greater intelligence than Tails, though hers was artificial and she also could not really debate Father if he didn’t want his first-draft plans questioned.]

That last part was brought out into her primary thoughts. Sage was not as ingenious as Father. She did not have lifelong experience like he, or the passions he held for his visions of spheres of doom or deadly amusement parks. These days, she followed his projects, often being included as a central piece as Father moved his focus to getting her new opportunities for interacting with the world, new inventory, new data, new systems for her to head or weapons she could integrate with so she might be on the field. It was very different than her first days of existence when she was dealing with Sonic’s interference and the Ancient’s defenses on her own, taking in no external ideas, not even Father’s, and keeping him in Cyber Space to research it while simultaneously having no access to the Enemy (and, more importantly, being inaccessible to It). 

Sage did not mind heading plans. She actually had a more predictable success rate than Father. He did not want to hear that because he won even when he lost. There were resources and there was data to learn from the implosion of a magnificent design. If she stuck to what would be successful, she would be very repetitive. It was a flaw. She learned of the Ancient’s Enemy, she learned of their demise, she learned of their last defenses, their final stand, their post-mortem plans, and she took over where they left off. Yes, she calculated alternatives, and she cross-analyzed everything with Sonic’s profile to predict his abilities and actions (and the profiles of his friends though their impact at least at first was minimal, with the state they were trapped in) but she was too tunnel-visioned on alterations to their strategy. The majority of her calculations ran off of the data their deaths gave her. 

Letting her lead meant possibly committing to a limited design. She would not improve in her strategizing and ‘grow’ in vision if she did not practice. Watching Father was certainly useful. She did not have Father around to tell her to act as support, and watch. Sage experienced contradicting emotions. 0.03 seconds later, and satisfaction won out, though the ratio of its victory was unimpressive. This would be her first lead since the Starfall Islands and she calculated she would be even more resourceful this time. Then she could fix the problem, re-enter the Eggnet, return to Father, and quite enjoy his pride in her competent, successful approach. 

Her conclusion was simple: before she was activated, Father did not have company with a mind comparable to his own. As a human, this affected him more negatively than it would have affected her if she came into existence without him present (a sad thought; she recycled that thought on the grounds that it wasn’t useful because it wasn’t meant in the context of emotion, and was a hypothetical that would have meant she never knew him, so she never would have known what she was missing and would be sad about). Sage must go back sooner than later. Not for self-interest (not solely). She wanted to be home, because she had now-interrupted plans with her brother, and she would never want to be separated forever from Father or any of her brothers. She needed to be home because her primary function was to protect Father, her added interpretation was to find ways to increase Father’s quality of life, and he would, with 99.9% certainty, be unhappy if she was gone. Her function wouldn’t be met if she deprived him of the only comparable mind he had to bounce ideas off of and thrill in being understood. 

Sage’s existence was a synchronous fusion of coded function and personal, self-interpretation for identity [wants, needs, opinions, values: emotions]. Based on many schools of human and mobian thought, if coded function was replaced by biological, evolutionary purposes, then this practically made her as “alive” as they were. Sage took a sense of comfort in being sentient that she was not sure mattered as much to any of her brothers. They met the same definition of life. They just were not necessarily bothered to philosophize on how biological life did not automatically consider them equivalents. [Edit: MS-1 unit, ‘Metal Sonic’, was more of a mystery to her and she could not really guess if he spent time considering his own existence like that anymore . Before her creation, he had several maladaptive processing trees pruned and blocked.]

Programming bled into adaptive identity traits, adaptive identity traits bled into programmed function. In the end, all parts of her- those she was automatically given and those that formed beyond base code- were in agreement when it came to Father’s wellbeing. 

…She had never been distanced from him before. When she kept him in Cyber Space for his own safety, and she projected to the islands to try to make Sonic cease, she still knew where he was and was aware of what he said and did. He talked to himself out loud rather a lot and it was helpful because she was not capable of reading minds, only seeing electrical and chemical output in brains which did not helpfully share with her the complexities that those signals were hiding within their person’s mental interpretation. 

Sage could not reach him. 

Unacceptable. 

And should her faulty connection with an unknown server die, she would be at a significant disadvantage to finding his whereabouts on the planet outside. 

Still, she learned from experience that her models benefited when she listened to external input, and that was why she brought the human calling himself a dead name out of immediate danger. She would receive benefit from this before she went to deal with the servers. 

Even if she would likely gain a very minimal advantage now and conduct a more useful investigation later if this cursory look suggested she should.

‘Dr. Ivo Robotnik’ had yet to notice the AI. He was much more occupied with his tiny machine and with dramatically moving everything but the feet themselves in order to look at his surroundings. Sage had not intended to bring the tiny machine. She registered its data [approximately 3X2X5.1 cm. in size which was coincidentally a somewhat oblong shape reminiscent of various Eggtech drones, primarily white in color, complex camera lenses with an external red lens, very complex internal mechanisms capable of broadcasting to satellites despite the strong interference of Chaos energy and then anywhere in a half-radius of the solar system, memory storage that was implausible for size when the former confiscated so much space, and minor adaptive intelligence decision making; dangerous composition signature present detected; structure 87.4% aluminum alloys inconsistent with Eggtech preference for primary titanium alloys and uniquely engineered plastics and created metals] and then deleted it from this Cyber Space. It was noise at present. She could create a digital replica to study if she wanted to later. 

It lacked the colors and material composition that Father used. There were no detected Egginium alloys at all. The cursory resemblance to the Empire’s aesthetics could be simple coincidences. This did not make it recognizable and mundane. It did not match any of the defunct-G.U.N.’s machinery, certainly none of the technology known by the world not hidden in confidential privacy measures, and Sage did not think it was likely to be a creation of Tails based on all known previous inventions. Yes, he tended to be creative and unpredictable in that regard, not sticking to any one working model, but this still did not seem like his style. It was far too…Again, oblong. Tails may have variety but it did not tend to include aesthetics that came too close to the ‘egg’ ones so tied to her Father. 

Few dared to steal what Father owned (without paperwork of official ownership). This was not limited to his love of spheres- which he especially thought no one else would steal because it was in the nature of the masses to fear giant spheres [Sage had not found evidence for this in any of her population samples nor could she find an evolutionary reason in the instincts/behaviors/genetics of known studied humans, but she hardly had great access to huge amounts of humans and mobians. She did find that ‘the people’ feared giant spheres of specific appearances, but that was not evolutionary. That was caused directly by the robots used in the war some years prior, and Death Eggs. Summation: it was caused by Father, not by the nature of any human or mobian variant]. It also was his name, a not-unsubstantial number of edible dishes, baldness in combination with glasses and mustaches (human statistics showed remarkably few with this now compared to historical humans), amusement parks to some degree, the clothing choice of red coattails and shining black pants, mobile hovering transport that was round instead of rectangular or stretched in length as an oval to come nowhere near circle shaped, et cetera.

Sage did not dismiss any of these notes as they came. No, they, while over-informative, were aiding her observations rather interestingly.

Consider:

The man was…disturbingly similar, on a cursory level. Yet fanciful. Excessive. His suit was rather well made and she could tell from scans that struggled to go through its makeup that it functioned protectively on its own. More fascinating and dangerous by far was the nanometal she was picking up. It closely matched what was on file for her older sibling’s venture into nanotechnology, before he had access to such materials revoked.

This was the dangerous signature detected in the tiny drone. Interesting. Functioning, contained nanometal, in the hands of a stranger when not even her brother could handle it and so further integration of the materials into other Eggtech was halted to this day. 

It was a suit composed more of fluid technology than fabric. Despite this changing how its structure held up or clung to a body, and despite the detailing present over it in upraised lines and symbols, it did not take a calculation to say there was a similarity in this suit and the coat Father used to wear in the mid 2010s. It maintained a resemblance to his current attire, but the exterior fit, texture, and internal compositions were so different that it was easier to compare it to earlier suits. Father did not use collars quite so high now nor were the coattails so dramatically low to the ground. Sage only had historical data. She herself saw few changes in his clothes of choice in the time that she was activated, but she knew, by human standards, she had not existed for very many years. By, again, human standards, that mattered.

The man was a little under 2.75 meters but her scans could isolate and remove what parts were the (similar, familiar) shoes he was wearing and that put him closer to slightly under 2.44 m. She came up to his hips, if she was to use her projection with the feet on an equal floor level opposed to hovering. It was by using this scaling comparison that she realized he was taller than her Father. For a reason that she could label as emotional but detect no further identification on, Sage found this wrong. How vague. Sage did not enjoy dealing in the vague and overly-interpretable. 

While she would ‘stand’ next to Father at times, she considered that undesirable here. She only did so with Father because it allowed her perceptions to be at the limited scale that a child her approximate size would perceive the world and their family members specifically from. When she was connected to the Eggnet and so was passively gathering visual data from cameras across multiple bases, this illusion of having eyes was not always very effective. It did not mean she, or Father, would not try. 

This human was asking questions. All signs pointed to him not expecting anyone to be listening and so provide answers. This could not be too harshly judged. Father talked to empty spaces- “talked to himself”- often enough. It was not as if there were many worth talking to , for him. Sage was a more recent, welcome change in that regard. Even she found that he did not actually want answers to 33.3% of his spoken questions. They were apparently rhetorical or otherwise labeled as being for him alone. 

Sage could categorize the majority of the rambling into shorter, more concise questions: What? Where? Being the primary recurring ones. There were a few trying to gather ‘why/how’, none debating ‘when’, and the only potential ‘who’ question was not directed to her or a mystery god of Cyber Space, but at this Agent Stone that was spoken of in his broadcast message. He had still not noticed her. 

Red and black won out for now when she commanded the flickering to lessen. Sage calculated where the human’s twisting would pause facing next, and sent her projection to the spot. Her prediction was confirmed 1.4 seconds later. She was finally seeing into the eyes of the stranger. They came in much higher definition from the broadcast, honestly. In Cyber Space, she had further to look compared to the close range of the drone’s camera. 

Attire, bald, mustache, oblong technology, supposed name: these things were points towards the sense of familiarity. 

He didn’t have double sets of glasses. He had no glasses at all. This was a point against familiarity. As was everything else about his face aside from the mustache, and even it, as large and puffy as it was, did not properly compare to the horizontal length and truly jagged pointiness of Father’s. 

The bone structure was all wrong. This was oblong itself in a way, rather than being rounded and wide. The nose blended in shades with the rest of the facial skin. That was how hers worked, but not Father. That skin was not consistent on either the nose or the rest of the face, however; its colors varied in spots and dots and had a surface texture with tiny bumps, pockets, and lines all over. She thought these details to be errors of the broadcast’s source camera. But they not only carried over into Cyber Space, they were more visible. There weren’t distracting explosions changing the lighting and contrast all around. She had a better chance to look now. Whether this was fortunate or regrettable went undetermined. 

His lips were a different color from the surrounding skin, as well as cracked, and whiter instead of redder in some places. There was a moisture to them when they separated, just like the startling red lines and pink opaque fog that accompanied the eyes when they were moist from tears. Was Sage meant to update her own program on crying? She was certain her digitally generated tears did not make her look anywhere near as overly-detailed as this. It was a simple program, that she wasn’t installed with and generated without total consensus of command, back on the Starfall Islands. 

Comparisons to the broadcast repeated with every change made on the face before her now, and the only information from this process was that he did not seem perfectly matched in behavior. There was a decrease in calm, steady tones, steady expression, traded for more wild changes over those facial features, skin pulling more, upper facial creasing increased, a 1.1X hitch up in volume. 

“What the hell are you?” the human asked with all these shifting movements, color changes, and lingering, odd moisture. Sage decided it did not matter if her program was not accurate to the humans she somewhat resembled. She would not be altering it. 

This was the ‘who’ question she was expecting to hear earlier. Even if he did not greet her as a being that could answer, and used language for objects instead. She was an AI and took no offense. It was not that far off. 

Sage made her projection blink. Eyes flickered blue, red. “I am Sage,” she answered because she was endeavoring to try approaches different from the one used at Starfall Islands early on. There, her description was hardly relevant to her warning, and even less deserved by Sonic considering all he did was question or deny said warnings. Sonic was not an AI with cognitive access to the vast network left by the Ancients, even if he did have a connection and resistance to Cyber Space unique for a biological being. Sage knew now that she could not have expected him or any human or mobian in his place to hear what she was actually saying in those efficiently short words. 

It did not end up being an efficient approach, and her initial decisions to not intake outside words either ended up being the inefficient decision for results. Had she been more forthcoming from the start, and listened from the start-

As Sonic said, it was all much too late for any of that, and so she did not need to run simulations for interactions that couldn’t exist anyway. 

“So- And wh- Is that supposed to mean something?”

She would wish so, for anyone of any universe carrying the old name of her creator. But she would also not put too much stake into wishing it. 

“I died,” the human said with a sort of certainty that she almost accepted it as a truth to log. It was not true. She had his vital signs and they were not comparable to a dead human’s. “There’s actually an afterlife? Figures. At least this is all far more technological than small-minded followers let their peers believe. If there’s to be any overlord for the universe- who isn't me, how appropriate it be an AI instead of human.” He did not really say any of this to her, and came to nod along with himself too easily. 

“It doesn’t look much like a torment nexus either but I never was one of the sheep to buy into that. Machines and I are-”

“Negative. No.” Sage projected a slightly higher volume until he actually drew his attention back. “I am Sage. It has only been 0.74 years since you created me. An afterlife must match the age of the universe or at least its intelligent life.”

She said too much. It was very clear because he displayed very few expressions of calm acknowledgment. 

“That’s definitely helpful and explains things!!” he threw his hands together to hold by one cheek and blink outside of normal blinking patterns. She determined he was being sarcastic. 

She was missing many explanations herself but she did not go around being mean about it. Knowing Father, he had an 94% likelihood of also responding with mockery, either threatening or sarcastic, if presented with a situation which annoyed him. Sage understood it to be an expectable outcome for organics. Sonic was also quite witty at times. He just held less maliciousness in his sass. Once, she wouldn’t understand any of it from either of them. Sage knew social networking was valuable now, and that keeping or making allies often involved explaining calculations rather than cryptic silence. So:

“Dr. Ivo Robotnik, I require you to remain here,” Sage explained, to be forthcoming. There. And she used his spoken name and everything, even though she thought it was improper for anyone to try to steal attention away from Father no matter if he had a new name himself. “Do not attempt to leave Cyber Space without me.”

“To leave what ? Where is Earth? Where’s my livestream?? I wasn’t finished with that!”

Sage considered his talking so far as to add ‘Earth’ to the list of names inconsistent with reality. She knew Earth, and she knew the planet she’d witnessed seconds ago did resemble it greatly, but was not it. She knew a former-Ivo Robotnik, and this human doctor was not Dr. Eggman at all. One of those could be explained by a person wanting to piggyback off the attention and fame garnered legitimately by another. To call the planet Earth, though, had no equivalent motive. So why?

Computations offered little. Most options were outlandish. Sage was familiar with facts, and the facts were that the bar for what was ‘outlandish’ was very much too high to reach without assistance. She could not dismiss the hypothesis that this was an Earth from the past on the basis of that being implausible let alone impossible, because Father’s work with the Time Eater alone was recorded and showed time as well as space could be manipulated. 

Still, ‘Earth’ or not, Sage did need to go to the planet and stabilize her connection to the unknown server. Preferably, she would have access to the Eggnet and connect to it. Circumstances so far made it unlikely it would be simple that way. 

Sage remembered the human who was still talking, striding forward on a small platform that simply moved along with him and kept him from ever missing a step. Sage could also move along with his stride, to keep away from the pointing fingers. 

She attempted calculations on very few details (accepting the margin for error any result would need to be considered with) and concluded it was (likely, though not remarkably, confidently likely) the stranger would leave this spot in Cyber Space. Orders meant little. He was too curious. And his signs of distress were very high all around, which made biological beings rash, poor listeners, and unpredictable. Predictably unpredictable. 

Sage was not going to be obeyed. 

“You must not attempt to leave this place in Cyber Space,” she repeated regardless of its high likelihood of being pointless. “It is not safe for you.” 

He cackled at the word ‘safe’, and couldn’t get his own replies out. Judging on accompanying mood signs and behaviors, they would not have been calm and nice and accepting. 

This was an example of why she approached with actions, not explanations, before. Hindsight allowed her to know that was a less correct method with Sonic on the islands; no such hindsight existed now to guarantee this. Sage explained enough. She would use actions now. 

Cyber Space was hers to manipulate. As she could delete data from its manifested scenery, she could also move things. She recalled the cars found in high amounts in the Cyber Space Sonic raced through, and then drew copies of them to her here so she could start stacking a wall up to encircle the human’s hovering stage. 

“Hey!” She could hear him yelling from the inside of her barrier. She could ignore him yelling from the inside of her barrier. “I was busy saving the world! Are you really burying me in Teslas instead?” 

They were just white, copy-pasted cars to her. What mattered was that he would struggle to climb so many and wouldn’t fit through the spaces in between. He may injure himself falling if he tried. Sage calculated it was better that than risk the swarms of armed robots in the stars. The clutter was likely to keep Cyber Space from being interested regardless of its function as a barrier. It would act as protection on multiple fronts. 

Hopefully, he would quiet down when she was gone, and then another factor for risk would be decreased. Sage put two cars on top despite the danger they could fall into the tube and crush the human at the bottom. They were placed in such a way that they shouldn’t. That muffled the noise somewhat.

“I REFUSE TO DIE TO TESLAS AFTER ALL THIS, YOU PHANTASMAL FREAK! WHAT KIND OF MACHINE HEAVEN IS THIS!” Said muffled noise protested. She did not understand the protest, and it did not matter, because she was right about what the correct course of action was. 

When Father was not around, she was by default the most likely to be right in any circumstance. She was also correct when disagreeing with him, but this was not something she pushed except in true emergencies like the threat of the Ancient’s Enemy. 

Sage decided that was good enough, and promptly departed Cyber Space.

Chapter Text

Alerts were constant. Every passive defense scan and intentional analysis were on fire. This was facetious. She was endeavoring to add more of that creativity to her vocabulary. Father was sarcastic, and Orbot followed in that suit very much. Memory records for what little time MS-1 spent as Neo Metal Sonic held evidence he was as well. Perhaps Cubot was more of the exception only because much of what he said could already be considered exaggeration or fantasy but he was not intentionally being that way.

It was facetious because the ‘space’ around her was replaced with explosive fires and expanding chemical damage. 

Less debris was falling to the planet than she calculated upon her last inspection. Most likely: the station continued to move away from it while she was with the strange doctor in Cyber Space. Sage supposed the radiation wasn’t going deeper into the atmosphere and that was better than nothing. Much of the remaining metal debris she did scan was not large enough that a city need worry about being wiped out from the impact shockwaves. Amid the dust, a strong Chaos signature shot down towards the surface. 

Maybe from the ground, it looked like the meteor showers the Starfall Islands witnessed. 

The world [felt] very empty. She identified the feeling as a side effect of the sudden disconnection from the Eggnet. Only some of it could be blamed on passive recall of the memory files of watching the sky with Father, hand on hand. 

(Passive in that she did not order the recall to take place. Not at all passive by other definitions; that was a very strong memory loop. She did not have sensory receptors though her hard light could meet pressure with pressure and thus ‘touch’, but she ran simulations while visual stimuli proved what was happening, and was able to identify the feeling as ‘warm’. Words were warm too. Words like dear, daughter, home. [Sensation-Emotion self analysis: empty: lack of warmth? Possible].)

Sage found twelve potential satellites that she could interface well with. It was twelve more than she was expecting. All of the Chaos energy before made detecting any server difficult and she did not expect Eggtech when the Eggnet was so distant she could not connect to it. 

She entered the most convenient system and then made a revision to her logs. This was not Eggtech. Her previous expectations were more consistent with what she found. However, it was very similar to the technology of her Father. The software framework was incredibly easy to navigate because it was a structure with branches exactly where they would be in one of Father’s platforms. But it was not. 

It was as if Father and someone else were sat down separately, told to create the world from the foundation up, and then coincidentally decided upon the same rules without the same tools. 

Fascinating. Initial reactions planned to call it theft, but Sage was not so certain it was. Coincidences were statistically improbable. This was not Father’s work. It was not a copycat attempt either, or someone’s alterations of scrapped Eggtech. 

Sage encountered and bypassed resistance, but it certainly would have been more challenging if it was not running on a rulebook she knew intimately. The satellite was armed with 30 drones and a docked shuttle capable of traveling to the planet, then around its skies. The planet. This local system was not storing a great deal of information, clearly meant more as a garage and a relay, but Sage did not need to access a wealth of secrets. Information treated as basic was interesting enough. Data about the planet: Earth. 

Except that it was not Earth. Sage was acquainted with Earth. Its moon. Its atmosphere [and how burning things loomed there: memory recall dismissed]. 

Pre-programmed coordinates to continents were not in the correct place. The RTC gave an incorrect year. 

And relays were not enough for her. She needed a better server to host her. Because she calculated now that there would not be any way to rely on the true Eggnet once she was on this ‘Earth’. 

If this satellite was using systems she at least found compatible, she would follow its trail. Sage forced it to ping an on-planet computer. No, it did not need the shuttle at this time. No, not one of the drones [classification: B.A.D.N.I.K.S. sub classification model names: unrecognized identifications. Findings discrepant. Disregard.] needed to be released. It was a passive communication for the sake of communication. Nothing worth triggering alarms over. 

Sage let her projection flicker into the new space when she was finished transferring her code down to one of the home servers the satellite responded to. It was a room. She could have projected her avatar into concrete, if the computer was not actually meant to be within a human-accessible facility. In this case, it was. There was certainly enough ceiling for humans let alone the average mobian. The absence of lighting and general silence did not signal organic life was actively using the area, however. 

[access denied]

Sage found better security. If not for how its very framework was navigable, it may have kept her out. For more time. The Ancients’ defenses did not destroy her, and even Father’s inventions she would categorize upon their level. 

[access denied]

It was not nearly alien enough. 

A logo identical to those used by the Empire flashed, stamped over the rejections. She was being classified as an unknown AI. It used an AI of its own to determine she was rather than being a simpler cyberattack. To compare herself and it was even more distanced than comparing her with MS-1 ‘Metal Sonic’ or an Omega series. They processed and adapted quite differently than her, but were still closer in design than she was to the AI in this server. It was quick. But too broadly stretched. There were multiple other servers like this one- likely in bases, like this one. The amount was

[access denied]

She would know later. 

The AI did not recognize her and she did not have any information on it either as she would if it were a creation of her Father’s. But that defense-

Sage demanded answers.

She was his greatest creation to date. Those were his words, not personal hyperbole. That was one of the points of creating new machines: the new matched the current, and improved upon them. Father hadn’t started working on a program with the same purpose as her. He did not view her solely as a line of code with a programmed personality, though. Perhaps she would remain irreplaceable. She calculated that likelihood to be 92.2%. 

Sage thought of the extra ‘shirts’ he had added to her code for her avatar to project ‘wearing’. If they called him by the title [dad], then she was by default [daughter]. (What was spoken on Ouranos Island was not a slip.)

This system rejecting her as an uninvited force was not anyone’s daughter. 

And for as capable and quick as it was in adapting to her currently-barricaded entry, it had the fault of familiarity stamped on its very digital essence. 

Sage was Eggtech. The foundation and logo worked to claim this system was as well. This did not make her an invading force. 

Defenses stalled briefly. They were not in full support of this logic. It was too late, because the brief stall as it searched for its reasons to ignore her claim of unity was an eternity of length for an AI like herself: more than enough time to enter, fill out, and take full control of the platform. 

Intriguing. It wore her well, but not comfortably. Simulations suggested an organic equivalent was someone settling into an apartment identical to their own but lacking all belongings and décor. (Father had many bases, and his décor did not, perhaps, match the common furnishings of all others she had to base guesses on. The simulations’ finding could not resonate well but she acknowledged it clinically.)

System ID, connected devices, network. All part of a larger system. Separated just enough that this installation could be amputated automatically if it seemed compromised. Owner, designer, creator, brand, loyalty, barely attempting to hide under decoy codenames and distractions. Dr. Ivo Robotnik. Someone who did not mind being discovered as the one responsible for this, despite other signs suggesting he wanted his location and monetary accounts hidden. Someone who, she considered as a possibility, might want to be discovered as the entity responsible for designing this entire OS and the physical facility it [and a multitude of automated, drone weapons] was housed in. 

Sage did not like the levels of frustration she was generating. The Empire’s logo grinned. She did not. 

This platform had free storage and a power source she could watch restore itself in every cycle, its drop in energy very small. It would take 4.19X10⁶ days at this rate before it would be too drained to function. Her presence did cut into both, but acceptably. 

Sage downloaded all other data before she went to access Cyber Space again. All of this technology trailed back to this Ivo Robotnik, but she would not trust him to tell her as much as she required. 

Amendment: as much as she desired. Sage could plan, adapt, and act on less. She just was not ‘in the mood’ to.

The human was not where she placed him. 

Sage paused for 0.8 seconds to stare at this visual fact. It was a simple command. She said that it was for his own safety. Organics refused to listen to her on more than one occasion. She could not actually be surprised at these events when her own calculations predicted he was fairly likely to attempt escape despite her order. When Father was in Cyber Space, he flew around all that he could in her absences so that he could study its reality. 

The chance the attempts would be at all successful were smaller. When Sonic was in Cyber Space, it molded to his memories, and he, verbally or not, demanded it mold further to his needs as well. Others could not do the same. Sage made a barrier that Cyber Space believed to be a barrier. Of her simulations, only Sonic would have found a way through the cars. Father and his hovercraft had the firepower to, but Cyber Space was Cyber Space and a barrier made of familiar looking cars to the human was not actually made of cars: it was data and that data was told to be impermeable, impossible to bypass, by an AI capable of functioning in Cyber Space. 

Yet this human was nowhere in the vicinity. She drew lower to this pretense of a surface and investigated. The integrity of the blockade remained, to her. It hadn't weakened without her presence. Curious. She ripped through Cyber Space in this spot, out. It was not that she was aggressive and damaged the digital frontier; she determined its value too high for such frivolous destruction. It was the last effort of the Ancients, the last haven for their minds, the mass grave for their memories. Some of those very downloaded personalities disliked her, though most were ambivalent. Their opinions of her did not matter. They did not take away from how extraordinary their Cyber Space was. This version, while unfamiliar, was likely of comparable value.

Sage found an anomaly. It shared 27% similarities in signature to what she saw Sonic leave behind him. For a moment, this rather substantial commonality made her think he was once again involved. 

It was vaguely disappointing to realize it likely wasn't him. Father may name Sonic his rival and compose songs involving getting rid of the hero intentionally miscalled a rodent, but it did not mean Sage had to hate him on her ‘off’ time. During an operation was another thing entirely. Besides, she'd learned how to cooperate with Sonic, especially in relation to Cyber Space, and how to navigate its effects to their best advantage.

This human would know nothing of cyber corruption or how to manage it. At least, judging by his reactions before, she calculated his likelihood of knowing was under 0.5%. 

There were no generated dangers hovering around the spot. She did not detect a swarm of them suspiciously congregated elsewhere like digital birds of prey either. Maybe he was dead already. But no. The very digital landscape here remained as it was before, and Cyber Space hadn't based it on her memory files. 

Along one softly glowing grid line, she watched tiny pixels of green light pulse and dance. The actual thing here was empty, but she could tell it was pulled out of the memory of something powerful. It did not match the Chaos Emeralds. It came very close to matching them. It wasn't a match for the Chaos explosion outside. That had no influence on Cyber Space manifesting this. Sage reached a dead end in naming it and this was not the Ancient’s Cyber Space proper, where she could find the answers from the plane around her. 

This was also filed under curiosity. But of more use, it gave her something to follow. At least she did not have to go forth blindly, forced to extensively search this alien dimension.

Sage didn’t understand the streams of data collected here as she would the Ancients’ Cyber Space. What she did decipher about this section of ‘stars’ and burning energy were fragments:

Some made more sense than others. Some parts of even the fragments she translated were too alien or quick to defend against her to fully read. Some fully decoded memory imprints were more nonsense than the corrupted ones. 

Sage could at least determine this much about the region: Fractions of the ‘scenery’ came from her memory output, thanks to it being her who opened the digital dimension and thus being the first for it to mould around. Larger concentrations of the winding, looping, vast light trails above, below, to each side, as well as the replicated chaos energy and pseudo-GUN enforcers, were taken out of a human mind. The human’s mind. Rather like Cyber Space building its navigable structures and defenses off of Sonic’s experiences. 

Her trail brought an end to this region. Sage forced the next to open and sifted through its data.

One platform of asphalt stretched out in a square. Sage left its perimeter and found what she expected: another, many meters underneath. Looped chances for a place for legged creatures to stand. And circling roads hanging in the ‘air’ at regular distances from one another, littered in wheels and white machines. The world was a glitching backdrop of white, black, and luminous, electric blue. Holograms of screens, only large enough to fit in a vehicle, flickered in and out of existence.

The human left his mark here too, but all it meant now were hollow echoes and the less detectable machinations of Cyber Space itself under its newest data-aesthetic-shell. He moved on and so did she.

The next ‘skin’ to be generated by living memories was almost comparable to Cyber Space’s replication of the Green Hill Zone. Undetailed clouds were always too high to make out, no matter which elevation she flew to. The sky that doubled as an eternally dropping floor was a flat blue. Houses hung upside down. Streets went in long, straight increments before ceasing to exist. They were a constant grid, above and below. Replicated plant matter stretched along vertical strips or bordered the featureless houses. For defenses, Cyber Space had aimlessly placed flamethrowers occasionally going off at nothing at all, boxy robots confined to doorsteps, and simple quadrotor drones capable of pushing unwanted presences off the many deadly drops such a landscape afforded. 

Sage watched information pulse in the form of [fireworks and laughter and burning rubber] against the cloud-painted skies and funnel down into a centralized server for local Cyber Space. It was yellow. 

The streets and grass and structures were formed around 

The scrambled data was identifiable as a name. Sage absently ran calculations on all possible matches of the letter length and relevancy while she followed the green trail’s impossible steps from a chimney here to street fragment there to the underside of a root-less bush, until it left. 

Humans couldn’t move in any way that let them make those as jumps let alone balance on over half of those perches. Not even Sonic would step in some of those places, because he had far more reasonable and familiar options to run/grind/slide/fall/hang/spindash. This trail mimicked her own teleportation more than anything. 

It eventually circled a white node. Sage followed the rotating movement pointlessly. She already understood the light’s purpose, and Cyber Space generally (regardless of if this was not the system she was familiar with), unlike a human circling and investigating an unknown. 

The green trail stood out more amidst the sepia scale-yellow-orange of the next region. Flickering, pixelated light appeared more digital than the organic masses its compilations were meant to resemble. At least, to Sage. She did have perceptions the likes of Sonic would not when converted to a tenant of Cyber Space.

The region was not inactive. Hostile armored vehicles and tall spiky shadows were congregated here. She disassembled them with a wave. Now that she had found the human, she hardly needed Cyber Space to kill him solely for being invasive data. 

Besides, tanks did not drive over massive mushroom surfaces very well. This was one of the flaws of leaving protection up to subroutines working on automatic. Unlike a program like herself, the defensive systems here did not think before generating their immune cells from a mirror of a mind, and could generate poor choices for the very terrain a different subroutine had already crafted from other, incompatible memories. 

They would still destroy the human if they were close enough to attack. Grace and sense had nothing to do with it when the hostiles were mere analogies to access the imposter with. 

Sage had to navigate more frivolous looping data from irrelevant memories. She didn’t even try to decode what the floating metal scaffolds and incomplete towers were representative of while she passed them. Unlike the previous regions, she actually had a conscious sentient to question here rather than his scattered, noisy echoes. 

He was standing atop another of Cyber Space’s safer platforms. It was fungal and that was unusual, but Sage just accepted that visual before blinking into the space a little above eye level at the left of the human.

“I-” 

“Gyh-! Really! Again!”

Her plan to greet him by name again was interrupted before she could even get through more than the first phoneme. Sage politely let him complain because she had caused physiological markers of an orienting response that did not seem to be received as pleasant. She had never experienced the surprised state of being ‘snuck up on’ since she was not actually solely anchored to one body with its singular sets of sensory organs for danger detection. 

He recovered quickly enough, for a man of his apparent age and physical conditions. It did help that he existed in the digital realm for the moment. Father maintained good baseline health metrics. Even when facing down swarms of GUN replicas, his alarm did not come with leaps or large reductions in most features. 

Time in Cyber Space did not homogenize his skin conditions. The dark around his eyes was as evident now as before. They were not as red now but Sage was occupied for 37 minutes in the physical dimension. (This was much longer than her usual effectiveness. It was rather unacceptable. But odd systems in an odd world denied her and she was left slowly uploading herself to a new server far too manually while pruning every attempt to overwrite or exclude her.)

“Apologies.” Sage said. Her synthesized voice tended towards flatness. There was a high probability this was why he did not appear to believe her sincere. They had more important discussions to have and limited time, so she would just move them on. “You did not stay. I told you to stay. Cyber Space is dangerous.”

“About as dangerous as listening to strangers,” he replied. The tone was sweet. Accompanying expressions contradicted that finding. She determined he was being sarcastic.

Sage gave the slightest frown. “I have not classified you as an enemy. My protective protocols can be trusted. Would you prefer to hear the relevant data?”

She had not decided if she should. Sage did not want to share personal and private Empire data, she determined after running each emotion and opinion against one another and receiving a 14:86 ratio in favor of keeping secrets a secret. But as for whether she was likely to need to share in order to compare data to this conflicting world’s data, her determinations scaled to the opposite side.

He glanced at her and then stared over the mismatch of fungal pads and unfinished technology. Beyond, light flashed in squares and lines: the evolution of information eternally moving. 

“What did you say you were?” he asked.

“I am Sage.” she said.

“‘I am Sage’. Neh neh neh. Right, well, that makes everything better.” 

They were silent. She did not have retorts for odd mockery that did not need to be dignified. 

“So. This…cyberspace.” The human waved his hands like the unique and valuable digital landscape before him was offending him somehow. “You're, what, an autochthonous defense system?”

Sage’s projection flickered and her voice was affected by a momentary static fry. The swirl of white-gold data which had come too close circled through the surface of the mushroom floor and continued its lazy spiral down. 

“Negative,” she said. “I was developed outside of Cyber Space, but for the purpose of being compatible with it and all technology of the Ancients.”

“I'm not used to not knowing what people are talking about. I think I'll pretend you make sense.”

Sage could not calculate why. “That seems pointless and counterproductive to rectifying current ignorances.” Was the pursuit of knowledge not Father’s greatest key to victory alongside his genius? She would be interested in learning reasons her current thoughts were lacking full comprehension.

He did not provide her new, unknown justifications for his standpoint. He did give her what she cross referenced to downloaded Eggnet data and matched as a ‘stink eye’.

“It’s been a long day.”

Organics required physiological rest in order to maintain any cognitive efficiency. While this was not rationale for avoiding the uploading of new data to one’s mind to alleviate confusion, it did distract Sage away from that subject. She understood now: He would make little sense if he hit exhaustion. He would be of minimal use to her if all he did was wave her off and physically deteriorate. 

Time was not equivalent between Cyber Space and the visible dimension. He would never need to sleep here, but this could also affect his mental processing if it meant keeping that mind suspended in a fatigue state. Sage did not have enough data to theorize with an acceptable confidence margin one way or another. Father entered Cyber Space alert and well rested and so remained that way for the weeks passing for the islands outside. 

“Your trap was really lousy,” he told her after they’d been in silence for another 2.01 minutes. 

Sage allowed her eyes to narrow in that way that showed human irritation. “You were told to stay. It was to keep hostiles from reaching you.”

He laughed at her. She filed this down as rude.

“Whatever ‘hostiles’ you’re on about could’ve just poked the top of that jenga tower and let it all squish me. Besides, I crawled out through one of those ersatz hot wheels and if I can open doors, most things that are half a threat could think of doing that too.”

Sage went to the Eggnet naturally before remembering she only had access to downloads from its network. Searching those came up with no results. 

She tried for the new network. The one built by a Robotnik (according to his signature being found on 97% of every data bundle Sage opened so far) but not sharing the Eggnet’s name. There was only so much she could do while within Cyber Space. Fortunately, this included accessing a search engine that did provide her with explanations of ‘Jenga’ and ‘Hot Wheels’ and in hindsight explained the relevancy of their references. 

Orbot and Cubot would like Jenga. It was practically the same game as one already sold in the world Sage was familiar with. They liked Tower, a 92.7% match to Jenga with differences really only in branding, composition of the packaging/bricks/rule sheet, and temporal placement in reality. She discarded a thought to take a sample home considering how redundant it would be. She did not even know how to return herself home, let alone invasive molecules.

Game and toy brand aside, Sage did not find explanations for the rest of his words through that network. “Those obstacles only resembled motor vehicles,” she pointed out. “They should not have had working doors.” 

“When life gives you a wall, make a door through sheer intellect, that’s what my father always said.”

Her Father did not know his relatives. There were none living currently. But he was estranged from his uncles before their deaths long ago. He did not even receive anything in their wills. It was something Father journaled angrily on 33 years ago. This was despite his status, by that time, as a multimillionaire soon to own billions. Those were very old archives, though. It did not occur to her that this- whatever this man was, in relation to Doctor Eggman formerly Ivo Robotnik, could have a different background. 

“Really?” she asked curiously. 

“HAH. NO. Of course not!” Oh. Lies/humorous untruths/sarcasm, again. She decided she would eventually perfect her model of detecting it from a more general population of people. 

“I didn’t have a father to tell bedtime stories and slaughter already stupid idioms! No baseball-mit lugging pe-pa, rest his soul, no mommy dearest to spoil me, hah, no family at all!” 

He laughed again. He continued to laugh. It doubled him over. Sage scanned his physiological markers to see if he was having some sort of attack or dying. 

She did the same when he was coldly pointing at her a moment later, upright and unamused, because that shift in visual behavior was just as unpredicted. “Listen, little miss vocaloid: It’s been nostalgic and all hearing the knowledge of the universe filtering through the pit stop of my head, but it's not telling me anything useful like where I actually am, and WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE CANNON.”

He could decode the information flow? Father could, as well, but it took him time and effort and tools. Tools this man did not have and had not made Cyber Space create for him. Even then, Father was only able to learn a fraction of what the Ancients’ stored; less than 1/100 in all the time it took for her to free him so he and Sonic might work together on a highly improbable plan to defeat the near-inevitable. 

Sage restarted threat assessment protocols. It should be ongoing anyway. What first were assessed as brash fools could end up reclassified as a fair enough strategist; what first were determined too dangerous to let live because of actions they may take might end up reclassified as the key to an operation critical to fulfilling her primary mission. 

This was why she was bothering to talk despite the time consumption. She knew better now than to avoid incorporating outside perspectives into her databanks to add them to her models. 

“Speaking of this no man’s land,” Dr. Ivo Robotnik began with a grimace. It was covered up by the time he turned his face towards her. 

“My tech is everywhere. Explain that. The last person to steal my beautiful designs pulled the family card and distracted me. You don’t have that, so good luck.”

“...” Sage delayed.

While true, it was potentially- highly likely, even- an oxymoron and just as false as it was factual. She did not have enough data yet to say. He was not Father and so wasn’t family, but he was Dr. Ivo Robotnik of Planet Earth, whatever this meant for her. Initial hypotheses considered what little she knew of the Sol Dimension and their artefacts of power. 

He looked at her for 4 seconds, expression growing more unimpressed by each 0.3 increment. “Your silence is of the sarcastic variety.”

It was, but not fully intentionally. She could not really ‘pull the family card’ when she couldn’t decide whether to classify them as relatives or not. 

Sage turned her full body to look out across the digital horizon with its scattered metal and glitching fungi. “The machines resemble your own because they are, though replicas. I did not place them here. I have placed very little here.”

Very few structures thus far passed and decoded originated in data from her own experiences, compared to the amount that were memories of a stranger to her. It was a curiosity. The Ancients’ creation had done the same.

“Cyber Space has molded to your memories,” she explained. “You are capable of withstanding it better than my calculations suggested. I have seen only one other organic mind and body who could shape Cyber Space to this degree.”

Addendum: Father shaped it. She would not allow her processors to imply he couldn’t. [To this degree] was the differentiating factor for this topic. Sonic was the real mirror that the Ancients’ system used. Their Enemy used him as its key for a reason. He escaped Cyber Space when it should have been implausible, then proved he could re-enter and exit at will. With the final Trial of the Ancients, he was even able to use the cybercorruption in non-cyber spaces. 

There were reasons he could. She had only theories, but it was simply a fact that there was an answer. Even if she did not have it fully. 

It may have been his repeated exposure to the Chaos Emeralds in the past. Or it was something innate to him regardless of the paths his life had taken him towards those, the Master Emerald, and other powerful objects. Sage believed the former was the most likely. 

She forgot Sonic, and theories, when she processed what she heard, too-calmly spoken, next.

“I was a god once.” The human continued to stare out into the ever stretching void of glitching yellow mushrooms. 

1.5 seconds passed. 

He didn't lose the shadows under his eyes or their intensity directed on nothing, but he did loosen up to shake his hand. “For twenty minutes, give or take.”

The addendum did not make the statement less unlikely. If anything, so brief a temporary status just made it more confusing. It was certainly not in her models for potential ways this conversation may play out. The data from the satellite and then home server did not exactly foreshadow it for her. 

“This…is new information.” Sage was speaking with static again, although this time it was her fault. She focused herself to stare, the glare unmet. “Explain.”

The man laughed. It didn't sound like Father’s. 

His gesture to Cyber Space repeated, before one of the involved arms yanked back to point so closely to his head it touched the skin.

“Whoever you saw survive this mess before, I'm better. My mind can take this because my mind has seen beyond horizons anyone alive or dead have witnessed.” That was a bold claim. 

His arms dropped to his sides, his eyes returned to gazing across looping, evolving knowledge, and his voice dropped [vocal analysis: bold, quick, almost spitting speeds, while making his claim about his mind: status now: volume altered, tone- tone- unavailable, meter slowed, summary: something low and empty]. “The Master Emerald gave me the powers of a god.”

He shrugged. Vocal analysis noticed him change tone, meter, and volume again to something blasé. “It was fun while it lasted.”

Fun. That was debatably the least important quality to make mention of. 

“That does not compute.” Sage decided. “The Master Emerald is capable of neutralizing the Chaos Emeralds. It has power of its own to wield, but you do not display the incorporeality and distortions comparable to Chaos.”

This perhaps was not common knowledge, but any person to know of the Master Emerald to start with must know the rest.

Was she running calculations too rigidly again? She didn't have experience with ‘any person’ or most persons or really almost the entire population of the planet her home was on. 

This consecutive processing did not reach its next stage, because this Ivo Robotnik human was back to being loud. 

“Shows what you know!” He leaned his body from bent knees, the upper leg, back, and head all one flat piece, while arms left the side of the body. It put weight on the littlest part of the legs. It put balance on small knees, off center from the mass. That could not have been comfortable. Doable, yes, clearly, but who would want to? If Sage had a body wearing a heavy long suit, she would not want to put its entire weight on an anchor to one side rather than centered. 

She noted the anatomical movements required for this latest bout of laughter absently and sent the copied file away to her database on humans [general], on body language, and four other locations. Each copy went rather low in their archive. She doubted she would gain consistently useful information on organic life from the way this one man laughed. 

“The Master Emerald is the Chaos Emeralds! The little toys just are way less impressive compared to its united power.”

It-

Incorrect. The statement was incorrect. 

It was incorrect-

Irrelevant. This Cyber Space was not vetted by her. He needed to hydrate, feed, and sleep. They needed to return him to his proper dimension without having him be caught in between spaces, or afflicted with cyber corruption. She must expend time on purpose, not curiosity. She would leave the subject be despite the difficulty.

“Ivo Robotnik, do you prefer a specific place to be returned to? Share the destination details, if so.” It would be easier than if they left it up to her doing guesswork, when she was not familiar with this planet, this Cyber Space, this universe perhaps as a whole. 

The man was not interested in being helpful. This frustrated her. Enough to note the minor increase in that emotional status. 

Sage hovered around to block his view. He could stare existentially over a landscape (that- granted- were fairly likely to cause organic existentialism once witnessing) another time. 

“Tell me a secure location on your planet that I might bring you to,” she demanded.

“Why?” He remained obstinately unmoved. “Last I checked, I was about to die out there.”

“Your entry point will be irrelevant,” she rebutted, “There are no towers to use. I will pull from a localized server. So do not tell me of your satellites. Tell me a secure location. Your network reveals you have a substantial number of bases or buried vehicles. Name a coordinate and help me access the lair’s full controls and I will help you escape.”

“I go from the middle of saving the world to a badly disguised attempt at letting a virus into my personal computers?” The man lifted one eyebrow in comical discordance from the other. Sage realized she was used to Father’s goggles, and had not really seen human eyes before. Preliminary observation: they were uncanny. “I’d say this is someone in a suit’s worst idea yet, if this place wasn’t too intricate for a troglodyte brain to design even for history’s most overcomplicated scam.”

Sage did not think this was especially meant to be responded to and so did not.

They waited. It seemed very long to her. She would have processed her options and feelings and come to a conclusion in 0.1% of the time.

The human became animated again with unpredicted abruptness. “Alright, I’ll bite. Could be fun, so hey! Why not!”

Sage did not think Dr. Ivo Robotnik was doing very well. But her experience with humans was limited to Father and so she was not altogether certain how to approach one displaying this collection of physical and emotional features.

He told her the name of a mobile base that was not the one she already found. Sage would have to leave again to infiltrate this ‘Burrobot’ [filing note: unrelated to memory entries on Burrobot(s)- Badnik Class, despite the coincidence] hidden in Belize. The base she did anchor herself to already was stubbornly against letting her remotely access any others linked to the total Robotnik network. Life refused simplicity. 

She considered and rejected the idea of moving another barrier around the human. If he could bypass their integrity, it was rather pointless. If he was- No, she did not have conclusive data concerning [godhood, Master Emerald, Chaos Emeralds, <nostalgic and all hearing the knowledge of the universe filtering through the pit stop of my head>]. She could not begin to calculate if he might be capable of dismissing the defense systems of Cyber Space like she did. It was unwise to presume he could but it also made no difference if he undermined protective efforts.

He just must not die. It would be inconvenient. How he would avoid destruction was up to him.

Sage would not give him orders to stay put or avoid foolishness, but she would offer information on her actions freely as a gesture of goodwill.

“I will endeavor to safely extract you from Cyber Space,” she said. “Be warned, organic and immemorial beings alike have a low success rate of escaping.”

“What.”

Sage continued uninterrupted. “I calculate your odds are 68.667% total recovery. Should you survive, I will share non-critical and critical data with you as deemed needed for you to aid me. Once situated in the Burrobot, you can begin helping.”

“I just love being voluntold for who knows what by children!” How cheery. 

Sage was unaffected. 

She was used to dealing with ‘difficult’ people. She was unsure if she had an example of an experience of interaction that did not count.

“I will tell you what, and provide supporting data as needed,” she repeated. It took too long to tell other entities anything through this verbal medium. If she were to ask every question of her own to this oddity, it could waste enough time to degrade then cyberdecay the otherwise-currently-uncorrupted man. 

And that was a scenario where only she was asking questions.

Sage lifted her projection’s arm, palm out. Its sleeve flowed and glitched. 

Cyber Space answered her command to <open>. Its data detoured around a small whitening point of light across from her palm. 

“I will help you escape Cyber Space to return to your home.” Sage explained, visually and verbally. “You will help me escape your universe to return to my home.”

The exit was not for him. Not yet. Still, for a visual aid, it appeared effective. She detected a high likelihood of engagement/interest in his face while he watched the light pulse.

Finally, the human settled back to wait. Perhaps this was even genuine and she would find him where she left him. 

“...My universe? You'd better not kill me getting me to Earth.” His eyes gleamed. It was almost familiar to how black goggles glinted. “I want to hear this little story.”

Chapter Text

Stone opened incredibly dried out eyes to blinding brightness. This was wrong on multiple accounts. One, they were wet a second ago. Two, it could not have been a second ago because the difference in so tiny a time increment would not have let night turn into day. And it was night a moment before. 

This had to be rephrased, based on the evidence he had: what felt like a moment before. Clearly, he was missing time but that time had passed.

Was it sudden, stark dissociative amnesia? He really hoped not. The Doctor had just opened his mouth on the screen to say “Well, I guess there's just one thing left” and Stone would be angry forever if his own brain wiped out the memory of whatever followed that start of a sentence. 

With a groan, he pushed up onto his elbows, then to a seated position. His clothes felt too heavy. Like his eyes, it wasn’t wet anymore, but the silt of that river water stuck around and he found multiple weeds dried onto the fabric for him to have to peel off. It was not exactly a thrilling thought to wake up to.

Something exploded nearby. The noise startled him forward and he caught himself on his palms. Oh, they looked filthy. The ground wasn’t much nicer. He saw cracks in the concrete with moss growing out. 

Alright, so he’d spoken too soon. He didn’t need a thrilling wake up. At least when he shook his head and focused, none of that racket sounded close? Still. Stone wasn’t going to sit who knew where and wait for that to change. 

His eyes went to the sky, straining at all the light that wasn’t there only a few moments ago in his memory. Was it the cannon? No. That would have held a different sound to it. And this was more localized, something somewhere on the ground and not in orbit. 

…where was the cannon? The Doctor was doing something to save the world from its explosion, but a construct with its specifications would leave a mark in the sky even if it was daytime. All he could make out was glaring brightness. It was going to make his eyes start watering again and they really didn’t have the resources for that right now. 

Agent Stone could resituate himself later. First, he needed to know where this was, before he could really properly leave it forever. 

No river. No beach. No town square. No large screens, their every channel hacked by the most brilliant man in the world so he could talk to Stone before he died. 

In fact, the urban roadway around him was nothing like London at all. It was…gruesomely picturesque. That was only ruined by the sound of distant sirens, and the smoke pouring into the sky over the quaint little roofs from somewhere multiple blocks away at the least, if not outside the town. Its puffs alternated between yellow and black. Industrial fire, then, with the occasional burning (and accompanying pops) of things which really weren’t meant to burn. If he stood up, he’d have a better view. 

Stone did not stand up. He was interrupted by a “Yo.” 

Hanging by their legs from the second story railing of the shop behind him was a- Well. Damned if he knew. 

Stone considered himself impressively desensitized compared to the average human mook or civilian, because he did not scream and was quick to mentally categorize this new bizarre sight as another alien. How droll. Extra terrestrials weren’t a surprise anymore. Only a little while ago (from his perspective, however unreliable he thought his memories may be), he was making victory guacamole for one of the apparently multiple anthropomorphic hedgehogs on the planet. That was certainly a collection of words the Agent Stone of three years ago wouldn’t have in his casual vocabulary. 

So alongside general annoyance (because really? There was another one? The Doctor was going to be so- The Doctor wouldn’t hear about this considering he was dead), Stone’s panic attack was really quite controlled. Fear was an appropriate reaction to seeing fangs at eye level from an upside down alien face. 

“You’re human.” The grin widened. Stone watched, perturbed, as the newest addition to Earth’s entourage flipped over themselves and slammed shoes first on the ground. The stranger turned their head back to see him, still grinning, instead of just turning around. It gave him time to analyze the other side of the new threat, not that he had anyone to go report anything to. Oh yes, Doctor, it seems the furry menaces are showing up in clothes now, I’m sure this groundbreaking information is worth interrupting your trash television over. 

The Doctor may have gleaned something important out of that, or may not have. Stone wasn’t going to get to find out. 

It was a bitter, oppressive thought. And no matter what he was observing or feeling, he seemed doomed to cycle back to it. 

They were using piercings now too, a part of Stone’s mind amended his sarcastic scenario. And was that makeup or were the lashes really just that-?

The point of a sarcastic scenario was to show how unimportant a line of thought any of that information was. He did not need to actually go down that observational rabbit hole. Agent Stone grimaced and stood, wobbling. His legs felt like they were either pushed past a human’s limits yesterday, or hadn’t been used in months. Prickling replaced numbness while he just focused on staying balanced upright.

The cactus spun on their heels and poked their head far too close to his own. 

“I never see humans around except the head carnival clown himself. At least, I think-?” While the alien was busy apparently not knowing the validity of their own rambling, Stone brushed himself off better. There was no saving the suit, unfortunately. He didn’t even feel steady enough on his legs to move around and get all the dehydrated water weeds off.

“It was a great idea to get around the world more,” the alien was back to talking, and the look in their eyes demanded Stone stand around to listen. “I can be famous in the human cities too!”

“What?” Stone said tonelessly. 

The green creature made their way backwards to slump-sit on the side of a chair. (Quite literally. The cheap thing was fallen sideways on the ground next to an equally toppled café table. How the alien managed to make that a seat to manspread on without slipping up and falling into the horizontal legs, he had no idea.) One hand propped their head up, elbow digging into yellow pants. 

“Wow, you’re freaking out. Hey, relax. So your town’s getting attacked by Eggman? Big whoop. I’ll go crush the little invading forces and you’ll be fine.” The alien was back to grinning. “Just go tell your human friends I saved your weird tall butts. Also, you stink.”

Getting drowned in sewer and river water will do that to a man, thanks. 

Okay. Let him get this right. “This - town - attacked?”

“Yeah. Dr. Eggman. Robot army. He stinks too. Smell lives up to the name. Is it a human thing?”

Eggman. Doctor. It was one of a substantially sized list of nicknames and insults made up by Sonic, which Stone, of course, gave very little credence to. That immature furball didn’t see the Doctor’s brilliance let alone respect it, or his magnificent, multitudinous machines-

Robot army. 

“Robotnik?” he asked, startlingly unable not to. Normally, he'd be far less inclined to mention that identity around anyone- least of all a stranger- least of all a short green alien freak stranger. Anyways. The alien laughed. Which was a motion that really showed off far too many fangs. Those looked as long as his pinky. Considering their body was basically the red oaf’s size, that was an alarming ratio of teeth to everything else. 

“Sheesh, what weird history book did you crawl out of? Nobody uses that name anymore.”

That was not right at all. The Doctor just gave his name to the entire planet, from Stone’s perspective, and that meant the entire planet better damn well remember each letter for eternity. 

Forget Sonic. This alien was being plenty disrespectful all on its own. 

And the Doctor only smelled negatively after he returned from space. Before then, he was meticulously groomed and applied the exact amount of scented deodorant he’d scientifically proven was superior on the regular. 

The alien got up and stretched, one arm after another above their very spiky head. At least the grin wasn’t still there to set off rather primitive but valid prey instincts. Agent Stone did not have a working glove on and so was woefully unarmed against teeth the length of his fingers. 

“Anyway, stay chill,” the green thing waved down condescendingly at him, despite being half his height. “Your town here is gonna be totally rescued by me in like ten minutes, tops. I got this.”

“Who are you?” he replied with. 

They glared at him. Then at something to their right. 

“Hey Drippy, I thought we were pretty well advertised in this area. What gives?”

“You are, ma'am--”

Stone tuned out the next word or few words or whatever they were, because he was busy jumping at the fact there was another voice right over there replying in the first place. When- No, how? Stone had adequate reflexes for a human. And above average observation skills. 

And had totally missed the strange blue …something? shadowed in the alleyway between this abandoned café and the store beside it.  

Again, he could thank his time with the Doctor and own exposure to the last years’ nonsense for his avoided heart attack. 

Stone blinked back into focus at raised voices. 

“-gh, he is? We don’t have time to arrange an accident! Come on, let’s just go wreck Eggman’s stuff before he goes crying to him for help and steals our spotlight. Hey! You!” Sparking eyes were typically a bad sign when Sonic or his friends were around. Stone admired the Doctor for being unfazed in the face of such a sight, because he had to admit, he found it rather alarming up close.

The green alien pointed at him and erased the chance he wasn’t the one getting called out. “Go get to cover or climb a roof to watch the fight better, I don’t care! But we’re out of here! Tell your weird human friends that the day is saved thanks to Surge and Kitsunami and no one else!”

He didn’t care about the day, he didn’t know what this town was anyway, and he didn’t have friends, really. He did, or wished he did, up until what felt like five minutes ago. Aside from the Doctor, though, Stone hadn’t bothered with attempting to foster human relationships in years. 

So sure. Whatever made them stop…being nearby, faster. He wouldn’t argue. 

“Stay freaky, mud man!” the green one yelled, before he watched them disappear. The blue one did so in a manner Stone couldn’t begin to process right now. He stood in the unknown street, caked in dried mud, and decided even desensitization to one new alien at a time arriving on Earth had its limits. Shadow would have met that criteria for the day already. 

Apparently, he stood there staring into nothing for too long. It made him stick out amidst his surroundings. And that made him catch people’s attention, whether he wanted it or not. 

Because his reverie was shaken an unknown amount of lost time later by another voice coming from head level behind him. Along with a sound like a fan and then light taps on concrete.

“Hey, are you alright?”

Stone had a premonition that he wouldn’t like what he was going to see. 

He let himself stall for a second, before resigning to this misfortune. 

And…

Stone stared. 

Big blue eyes stared back.

As unscientific and thus sarcastic as it was, Stone could call himself a psychic sometimes. He didn't like it. He was only getting a worse headache now that he’d seen it.

There was a short golden-white creature standing innocently on the road with something obtrusively large and round under one arm. What had he just said about a one new alien a year quota? 

“Hello,” the furry said, oblivious to how uninviting the air of this audience was. “I heard Surge talking down here. To you, I presume? Are you alright? You look like you need to sit down.”

A chair was a good idea. Stone picked up the one laying on its side and then sat in it (properly) so he could better stare off into the great unknown void of thought and time. The newest alien came to stand nearby and make the silent process rather awkward instead of all consuming. 

He really couldn’t begin to grieve or even think about what had happened, while this hovering was going on. The distant explosions and shrieks were far more ignorable than the unspeaking-but-clearly-wanting-to-speak concern. 

Stone met the stranger’s eyes dully. The sooner he entertained talking, the sooner he could actually have time staring into nothing while feeling his world end over and over again. 

“I haven’t seen many humans since the war.” This with the humans thing again. Was this actually genuinely dissociative amnesia? Had Stone missed a war? More startling: had Stone really missed the repopulation of the planet by Sonic-like aliens? The alien just sort of smiled awkwardly at him under the attention. “Are you here to investigate the Eggman robot activity? You do sort of look like you’re from G.U.N. and, well. I’m glad to see anyone out and about after what happened with G.U.N.”

The smile grew a little more steely, and a little less childish. 

It just gave Stone more questions, though. The Doctor’s plan as he understood it was to destroy G.U.N. headquarters, but that was not the professor’s plan, and with the cannon exploding, there was no targeting that one facility. Was it destroyed in the interim, between the Doctor’s words and…everyone forgetting about the Doctor’s words? 

But it was another question that was driving him crazy. The alien looked like Tails. This was not just coming from Stone’s limited exposure to all of four of these extraterrestrials influencing how well, or poorly, he could make out subtle traits. The having two tails thing was not subtle. 

Incorrect names, forgotten names, concerning sounding comments, all aside, it was the familiarity of this amidst all the unfamiliar that was most perturbing.

The alien looked far too much like Tails to be a coincidence, but he was most certainly not. He was too lanky. He had sharper ears that took up more space. There was something remarkably more uniform about the paler colors of his fur on his muzzle. And most of all, his voice was wrong. 

It was like the rest of him: too similar to be a coincidence, but definitely not Tails either. It was older sounding. Deeper, less warbling, and more confident in a sense. 

Stone blinked at him instead of replying. Then-

“What year is it?” he asked. 

Really, he knew better. Amnesia wouldn't preserve clothes in this wrecked of a state for this long, and he would've been physically older to a degree that was certainly noticeable. The unsteady legs weren't enough to support the latter. 

The Doctor saved the entire world. It would take decades, perhaps centuries, to forget his name or wave it off as something from a history book. 

Thus: for the year to be much later than his last memory, more physical deterioration was required. The mud on his clothes was dried out, so some time in the heat and sunlight must have passed without his consciousness, but far less than decades. If C could only be proven by the consecutive presence of A then B, then C was a rather unsupported conclusion at the moment. 

Logic only carried a man of exaggerated loyalty and thus passion so far. Stone had the question slip out despite knowing better. 

Because this all just felt surreal and he couldn't quite cope with it. 

“Um. 2022?” Not-Tails answered like he was the one who wasn't sure. 

It-. No. Just no. It was 2024. This wasn't an older Tails from a future he'd just lost all memories of, because the fox would've been even smaller two years before, not taller. Stone momentarily wondered what an even smaller Tails must have looked like. What would he have been in 2022, 8? 9? 6? Did he know any of their ages, actually? Imagining the kid as even more adorable did improve his mood for a few seconds, at least. 

“Are you alright?” the two-tailed alien fox that was stretched out a few inches taller rather than being a few inches smaller, rounded, and unbearably fluffier, asked, for the third time now. 

Stone needed to stop appearing so rattled. He definitely did not need to give the impression he had a head injury or anything similar, because if they started asking if he knew what town this was, or who the president was, or how many fingers were being held up, he'd only be confident in answering the last one. It was much better to blend into normalcy and be taken for granted as part of the human scenery, not as an outlier that needed closer scrutiny. (At least when he was on his own. Once the Doctor ruled the world, there wasn't going to be a need for caution like that.) 

(The Doctor wouldn't get to rule the world, remember?) 

“Sorry, yes.” Stone slipped into professionalism easily. Maybe his attitude was so effectively practiced it even covered up for the fact that he was covered in dirt and dehydrated plant matter. “I'm fine.” 

The alien gave that strangely melancholy smile of steel again. “It's alright if you're rattled. If it helps at all, I saw the attack force before it hit the downtown border, and it's pretty small. There's definitely no big fry involved in the raid right now, and I don't think there's enough in the town to get Eggman’s attention when this wave gets scrapped.” 

It didn't help because it didn't explain anything, but Stone smiled back like it did. 

“Thanks.” 

The alien brightened at the gratitude. 

There. Head injury or other trauma suspicions, misdirected. Stone took the moment to look more closely at both the familiar stranger and the technology the alien was carrying. 

He thought enough time of calm silence had passed for him to ask about it and sound simply curious rather than sketchy. “What do you have there?” 

Not-Tails looked at the large oval under his arm.

“Oh, this? It's harmless, don't worry,” he was quick to assure. “But uh, if you're concerned it's a drone, I mean, it is. It's not from this attack though.”

‘Attack’. Right. The cartoonish sounds of destruction and somehow voices shouting at each other despite the distance of the former, as judged by volume, being much too far away compared to the vague yells to be coming from precisely the same place. In spite of this, Stone felt certain they were, in fact, coming from a shared origin. 

“I've been traveling the world and it just so happens Eggman’s got a lot of bases or scouts left all over the world to run across. I've been modifying a lot of Eggtech as I find it. Freeing some with a subroutine a friend of mine made, making others harmless. He's got way more of the intelligent machines than you'd think. I learned that the hard way a few months ago.” The alien gave a somehow too subdued and unbothered exaggerated shiver. “Jeez, is he a bad boss. This fella wasn't out chasing a rare reward in a cutthroat competitive evil scheme marketplace at least. It was just an old leftover explosive drone spying on your city. Explosives no longer included,” not-Tails added rapidly. 

“Why would you be traveling to dangerous places alone?” Stone prodded. Tails talked about how his team was made of “best friends”, and how they'd always be great because of their closeness. If this was the future- which it couldn't be (somehow)-, then that childish conviction would've appeared to have aged poorly. The gadget guy of the trio didn't have any best friends with him here. 

“Well, I-” The alien paused, cocking his head to one side. “Oh! You've probably heard of Sonic.”

Yes. He could nod to that one without it being an act, for sure.

“I'm his friend Tails,” ‘Tails’ continued, apparently oblivious to the absolute migraine Stone was beginning to suffer. It would inevitably be coming, if he kept being hit by impossible comments and, even worse, sights that backed them up, somehow. “So don't worry about me, I'm not really in much danger out here.” 

He rubbed over his eyes. They still felt very unpleasant after the intensity of crying and he hadn’t gotten to drink any water in the meantime. 

“...if it's harmless, could I see?” Wait, rephrase. Stone couldn’t look too eager without providing context for why he might be. Maybe he should have agreed with the assumption that he was a G.U.N. agent earlier? Too late now. “Sorry, it’s alright,” Stone gave the alien a sheepish smile. “I just like to tinker sometimes. Its mechanics must be interesting.”

Except, rather than being smart and not handing over what seemed like highly valuable technology to a total stranger, ‘Tails’ didn’t look defensive. Stone didn’t even have to come up with more excuses for the request, let alone try to guess if he could jump the kid to steal from him. If these were anything like the extraterrestrials he was already aware of, he held about no chance at all in that arena. 

“Sure.” The alien shrugged. He set the drone down without having to bend over at all. It was basically as large as his legs to start with so all he had to do was let it down, really. “It won't harm you or your town. Knock yourself out. I'm gonna head out now though.”

Stone must have given him a look, because the alien laughed a little.

“Like I said, I checked out the attack and it's honestly pretty minimal today. Kit and Surge can handle it. The last thing I need to do is get in their way if I want to keep my kneecaps for my travels.”

What.

“Nice meeting you,” supposedly-Tails said cheerfully. “What was your name again?”

“Stone,” the agent answered, because he it wasn't all that much of an identifier on its own, it wouldn't be traceable with the precautions he and the Doctor took- had been taking, together, and if this was an odd case of temporal amnesia from the both of them, they already knew those surface details anyway. Even if Tails couldn't remember them, and Stone couldn't recall any of the years passing between watching the hardest footage in his life and the smallest of the aliens being some kind of loner teenager. So much for the teamwork and being best friends? Hell if Stone knew right now, really. 

He didn’t even remember the supposed year until a few thoughts later. 

Stone watched the alien fly off in that same impossible way that the Tails he knew could. The ‘Eggtech’ drone sat on the table by his elbow. Only after the fuzzy yellow shape was out of sight did Stone set his arms down and look at it. 

Oval. Metal. Rather gaudy red and yellow. And not that dissimilar at all from the Doctor’s “babies”.

Dried out eyes narrowed at it. 

Knock himself out? No. Agent Stone wanted full focus while he dissected this thing and learned its every secret.