Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The hedgehog's heart was in the wrong place. 

Doctor Starline pressed his hands against the patient’s midsection, an inch below his ribcage, and felt the pulse of a beating heart against his fingertips. A quiet gasp escaped his throat. Hedgehog hearts were meant to be higher in their chests, behind the breast plate . . . why was this one so low? 

Of course, there was always a chance that he was misremembering hedgehog anatomy. There weren’t many hedgehogs around Starline’s home on Victoria Island. It was his first time ever treating one. However, he’d made sure to check his Mobian animal-type reference book prior to the consultation. He was fairly certain it said hedgehog hearts were in a different location. Either his memory was failing him, or this was a very weird hedgehog. 

He continued his inspection of the patient’s body, looking for injuries that would explain his unconscious state. Despite his best efforts, he found nothing. The black-and-red hedgehog appeared to be perfectly healthy. 

“You said a fishing boat found him on a garbage patch, correct? Was he unconscious the whole time?” The question was directed to Doctor Niran, the man actually responsible for the hedgehog’s care. Starline’s specialty was in Mobian medicine, which meant that he was often called for consults whenever the other doctors at the hospital were given a patient whose anatomy they knew nothing about. All medical schools devoted lessons to Mobian medicine, but the species varied so widely across animal-types that most doctors only bothered to study the most common ones in their areas. Like Starline, Doctor Niran had likely never seen a hedgehog in his life. Starline was simply considered more equipped to look at the patient because he exclusively worked on Mobian medical cases. 

Doctor Niran didn’t answer him. Confused, Starline looked over his shoulder to discover that Niran wasn’t standing where he was a few minutes ago. He wasn’t even in the room anymore. Now, this wasn’t entirely abnormal—Starline was known for getting fixated on his work to the point that his surroundings faded away entirely. But it was definitely strange for a patient’s primary doctor to leave mid-consult, and Niran was known for doing everything by the book. Only an emergency could have pulled him away. 

Starline rounded the bed and opened the door to peek into the hallway. There were other cases he needed to work on. If Niran wasn’t nearby to help, he would have no choice but to leave and explain later. He didn’t have time to sit around and wait for him to get back. 

The first thing he noticed in the hallway was the blood. It was smeared across the linoleum floors, seemingly spread around by human-sized footprints. Bloody handprints on the walls were equally large. And down the hall—

His heart jumped to his throat. Bodies were littered around the reception area, a pile of scrubs, hospital gowns, and lab coats alike. He stepped out of the room slowly, approaching the reception desk as quietly as he could in fear that the one responsible for the massacre was still around. He checked each room in the hallway as he made his way to the end, noting a common scene among them: the sheets were thrown off the beds, drip bags and equipment in disarray, and their doors wide open. Only one patient was still in their bed—a kangaroo whom Starline had sedated while treating their burn wounds just yesterday. The significance of the patient’s species did not occur to him until he reached the reception area and took in the depth of the scene there. 

Every dead body was human. He found Doctor Niran among the bodies, killed by a hard blow to the side of his head. His breaths became shallow as he checked out the other bodies, hoping to ascertain what kind of weapon was used in this massacre. What he found confused and terrified him. The deaths were primarily caused by blunt force trauma. Some were caused by gashes across the throat or chests. In the hands of the victims were scalpels, saws, trays, and other heavy objects that could be used to bludgeon someone to death. 

The variety of wounds revealed that there was no sole perpetrator. They had all fought each other to the bloody end. 

Movement under the reception desk caught his attention. He peered below, where he found himself locking eyes with a wombat nurse backed against a filing cabinet. The wombat flinched at the eye contact and put her head in her hands. 

“I don’t know what happened,” she whispered, words muffled by her gloves. “They just started attacking each other out of the blue. I hid down here. I don’t know if they forgot about me, or just decided to leave me alone, or . . .” 

The nurse broke down into tears. Starline watched as a growing feeling of dread settled into his bones.

“Were you the only Mobian working here?” he asked. With a sob, the wombat nodded and curled up tighter against the cabinet. 

Starline swallowed nervously. Okay. For an unknown reason, all humans in the hospital had stopped what they were doing and slaughtered one another until no one remained. Mobians were unaffected. Why?

“Stay here. I’m going to look for other survivors.” 

He exited the reception area and returned to the main corridor. As he walked down the hall, he heard a voice call out from down the hallway. It was loud and commanding. As Starline got closer, he realized it was coming from the hedgehog’s room. 

Inside, he found the hedgehog sitting upright in his bed. He beckoned for Starline to come closer. 

“Robotnik told me all about you when I was in space. I thought the other one was an outlier, but I guess you’re all the same.” The hedgehog titled his head to the side, looking Starline up-and-down with a curious expression. “You look like some kind of scientist. Tell me: why can’t I join your mind?”

The words were like a lightning rod to the heart. They formed a claw that reached back through time, tearing through layers of disappointments and resignations to pierce the skin of a version of himself that he’d buried long ago. They dragged him forward and cracked the egg of his future wide open, flattening trails that he’d once deemed too difficult to travel. The hedgehog shrunk Starline’s world until it was small enough to crush in his hands.

He cradled the globe gently, feeling its oceans and mountains press against his webbed fingers. Then he applied pressure.

“That’s funny,” Starline said. His voice was barely a whisper. “I knew a Robotnik once, too.” 

Sonic was sick often.

It happened at random; sudden, brief illnesses that wracked his body and typically left within a day’s time. They most commonly manifested as headaches and nausea, but he was sometimes prone to chills and feverish symptoms as well. He dreaded the fevers more than anything else—they tended to last a bit longer, knocking him off his feet for days at a time. Since there was nothing he hated more than staying still, finding himself bedridden with a fever was always a nightmarish experience for him. 

There was no definite cause for his condition. The only time he’d seen a doctor about it was when he was fourteen, after a three day-long spell of nausea made Amy so nervous that she consulted the resistance’s medic against his will. The medic had asked him a few questions about his past, felt his stomach and listened to his heart, and then expressed her professional opinion: Sonic wasn’t sick, just extremely anxious. 

Psychosomatic was the term she’d used. Apparently, his brain was sick enough that it was making his body feel sick, too. It didn’t make a lot of sense to him. During Eggman’s occupation of the East Pacific islands, he’d never felt scared—only very, very angry. 

Her diagnosis especially didn’t make sense now, a whole year after he’d found Tails on Cocoa Island and learned the truth behind Eggman’s success. The little fox had single-handedly purged every potential source of stress from the world, freeing not just the two of them but every other animal on the planet, too. There was nothing left for Sonic to fear. 

And yet, here he was, sitting as still as he could in the Chao Garden as he tried not to throw up his breakfast. He’d come up here to help Knuckles with the Chao. Instead, he could do nothing but watch his friend do all the work while he struggled to survive wave after wave of debilitating nausea. 

Grass prickled the undersides of his legs as he watched the last few Chao climb out of the pool and gather with the others beside Knuckles’ cart. Its wooden compartment was filled with the various shapes and colours of the unique fruit that grew around Angel Island. The Chao weren’t very good at foraging for themselves, so Knuckles put aside some time every few days to pick fruit from tree branches too high for the little creatures to reach and made sure they had enough food to go around. It seemed like the echidna did a lot to take care of the Chao. Sonic liked to help out whenever he visited, but today he’d fallen too sick to even get off the ground. It was embarrassing, and he felt bad for Knuckles, who usually used Sonic’s presence as an excuse to take a break from his duties. He hadn’t been able to do that today and it was Sonic’s fault. 

Well, not really his fault. He didn’t want to be sick—it just happened sometimes. There was no point in fighting it. He couldn’t control when it struck him or how long it stuck around. All he could do was wait for it to pass. 

It didn’t take long to distribute the fruit amongst the Chao. A couple of them finished their pieces quickly and tried to climb up the side of the cart for more, which only made Knuckles shout at them angrily before he gently grabbed them and placed them down on the grass. The Chao didn’t seem very upset about the scolding—if anything, they seemed to find it funny, letting out mischievous giggles like they’d been trying to make Knuckles mad on purpose. Sonic couldn’t blame them. Knuckles was a very fun animal to annoy. 

Once all the Chao finally calmed down, Knuckles stepped over their small bodies and made his way over to Sonic. He sat beside him without saying a word, content to observe the Chao eat and play in silence. Sonic glanced over to his friend curiously, where he watched him fiddle unconsciously with the bracelet Amy had given him last year. It looked kind of heavy. He wondered if it was comfortable to wear. 

“Does it bother you?” Sonic asked. 

Knuckles followed his gaze to his wrist. He blinked in surprise and then responded, “No. It used to, before I understood what it meant. The fox never explained his plan to me. Amy helped me understand when she gave me the bracelet, and now . . . I don’t like it, but I’ll do it if I have to.” 

It was strange to hear uncertainty in the echidna’s voice, but Sonic could understand his hesitation. Knuckles had spent his whole life protecting the Master Emerald. Thanks to Tails’ deterrence, he was now expected to destroy it at a moment’s notice. No wonder he was so conflicted. 

“It probably won’t ever happen,” Sonic said, although he doubted it would do much to make Knuckles feel better. Amy and Tails had likely already told him the same thing. Still, repeating it to himself helped Sonic when he thought about things too much—maybe it would help Knuckles, too. 

The echidna scoffed. “You’re pathetic. If you want to worry about me, you can do it when you’re not about to puke all over the garden.”

The comment made Sonic want to shrink away in embarrassment. He brought up his knees and pressed his face into them, waiting for the feeling to pass. Why couldn’t this episode just end already? All this sitting around was making him miserable. There were better things he could be doing right now, and he was sure the same was true for Knuckles, who probably hadn’t planned on babysitting a sick person all morning. It wasn’t fair for either of them. 

“You don't have to sit here with me,” Sonic mumbled into his leg fur. “It should go away soon. I’ll be fine.” 

He heard Knuckles shift in place, but it didn’t seem like he was leaving. Sonic risked a glance from the corner of his eye. Knuckles was leaning back on his paws, more relaxed than he’d been before. It looked like he was in no rush to go anywhere. 

“The Chao used to live everywhere. Now, these are the only ones left,” Knuckles said slowly. His words halted Sonic’s spiral of guilt in place and piqued his curiosity. Where was Knuckles going with this? “It makes sense. They’re resilient, but also difficult to keep alive. I almost killed them many times while learning to take care of them on my own. They are sensitive to changes in their water. If anything is wrong with the pool here, they get really sick. Even little things can set them off. One time, they started falling ill because a frog had laid eggs in the water. They only got better when I moved the eggs to a pond on the other side of the island. I used to be really confused about how they managed to survive in the wild. If some frog eggs were enough to kill them, how could they make it on their own in nature? But now, I think I understand. Do you know how they did it?”

Sonic didn’t know much about the Chao, so he was intrigued to learn about Knuckles’ discovery. He turned his head to look at his friend, resting his cheek against one of his knees as he continued to hug them against his chest. “No, I don’t. Tell me.” 

“They survived because they were never alone. No matter where they lived, there were always animals like us around to help them. When the planet changed, we couldn’t take care of them anymore. That’s why they nearly went extinct.” Loss was a common thread in stories about the past. Sonic had become numb to it all years ago—there were only so many times he could hear something upsetting before he got tired of feeling that way all the time. Knuckles did not appear to share his feelings. He gestured to the garden around them with a proud smile. “There were only a dozen Chao here when I was younger. In a decade, their numbers have reached around sixty. They’re repopulating. If they continue at this rate, I may need to find them a bigger garden soon. Or move some of them to the islands with you. I could teach the villagers how to take care of them again, and maybe even plant seeds for the fruit trees the Chao like so much in their farms. What do you think? Could it work?”

It sounded nice, but Sonic couldn’t quite figure out Knuckles’ underlying intention here. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I was just thinking about it. The Chao only survived because I was here to take care of their environment. Sometimes, maybe that’s all you need to get better. The right conditions.”

Sonic bit the inside of his cheek. “What if those don’t exist anymore?”

Knuckles hummed and narrowed his eyes in thought. “The world is always changing, so maybe what you're trying to heal back to doesn't exist anymore. If that’s true, then your only option is to bring what you know into the new world and find a way to make it work for you. Healing always moves forward, which means you can’t heal against change. You can only heal into it. Otherwise, you’ll just get stuck.” 

Stuck. Was Sonic stuck? 

Sure, maybe he was stuck in place right now. Nausea had a tendency to do that to you. Metaphorically, though . . . he wasn’t sure why he would be stuck. Or why Knuckles seemed to think he was. He didn’t hate change. And he wasn’t sure what exactly he was meant to be healing from. 

The conversation was a rare show of tenderness from Knuckles. And still, it angered him. Did Knuckles really see him this way? Did he think he was this broken—so fragile that he had to beat around the bush when he tried to comfort him? 

The more he thought about it, the worse his indignation became. Sonic pushed his face back into his knees so Knuckles couldn’t see his expression. “I’m not stuck,” he growled.

Thankfully, Knuckles didn’t contest his point. He didn’t say anything at all. The two of them fell into a strange silence, one that made Sonic wonder why Knuckles wasn’t pushing back. The two of them used to argue all the time. If Knuckles was choosing not to engage, then he must have thought that Sonic couldn’t be reasoned with. Like he was too irrational to even listen.

That was fine. Sonic had never been much of a rational animal, anyways. 

He hugged his knees a little tighter against his chest, and then settled in to ride out the rest of his sickness in silence. 

By midday, Sonic recovered enough to return to the surface. He flew the Tornado to South Island, touching down on the worn out landing strip whose cracks and potholes rustled his landing gear. The nearby plane hangar had been repurposed into a storage shed, so he parked the plane on some grass nearby and secured a tarp over the cockpit in case a storm rolled through. The sky was clear and it certainly didn’t feel like it was going to rain, but there was a danger in assuming that sort of thing. The world was a very weird and random place. Who was he to predict its future?

A short dash away from the landing strip was Eggman’s decommissioned launchpad. During his race to the ARK, the Doctor had left behind a lot of advanced equipment around this part of South Island. It was now a hub of activity, busy with Restoration personnel who were in charge of dismantling the equipment and finding a way to share it equitably to the other islands. Sonic helped out whenever they needed him, but there wasn’t all that much for him to do around here. Taking apart rocket technology didn’t require super speed. He mostly just wound up running whatever errands Amy assigned him.

“Hey, Sonic!” 

Speaking of which . . .  Sonic looked over to the direction of the voice, where he found Amy waving at him from the entrance to one of the many Restoration tents around the launchpad. He smiled and zipped over to stand beside her. 

“Hi, Amy,” he said with a small wave. “Long time no see!”

Amy rolled her eyes at him fondly. “I saw you two days ago.”

“Two days can be a long time.” Based on her appearance, it seemed like Amy had been sleeping better than the last time he’d seen her. “Are the villagers still keeping you up all night?”

Amy lived in an apartment in Metropolis Zone, so she was staying in a nearby village while she helped with the launchpad. The villagers shared a few big cabins together that were organized by sleep-types. Unfortunately for Amy, the only cabin with space for her had been the one designated for nocturnal animals, which meant that her roommates were wide awake whenever she was trying to sleep. The arrangement had resulted in many sleepless nights since she moved to the island a couple months ago.

“I slept on the ground in here last night.” She gestured to the canvas tent behind her. “I stole one of the village’s blankets to cover the grass I was laying on, so I guess I’ll have to return it when I’m done. Do you think they’ll be mad?”

The question perplexed him. “Why would they be mad? Did they need it for something?”

Amy frowned. “I don’t think so . . .” 

“Then I’m sure it’s fine,” he said with a shrug. 

“Okay, cool. Thanks.” Suddenly, Amy’s entire demeanour changed. She crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a pointed look. “Sonic, where is your cell phone?”

Uh oh. If she was asking, then she must have been trying to reach him while he was on Angel Island. “In the Tornado,” he replied. 

“When was the last time you bothered to charge it?”

Sonic grimaced at her frustrated tone. He lost his charger a few weeks ago, when he’d let someone use it and then forgot to pick it up again afterwards. It was probably still plugged into Spiral Hill’s ring-powered generator. Whoops. 

Looking back, the phone itself had disappeared in the past few days, too. He was pretty sure it had slipped below the Tornado’s pilot seat somewhere, but he couldn’t be bothered to look for it. Why would he? The phone’s battery had been dead for nearly a month. Even if he found it, it wasn’t like he would be able to use it, anyways. 

Amy didn’t need to know any of this. It would probably just make her want to tear her quills out. “I think I last charged it a week ago,” Sonic lied. 

The pink hedgehog groaned and ran a paw down her face. “Sonic, I gave you that phone for a reason. What if there was an emergency?”

Sonic glanced around the launchpad nervously, looking for signs of disaster. “Was there an emergency?”

“Ugh. No. Well, not really.” Amy gestured east, towards the rest of South Island. “Tails hasn’t come over to help in a few days. He swore he’s fine over the phone, but I don’t believe him. I’m too busy organizing stuff here to spend a whole day walking there and back. Can you go check on him?”

On the surface, it wasn’t strange for Tails to occasionally disappear for a few days at a time. He liked to spend time on his own here and there, which was something Sonic could relate to as well. However, it was a little weird for him to do it now, when the Restoration was taking apart Eggman Empire infrastructure. Tails always stuck around when the empire was involved. Just like the animals who’d been hurt by Eggman’s schemes, Tails also needed to watch the remnants of his empire fall—for closure, or maybe even something like vindication.

So why wasn’t he here now?

“Do you need him for anything?” Sonic asked. Tails would want to know if there was a technical problem that needed fixing. 

“No. I just want to make sure he’s okay.” 

There was a worried expression in Amy’s eyes. Hoping to ease her concern, Sonic pressed a paw against his forehead in a mock salute and stepped back. “Aye, aye. I’ll report back in a bit.”

Sonic took off from the launchpad, picking up as much speed as he could before he reached the other side of the island. South Island wasn’t very big, so he only got to run for a few seconds before the workshop came into view and he had to dig his heels into the dirt to slow down. He skidded to a stop beside the workshop’s small fruit and vegetable garden, where he could sometimes find Tails when he was at home. He wasn’t there.

On a normal day, Sonic would look for Tails elsewhere on the island. Usually, the beach was a safe bet—it was a short walk from the workshop, so Tails liked to spend time there as well. Unlike Sonic, he was comfortable with swimming and enjoyed floating in the calm waves on sunny days when the water wasn’t too cold. If the weather was shabby, he could also be found on the beach building all kinds of structures out of the sand. He never wore gloves when he played in the sand. Sometimes, Sonic caught him feeling the sand between his tender pads, completely entranced as though it were his first time holding the grain in his paws. Or like he was afraid that every day on the beach would be his last.

Sonic didn’t bother to check the beach today. From where he stood in the grass, he could make out the sound of someone speaking from inside the workshop. Was Tails talking to someone? He knew that Cream called often to ask for help with her schoolwork, so maybe he’d just been busy the past few days because he was helping her with a big problem. Although, Sonic didn’t think Cream was old enough to receive such rigorous homework yet . . .

Not that he would know. Sonic had tried school exactly one time and never went back. Ugh, talk about mental torture.

The workshop didn’t have a door. Tails had insisted on keeping the entrance open when they built his workshop together, but had faced a dilemma when South Island’s many nocturnal snakes, spiders, and annoying bugs kept getting into his home while he was asleep. As a compromise, Tails decided to secure a mesh curtain over the wooden door frame that he could remove during the daytime. He typically took it down as soon as he woke up. Today, the mesh was still attached when Sonic pushed it aside to enter the workshop in the early afternoon. Weird.

Inside, he was greeted with another strange sight: between Sonic’s visits, Tails had rearranged his furniture.

 The desk was now on the other side of the workshop, where it was currently sandwiched between two bookcases. Those were turned so their backs were no longer against the wall, each one hugging either side of the desk to create a box-like formation. The setup resembled one of those office cubicles he’d seen in human movies and television shows. Tails was seated at his desk, working on something Sonic couldn’t see from the doorway.

He didn’t understand the new setup. The bookcases especially didn’t make sense—there was no reason for them to be closer to the desk. Tails had built them in anticipation of amassing a collection of science books, but there weren’t many books in circulation these days so his shelves mostly sat empty. It would be that way until the United Federation allowed the islands to import goods again. Other than to create an intentionally suffocating work environment, what purpose did it serve Tails to keep his meagre book collection close by?

Suddenly, the sound of crackling static erupted from the desk. “. . . survivor of the Canberra hospital massacre . . . humanity at risk. . .” 

The cadence of English words didn’t surprise him. Despite Amy’s improvement to near fluency in Mobian, Tails still communicated with her almost exclusively in English. Sonic was used to hearing the language spoken around him. However, the voice was not one he recognised, and it made him curious.

Sonic walked over to the desk and stopped behind Tails’ chair. “Hey, buddy!” He put a paw on the fox’s shoulder and leaned over to peek at what he was doing. “What’cha working on?”

Tails was writing diligently in a graph notebook. There was a small radio on the corner of the desk, which was now spitting out nothing more than garbled static. Tails put down his pencil with a groan and reached forward to fiddle with the radio’s antenna.

“Hi, Sonic. I’m, uh . . . I don’t know how to explain it. Mostly, I’m trying to listen to the news, but the reception here sucks.” He rotated the antenna slowly. When it hit a specific angle, words broke through the radio’s speaker again. Some kind of advertisement was playing. Tails bit his lip and held up the radio to Sonic. “Can you hold the antenna in place? I can’t concentrate on what they’re saying and keep it in place at the same time.”

Sonic took the radio in his paws, careful to keep the antenna in the correct location. “Since when did you listen to the news?”

“Since Vanilla called to tell me about something weird on the other side of the world. I think they found Shadow a few days ago. I’m trying to get more information, but radio stations from the United Federation don’t reach South Island very well. We’re too far away.” The advertisement ended and stern, human voices took over the program. Tails put a finger over his snout. “Sorry, no more talking right now. I need to listen.” 

“The city of Canberra remains on lockdown as officials investigate a sudden outbreak of violence that resulted in hundreds of deaths four days ago. The epicentre appears to be a hospital in the east end of the city, where survivors forced to quarantine inside describe the scene as being the result of a ‘human mind virus’. That’s right—only humans were affected by whatever happened there. Mobians were completely unharmed. What do you think happened?”

Another host on the radio show cut in. “You know what I find interesting? Outside the hospital, the only deaths were from a group of fishermen. All of them were out that morning on the same boat. Now, one of the fishermen survived, and I think it’s worth noting that he lives outside the city. The mind virus is clearly constrained by distance.” 

Tails made a weird expression. “Mind virus . . .?”

The first host spoke again. “On that point, I think you should listen to the fisherman’s testimony. He said his group rescued an unconscious hedgehog from a garbage patch near their fishing site on the way home. They dropped him off at the hospital just hours before all the humans killed each other. Clearly, this hedgehog—” 

The radio program was disrupted by a flat tone. It continued for a minute, then the station began to play a traffic report. Before Sonic could worry that he’d changed the channel by accident, Tails took the radio back and turned it off. 

“Well, that pretty much confirms it.” Tails’ voice was distant, almost hesitant. Like he didn’t want to continue his line of thought. “The United Federation is censoring reports about Shadow. My window of opportunity is closing.” 

Sonic gave Tails a desperate look. "What did they say? I didn't understand it all."

Quickly, Tails translated what the radio hosts had been saying into Mobian. He then continued his train of thought. “I’m one of the only people on the planet with access to Gerald’s transmission logs. If those got out, the world would punish the United Federation for letting Gerald send radio signals into space. I wanted to use them as a bargaining tool, but that would mean . . .” Tails gestured to his desk’s cubicle-like setup. “I thought replicating the environment would jog my memory, but I still can’t remember the exact numbers. I have no other choice.” 

The fox pushed back his chair and stood up. When he turned to face Sonic, there was a strange spark in his eye that he’d never seen before. 

“I need to go back to Northstar Island. Will you come with me?”

Floral Forest Village was clearly not the destination Tails had in mind. There was only one other location on Northstar that held any significance to him, but the idea of letting Tails return there filled Sonic with dread.

“Yeah. Why?” Sonic said. It wasn’t a necessary question. Of course, Tails would want company on this specific quest.

Tails took a deep breath. “Because I can’t go back there alone,” he said. One of his paws brushed Sonic’s own, like he was on the verge of holding it for support. Then he stepped away and made for the door. “Come on, we need to prep the Tornado. We don’t have much time.”

Sonic struggled to ignore a developing headache as he followed Tails deeper into the woods. He worried that it would get worse than it was now, an annoying ache in his skull that he could tolerate as long as he shielded his eyes from the sun. Sometimes, he got headaches that felt like something was crushing half his head. They made him dizzy and he was usually forced to find somewhere dark to hide until the pain went away. Tails needed him to be present right now. He really hoped this headache didn’t turn into one of those. 

“We’re here,” Tails announced. Sonic looked around in confusion. Where was the entrance?

Tails grabbed a handful of branches from a bush in front of him. Carelessly, as though it weighed nothing at all, he tossed it over his shoulder. The shrub landed near Sonic’s feet. He noticed a shiny gloss to its leaves—a plastic plant?

A wooden trap door rested in the place the bush used to be. It was locked shut with a combination lock that Tails tackled with no hesitation. Weird. If this was Tails’ first time returning to the burrow since his escape, why did he know the code to the lock? 

“Who put that there?” Sonic asked. Eggman only ever used electronic locks, so it couldn’t have been him. 

“Rouge.”

It had been a while since Sonic last heard about her. “I thought she didn’t work for G.U.N. anymore.”

“She doesn’t. She did this for me,” Tails replied. The lock popped open. Tails removed it from the latch and set it down on the nearby grass. He put his paw over the latch and then . . . did nothing. 

A moment passed with no progress. The puffiness of Tails’ tails told Sonic everything he needed to know: the fox was too scared to complete the final step on his own. 

Sonic kneeled beside him. Gently, he pulled his paw away from the latch and replaced it with his own. “Let me do it,” Sonic said softly. Then he undid the latch and pushed open the door. 

They were greeted by a hole with no end in sight. Now that the door was open, he could see that a thick rope was wrapped around the frame of the trap door. Immediately understanding what it was for, he unwrapped it and tied one of the ends to the door frame using a strong knot he’d learned in the resistance. The other end was dropped unceremoniously into the abyss. 

“It’s twenty metres deep,” Tails said. He took the rope and pressed it into Sonic’s paw. “You go first. I’ll follow.” 

Sonic gave his friend a once over. His fur stood on end and his ears were pressed against the side of his head. It had been Tails’ idea to come here, but was it really a good idea for him to go inside? He was clearly terrified. 

“I can go alone,” Sonic offered. “Just tell me what you need. I’ll find it.” 

Tails shook his head. “No, I want to go. Just not alone.” 

Ah. In order for Tails to feel safe going down there, Sonic had to be the first to arrive and the last to leave. There could be no opportunity for the fox to find himself alone in the bunker again. 

It didn’t reassure Sonic very much, but he knew better than to disagree with Tails right now. If the kit wound up being too scared to go, then he could just stay on top and guide Sonic with his voice. There was no way to know how this was going to go until Sonic did what he was told and entered the burrow. 

“Okay. By the way, I don’t need this.” He passed the rope back to Tails with a forced smile. “Twenty metres won’t hurt me. I have strong ankles.” 

Sonic sat over the edge, dangling his legs in the hole. Then he pushed off with his paws and dropped into the burrow. 

His shoes hit metal after a few seconds of falling. The impact rattled his brain a little, sending a fresh wave of pain over his skull. He winced in pain as he  crawled out of the small opening at the bottom of the chute and stepped down into the burrow. 

“The light switch is on your left!” Tails called from above. “They should still work. Just flip them all.”

Only a small amount of light leaked into the burrow from the chute, so he felt the wall blindly until he stumbled upon a row of plastic bumps and flicked them on. Multiple rectangular ceiling lights activated all at once, casting a cold light over the room. Sonic held his breath and surveyed the burrow slowly, taking in his friend’s prison for the first time. 

Immediately, he felt claustrophobic. The burrow wasn’t small, per se—in fact, it appeared to be somewhat bigger than the workshop on South Island. There was just something about the metal walls and lack of any human touch that made it feel like a prison. Burrowing animals like Sonic were supposed to find comfort underground. There was no such comfort here. 

“I can see light. Did you find the switch?” 

Tails’ voice snapped him back to attention. “Yeah. You can come down now.” 

A pause. “Okay,” Tails responded meekly.

It took a few minutes for Tails to climb down. Sonic waited for him at the bottom of the chute, hoping his presence would ease his descent. He wasn’t sure if it made a difference, but Tails eventually stepped down beside Sonic in the chute. Little victories.

Obeying their unspoken rule, Sonic crawled back into the burrow first. He turned around to help Tails climb down, but the fox didn’t pay him any attention. He was too busy staring at the inside of the burrow with wide eyes, his once terrified expression turning into something like . . . wonder? No, it was surprise. Tails was surprised. 

“It’s bigger than I remember,” Tails commented. He dropped down to the burrow floor and took a few hesitant steps inside. Slowly, his gaze swept over the room. It stopped on something and he huffed out a quiet laugh. “It’s still here. That’s funny.”

Sonic followed his gaze to the back wall, where a broken phone set was sprawled across the floor. “Did you do that?” he asked.

“Yeah. Rouge said she was going to clean the place up, but I guess she decided not to.” Tails’ nose wrinkled. He pointed to the fridge in the kitchenette. “Don’t open that. It might be full of rotting food.”

The second mention of Rouge piqued his curiosity. “I thought you didn’t want anyone to know where the burrow was.” Even Sonic hadn’t been allowed to know its exact location until today.

Tails shrugged and approached the workstation in the middle. “She’s known since I was seven,” he said.

Rouge would always be someone that Sonic couldn’t wrap his head around. During the occupation, she’d played the delicate role of triple agent where she helped G.U.N., Eggman, and the Restoration all at the same time. Then, in the aftermath, her true loyalties had revealed themselves: she was a little more loyal to G.U.N. than the others, but she was loyal to Alhazen most of all. Tails had made it clear multiple times that he couldn’t have escaped without her help. Sonic wanted to trust her the same way Tails did, but . . .

It was hard. And every time Tails unveiled more details about his relationship with her, Sonic couldn’t help but trust her a little less than before.

“She knew?” Sonic said. Tails was nine years-old now, meaning that he would have still been locked in this burrow when he was seven. Rouge had known where he was and consciously chosen not to do anything about it. This realization angered Sonic. He failed to hide his disgust when he asked, “And she just let you stay here?”

“I never asked her to rescue me.” Tails pressed the computer’s power button. He eyed the office chair tucked under the desk beside him, but seemed to decide against sitting down. “I didn’t want her to, either. It would have messed up my plans.”

It was easy for Sonic to get mad about this kind of thing in hindsight. If he’d been in Rouge’s position, maybe he would have made a similar choice and helped Eggman's prisoner destroy everything in his path to escape. He tried to imagine himself in her shoes, but he was forced to stop when his skull began to throb painfully. No matter what strategic value it provided, he wasn’t sure leaving a child in captivity was something he could bring himself to do. He couldn’t even stomach the thought of it.

“There are painkillers in the bathroom,” Tails said. When they met eyes, he shrugged apologetically. A year of exposure to Sonic had certainly taught him by now that the hedgehog preferred his episodes went unacknowledged. As if breaking that rule wasn’t enough, Tails decided to add, “You know, if you think you need one.” 

Wow. Talk about kicking someone while they were down. 

Being consoled by Tails here of all places was mortifying enough, but the suggestion that he use medicine so irresponsibly only made him feel worse. The supply of pharmaceutical drugs on the islands was already reaching critically low levels. Did Tails really think he was up for wasting such a luxury over something as insignificant as a headache?

Sonic reminded himself not to take it personally. Animals who spent a lot of time around humans were prone to this kind of thing. Amy, who had only relocated to the islands a few years ago, often struggled to go a day without unintentionally offending someone in some way or another. Tails’ upbringing on Westside Island made it much easier for him to readjust, but he had a habit of slipping into overcorrection when he realized too late that he was saying something rude—like suggesting Sonic take painkillers to ease the sting of a headache, for instance. 

“Painkillers and a fridge? I had no idea this place was so luxurious.” Sonic scoffed sarcastically. It was a joke, but he supposed there was some truth to it since the workshop didn’t have either of those things. Painkillers and refrigerators were reserved for public use at gathering buildings—provided, of course, that the village or island in question were able to acquire them in the first place. Even basic medical supplies were growing scarce as the United Federation continued to suspend its support to the islands. It wouldn't be much longer until they ran out completely, and when that happened . . .

The pain in his head flared, freezing his thoughts in place. Ouch. Eager for a distraction, he left Tails to the computer and wandered over to the walled-off bathroom. He opened the cabinet below the sink and his heart skipped at what he found: four large medicine kits that, upon inspection, appeared to be fully stocked and completely unused. Each kit had multiple bottles of painkillers. He also found gauze, sterilizing wipes, ice packs, stomach medicine, and even spools of surgical thread for stitches. All items the islands were going to run out of in the near future.

The Restoration would find good use for everything here. Sonic gathered the kits in his hands and joined Tails back at the workstation. “Let’s give these to Amy when we’re done here.”

Tails eyed the med kits. “Good idea,” he said, then turned his attention back to the computer. It seemed to have finally booted up during Sonic’s time in the bathroom, and he watched Tails click through folder after folder as he looked for the correct files. 

“Did you lose them?” he asked. It was probably a stupid question. Sonic had no idea if files could be ‘lost’ the way things could be misplaced in the physical world. The only computer he’d ever used was Amy’s laptop, and even then she’d been around to supervise him the whole time to make sure he didn’t break it by accident. He didn’t really know much about them at all. 

Tails’ ear flicked in annoyance. “Some of the Project Shadow files were smuggled to me. I had to hide them in case Robotnik decided to look through the computer.”

Oh, okay. Sonic kept his mouth shut and placed the medicine kits on the floor near the chute so he could use his hands again. With nothing to do but wait for Tails to find the files he was looking for, Sonic wound up checking out the books on the workstation’s shelves. All of them were science books, mostly physics, ranging in thickness and difficulty of subject. He took one off the shelf and observed its cover: Elementary Particles. Fancy. 

“Should we bring up the books, too?” Sonic asked. They could always use more books on the islands, especially science ones.

Tails didn’t look away from the screen. “No. They’re all in English, anyways.” 

Sonic hummed in acknowledgement. He put back the physics textbook and moved on to explore the lower shelves. The lowest shelf didn’t have any scientific materials at all, instead displaying a full row of English children’s books. When he opened one of them, he found Mobian translations of the book's words stuffed between the pages on scrap paper. The writing was big and childish. These must have been written by Tails when he was younger and learning English for the first time.

It tugged on his heartstrings more than anything he’d seen in the burrow so far. His memories of four year-old Tails were seared into his mind by grief. He could recall the young kit’s appearance perfectly. The image of him trapped here alone, learning a new language under the tutelage of someone as terrible as Robotnik . . . it made his face warm, and he blinked rapidly in an attempt to dry his eyes. He rubbed a paw over them and his glove returned damp with tears.

Sonic closed the book and pushed the visual out of his mind. He was here to support Tails. If he was going to get upset about things, now wasn’t the time. 

Thankfully, Tails was too focused on the computer to notice his soured mood. “Sonic, come here,” Tails said. He looked over his shoulder and gestured for Sonic to come closer. “I found it.”

Sonic crossed the workstation to look at the computer screen. A document with many blacked-out sections was displayed on the screen. “Is that the transmission log?”

“Yep.” Tails opened a drawer in the computer desk, where he retrieved a pad of paper and a pencil. He drew a circle in the middle, a smaller circle beside it, and then a big circle that cut through the smaller circle to form a loop. “This is the moon’s orbit around Earth. The circle in the middle is Earth, the small circle here is the moon, and this ring is the moon’s orbit. Do you see it?”

Sonic nodded. “Yeah, I see it.” 

At the southeast of the orbital ring, Tails drew another ring. He then added a small circle on top of the ring. In the middle, he wrote L5. “The Earth and moon form a two-body system, which is where their gravitational forces affect one another and create a stable orbit. That’s why the moon orbits the Earth. Two-body systems sometimes create pockets of gravitational equilibrium—so, an area near the moon’s orbit where the gravitational pull of either body is equal enough that the space there is stable. That’s a Lagrange point.” 

“Uh huh,” Sonic said, although he wasn’t entirely sure what Tails was trying to explain to him. 

Tails added a small circle to the L5 ring. “Humans have used Lagrange points to park telescopes and space stations for a long time. The gravity of the two bodies allows for any object to achieve a stable orbit around these zones. The ARK orbited around Lagrange point five until it blew up.” 

Sonic traced his finger over the L5 orbital ring. “So, it just went in circles here?”

“Correct.” On the other side of the planet, Tails wrote a big ‘V’. “This is the direction the voyager alliance approached the planet from. If the lost voyages find us, they’ll come from this direction, too. The first time I looked at Gerald’s transmission logs, I didn’t take that into account. I saw that he was sending signals into space and assumed he was trying to contact the lost voyages. Now, I see that my initial assumption was wrong: he was sending his signals in the other direction. He wasn’t trying to contact other humans—he was trying to contact different alien lifeforms.”

“Different aliens?”

Tails glanced up to the computer screen and then drew an arrow coming out of the L5 zone. He referenced numbers on the computer as he drew many more, creating a crown-like halo around the Lagrange point. The only place the arrows didn’t point to was the presumed location of the lost voyages.

“Gerald sent transmissions in these directions. At the beginning of his logs, the directions are pretty random. That stops halfway through.” Tails made a big arrow pointing southwest of L5. “Two years after he starts, every transmission is sent in this direction. Over time, the interval time between the transmissions gets shorter. He sends more over less time. Do you think this means the same thing as me?”

Sonic tilted his head. “Um, he sent them in the same direction each time because he finally reached someone?”

“Yes. And then they started getting closer to us.” 

Right. If the aliens were closer to the ARK, then it would take less time for Gerald to receive their transmissions. They could communicate at a higher rate of response.

This begged a single question. 

“Where are they now?” Sonic asked.

Tails bit his lip. “I don’t know,” he said. He ripped the paper explaining Lagrange points out of the pad and threw it away. On the blank paper below, he began copying down all the information from the transmission logs. “Now that Shadow is out in the world, people are going to start asking questions about what happened on the ARK. It won’t be long before G.U.N. deletes their own backup copies to make it harder for other countries to build a case against them. This might even be the only remaining copy of the transmission log in the world. If this gets out, they’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

Sonic watched him fill the paper with numbers and dates. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to tell the U.F. that I have it. Then they’re going to stop starving us.”

“Starving?” Many supplies were running low, but food wasn’t one of them. It was one of the few items the islands were capable of producing independently.

“Sorry, not literally starving. Metaphorically starving.” Tails stopped writing for a moment, staring at the page distantly. “You know, under the Convention on Cohabitation, they’re supposed to support the East Pacific. It’s part of the deal; in exchange for the continents, they have to help out ‘their’ Mobian Island territory. That’s us. And now they’re effectively blockading us instead.” 

None of this was news to Sonic. It was probably a little rude for Tails to assume something this basic needed explaining, as though Sonic didn’t know much about anything at all, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel insulted by it. The fox was bad at gauging the knowledge levels of other animals. There were times when he overestimated Sonic’s ability to understand things, too. It went both ways, so it wasn’t like Tails thought he was stupid. He just couldn’t tell when something was too advanced to be ‘common knowledge’. 

This was not a good time to be getting distracted. Sonic returned his attention to where where he believed Tails’ explanation was leading the conversation. “They’re punishing you,” he said. 

Tails nodded. “Power is like a pie. There’s only so much to go around. The United Federation is mad because I used the Master Emerald to cut a slice for Mobians for the first time. By doing so, I took power away from the U.F. and other human states. They don’t want anyone to think that kind of thing can happen again, so they’re tormenting the islands to make an example out of me.” 

Sonic knew all of this, too. He felt like Tails was trying to reach a point, so he continued to play along. “I thought they were doing it so you would get rid of the Badniks.” 

When Sonic and Tails returned from their trip around the world, they were greeted by bad news: contrary to Tails’ expectations, the United Federation wasn’t interested in returning to their pre-empire arrangement with the islands. They were worried about the Eggman Empire technology left scattered across the East Pacific. Specifically, they were concerned that the Badniks sitting in underground storage units would eventually be turned against them. They refused to provide material support to the islands until the Badniks were destroyed or handed over to G.U.N. Sonic had originally assumed that Tails would destroy the Badniks right away, especially since he hated reminders of Eggman’s control of the islands, but the fox refused to budge on the issue. He believed the blockade would crumble under international pressure, but it was still going strong a whole year later . . .

“They only claim to be scared of the Badniks. Even if I got rid of them, I’m sure they would find something else to complain about. They won’t stop until I rescind my threat to destroy the Master Emerald.” Tails gestured to the data written on the page. “This is like a counter-strike. Once I’ve told the United Federation that I have proof Gerald was contacting aliens, they’ll have two choices: come clean to the world, where they might face heavy penalties, or end their blockade and keep their global standing. Which option will they choose?”

Strategy had never been Sonic’s forte. The gradual worsening of his headache wasn’t making the question any easier to answer. “I don’t know. I’m surprised they’re testing you like this in the first place. Isn’t it dangerous for them?”

“Have you ever played chicken? You know, the game where you charge someone and see who moves first?”

His memories of the game made him smile. “I used to play it with Knuckles all the time. He can punch me even at my top speed, so there was danger for both of us. I was the only one who ever flinched, though . . .” Knuckles was always as steady as a rock. Sonic had gone into each game expecting to lose.

“Okay. Right now, the United Federation is playing a game of chicken with me. The blockade on the East Pacific is like their version of charging at me.” Tails put down his pen and quickly referenced the data against the computer. Once he was certain the numbers were correct, he tore the page from the notepad and folded it into a neat square. He held it up to Sonic. “This is my punch. It’s up to the U.F. to decide if it’s a hit they want to take.” 

The chicken example didn’t help Sonic with the initial question. “I can survive Knuckles’ punch, though. It just hurts a lot.” 

“True. I guess you started to flinch when you realized he was never going to let you land a hit?”

“Pretty much, yeah.” Sonic never would have wanted to land a hit on Knuckles, anyways. Not with his spin-dash. The echidna was made of tougher stuff than most, but there was still a chance that a normal spin-dash would kill him. It wasn’t something Sonic was willing to risk. 

Tails reached over to shut off the computer. “That’s because chicken is based entirely on your perception of the other player.” He nodded to the chute, signalling that he was finished in the burrow. “You perceived Knuckles as being someone who wouldn’t flinch, which meant that you had to flinch to protect yourself. The United Federation doesn’t believe I’ll blow up the Master Emerald over a blockade. Obviously, this is true—if that was going to tip me off, I would have done it by now. I’m going to challenge them in return. I don’t know if threatening to release details about Project Shadow will make them flinch, but it will make them realize that I can fight back in ways that won’t end science forever. That should be enough to end their blockade.” 

Sonic followed Tails to the chute’s opening. “Oh, so it’s like a double-edged sword. Threatening them with Project Shadow stuff also means you’re threatening to do more in the future.” 

“Yep.” Tails looked to the medicine kits on the floor. “How are we bringing those up?”

“I already thought of that,” Sonic said. The medicine kits had handles on them, just wide enough for a rope to slip through. He brought them into the chute and slipped the rope through their handles one by one, then tied the end into a thick knot right in front of the first medicine kit. This formed a loop that kept the kits attached to the bottom of the rope. “We can climb up and then pull them up with the rope.” 

Tails blinked. “Oh, good thinking. You’re really smart, Sonic.” Then he crawled into the chute and started to climb the rope. 

What a funny compliment. Sonic turned off the lights and waited until Tails reached the surface. Once the fox was out of the chute, Sonic grabbed the rope and got ready to pull himself up. 

Then he heard a chime from inside the burrow. 

It was a simple, two-note electronic song. He peered back into the burrow, where he saw a green light blinking at him from the darkness. A sound that resembled the chugging of a train engine followed, then stopped after a few moments. 

“Sonic?” At the top of the chute, Tails looked down at him. He was too far away to read his expression. “What’s wrong? Is something there?”

“One of the machines made a noise. Like da-da.” He imitated the chime to the best of his ability. 

Tails was quiet for a long time. “That was my fax machine. Can you see if it printed anything?”

“Roger,” Sonic said. He climbed back into the burrow, opened the lights, and made his way to the workstation. 

The fax machine was no longer making noises. In one of its slots, he found a single piece of white paper.

Sonic took it in his paws and flipped it over. The letter printed on the paper was written in English simple enough for him to read: 

Hello, Alhazen. I will keep this short. 

Aliens are coming. Not the lost voyages. Different aliens—ones so unique that our resemblances to Terran animals won’t save us this time. 

If you want to protect the planet, you must undo your greatest error. You must rebuild the Eggman Empire and use its resources to fight off the invasion fleet. You must fulfill the destiny created for you by Doctor Robotnik.

Please respond at your earliest convenience. 

Dr. Starline

PS: I have Shadow the Hedgehog. He is one of the aliens, too.

Chapter Text

You claim to know a lot about biology and genetics. Is this true? 

I am a microbiologist turned doctor. I know quite a bit, yes.

Wonderful! Then tell me: in terms of evolution, which species is the anomaly? Humans or Mobians? 

Anomaly? How?

On Terra, humans evolved into existence from a single species in a single place. We are all the exact same type of animal. Our genetic makeups from person-to-person are nearly identical for this reason. 

Mobians are different. You do not have a single origin. Rather than one animal developing high intelligence and then dominating the planet, it is as though all of you evolved into sapience at the same time. Bugs, mammals, reptiles—all over the world, you evolved opposable thumbs, learned to walk on two legs, and developed complex speech. Instead of one dominant life form, you have thousands.

Which evolution into sapience do you believe is more common throughout the universe? 

Very cute! You’re doing it again, Ivo.

I am not going to entertain your question. It would only slow your progress. Again, I must remind you of the basic rules:

Stop finishing patterns. Stop trying to establish new rules. Stop assuming the world is predictable.

Stop thinking like a human!

You claim your human impulses have stalled your research. Where is the effort to overcome them?

If you cannot learn to think like a Mobian, how are you supposed to solve the Chaos Energy crisis?

Leaving the burrow was supposed to thaw the numbness in Tails’ heart forever. 

It did, in the beginning. For the first seven months after his escape, he learned to challenge the antagonistic mindset so skillfully implanted in his brain by Doctor Robotnik. He made friends and travelled the world with Sonic. Day by day, bit by bit, he taught himself that cruelty was only a rare trait to be found in others. Not everyone was out to get him. Not everyone wanted to hurt him. Not everyone wanted to hurt everyone else. Love and violence existed in  contradiction but coexisted nonetheless, achieving a balance that could only be tilted by one’s own perception. Tails was determined to never assume the inevitability of violence ever again. 

It wasn’t easy. The person he was before the bunker was too young, too naive for him to return to. There was no model for stability or happiness for him to aspire to. All he had was himself, a shell with two tails and a brain, as he healed into the outside world. Despite all his progress made with Sonic, he found that he’d stagnated somewhere halfway to full recovery. His time in the burrow was distant, ignorable on better days but never truly gone, like a scab that refused to heal right. It wouldn’t take much to rip open the wound and once again stain his fur red with blood. 

The letter from Dr. Starline did more than pick at the scab—it took a knife to all his scars and cut them open, dragging him back in time to the person he was a year ago. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t scare him. It only made him feel numb. 

The paper trembled in his grip as he walked stiffly back to the Tornado. Distantly, he heard Sonic lock up the bunker’s chute door, but he couldn’t be bothered to wait for him. Sonic would catch up. And Tails really needed to get to his Miles Electric as soon as possible.

A boom! sounded from behind. Sonic fell into stride beside Tails half a second later, medicine kits stacked in his arms. “I think I closed everything properly. Are you . . . okay?”

Tails glanced over to his friend. Sonic appeared worried, eyes watching Tails’ face carefully. He turned his attention back to the ground in front of him and walked a little faster. “It doesn’t matter. Getting to the Tornado is more important.” 

Sonic went quiet for a moment. “One second,” he said, and then disappeared ahead into the trees. He returned moments later, medicine kits nowhere to be seen. He held out his arms for Tails. “Come on. I’ll carry you there.”

With a nod, Tails climbed into Sonic’s arms. One of Sonic’s paws pushed Tails’ head firmly against his chest to prevent whiplash, and then the force of high speed winds took over Tails’ surroundings completely, ruffling his fur and screaming into his ears in a way that made his skull ache. Tails held Sonic in a death grip, his claws unsheathed but unable to dig into the hedgehog’s backside thanks to the thick gloves that rendered them harmless. No matter how many times he was carried like this, something about it still terrified him, like a deep, vulnerable part of him didn’t trust Sonic not to let go. Like he believed there was always a chance he could get swept away by the wind and be lost forever. 

His thoughts filled him with shame. Tails pressed his forehead against Sonic’s chest a little harder, an unvoiced apology into the beating heart of a friend who would have torn apart the world to find him if he’d known it was possible. 

The wind stopped all at once. Tails lifted his head and was relieved to see the Tornado only a few metres away from him. As soon as Sonic lowered him to his feet, he took off towards the plane and pulled himself into the pilot’s seat, where his Miles Electric sat in a pouch close to the dashboard. He took it into his paws and pressed the power button. Using the tablet, he could log in to the Eggnet and—

An error message popped up on his screen: NO WI-FI NETWORKS AVAILABLE.

With a growl, Tails shut off the tablet and shoved it back into the pouch. Right. Only a handful of places on Northstar Island were connected to the internet, and the clearing where Sonic and Tails had parked the Tornado definitely wasn’t one of them. It was stupid of him to even try in the first place. 

“What’s wrong?” Sonic asked from the ground. Tails ran his paws down his face as he considered his options. 

“I need to know how Starline connected to the burrow’s fax machine. Once I do, I can figure out how to respond to him without anyone else finding out about his message. The only problem is that I can’t do any of that without a stable internet connection, and I also don’t want to risk using the Eggnet in public. Someone might see my screen and figure out who I am.”

Despite giving Tails free reign over technological development on the islands, Robotnik had still placed a limit on the amount of resources he could allocate to ‘nonessential’ projects. Tails’ proposal of a ring-powered electricity grid was accepted immediately, but connecting islanders to the internet was something Robotnik had only agreed to in moderation. Laying internet cable was both costly and invasive, so it had only been installed sparingly across the islands. With the exception of Metropolis Zone, which had been connected well before Robotnik ever set foot on Westside Island, the internet was still reserved exclusively for use in community buildings. It wasn’t something that could be used in private. 

In Tails’ corner of South Island, the only place to access wi-fi was in one of the bigger villages that operated a hotspot out of their library. However, they were reluctant to let children use it, and Tails had eventually given up on trying altogether. The adults couldn’t outright refuse his request to use their internet, bound as they were by cultural norms against asserting undue authority, but they’d employed a number of passive aggressive tactics to make him leave, anyways. During his first few visits, they interrupted him incessantly to talk about what the other kids were doing outside, an attempt to convince him to log off that decreased in subtlety the longer he stayed indoors. The last time he went, they’d unplugged the ethernet cables and pretended they lost them. Tails finally took the hint and never asked to use their internet again.

It didn’t upset him very much. The internet wasn’t something he was accustomed to having—he was fine without it. Although, a part of him would always mourn being cut off from any form of new technology . . . 

“You can use the wi-fi in Amy’s apartment,” Sonic suggested. His head tilted in thought. “I think it’s kind of slow, though. She complains about it a lot. But at least no one will see what you’re doing.” 

Tails shook his head. “The infrastructure in Metropolis Zone was supplied by the United Federation. I’m sure they monitor it constantly. If they see Starline’s message, they’re going to freak out. I can’t take that chance, sorry.”

There was an obvious solution that he desperately wanted to ignore. Visiting the bunker had drained him emotionally, and he was bound to feel frazzled about it for at least the next few days. He didn’t know if he had it in him to go back there, too. 

Unfortunately, he had no other option. It was the only place where he could dig into the Eggnet without being caught. 

“I’m going to Cocoa Island,” Tails said. He turned his head to look at the plane’s console, unwilling to meet Sonic’s eyes. “I think I can stomach that one on my own. Does Amy need you for anything? I might be stuck on the island talking to Starline for a long time. I can drop you off somewhere on the way if you don’t want to be stuck there for the whole day.”

The Tornado dipped as Sonic climbed on. Rather than sit in the passenger seat, Sonic leaned over the edge of the cockpit and tapped Tails' shoulder. “Okay. First of all, Amy is not my boss. Also, please don't make me hang out with her. I lost my phone charger and she's going to be really mad when she finds out. I’d rather go to Eggman's house with you—I didn’t sleep much last night anyways, so I can just take a nap in the mountains somewhere while you’re busy.” Sonic paused, then placed his paw gently over Tails’. “Hey. Talk to me. What are you thinking?”

Tails looked down at his paws, noticing the way they trembled against the plane’s control wheel. Right. Stress had always been a physical thing for him—his body reacted, but his thoughts stayed perfectly clear. He was good at keeping his emotions and his logic separate. An irrational, emotion-driven decision wasn’t the kind of mistake he could afford to make. Not in the burrow, not here, and especially not when there was a potential alien invasion on its way. 

That last line of thought made his stomach flip. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the wheel, shutting his eyes as he thought of his response. 

“Once he thought I was old enough, Robotnik stopped holding back when he described what the humans did to us. I learned about it all in gruelling detail. It made me spiral a few times, and if I think about it too much now, I still do. Red foxes come from a lot of places, but not this far south. I’m not from here. Wherever my ancestors lived, it wasn’t on the islands. And that’s what really gets me—I don’t know anything about them. I probably never will. They’re scattered and gone.” Sonic was completely silent behind him. This wasn’t something Tails had ever brought up to him, so he was probably at a loss for how to deal with it. That was okay. Tails wasn’t done talking yet. “I hate that I don’t know. But at the same time, I don’t envy the ones who do. Living through it all, I mean—I know that technically it isn’t over. I didn’t really stop the human invasion, I just denied it access to certain places. But I was born late enough to dodge the worst of it, and it makes me feel very lucky sometimes. I’m glad I didn’t go through the same thing as Vanilla and other older people. The idea of it scares me enough to keep me up at night. And now, if Starline is telling the truth, it might happen again. I don’t want to live through another alien invasion. I don’t think we can survive it.” 

The silence persisted after he finished. Then, finally, Sonic’s paw wrapped around his own and squeezed. “You know what? I’m not too worried. If anyone can figure out how to stop a bunch of aliens, it's you. We’ll be alright.” 

Tails forced himself to take deep breaths. The reassurance didn’t make him less scared, but . . . it did remind him that he wasn’t alone. And maybe he needed that more than ever right now. 

“Do you want me to fly?” Sonic asked. 

It took courage to brave another look at the hedgehog. Tails watched his head for a moment, looking for the telltale twitch of his blue ears that usually denoted one of his frequent headaches. “Is your head okay?”

Sonic waved him off. “It’s not that bad. I can fly.” 

Tails nodded. “Okay. Thank you,” he mumbled, and climbed into the passenger seat. The medicine kits were at his feet and he made sure not to step on them as he strapped himself in, wary to damage the precious contents inside. If he managed to pressure the United Federation, they would no longer be so desperate that they needed to turn over such basic supplies to the Restoration, but Starline’s letter made him doubt his ability to maintain that kind of peaceful pressure in the near future. There was a chance that relations between the islands and the United Federation were about to get hot in a way they hadn't been since the Eggman Empire. And Tails, of course, was caught right in the middle of it. 

Once they were airborne, Tails closed his eyes and did his best to control his breathing. It felt like things were slipping out of his control again. If he made the wrong move here, would he lose his newly gained freedom? How long would it be until he returned to being someone's prisoner?

He hoped it wasn't anytime soon. He’d barely survived the burrow with his heart intact. If he were locked away again, what kind of person would he become?

Just like last time, the front door to Robotnik’s house unlocked at Tails' touch. 

It didn't scare him like the burrow did, so he was comfortable leading Sonic inside. His memories here weren't great, but they weren't all terrible, either. He'd met Rouge and reunited with Sonic here. It was something of a grey zone to him—but that didn’t mean he was happy to return here. 

“I’m surprised his house isn’t bigger,” Sonic commented as he followed Tails through the doorway. “His bases were always huge. I didn’t think he was capable of being so modest.” 

Tails walked slowly, reminiscing on his surroundings. Had it really been a year since he’d escaped and taken off with Sonic?

“Some of his bases were designed to be discrete,” he explained. He turned his head, taking in the familiar sight of the living room. “He was always paranoid that you or G.U.N. would try to kill him some day. He liked having places to hide.” 

He stopped at the top of the basement stairs and faced Sonic. “I’m going downstairs. What’s your plan?”

Sonic yawned and stretched his arms out over his head. “I’ll probably pass out for a few hours. Are you sure you can do this on your own?”

Tails nodded. “I’ll be fine. Remember to leave the door open so you don’t get locked out.” 

At that, Tails descended downstairs to the basement. At the computer station, he pressed the power button and climbed onto Robotnik’s chair, which he was forced to stand on so he could reach the keyboard. The computer didn’t take long to boot up. Just like last time, the login screen prompted him to look into the webcam for a retina scan. A red light blinked next to the lens. After a few moments, the scan was accepted and Tails was granted access to the computer. 

He worried, briefly, that tracking down Starline was going to take a long time. Then he opened Robotnik’s email and found the letter sitting at the top of his inbox. 

Okay. That made things a little easier. 

He hit ‘reply’ and typed his first response: 

Hi. I am Alhazen.

Who are you?

As much as he wanted to dive straight into questioning Starline about the aliens, it would be a mistake to not investigate the doctor himself first. Starline, for whatever reason, wanted Tails to rebuild the Eggman Empire. He had motives Tails didn’t understand. Learning more about Starline was his first priority. 

Thankfully, Starline didn’t take long to reply. His response appeared in the inbox only ten minutes later. 

Hello, Alhazen!

As you know, my name is Dr. Starline. I am a doctor who works in Canberra on Victoria Island. Currently, I am responsible for keeping Shadow restrained in the hospital so he cannot leave to harm others. I believe both luck and fate have brought me into this incredibly valuable position!

In case you are worried, I did not hack into the Eggnet to send you my message. I was able to access it remotely because my laptop was given to me by Ivo himself! I have credentials in his system, although not nearly as robust as yours. Sending commands to printers and fax machines is the upper limit of my user permissions. 

You may be wondering why Ivo would give me permission to do anything. Fifteen years ago, we worked together online to find solutions for all kinds of topics! Perhaps I will share some of his insights with you if you prove to be cooperative. Despite your treachery, I’m sure that even you still miss his guiding wisdom from time to time. 

Think of me as an old research partner. Or, perhaps, a failed version of you. 

Tails bit his lip. A failed version of him? Did that mean Starline had been helping Robotnik with Chaos Energy research?

What did you research together?

Ivo reached out fifteen years ago to get a Mobian perspective on the Chaos Energy crisis. At the time, he’d become completely disillusioned with his ability to solve the problem on his own. He believed he could not do it because he was a human. Since I am a Mobian, he believed I would be useful for his project. Sounds a little funny, right? 

There are no meaningful cognitive differences between Mobians and humans. We are as smart and as stupid as each other. However, there are cultural differences between us! Mobians—provided they are not influenced by humans, of course—think differently from humans. It is a major difference that will become glaringly obvious in your interactions with your friends once I lay it out for you. 

Mobians do not like to make assumptions about the future. Humans, on the contrary, do nothing but think about the future. This makes total sense. Humans come from a planet with stable physics. They could observe their surroundings and make laws about how nature behaved. Here, we could do no such thing. There is a popular story told to children on Victoria Island that explains how we developed such an aversion of predicting the future: 

Long ago, the Wamlin Empire controlled every inch of Victoria Island. Emperor Wamlin had a group of oracles who could predict the weather, and this made him very popular among his subjects. They planned their farming and hunts around predicted rainstorms and dry spells. It worked flawlessly for many years, until a sudden heat wave spread across the island and spawned fears of potential fires destroying the land. Emperor Wamlin called on his oracles to determine if a bushfire would occur during the summer.

The oracles spent a month debating the possibilities. They could not decide on an answer, so on the date upon which they were meant to advise the Emperor, they took turns arguing their theories to him instead. A crowd of interested citizens gathered in the throne room to witness the magic of the oracles in real time.

A kangaroo oracle spoke first. He cited recorded weather events throughout history and told the Emperor that fires were common during hot and dry seasons. If he wanted to protect his subjects, he would need to move them away from dry areas. 

A koala oracle spoke next. Instead of focusing on fire, he predicted the incoming seasons of rain. He used divination to predict the next rainfall in the dry region, and said it would occur in the next few days. It would be too wet for fires to occur. The people were safe. 

A wallaby oracle spoke next. To satisfy the forces of fire, he’d kept a bonfire burning day and night while the others did research. He believed that fire was a limited resource.  By burning a fire in a safe location, he could prevent fire from erupting elsewhere on the island. So long as his bonfire continued to burn, they would be safe. 

It was time for the Emperor to make his decision. “Each oracle here is a testament to my empire’s longevity!” he proclaimed to everyone in his throne room. “Our dedication to discovering the truths of our world will keep us strong for eternity. Since two of my oracles have said it is safe to stay, no one will be moved from the dry areas. Glory to the Wamlin Empire!” 

Suddenly, the doors to the palace burst open. A rush of cold wind flowed into the room, colder than anything anyone had ever experienced. A flurry of freezing crystals flew inside and buried everyone in deep snow. The whole island was covered in a layer of ice for one year. The Emperor and his oracles died, and the era of the Wamlin Empire was brought to an end. 

There is little historical basis for this story. We know the Wamlin Empire existed, although not much is known about its collapse. It is believed that a Chaos-powered polar vortex could have travelled up from the south pole, freezing everything in its path until the Chaos Emerald moved on. We will likely never know. 

Either way, this story tells you everything you need to know about most Mobian cultures. We have attempted to make laws for our surroundings and failed each time. As a result, a norm against predicting the future became a planet wide phenomenon. We stopped trying because we had no reason to believe it could be done! 

Ivo believed this gave us an advantage in understanding Chaos Energy. He attempted to perform experiments with no expectations of their results, but failed to bury the human part of him that predicted what was likely to happen. Understanding gemstones that do not follow rules is hard when you have been hardwired to do so. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to help him as much as he wanted me to. Victoria Island is home to a significant human population, too. I went to their schools. All of my teachers were human. My fear of predicting the future was trained out of me long ago.

Ivo then theorized that the most capable person to solve the crisis would be a Mobian who is trained in physics without being assimilated into human culture. I’m sure his human mannerisms rubbed off on you since you were captured at a young age, but he likely made no real attempt to make you think like a human. When you discovered the solution to the crisis, was it the result of an experiment where you expected the results? Or did you stumble upon it randomly, perhaps even by accident?

But I'm comfortable with predicting the future.

Sure. As I said, his human mannerisms were bound to infect you to some extent. He taught you science the way he understood it. But did he enforce it? Were you punished when you did not follow the scientific method? There is a difference between teaching you human ways of thinking and indoctrinating you into them.

Huh. Before now, Tails had never really considered how far Robotnik had assimilated him into human culture. He’d made him learn English, but there was a logical component to it that was wrong to ignore. Tails needed to be able to read human scientific texts and government documents on his own. Relying on Robotnik for translations would have made his job much harder, and even made escape impossible. It wasn’t done with the intent of making him think or act like a human. 

Starline was right. Robotnik hadn’t tried to interfere with his initial upbringing beyond stressing the difference between 'people' and 'animals'. His worldview was left largely intact. Was that really why he’d been able to solve the energy crisis? Looking back, it wasn’t like Robotnik had ever gone out of his way to enforce the scientific method . . . if anything, he’d encouraged Tails to come up with ideas based on his feelings rather than evidence. Had that been his way of making sure Tails didn’t lose his natural assumption of chaos? The gut feeling that helped him deter Sonic and ultimately discover the solution to the crisis—was that a result of his own cultural lens? 

I stumbled upon the solution. You’re right—he shielded me from human cultural influence so I could solve the crisis.

That was my role in your creation. You’re welcome.

You said dismantling the empire was a mistake. Why?

Terra died because human statehood made cooperating against an existential threat impossible. They did not learn from their mistakes and established the same system on this planet. We are bound for destruction because we are stuck in a system that generates endless competition and war. 

The Eggman Empire, had it succeeded in taking over the planet, would have ended this self-perpetuating cycle of interstate violence. As the aliens approach, you will witness the total incapacity of multiple states to work together to face this kind of problem. You will understand why resurrecting the empire is the only solution to the alien invasion. I am sure you will not need much convincing when you learn that their governments would rather kill each other than help each other. 

Robotnik made the same argument about the Chaos Energy crisis. He thought competition made it impossible for scientists to work together, so the crisis would only be solved when the world was unified under one government.

I assume you disagree with our perspective. That’s fine. You will understand soon enough. 

Okay. Now that Starline’s motivations were clear, it was time to address the elephant in the room. 

Who are the aliens?

They call themselves the Black Arms. Their leader, Black Doom, has been using Shadow as a proxy to talk to me. I’ve learned many interesting things about them! 

For starters, the Black Arms are a hive mind. They share thoughts with one another. The hive mind is hierarchical; every member of their species is little more than a husk for Black Doom to control. They do not exist as true individuals. 

As seen in the hospital, they are capable of bringing humans into their hive mind. They do this by infecting alien lifeforms with spores. Infected aliens then spread the spores all over their planet. If they are a viable match, Black Doom can control them and read their minds. Mobians are the first immune species he’s ever encountered. Apparently, we’re an anomaly on an intergalactic level. How interesting!

I don’t get it. Why is Black Doom talking to you? Shouldn’t he be keeping his abilities a secret from us so we can’t figure out how to stop him?

Oh, the answer for that is simple! Black Doom has not been in contact with anyone from Earth for over fifty years. Shadow’s short trip from the garbage patch to the hospital was not enough time to give him a meaningful update on our society. I have taken advantage of this by lying to him about our planet’s social progress entirely. 

As far as he is concerned, humans have not relaxed in their conquest whatsoever and I have been rendered a second class citizen in one of their regimes. It’s quite tragic! I told him my entire family was executed in front of me and he believed it. Since he comes from a species where everyone shares their thoughts with one another, I believe he finds it difficult to tell when someone is lying. This ruse will fall apart when he’s close enough to read human minds and discovers what has really happened here, but for now, he believes I have good reason to support an alien race who has promised to so kindly liberate me from humanity. 

What do you mean, close enough to read human minds? Can’t he already do that?

Not yet. His invasion fleet is too far away. For now, he can use Shadow as a proxy for his powers, but only within a certain distance. Humans have been evacuated from Canberra—there is no one close enough for him to control with Shadow.

How are you keeping Shadow restrained in the hospital? He seemed pretty powerful when I met him last year.

I have imprisoned Shadow by keeping him sedated. When I need to talk to Black Doom, I reduce the dosage enough that his body is awake enough to talk but too weak to walk. Then I put him back to sleep when I’m done. 

Of course, Black Doom was not happy about this arrangement initially, but he has reluctantly accepted that I got the better of him. He knows that he can only communicate with the planet through me. When you start rebuilding the empire, this will give us a major advantage over the human states. We will understand the Black Arms in ways they simply cannot. Luck is on our side!

I will share some very important information with you now.

Black Doom has provided me with a rough timeline for his invasion. He will be close enough to Earth to read all infected human minds in one year, and close enough to control them in two. The Black Arms will touch down in three years.

Unfortunately, he refuses to explain his goals here. We will have to figure that out on our own.

Tails' heart pounded in his chest as he connected all the dots. 

If humans can infect one another, then tons of them must be infected by now. G.U.N. was responsible for shutting down Project Shadow—the entire organization must be completely infected. They’ve had fifty years to infect as many humans as possible. In one year, Black Doom will be able to read the minds of millions of people. In two years, he will be able to control them. He’ll have control of the planet before he even gets here.

Not if you control it first. A Mobian leader with a robot army is not something Black Doom can control. The Eggman Empire is our only hope to protect the planet. 

I don’t want to rebuild the empire.

You don’t have a choice. 

What if we don’t need an army? What if I find another way to stop them?

I am not stupid enough to put ideology before my own life. As long as your plan will protect the planet, I will support you. 

But you will fail. Aside from what Ivo left behind, humans control access to technology around the world. You will not be able to do anything without their permission. After the stunt you pulled last year, do you really believe they’ll let you anywhere close to the fight against the Black Arms? They will not offer you even a crumb of power. 

Not by choice.

Tails could see where he was going with this. 

If I want power, I’ll have to take it by force.

Precisely!

For the most part, Starline was correct. The humans would not want to cooperate with him. However, once they learned of the Black Arms’ hive mind, what choice would they have? 

The humans had one year to stop the Black Arms. Once the first year was over, their plans would be revealed to Black Doom via mind reading. A strategy that involved an all-out assault on the Black Arms did not need to be concealed, but did they have enough time to assemble a space force and reach the alien fleet within two years? What kind of weapons would they use? Did they have enough time to build reactors and sufficiently enrich enough fissile material for atomic weapons? Their strongest weapons had been rendered inoperable by Chaos Energy, and they were only just beginning to upgrade their forces again. They did not have enough time to use a strategy based entirely on dominating the Black Arms with strength, so they had to develop a plan that could be used before Black Doom read their minds. They had to be sneaky. But could they do this within a year? 

Even the most optimistic humans would see the futility of working alone. Mobians had an extra year to stop the Black Arms. Humans would be used to sabotage them once two years had passed, but if they could hide the sites of the weapons they were planning to use against the aliens, then they could buy even more time to prepare. Logically, this was the only way the planet would have enough time to protect itself. 

Realistically, he wasn’t sure if it was feasible. The humans would need to entrust Mobians with all of their resources. This meant sharing not only their weapons and technology, but their knowledge of how to build and use them, too. To prevent plans from leaking to the Black Arms, humans would need to be completely cut off from the defence plan. Dominion over the planet would be passed on from hand to paw. Was that something they would be willing to do? 

Starline didn’t think so. Despite how unlikely it seemed, Tails felt somewhat optimistic about it all. The humans would not let a second Earth die, even if it meant briefly sharing power with Mobians. Not after everything they went through to get here.  

The weight of it all was starting to get to him. He needed to get some fresh air. Once his head was clear, he would think over everything again and work on putting together a plan to stop the Black Arms. He could present his plan and reveal the news about the invasion at the same time. This head start would make it much, much harder for the humans to refuse his involvement in protecting the planet. If he was already in the lead, what choice did they have but to follow? 

He slid off the computer chair and went upstairs. The front door was open, and the outside air flowing in was enough to lift his spirits. Maybe Sonic was right, and everything would turn out okay—

As Tails passed the entrance to the living room, something strange caught his eye. He glanced inside the room and what he found made his body seize still with terror. 

Looking out the living room window, back to him and hands in his pockets, was G.U.N. Commander Abraham Tower.

He turned around at the sound of Tails' footsteps. “I've been waiting for you, Alhazen.” Commander Tower gestured to the armchair beside the couch. “Make yourself comfortable. We need to talk.”

Chapter Text

Commander Tower didn’t belong here.

His navy blue commander’s uniform was freshly pressed. Everywhere Tails looked, he spotted new ribbons and accolades pressed into the fabric that suggested years of faithful service to the military. His leather shoes and gloves were in an equally pristine state. The Commander’s very essence stood out against the casual, home-like atmosphere of the living room. The house belonged to neither of them, but it was clear who was the intruder here.

Rather than accept the invitation to sit down, Tails looked back toward the front door. Through the open doorway, he could see a sleek, black jet parked on the runway. “Sonic is a light sleeper. He should have heard the plane come in. Where is he?”

Commander Tower raised an eyebrow. “You think all planes make noise? From a technological standpoint, that plane is from one hundred years in the future. It’s very quiet.”

The explanation only worried him more. The technological gap between the islands and the continents was already wide enough. If humans were rebuilding the technology that Chaos Energy had forced them to leave behind sixty years ago, how much worse would it get? They couldn’t keep up if the humans were making century-long leaps into the future overnight.

“How did you find me?” It didn’t terrify him as much as he expected it to, finally being found by G.U.N. Internally, at some point over the past year, he supposed he’d recognized it was bound to happen eventually. They surveilled the islands constantly. Their spies were everywhere.  Keeping secrets from them was very hard. If they really wanted to find him, they could figure out how to do it. 

Evidently.

Commander Tower gestured to the room around them. “This is a human-sized house. We’ve had eyes on it for a while now. I came over as soon as our surveillance drones caught sight of a plane en route to this destination.” 

“Why are you here?” Tails asked. He refused to step into the room and get any closer to him, to this person he’d built up as an enemy in his head for the past several months. It seemed too dangerous. Tails eyed the Commander’s hands, wary that they would reach below his jacket for the gun they both knew he carried. “Are you going to kill me?”

A bewildered expression crossed Tower’s face. “Kill you? No. I’m here to talk.”

Tails didn’t believe him. He swallowed and took a deep breath, trying to keep his voice steady as he responded. “Okay. Then talk.”

“We have a big problem on our hands, Alhazen.” Commander Tower reached into his breast pocket, where he retrieved a folded piece of paper. He flattened it and held it up to Tails. “Two hours ago, this letter was sent to every single printer and email address on the Eggnet. Have you seen it before?”

Tails' blood ran cold when he recognized the words on the paper. Starline had sent the letter to everyone? 

He cursed internally. It had been incredibly stupid to assume that Starline knew how to contact him directly. Alhazen’s location was unknown. The technology available to him was also unknown. In that case, sending it everywhere on the Eggnet was the most reliable way to get the message to him. It made sense, even if it had doomed him in the end. 

If Commander Tower had a copy, then he could only assume the letter had already spread around the world, too. Everyone knew about the incoming invasion. And they all knew that Starline wanted the Eggman Empire to stop it. 

“I’ve seen it,” Tails replied neutrally. 

Commander Tower tucked the letter back into his pocket. “This Dr. Starline claims that an alien invasion is coming. What can you tell me about that?” 

This was the last person Tails wanted to tell about the Black Arms. A deep-seated, primordial instinct told him to run from the danger in front of him. He suppressed the urge. The door was wide open, but he knew he wasn’t free to leave. Soldiers were probably waiting outside, ready to scoop him up or shoot him if he tried to make a run for it. He was stuck here until Commander Tower got whatever he wanted from him. 

Angered at being made to feel like a prisoner again, the comment left his snout before he could stop it. “Alien invasion? There’s another one?”

Commander Tower’s cold gaze did not falter. He waited to respond, letting the silence stretch on long enough that Tails became embarrassed over his outburst. The Commander already viewed him as a security threat, and now he’d just responded antagonistically. Way to prove his point, he thought bitterly. 

As the silence turned intolerable, the Commander finally spoke again. “Fine. I’ll tell you what I know first. If Shadow is one of them, we can assume they have similar abilities. The aliens can control human minds. Mobians are immune. Is that correct?”

His pride screamed at him to refuse to answer, to hold on to the only advantage he had, but Tails could recognize the olive branch being offered to him. The humans would need to depend on Mobians to help them with the Black Arms eventually. If Commander Tower was trying to initiate some kind of reciprocal exchange, then Tails would be an idiot to reject him. Even if it pained him to pretend they were meeting as equals. 

“That’s correct,” he responded. 

“The aliens would only launch an attack if they were close by. Attacking too far in advance would give us enough time to gather information and find a way to defend ourselves. Do you have an ETA?”

“They’ll get here in three years. They will be close enough to read all infected human minds in one year and close enough to control them in two.” 

“Good. We have more time than I expected,” Commander Tower said. He adjusted his gloves casually, pulling the leather snug over his long, branch-like human fingers. “As I said, this is a big problem. I’m sure we’ve come to the same conclusions about what this means for our coexistence.” 

The phrasing set off an alarm in his head. Coexistence. Did Tower believe that was under threat?

Before he could ask for clarification, Commander Tower cotntinued speaking. “Dr. Starline wants you to rebuild the Eggman Empire. This has caused a lot of panic among other world leaders. You see, they don’t trust you because they don’t know you. I don’t trust you because I do.” He looked down on Tails sternly. “You’re a child incapable of acting responsibly on your own. You may have outsmarted him in the end, but I believe Eggman kept you in check until his demise. Without him, you’re only bound to fail. Don’t you agree?” 

“I—” The accusation that he couldn’t operate without his captor looking over his shoulder made his brain stall. Distantly, it enraged him, but the feeling was out of reach. He mostly just felt insecure. “No. You’re wrong. I kept him in check, not the other way around.” 

“Then it was mutual. He needed your focused brain. You needed his perspective and resources. I don’t care that you never wanted to build the empire—either way, you could not have done it on your own.” Commander Tower let the comment sit. When Tails didn’t protest, he continued, “Dr. Starline intends to cut everyone but you out of the fight to protect the planet. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a set up doomed for failure. It cannot happen.” 

“Because I don’t have Robotnik to supervise me, or because you want me to be powerless?” Tails growled.

Commander Tower watched him carefully for a moment. Then he rolled his eyes. “By taking science hostage, you have ensured that you will have power until you die. I will never be able to stop you from having power—but I can control what you do with it.” 

Tails felt his tails flick behind him in annoyance. “You can’t control me. No one can.” Not anymore.

“Then let me spell it out for you. When you set the conditions for your Master Emerald deterrence, you betrayed every single islander on the planet. You drew a line at violating their independence and safety. In doing so, you revealed to the world exactly  how to punish you.” Commander Tower took a big step forward. Tails took a step back, startled by the sudden advance. “By refusing to resist my blockade in any capacity, you gave up the uncertainty that protected you. Sanctions, blockades—now we know you don’t consider those violations of your conditions. You’ve given us permission to do anything short of infringing on Mobian territory. And believe me, we intend on taking full advantage of the leniency you’ve granted us.”

Tails found it difficult to breathe around the rising panic in his chest. “What—what do you mean?”

“If we fail to stop the aliens in two years, they will use us against you. You are a species they cannot control—that is a major liability to their plans here. They will not tolerate your existence. Once they are close enough to do so, the aliens will occupy our minds and use our knowledge, bodies, and weapons to hunt you down like animals until you no longer pose a threat to their mission. Did you seriously fail to consider this?” 

Tails’ mind was racing so fast he didn’t even think to answer his question. He finally arrived at the same logical conclusion as Tower, so he knew what he was going to say next, but he was too scared to tell him what they both already knew. He feared that speaking it into existence would set the world on fire. 

Relentless, Tower did it for him. “Humanity is now an existential threat to Mobians in a way we’ve never been before. You have every incentive to strike first to prevent us from being used to kill you. Whether that means wiping us out, weakening us, or destroying our cities—no matter what, you are just as much of a threat to us as we are to you. I have already advised the other human states to take the necessary precautions.” 

“Precautions?” Tails asked wearily. 

“During last year’s mini-war, our ground and air forces were almost completely eliminated. Our maritime forces survived in much greater numbers. The human navies are en route to surround the islands—if they aren’t already there by now, of course. Their submarines and warships are armed with enough artillery to reduce the islands to rubble. Whether or not this happens depends on your willingness to cooperate with me.” Tails' face was growing hot, and he was terrified that he was going to cry in front of his enemy. He blinked away the tears and tried to put on a brave face. Commander Tower continued, “The conditions for you are simple. You will hand over any and all information you possess about the alien invaders. You will cease all communications with Dr. Starline. If you violate these terms, we will embargo the other islands like I’ve embargoed yours. And finally, if we believe for even a second that you are arranging a preemptive strike against humanity, we will light up those islands one-by-one until nothing is left. I am aware this violates your conditions, but we will gladly sacrifice science if it ensures the survival of the human race. Understood?”

Desperately, he jumped at the only inconsistency in the Commander’s threat that he could find.  “Why are the other humans listening to you? They hate you.” 

The blockade on the East Pacific was not popular. Multiple UN resolutions had called for it to end, and even the United Federation’s Congress had passed legislation mandating the return to normal relations with the territory. However, Commander Tower was something of a rogue actor on the issue, and the President seemed intent on enabling him. No one was powerful enough to bring them to heel, so the blockade had endured until the current day. 

“They do hate me, yes. They call me heartless, but I take pride in that kind of accusation. In times of crisis, you must be willing to do whatever it takes to survive.” Commander Tower strode to the living room entrance. This time, Tails steeled himself and didn’t back away, even when the Commander looked down on him from several feet above. “Our time on Earth has made humanity soft. The other leaders accepted my guidance because they know that only someone who thinks like a voyager can get us out of this mess alive. They need my perspective, whether they like it or not.”

Think like a voyager. Tails used to be able to do that. If he wanted to help the islands, did that mean . . .?

“This is why you can’t be allowed to lead the charge against the invaders. At least, not alone.” The Commander straightened out his jacket, as though getting ready to leave. “Eggman would have seen this coming from a mile away. Whether you like it or not, you need him. Keep that in mind next time someone begs you to rebuild the empire.” 

Commander Tower exited the room. Tails peeked into the hallway, where he watched Commander Tower exit the house and climb into the jet, followed by two soldiers. The door shut. Seconds later, the jet took off, rising into the air with an engine volume equivalent to a car. He was sure it made less noise once it reached altitude. The Commander was right, the jet was quieter than any plane he’d ever seen. 

Tears welled in his eyes. Tails didn’t want to cry here, feeling the house was now cursed in some way, and chose to go outside instead. He turned east, remembering the route to the closest beach to the house. At the edge of the sand, he removed his gloves, kicked off his shoes and socks, and made his way to the closest patch of shade. It was a sunny, hot day, so the sand was hot enough to burn his tender pads. He sat in the shade and dug his feet into the sand, relishing in the familiar feeling of sand between his toes. He watched as crabs and lizards moved erratically nearby, wary of the sudden intruder on the beach. Tails had come here with the intention of having a nervous breakdown, but he found that he couldn’t cry in their presence. He was too busy being mesmerized by the way they adjusted to his sudden arrival, eventually returning to business as usual as they accepted that he wasn’t going to disturb them. Flickies dropped to the sand from the trees, watching him nervously as they hopped around and looked for nuts and seeds around the tree. They learned to ignore him too, getting close enough to touch while they explored the sand at his sides. He stayed as still as possible, worried that any movement would scare them away. He didn’t want to bother them. 

A part of him would always be jealous of the little animals. Sure, they couldn’t think as well as he did, but they didn’t know anything about what was going on in the world. They never had to worry about the things he did. Especially not these little animals, who lived on an island that was usually uninhabited. The world was changing every day and they had no idea. Or, maybe they did, and they just couldn’t voice their concerns to him. It wasn’t like Tails had bothered to ask how they felt about anything. Sonic talked to little animals all the time. He claimed that what set big animals like them apart from little animals wasn’t their intelligence, or their dexterous paws, but their ability to speak. He liked talking to them because he thought it was rude to reserve his words exclusively for animals who could respond. Tails thought it was a little pointless, but he could remember feeling differently about that kind of thing when he was younger. It was a byproduct of his time with Robotnik, this perceived distance between himself and small animals. It would go away with time. At some point, when he was older, Tails would learn again that there were no small animals or big animals, but only animals who could talk and animals who could not. He would think of himself as living beside all animals instead of above them; as neighbours who were just trying to survive this world together. 

If he got to live that long, of course. Stupid aliens. 

In the distance, he heard a boom. A few seconds later, he heard a shout near the house. There was another boom, and Tails counted one, two, three, four on his fingers before the trees shook behind him and Sonic appeared beside him on the beach, launching a mountain of sand away as he dug his shoes into the ground to stop his momentum. The animals scurried away, and Tails mourned their absence. Sonic was truly a disruptive force of nature. 

“Did you talk to Starline?” Sonic asked. He seemed to be in a better mood than before, and Tails felt a little bad for what he was about to tell him. 

“I did. It didn’t go very well.” 

Sonic blinked. Then he sat beside him in the shade, close enough that their shoulders touched. It was an inviting touch, an unvoiced offer of further affection if Tails needed it. Tails had never been very touchy-feely. But after today . . .

He launched to the side, worming his arms into the places on Sonic’s back where his quills couldn’t hurt him and then squeezed as tight as he could. He shoved his face into the hedgehog’s shoulder, unable to hold back the tears any longer. Time slowed, and Tails sobbed away all the heartbreak and terror from the day into Sonic’s fur, a rare moment where he felt his own age—like a kid who needed comfort from an adult. Or, in this case, a hedgehog who was seven years older than him. Close enough. 

Sonic rubbed soothing circles into his back. “What did Starline do to make you so upset?”

Tails hiccuped. “Starline wasn’t mean. The Commander of G.U.N. came to visit me.” 

“Wait, what?” Sonic’s paws stopped moving. “He was here? When?” 

“I don’t know when he got here. He was waiting for me in the living room.” Tails knew how Sonic would take it, so he reassured him quickly, “The plane was really advanced. It barely made any noise. I didn’t hear it land, either.” 

“Why was he here?” 

With a sigh, Tails pushed himself off of Sonic and hugged his knees to his chest. He explained everything he knew about the Black Arms, and how G.U.N. and the other humans were reacting. “A year ago, I would have thought of the same thing,” Tails said. He rested his chin on his knees and watched the waves hit the shore. “I would have seen it coming. I don’t know why I didn’t.” 

Sonic was quiet for a long time. Then he muttered, “You need to tell Amy.” 

Tails groaned and pushed his palms into his eyes. He was right—if the Restoration saw a bunch of ships approaching the islands, they would assume the worst and tell Knuckles to destroy the Master Emerald. Then they would have no hopes of beating the Black Arms at all. 

Reluctant to leave the beach, Tails got up slowly. When he looked down, there was a blank expression on Sonic’s face that intrigued him. “What do you think? About . . . everything.” 

The hedgehog shrugged. “I don’t know. All this strategy stuff is your forte, not mine.”

“Then tell me your gut feeling.” 

“I . . .” Sonic frowned. “It reminds me of what you and Eggman did to Knuckles. He’s threatening you into doing nothing.” 

Except this time, the bombs threatening to blow up what Tails cared about were real. “You knew Robotnik was bluffing. Do you think the Commander is doing the same thing?”

Again, Sonic shrugged. “Eggman never made threats—he just did stuff. It was weird enough that I knew he was lying. I don’t know anything about the Commander. I couldn’t tell you.” 

“Okay. Thanks anyways.” 

Tails walked over to the grass, where he slipped on his gloves and shoes. He waited at the edge for a moment, giving Sonic the opportunity to get up and follow him. The hedgehog didn’t seem intent on moving. He continued to face the ocean, and Tails decided to give him some space and head back to the house on his own. If the news had upset Tails, it was probably upsetting Sonic, too. And the hedgehog preferred to deal with things alone. 

In the house’s basement, he snooped around until he found a landline phone close to the command terminal. He punched in Amy’s number and pressed the receiver against his ear. 

After a few rings, she picked up. “Hello?”

“Amy, it’s Tails. There’s something important—” He was cut off when Amy spoke again.

“Yeah, I’m doing great actually! Thanks for asking,” she said sarcastically. 

He rolled his eyes. “This is serious.” 

“So is checking in on your friends! Do you even care about me?”

This was a losing battle. With a sigh, he gave in. “Hi, Amy. How are you?”

“I’m a little annoyed, actually. I gave someone in the Restoration the specific task of hitting the tell-Knuckles-to-destroy-the-Master-Emerald switch if there was a human invasion. She said, ‘Okay, Amy, I can do that for you! I love you. You’re the best not-boss, not-authority-figure-because-we-don’t-do-that-here leader I’ve ever had!’ And I said, ‘Wow, thank you. That means so much to me. It’s great to have not-subordinates who take initiative and act on their own!’ You’ll never guess what happened when she saw a military plane fly over the islands. She called me to ask if she should press it!” Amy clicked her tongue in annoyance. “Like, her only job was to decide if she should press it or not. And she still asked me! This place is full of sheep. Did you know that phrase doesn’t translate well over here? I used it the other day and everyone took it literally. One of them told me, ‘Amy, none of us are sheep. I’m literally a lemur.’ Like, obviously! But whatever. I think I need to lay off the animal metaphors. How are you doing? Are you having a good time with the whole alien invasion thing?” 

“Did you press it?” he asked nervously. 

“Nah. If they were invading, I figured they’d use more than one plane, you know?”

The relief was palpable. “Oh, thank you. It would have been really bad if you did.” He bit the inside of his cheek as he recalled what she said earlier. “Did you really offload the button pushing to a single person?”

“I didn’t offload it. I’m not allowed to tell people what to do! Although, I’ve discovered you can kind of get around it by implying they should do something instead. So, what I did was track down the most anxious person in the Restoration—that I trust, of course—and then snuck in a comment about how she’d be a perfect button pusher into an unrelated conversation. The next day, I asked if anyone wanted to take up the responsibility of pushing the button, and she volunteered. It worked out perfectly!” That sounded like a roundabout way of telling someone what to do, but Tails chose not to comment. “Anyways, I chose her because she’s one of the most neurotic people I know. She won’t push the button until a human is physically shoving a gun into her face. I trust her not to overreact to small things. Now that I think of it, it’s probably a good sign that she asked my opinion about pushing the button earlier. It gives us the opportunity to finetune our threshold of response a little bit.” 

“Threshold of response?” Tails laughed airily in disbelief. “I didn’t realize you used military lingo.” 

“I watched a few videos explaining how your deterrence worked. It’s pretty interesting,” Amy said. “Okay, I know you didn’t call me to ask me how I was doing. What’s up?”

“That plane you saw belongs to Commander Tower. He came to visit me on Cocoa Island.” For the second time that day, he summarized his conversations with Starline and the Commander. “You might see a lot of military ships near the islands soon. Don’t let anyone push the button over it.” 

Amy hummed for several seconds. “So what? He’s obviously trying to scare you.” 

“Amy, this is a serious threat. If I make the wrong move, we could lose the islands.” 

“Well, duh. I’m not saying you should test him on that front. Let the humans embargo the islands. We’ll get over it.”

“No, we won’t. We’re lucky to have good land for farming—we can feed ourselves. Not all the other islands will be able to hold out for as long as we have.”

Amy groaned. “Oh, my God. You’re just like Sonic.” 

“What?”

“Um, I don’t know if you remember, but you and Eggman kind of psychologically terrorized him for four years straight. He puts on a brave face around you, but me? I’ve seen him at his worst. I know what he looks like when he’s on the verge of giving up. And it’s looking a lot like you right now.”

“I’m not giving up.” 

“You’re not exactly trying, either. We’re not helpless. Stop acting like it.”

“I just don’t know what to do,” Tails said quietly. 

“Well, then let’s figure something out together. Let’s play the ‘why’ game—we used it in the resistance to try to uncover Eggman’s plans. Why is the Commander threatening the islands?”

“To stop me from attacking humanity.”

“Why?”

Tails held in an annoyed sigh. “Because the aliens can mind control humans and not us.”

“Why?”

“Because . . .” The question gave him pause. “I don’t know. It’s probably a biological difference.” 

“Probably?”

Amy was right. He didn’t know that for sure. “What else could it be?”

“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m not a scientist. You figure it out.” 

“I’m not that kind of scientist. I do physics.” 

“Oh, geez. If only you could talk to someone who knows human and Mobian bodies really well . . . like some kind of medical doctor who probably had to study both species to get his degree . . .”

“If I talk to Starline, the other islands will get embargoed.” 

“Uh huh, sure. And how is Tower supposed to even know you’re talking to him? Take the risk! He’s obviously bluffing.” 

Her insistence that Commander Tower was bluffing made him reconsider his initial assumption. Was it even possible for the Commander to know when he was talking to Starline? If he was capable of intercepting their messages, he wouldn’t have needed to fly all the way out here for information. Amy was probably right—as long as Tails was careful, he could keep communicating with Starline without anyone finding out. 

Suddenly, the situation felt a little less impossible. Tails wanted to get working right away. “You’re right. Thanks, Amy.” 

“You’re welcome. Now, go use that big brain of yours and save the planet.” 

The call ended. Tails took a deep breath and put down the phone. It’s okay, you’ve got this, he told himself, and forced himself to believe it. 

At the computer station, he stood on the chair and opened Robotnik’s email.  Then he selected the reply chain with Starline and sent a new message: 

Why are Mobians immune? 

Black Doom has no idea. We’re an anomaly. 

Is it biological?

It must be! I believe you mean to ask if our immunity is innate —meaning something we just so happen to have that others cannot acquire easily. Is this what you wanted to know?

Yes. Is it innate?

Maybe. Maybe not. Humans and Mobians look and act differently from each other. Can you name the single innate feature we have in common?

Opposable thumbs. 

Plenty of animals have opposable thumbs. Before you guess again, many animals also walk on two legs. Some of them are nearly as smart as us. What elevates humans and Mobians above them is our capacity for language. 

Many animals have mastered basic communication. They have signals for danger, confusion, even love—but they cannot communicate more than one idea at a time. A bird, upon noticing a predator, may call to its friends, “Danger! Leave!” Humans and Mobians, when in danger, may say, “Look out! Let’s hide and then leave when the enemy is gone!” Do you see the difference?

Yes. We can communicate multiple steps at a time. Animals cannot. What does this have to do with our immunity?

On both Earth and Terra, only one species developed the capacity for language. I’m sure there are millions of planets out there whose most intelligent animals have not developed language at all. There are probably millions more who do have language, but it cannot be heard or comprehended by us for various reasons. 

In the grand picture of the universe, it’s very strange that humans and Mobians are so alike that we can speak and understand each other’s languages. What are the chances that two aliens would have mouths, throats, and tongues similar enough to reliably replicate the phonetics of each other’s languages? What are the chances the language centres of our brains responsible for processing sounds and symbols into meaning would be capable of understanding the intricacies of alien languages? Our sample size is small, sure, but it feels statistically near impossible. How could two alien species develop so similarly, despite evolving thousands of lightyears away from each other? 

With this information in mind, I would like to propose a theory: 

Humans and Mobians are the same species. 

This wasn’t how Tails had expected this conversation to go at all. 

The same species?

Why not? Foxes like you have several variations of themselves all over the planet—red foxes, arctic foxes, desert foxes, and more. What if that is all we are, variations of the same common ancestor? 

You think we share a common ancestor?

I think it’s worth considering. In such a short time, we have already met two peoples from different planets. There must be many more out there. Some of them are probably more advanced than humans ever were at their technological peak. They may hop around planets, leaving behind the seeds of life as they go. What if that is why Earth and Terra are so similar? 

What, like we’re the offspring of some kind of interstellar empire?

Sure! Either way, I consider humans to be the same species as Mobians. So, to answer your question: our immunity to the spores is innate now , likely passed through our genes, but its origin is environmental. 

Meaning that we acquired it by living on Earth. 

Precisely!

If Mobian immunity to the spores was environmental, did that mean humans could also be immunized against Black Doom’s hive mind?

Clearly, living on the planet wasn’t enough to do it. Black Doom had killed every single human in the hospital. Whatever immunized Mobians hadn’t been available to them. 

Of course, this was assuming Mobians were even immune in the first place. Hmm . . .

How do you know Black Doom isn’t lying to you about Mobians being immune? Pitting humans and Mobians against each other is a great way to make us waste a lot of time.

You’ve interacted with Shadow before. Did Black Doom control you? Did he read your mind?

A good point. If Black Doom had been able to read Tails' mind in the burrow, he would have learned that the ARK was rigged to explode. Why let Shadow go there if it would potentially risk his life?

Actually, wait, no—Black Doom should have known the ARK was rigged to explode. Doctor Robotnik had been aboard the colony when Shadow used the Eclipse Cannon. At the time, Tails had just told Robotnik he was going to kill him with explosions. When Black Doom read Robotnik’s mind, he would have learned that Shadow was walking into a trap. 

Except he didn’t protect Shadow at all. He’d allowed him to use the Eclipse Cannon and blow himself up. 

Why? It didn’t make any sense. Of all people, Robotnik was guaranteed to be infected. He’d spent too much time with G.U.N. officials as a child to be uninfected. Those spores had been in his blood since he was very young. 

Unless . . . he had been infected, and was then cured by the time Tails put his escape plan into motion. 

Is Black Doom available right now?

Why?

Morbid curiosity. Robotnik had no idea I was planning to kill him. Did he have anything on his mind when Shadow went up to the ARK?

He got his response thirty minutes later. 

Here is Black Doom’s response verbatim: 

“Humans only think of themselves. He was sad when Shadow revealed his plan to destroy the Earth, because it meant the planet would no longer be conquered by his empire.”

Tails laughed. What a liar! 

As soon as Shadow touched down on the ARK, Robotnik would have realized how the hedgehog fit into Tails' plan to kill him. He wouldn’t have been mourning his empire—he would have been mourning himself. 

Black Doom hadn’t been able to read Robotnik’s mind, and he was lying to make up for it. This was all the evidence Tails needed: Robotnik was immune to the spores. 

Then what set Robotnik apart from other humans? What set him apart from the humans in the hospital? 

When the humans arrived on Earth, they’d changed their environments to suit their needs. The Earth looked very different than it had sixty years ago, except in places like the East Pacific, whose environment had only been minimally disrupted by human activity. Sonic and Tails had specifically made sure that Robotnik did not harm the environment. What if, for the most part, the environmental factor that had once immunized Mobians was now gone? And now it remained only in the most unchanged corners of the planet? 

Unlike other humans, Robotnik had lived in one of these unchanged corners for multiple years. He must have interacted with the immunizing agent at some point during his time on the islands. The cure was nearby—Tails just had to find it. 

With a smile, Tails spun the chair in a circle as everything became increasingly clear: 

If the cure was only available on the islands, then the militaries couldn’t risk destroying them. Not without potentially letting the entire human race be absorbed into an alien’s hive mind. 

Finally, Tails had an advantage. All that was left to do now was figure out a way to exploit it. 

When he got dizzy from spinning, he grabbed the desk to stop himself and slid off the chair. Sonic had compared Tower’s trick with the navy forces to Robotnik’s false threat against Knuckles. Amy had done something similar by assuming the human was bluffing. Take a risk, she’d said. Maybe she was right. Tails had let G.U.N. embargo the East Pacific for too long because he hadn’t been willing to take the necessary steps to defend them. If there was a time to demonstrate his determination to protect the world’s island territories, it was now. 

Tails created a new email draft. Just like when he’d made his Master Emerald threat, he sent the email to the Interstellar Radio Receiver contact inbox. 

Hello. This is Alhazen. 

The Black Arms can control humans through spores. I have reason to believe humans can be immunized. The curing agent is native to this planet but not available everywhere. A version of it exists in the East Pacific. More of it likely exists in the areas of the planet least altered by human activity: the island territories. 

I will find evidence. For the sake of your own survival, I recommend you hold your fire. 

Tails made his way to the command terminal on the other side of the room, a big screen with multiple buttons and a keyboard that allowed him to control the empire’s badnik forces. Since Sonic and the world was unpredictable, the AI in the badniks was designed to operate on unspecific orders. Tails intended to use that to his advantage today. 

He issued a simple command to the 150 sea-based badniks in his possession: find every warship and submarine surrounding the world’s Mobian island territories—and then destroy them.

The sea-based badniks were armed with torpedoes, and many of the robots themselves were strapped with powerful explosives that detonated once they crashed themselves against the hull of their targets. By the time they appeared on the navies’ radars, it would be too late for them to save themselves. The world’s maritime forces were about to be wiped out in one blow. 

For the next few hours, he watched the badniks travel the oceans and take out their targets. He sent flying badniks to watch the carnage from above, pleased to see that the humans had accepted his warning and did not retaliate against the islands. They were safe. 

Eventually, his attention was broken by the sound of a ringing phone. It wasn’t the phone in the basement. Curious, Tails followed the sound out of the basement, tracking it down to the living room. 

A smart phone awaited him on a shelf in the bookcase. Its screen displayed the caller’s information: 

CMD TOWER

The Commander had left a phone for him. Did he want a direct line of communication? Weird. Tails had thought he didn’t want him involved in the fight against the Black Arms at all. 

The success of his recent attack gave him the confidence he needed to answer the call. “Hello?”

“Give me one reason not to strike back right now.”

 This time, the threat didn’t scare him. “I’ve fought alien invasions before. You need me.” 

There was a long silence. Tails was ready to gloat, taking his silence for shock, but then the Commander sighed on the other end of the line.

“I’m disappointed, Alhazen. Do you take me for a fool?”

His words chipped at Tails' confidence. “What?”

“I’m sure you tracked the badniks as they hit their targets. Did you see them hit anything near the United Federation’s island territories?”

His memory provided a blank. The implications of Commander Tower’s words dawned on him quickly. “You didn't send any of your forces to the islands. You knew I was going to strike back.” 

“This is a time of true crisis, Alhazen. If we didn’t act right away, we were going to end up killing each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll walk you through it. When the letter leaked, every single human leader called me and assured me, at some point during our conversation, they had faith you would not turn your robots against humanity to protect yourself. What does that mean to you?”

Tails sighed. “They were asking you for confirmation, which means they were scared I was going to do it.”

“Very good. I encouraged them to explore their insecurities. You’ve never given them a reason to distrust you. When you took the fate of science into your own hands, you made reasonable demands only. You have patiently weathered the storm of my blockade even when it has violated international law. You have proven over and over again that you are patient, risk-averse, and perfectly rational. Do you feel the same about us?”

The absurdity of the question punched a laugh out of him. “No. What reason do I have to trust you?” 

“That is precisely the problem. The other leaders know you have no reason to trust them. Therefore, you know that they know that you have no reason to trust them. In war time, there is a law of double perception: you base your decisions not on what you think of the enemy, but on what you think the enemy thinks of you. The leaders were concerned that you would eventually come to the conclusion that if you can’t trust humans, then they can’t trust you, and therefore they must prepare for your worst intentions. Which would be . . .?”

His paw tightened around the phone. “A direct attack on humanity.” 

“To prevent an all-out war, humanity’s best option would be to bomb the East Pacific territories and destroy your badniks before you could turn them against us. You would then have every incentive to use your badniks before we could destroy them. Do you understand now? If I didn’t step in, we would have hurt each other severely.”

As much as Tails loathed to admit it, the logic tracked. Commander Tower was right—the mutual paranoia could have devolved into a conflict much worse than what had happened today. 

“I pushed the other leaders to confront you directly, knowing it would force you to act. If you were going to conserve your badniks for countervalue strikes, that was the time to do it. But you didn’t. You used your robots to attack their ships, and in turn you have demonstrated that you have no intention of killing us before the Black Arms get here. We can now all work together without mutual suspicion. You’re welcome.” 

Tails couldn’t tell if he’d been saved or tricked. He wasn’t the only one who would be feeling this way, too. “The other humans will be mad when they find out. You sacrificed their navies.” 

“Do you think I did this out of the goodness of my heart? Billions of dollars have been funneled secrelty into G.U.N.’s reconstruction since I took over. You just dealt such a huge blow to the other militaries that they have no hopes of competing with us at all. I plan to reveal this during the fallout of your attack. Once they realize how far ahead we are, they will fall into line behind my leadership. This is a good thing. Humans need a unified front, and I’m the only person I trust to do whatever it takes to protect the planet.” 

Tails scowled. “I can think like a voyager, too.” 

“Don’t bother. If you want to help, you will defer to my leadership like the others. You are no longer allowed to act unilaterally. I want to hear about every move before you make it. You will not do anything without my permission. Do you understand?”

“I don’t have to find the cure. You just said everyone trusts me not to hurt them. I can do what Starline asked and build my own army. I don’t need you.” 

“Did you forget what I said earlier? Your Master Emerald deterrence protects the islands from occupation only. There are many things I can do to hurt you that fall short of that criteria. Don’t test me.” 

The line went dead. Phone in paw, Tails left the house in a daze as he thought everything over. The weight of the world was heavy on his shoulders, a feeling he hadn’t experienced since he was in the burrow. He needed to talk to someone about what had just happened, so he hung a right to return to the beach where he hoped to find Sonic. The hedgehog was a good listener. He would know what to say to make him feel better. 

When Tails was a few metres away from the house, a shrill whine rang from behind. He turned back to face the house, not understanding what he was hearing—

The house exploded. The force of it knocked Tails back, sending him flying several feet into the air. He landed hard on the runway, where he slammed his head against the pavement before rolling to a stop. His vision was blurry. A grey mass floated into the sky—smoke? Then a blue blur streaked across his vision, and darkness became all he could see. 

Chapter Text

His return to consciousness happened slowly. 

The first thing he noticed was the lack of fabric surrounding his paws—at some point while sleeping, someone must have removed his gloves. He stretched out his paws over the sheets, feeling the softness of cotton bed sheets against his tender pads. It was a foreign feeling. When was the last time he slept in a bed with sheets?

His nose wrinkled. It smelled weird, like chemicals. Around him, he heard the faint buzz of electricity. Voices spoke in the distance, muffled as though in another room. To hear them better, he turned his head to angle his ears toward the sound—

It felt, truly, like someone had sawed his brain in two. He opened his eyes, coming face-to-face with a bright ceiling light. The light made the pain in his head flare, so he shut his eyes and decided to remain in darkness until he felt better. 

A door opened. There was a plastic clicking noise. And then, an unfamiliar voice whispered close to him, “I dimmed the lights. You can open your eyes.”

Tails blinked his eyes open. A mouse in a lab coat closed the door behind her and nodded her head in greeting. 

“Good morning. You must be Tails.” The mouse walked to the side of his bed, where she fiddled with something on Tails' head. He hissed in pain and the mouse gave him a stern look. “Don’t move. I need to check your head injury. It’s going to hurt, but I’ll do it quickly. I promise.”

True to her word, the mouse didn’t take long. She unwrapped bloodied bandages from his head, then leaned in close to look at the area the pain was coming from. “Where am I?” Tails asked, voice raspy from disuse.

“Metropolis Zone Hospital,” the mouse replied. She prodded the area and it took all his strength not to jerk his head away. “My name is Dr. Petal. I’ve been watching over you since your friend brought you here yesterday.” 

Sonic. “Is he still here?”

“He was fussing over you all night, so I told him to leave. You needed rest.” Dr. Petal stepped back from the bed. “The wound on your head is healing well enough; there’s no infection and you won’t need more bandages after I apply some new ones. Consider yourself lucky you got here so soon. I fixed you up with nothing more than soap and water. I would have had to use antibiotics if your friend had waited too long.” 

Tails averted her gaze, chest heavy with guilt. It was his fault they were rationing medical supplies. “Thanks,” he mumbled. 

“You have a mild concussion. It should get better by the end of the week. Stay in bed. Avoid bright lights and loud sounds. Where do you live?” 

“South Island.” 

“Do you have reliable access to clean water at home?”

At the workshop, Tails had a big bucket that collected rain water outside which he boiled to make drinking water. If there was no rain, he filled it up at a nearby river and walked it back home. With a head injury that limited movement, he assumed this method fell into the ‘unreliable access’ category. “No, but I can stay somewhere that does.” 

“Recovery will only happen if you drink lots of water. Make sure they have a working water filter.” Dr. Petal grabbed a white cloth and rinsed it in the room’s sink. When she returned, she dabbed his head wound carefully and then dropped the cloth on a tray. She opened a new roll of white bandages and began the process of wrapping his head. “Are you from here?” 

The question confused him. “Why?”

“You’re not ashamed to be using bandages for your injury.” 

Momentarily, Tails was thrust into internal crisis—was she implying that he was being wasteful by not refusing the bandages? He knew, of course, that animals denied all medical treatment deemed unnecessary. Were the bandages not necessary? He didn’t know. The wounded area was in so much pain that he couldn’t even feel if there was blood weighing down his fur or not.

“If I don’t need them, you can save the bandages for someone else,” Tails pleaded. 

Dr. Petal huffed. “It’s too late. They’ve already touched your fur and blood. I can use fewer layers than recommended, though.” The bandages around his head tightened as she tied the knot to keep them in place, and his guilt increased tenfold at the noticeable pressure. “You also haven’t protested the private room. Especially for such a minor condition.” 

His face warmed in embarrassment. “I’ve never been in a hospital before.” 

A lack of knowledge did not make his complacency forgivable. It was, generally, quite rare for someone to have the kind of privacy a single room afforded. Tails only lived alone because he’d chosen to build his home away from other villages. The villagers would never scold him for trying to live alone within their communities, but to dispossess them of land by occupying it and then denying them access to it was totally unthinkable. Such an action would violate a core tenet of his morality: equity. It wasn’t something he could do. Even at a cost to himself. 

Building the workshop had come with various costs. New materials were reserved for fixing public amenities and thus unavailable for personal projects, which made it impossible to outfit his home with anything beyond what he could acquire from the forest around him. There was no electricity, no water system, and none of the technology that had fascinated him for his whole life. Amy had eventually given him a solar-powered generator, which he used to charge his tablet and phone. The phone was also a gift from Amy, although it couldn’t be brought anywhere because it was old enough that it died as soon as it was unplugged from the generator. That was okay. The idea of being constantly reachable when outdoors, as though he were at the world’s beck and call, left a sour taste on his tongue. He was happy to leave the phone at home.

Upon returning from his trip around the world, Tails had tried in earnest to live with others as he had when he was younger. His home village had one big lodge for children and two others for adults. He’d never slept in a room alone before being kidnapped by Robotnik, although he’d occasionally resorted to sleeping in burrows when his bullies made the children’s lodge too unwelcoming to stay in. Like most aspects of East Pacific society, he’d assumed the communal living standard would come back to him with time, but he found sleeping in a room with multiple people to be borderline impossible after spending so much time in complete isolation. A week of sharing a bed with Cream had not prepared him for a return to shared lodges like he’d hoped it would. In the end, he was frequently called away to help the Restoration with Eggman Empire or other technological issues, so he wasn’t home all that often anyways. It was better that he didn’t occupy a bed he was rarely going to use. 

Maybe Tails should have assumed the private room was an unearned privilege. Dr. Petal must have thought similarly, because she appeared wholly unimpressed as she put down the roll of bandages and backed away from the bed. “You’re here because you have a head injury. Putting you in the public rooms would have aggravated your symptoms.”

“Oh,” Tails mumbled. At least, the doctors had deemed it necessary. Still, he hadn’t even thought to protest the privilege of a private room, and learning the rationale did nothing to lessen his shame. 

“Your headache seems to be bothering you. I will give you painkillers to relieve it.” 

Dr. Petal opened a drawer to look for the medicine. This time, Tails' reaction was automatic. “No, it’s okay! I don’t need them.” 

The mouse showed no positive reaction. “Okay. If you end up somewhere with a freezer, you can use ice to help the pain. It’s better than nothing.” 

Where could he go that had a freezer? Reaching into his memories for it made his head hurt for some reason, so he remained in silence as he watched the doctor put the bandages and the cloth in their rightful places. He wiggled his toes and flexed his leg muscles, attempting to ascertain if he could walk without aggravating his head too much. It didn’t protest at the movement. Good. 

“Can I leave?” he asked shyly. He didn’t want to occupy the room longer than he needed to.

“Are you asking for my permission?” Dr. Petal snapped. She was no longer disappointed—now, she seemed angry. 

For good reason. Tails dragged his paws down his face as he realized what kind of mistake he’d just made. Being selfish about medical care was one thing. Assuming someone was seeking dominance—asserting authority they did not have—was something much, much worse. He may as well have called her a warden to her face. 

Before Tails could defend himself, the tension was interrupted by the sound of someone knocking on the door. Dr. Petal groaned in frustration and yanked it open. 

Waiting on the other side was Amy Rose. Dr. Petal didn’t give her the chance to say hello before demanding, “Knocking on the door?”

Tails cringed. Knocking on doors implied the assumption that the person inside the room was trying to keep others out—a faux pas almost as destructive as Tails' authority assumption a few seconds ago. 

To Amy’s credit, she took the accusation in stride. She put a paw on her hip and raised an eyebrow. “Closing the door?”

There was a moment of tense silence. Eventually, it seemed that Amy’s decision to throw the accusation back into Dr. Petal’s face was a worthy retort, because the mouse’s mood deflated and she motioned back to Tails. “Is this your friend?”

Amy nodded. “Yep.” 

“Wonderful. You can take him home. I’m done here.” 

She pushed past Amy and left the room. Amy watched her go and then turned to glare at something beside in the hallway. “You told me to knock.” 

Sonic poked his head into the doorframe with a smug smile. “It was really funny, though.” 

Amy scoffed. “I hate you. In fact, I am so mad that I am going to exclude you from the rest of the conversation.” She turned her attention back to Tails. In English, she continued, “What did you do to make her mad? That wasn’t all me.” 

“I am not doing this,” Tails responded dryly in Mobian. He didn’t like being mean to people, even as a joke, and Sonic would understand most of what they were saying, anyways. His English vocabulary was weak, but not non-existent. “Also, I made her mad by asking if I could leave.”

Sonic winced. Amy, however, laughed airily. “Oh, my God. Who cares?”

“It was mean.” 

“Whatever.” Amy waved him off. “What happened? Sonic said the house just randomly exploded.” 

“G.U.N. bombed it.” Their expressions morphed from curiosity to anger immediately, and Tails felt the need to add, “Not to kill me. Tower outsmarted me, and I was mad, so I threatened to rebuild the empire. He blew up the house as a warning.” 

“As a warning? He could have killed you!” Sonic said. 

“I didn’t say it was a nice thing to do,” Tails mumbled.

Amy put a paw on her hip. “Well, at least you’re not too hurt. What’s the verdict?”

“Concussion. I need a week of bed rest, clean water, and ice for my head.” 

Amy and Sonic looked at each other. After a moment of silent communication, they nodded in unison and turned back to Tails. 

“Okay. Amy called dibs on watching you if your injury required bed rest, so you can stay with her for a week,” Sonic said. He stuck his thumb over his shoulder, as though gesturing to something behind him. “I’ll go back to Cocoa Island and see what’s salvageable. I found a phone on the ground near you when I picked you up—its screen is cracked all over but it turned on when I pressed the button. It’s already at Amy’s apartment. I’ll look for your tablet and bring it back if it still works.” 

“I left it in the Tornado. You don’t need to go all the way to Cocoa Island to get it.” 

“The Tornado is still on Cocoa Island.” 

That hurt his brain a little. Tails shut his eyes and leaned back against the pillow. “What do you mean? How did you bring me here?” 

“I ran you here.” 

What? “Across the water?” 

“Yeah. I’ve done it before. Usually, I psych myself out of trying, but you were bleeding a lot and I was pretty worried, so . . . it just kind of happened?”

Huh. Tails thought he knew everything there was to know about Sonic’s speed, but he supposed that wasn’t true. Even Robotnik had never noted an ability to run on water. Maybe he’d just never had a reason to try during the occupation? 

Amy piped up. “Hey, we should go. Someone else probably needs the room.” 

Tails and Sonic glanced at each other. In the hedgehog’s eyes, he could sense the same flavour of embarrassment he was currently feeling. No one liked to be caught being selfish. In a place where the judgement of one’s peers maintained the social order, such social violations were equivalent to murder. 

It was Tails’ fourth time being reprimanded since he woke up. Mortified, he wiggled his whole body beneath the sheets to hide the way his ears wilted against the side of his head. 

Outside the hospital, they parted ways with Sonic. Amy pulled Tails through the streets of Metropolis Zone on a wooden wagon, taking the time to point out her favourite places to visit and the buildings her various friends lived in. The way Metropolis Zone had been described to him when he was younger made it sound like a sprawling, futuristic city where there was more metal than nature. Seeing it first hand revealed how much these stories were exaggerated to him.

There were no high rises in Metropolis Zone. The tallest buildings were five storeys tall, although the way they were clustered together really did make it feel like a big city compared to the rest of the islands. The bottom floors of the buildings were communal zones, taking on the form of dining halls, supply depots for essentials, and educational spaces like schools and libraries. Trees and other plants lined the streets. Tails watched with curiosity as the wagon rolled over cracks in the pavement filled with grass and leafy plants, wondering how long it would take for the streets to be taken over by nature completely. 

Amy took a hard left into the main floor of a three-storey building, rocking the wagon enough that it jostled Tails' head and made his pain flare. She pulled him through a dining hall, but he struggled to pay attention to his surroundings as he was overcome with dizziness. By the time she stopped at the bottom of a concrete staircase in the back wall, he’d shut his eyes in a desperate attempt to keep his world from spinning out of control.

“Oh, crap. I’ll carry you upstairs. Come on.”

Her paws grabbed him by the underarms, picking him up and holding him against her chest so he could wrap his limbs around her torso like he did with Sonic whenever he ran the two of them somewhere. Amy laughed at his automatic movements and scratched the back of his head affectionately. “Sonic must carry you a lot, huh? Can’t you fly nearly as fast as he can run?” 

As Amy climbed the steps, she held Tails' head in place, and he was grateful for the support. It made the journey upstairs a little more bearable. “I’m not that fast. He gets distracted when I fly behind him, anyways. He looks back to make sure I’m not falling behind too often and ends up tripping over stuff on the ground. It’s easier if he just carries me.”

“He’s such a weirdo,” Amy said lightly. At the top floor, she exited into a hallway and then stopped in front of a door in the middle of the corridor. “Okay, you can’t see it, but I live in number thirty-six, okay? The doors here don’t have locks, so you don't have to stress when the door is closed. Got it?"

“Mhmm,” Tails hummed into her chest. Amy opened the door and brought him inside.  He’d never been in Amy’s apartment before, so he lifted his head to look around, forcing himself to make out the details of the room despite his distorted vision. The apartment was small and box-like. In one corner, a single bed was covered by bundles of blankets and pillows. Another corner had a sink and a small countertop beside it. A wooden shelving unit against a wall contained piles of folded clothes. On the floor, in the middle of the room, was a circular low table with flat cushions positioned around it. A door in the back promised access to a balcony, which excited him more than anything else. He’d never been on a balcony before! 

Unfortunately, that would have to come later. Amy sat him on the edge of the bed’s mattress, removing his shoes and socks and then placing them under the bed. She helped him settle into the bed and rested his head atop a fluffy pillow. “There you go. Are you comfortable?”

Something felt weird. It took a moment for his brain to put the pieces together. “Yeah, thank you. Do you live alone?”

“I’m not supposed to. Technically, Sonic lives here too. I registered him as a roommate without telling him because I didn’t want to live with other people. Don’t snitch—he’ll get really mad at me.” Amy reached over him and closed the window curtains, enshrouding the bed area in darkness. “I’ve taken care of Sonic when he was concussed before, so I know what to do. I’ll keep the lights off and stay quiet. Can you walk, or do I need to carry you to the bathroom?”

He hadn’t tried walking yet, but he knew he wasn’t injured enough to be totally immobilized. “I’ll be fine when my head stops spinning.”

“Okay. The bathrooms are at the end of the hallway, next to the stairs. If you want to wash your fur, I can sponge you down in the sink or bring you to the bathhouse down the street. I think they cleaned you in the hospital though, so you should be good for a few days. By then you’ll basically be back to normal. Sound good?”

The reference to being here later in the week made him anxious. “Are you busy? You don’t have to be here if you’re busy.” 

In a comforting gesture, Amy rested a paw on the top of his forearm. “I told the Restoration I’d be gone for the week. Don’t feel bad about it—they can handle themselves just fine. If anything, it’s like a little vacation for me.” 

“I don’t think taking care of sick people counts as a vacation.” 

“When you work as much as I do, sitting around at home and watching movies with someone who isn’t feeling well definitely feels like a vacation. I’ve needed a break like this for a while, trust me.” Amy squeezed his arm gently. “Okay, let’s stop talking. You need to rest your brain. Let me get you some water.”

After bringing him a mug full of water, Amy stayed true to her word and let him rest in silence for the rest of the morning. Tails wasn’t tired enough to sleep yet, but doing nothing in darkness made his headache more manageable. It flared up randomly in the afternoon, bad enough that he was rendered disoriented and almost threw up over the side of the bed. Amy brought him some ice from the freezer to put over his head, which helped with the disorientation but didn’t do much to stop the pain. Miserably, Tails accepted that all he could was wait for it to heal and go away. 

The stress of doing nothing was like torture. Commander Tower had just demonstrated how important it was to stay ahead, and now Tails was going to be out of commission for a whole week. It frustrated him when he realized how intentional it was. The Commander had used him to take out his opposition, then attacked him so no one was left to challenge his supremacy. By the time Tails could think clearly enough to do anything about it, the global order could be completely different. He was falling behind. 

And yet, there was nothing he could do. He was stuck.

In the late afternoon, Amy poked his shoulder, rousing him from a light sleep. “Sonic checked in. The plane and your tablet are a little busted, but they still work. Good news, yeah?”

He sleepily uttered an acknowledgement and then closed his eyes again, exhaustion heavy enough to pull him back under in seconds. By the time Amy came back for him, it was time for dinner, so she helped him put on his shoes and encouraged him to try walking in the hallway before they went downstairs. Thankfully, he was not overcome by dizziness, and was able to descend the stairs without an issue. She still insisted on holding his paw, just in case, and he wondered how bad Sonic’s head injuries used to be if she was this concerned over a mild concussion. 

The dining hall that made up the bottom floor was filled with long tables and benches. At the back, near the staircase, was a counter and kitchen where two workers served food to a dwindling line of animals. Amy sat him down at one of the tables, and he awkwardly avoided eye contact with other patrons nearby while he waited for her to return with the food. Thankfully, no one tried to talk to him, and he was spared from potential attempts when Amy sat down beside him with a bowl of meat stew and two rolls of bread. 

She positioned the spoon in the bowl so it faced him. “It’s yours.” Despite his hesitation, she placed one of the rolls beside the bowl, too. “And this. You won’t get better if you don’t eat, right?” 

Tails looked at the single bowl with confusion. “What about you?” 

“They’re running low.” Amy gestured nonchalantly to the kitchen behind them. “I’ll come back later to see if there’s any left. For now, I’ll just take it easy. I can be selfish at breakfast tomorrow if I don’t eat tonight.” 

He didn’t understand. “There isn’t enough food?”

“Cities need a lot of food. We have farms and hunters, but we can only take so much. There’s like a . . . deal we have with nature. If we turn too much of the forest into farmland, the little animals will suffer. If they suffer, their populations go down, and then our carnivores will starve. People here would rather shoot themselves than produce meat like they do up north, so we just have to deal. We have two, maybe one and a half meals instead of three. It’s better that we all eat a little less than let some people starve, yeah?”

It wasn’t something Tails had ever given much consideration. At home, he had a small garden and could forage plants whenever he needed them. He set traps to capture animals if he was going to be there long enough to eat the whole thing, but he occasionally walked to the closest village to take meat from them when he lacked the mental fortitude to handle dead animals. No matter how much he intellectualized or moralized the act of hunting, he was unfortunately still nine years-old, so the process of it made him squeamish at times. Regardless, he’d never worried about how his food consumption affected others, and now he wondered if he should have been undertaking the same habits as the animals in Metropolis Zone. He stared at the meat stew in front of him and contemplated what it really meant to be eating it. Was there a hungry animal who could use it more than him? He wasn’t exactly starving . . .

Before the thought spiral got out of control, Amy rolled her eyes at him with a smirk. “Are you afraid of germs?” 

The burden of doing something selfish was instantly alleviated. “No, we can share. That’s better than—”

Amy licked the side of her bread roll and dipped the whole thing in the stew. She removed it, took a bite, and then pushed the bowl closer to him. “You islanders are so predictable. The bowl has my germs in it now, so no one else can eat it. Bon appetit.” 

He didn’t understand her last few words at all. “What?”

“It’s French. It means ‘eat up or I’m going to kill you.’”

At first, the audacity of her actions baffled him. But then, as he accepted that he now had no choice but to eat the food, he felt protected by them. Amy would make sure he got better—even if she had to break a few social rules to do it. He was in good hands. Paws. Whatever. 

When he was done eating, Amy washed the bowl and utensils and brought him back upstairs. He returned to the bed, and for the rest of the evening, he closed his eyes to protect them from the lamp’s glow as Amy sat with him on the bed and read to him from a fiction book. It was an English one, about two humans on the run from the authorities after uncovering important government secrets. Tails found it a little silly, but Amy claimed it was one of her favourite books, so he withheld his criticisms and did his best to pay attention despite the fog in his brain. It was better than being bored, anyways. 

The book made several references to places he’d never heard of before. A few chapters in, it dawned on him that the book was written over two thousand years ago on Terra, and the story became much more interesting. It was like a window into another world. And yet, despite some differences, it was not particularly foreign—the people in the story were similar to the ones he’d met on his trip with Sonic, cultures and mannerisms strange but comprehensible. It didn’t feel alien. 

Starline’s theory about the two species sharing a common ancestor made more sense now. It was a long shot, implausible if he gave it too much thought, but he understood it better than before. Maybe they were one people, all animals whose only difference was their planet of origin . . . 

The next two days were spent resting indoors. On his fourth day with Amy, Tails awoke from his slumber with a mental clarity that felt like emerging from a dense fog. The pain in his head was manageable, an object in the background that no longer consumed his whole being when it flared. He turned his head back and forth on the pillow, smiling when the sudden movements didn’t trigger a spell of dizziness. Finally, he was getting better! 

Triumphantly, he sat up in bed and stretched out his arms. “Okay,” he said loudly, getting the attention of Amy, who was sitting at the low table with her laptop, “I can think again. Where’s my tablet?” 

Amy smirked and wagged a finger at him. “Nope. You said seven days for recovery. Ask me again in three.” 

“What?” Tails balked. 

“If I give you that tablet, you’re going to spend all day online stressing yourself out. Do you really think that’s going to make your brain feel better?” She tapped the side of her head, mocking him. “Because no, it won’t! Don’t be stupid. Let your brain heal properly.” 

“I want to know what’s going on. Not knowing stresses me out, too.”

Amy closed her laptop and stood up. “Okay, then let's make a deal. I’ll tell you what I know so far. After that, you only get updates if anything super serious happens. Deal?”

It was better than being left in the dark completely. “Okay. Deal.”

“Great. Here’s your first big update: the human governments are having a lot of meetings with each other about the aliens. I can’t tell you any other details because we haven’t been invited. That’s it.”

“Meetings . . .” he mumbled. Commander Tower had claimed the other human militaries would submit to his authority once he revealed G.U.N.’s true capabilities. Is that what the meetings were about? Were they creating one big army to fight the Black Arms?

No, that was probably too optimistic. The other states wouldn’t give in to the Commander right away. They would try to find leverage first—some kind of out that prevented their loss of relative power. Only once they exhausted all possibilities to maintain control would they relinquish their authority.

This was good. It meant Tails had time to recover and make a move of his own. Whatever that would end up being. 

Since Tails was feeling better, Amy brought him on a walk around the city, allowing him to explore to his heart’s desire. At the edge of Metropolis Zone, they stumbled upon a game centre that was occupied exclusively by the elderly. A group of old animals played with carved stone pieces on one of the tables. Tails watched them curiously from the doorway, wondering how their game was played. He’d studied how to play and win games under Robotnik. If he observed the game for long enough, maybe he could deduce the optimal way to play. 

He felt Amy shift at his side. Then, much to his annoyance, she walked up to the table and told everyone that he wanted to play. 

The animals cleared the table and made room for him on one of the benches. Unable to decline now that they’d stopped the whole game for him, Tails shot Amy a woeful look and then sat down on the bench. A toucan gave him a pawful of stone pieces, telling him to hide his lot from the other players. Tails cupped the pieces in his palm and observed them secretly. There were two types of pieces: ones shaped like sharks, and ones shaped like fish. 

The game was simple. Players were not allowed to speak or disclose which pieces they possessed. Over the course of ten rounds, they took turns trading pieces with others. The goal was to correctly trade to make everyone’s collections as even as possible. If each player did not have an even collection of fish and sharks, the player with the most fish automatically won.

Immediately, Tails worked out the core conflict of the game. Everyone was better off if they cooperated, since it guaranteed a win for all players. However, someone who did not trust the other players or noticed that the optimal outcome was impossible would quickly defect and resort to sabotaging the other players in order to win. The rule against communicating made this even more likely, since players could not express their intentions and mutual suspicion was bound to arise. The odds of cooperation securing a win were extremely low. Therefore, it was in Tails' best interest to collect as many fish as possible and make sure he won the game. 

He played the game with his strategy. During his trades, he handed out sharks and only offered a small number of fish. He kept track of the other players’ trades to make sure he was always ahead. At the end of the game, when they all revealed their collections, Tails was crowned the sole winner by a significant margin. 

The toucan tapped Tails' collection. “Why did you give out sharks when you had so many fish? You could have used them to help the other players.” 

“What?” he asked incredulously. “Keeping all my fish is the best way to win.” 

The toucan gestured to the imbalanced collections around the table. “We could have won together, but the rest of us have lost. Is that winning to you?”

Tails looked at the other stone collections. His mental tallies of their contents were correct, but now that he was looking at the big picture, it was evident that he was the only player who had defected. The other players had all tried to secure the collective victory. Why? That wasn’t supposed to happen. 

“It’s not about winning—it’s about not losing. If someone can win by sabotaging you, then you need to protect yourself by making sure you sabotage them, too. Trying to cooperate is just setting yourself up for failure.” Tails placed his collection next to the toucan’s to accentuate his point. “I assumed that someone was going to sabotage us to win. Since you didn’t, you lost by a lot more than you would have if you’d played like I did. My way is rational because it’s the only way to prevent absolute losses.” 

Across the table, an opossum burst into laughter. “Ha! You assume the worst in others and then call it rationality. What is sensible about cruelty?”

“I didn’t say it was rational to be cruel!” Tails argued back. The unimpressed expressions on the other players made him shrink back a little in his seat. “That’s different. This is how you protect yourself in case someone is cruel.” 

“Ah, I see! You hurt others and then call it self-defence!” The opossum huffed and slammed his pieces on the table. “If we all thought like you, life would be unbearable. We would hurt each other every day over nothing. Who taught you to play games like this? Was it the pink hedgehog?”

Quickly, Tails waved his paws in dismissal. “No, she has nothing to do with it! It’s just me.” 

The opossum looked like he was going to speak again, but the toucan cut in before he could. “Stop! We are not here to argue. Let’s play again.” 

Feeling dejected and insecure, Tails wanted to leave. He’d ruined their game and they all thought he was a bad person. But when he moved to leave, the toucan grabbed his arm and held him in place. “Stay for one more,” he said, and then forced a bunch of pieces into his paw. 

The game began. When it was his turn to trade pieces, he noticed the opossum eyeing him warily. He’d just explained to the table that he thought the correct way to play was to sabotage others. The opossum—and everyone else, really—would likely assume he was going to do the same thing again. They would adopt his playing style to make sure he did not win again. It was the . . . rational thing to do. 

Something about this thought process now repulsed him. Against all logic, he decided to abandon his previous methods and cooperate. He traded away his fish and accepted many sharks. Many of his plays were sacrificial in nature, helping others at a cost to himself. Eventually, his sacrifices would be rewarded by other players when they gave him their extra fish pieces. There was an unspoken rhythm to the game, wherein he could depend on other players to cooperate and help him keep his ratio balanced. By the last round, he learned to trust the other players and stopped assuming the inevitability of sabotage. 

They revealed their collections at the end. The collections were almost perfectly even, although a player won by having one fish too many. The reaction to the round was much happier. The animals laughed and clapped at how close the game was, jokingly chastising the winner for failing to get rid of his fish on time. Tails was encouraged to play again, and his spirits lifted at their decision to include him another time. 

They played for an hour. Finally, during the last game, they achieved the desired result: an even collection for every player. 

The table erupted into cheers. Tails winced, the loud volume making his head hurt, but was elated by the outcome nonetheless. It was a different kind of elation than what he’d felt when he won alone, and one far more satisfying: the joy of mutual triumph.

Outside the game centre, Amy held his paw and squeezed tight. “Are you okay? It looked like they got mad at you in there for a second.” 

He kicked a rock along the road as they walked. “I’m okay. I just played wrong the first time, that’s all.”

In the evening, Amy sat beside him at the low table in her apartment and put her laptop in front of them. Knowing that Tails didn’t get to use computers very often, she let him take control and open the website she used to watch movies. He struggled with the trackpad, only having experience with a mouse, but eventually figured out how to click on stuff and was able to make Amy’s desired movie start playing.

The movie was weird. It was about a man who built a device for time travel but used it exclusively to undo mistakes he made when interacting with his girlfriend. Tails hadn’t watched any movies since he was really little, so he couldn’t remember what happened in them. Did all movies have such strange premises? 

“They should break up,” Tails commented. 

Amy scoffed. “You don’t get it. They’re learning to love each other.” 

“She doesn’t even know what’s happening.” 

“Yeah, but he’s doing it all for her. It’s romantic.” 

“It’s manipulative.” 

Amy shoved his shoulder playfully. “Shut up and watch.”

The movie ended. There was no reckoning at all for the main character, which made Tails feel vindicated in his criticisms. He looked over to Amy, ready to complain again, and then realized that she was tearing up. 

“Are you okay?” he asked. 

She wiped the tears from her eyes. “Sorry, it’s just so sweet . . .”

For her sake, Tails decided not to voice his opinion. Some things were just better left unsaid.

They followed a similar schedule for the rest of the week. After breakfast, she took him around to explore, and then they retired to the apartment before dinner so he could continue resting. There were no meaningful updates about what the humans were doing. Tails itched to log back into the Eggnet, if anything at least to assure Starline that he was alive. Abandoning the animal in charge of watching over their only connection to the Black Arms was definitely not a good idea. 

Once Amy let him go, he would reach out to him right away. He would find some library corner to sit in somewhere and send the message away from curious eyes. Then he would get to work on finding a new place to reliably access the Eggnet, since the computer and servers in the house were probably too damaged to be used after the explosion. That single bomb, so expertly planted, was turning out to be a very effective and very annoying move on Commander Tower’s part. 

On the last day, they passed a classroom full of children his age. Tails stopped walking to peer inside, feeling something like a pang of jealousy for experiences he never had when he saw them crowded around tables with books. Of course, he’d received very good academic training from Robotnik, but it wasn’t the kind of education he’d wanted when he was younger. It was never how he’d wanted to learn. 

The design of the classroom fascinated him. Like most buildings in Metropolis Zone, the doors were left open—but so were the walls, too. The flat concrete and brick walls that made up the walls of the other buildings were not present here. Thick load bearing beams surrounded the room, supporting the residences on the floors above, but there was nothing between them. Weird. 

“Why are there no walls?” Tails asked. 

Amy stopped walking and turned to look at the classroom. “Oh, schools are always kept open here. Look at the beams, do you see those?” She pointed one out. Wooden shutters were tied to the sides of the beam with a rope. “They close up the walls during storms. Otherwise, they keep them open. A lot of kids sleep inside, so it makes it easier for them to go in and out.” 

Tails had never heard of this before. “Kids sleep in their classrooms?”

“Oh, yeah. I guess that doesn’t happen in the villages.” Amy stared at the classroom intently, then sighed. “It’s . . . it’s a band-aid solution to a bigger problem, I think. A lot of kids are on their own. This is how we keep a roof over their heads.”

“Why?”

Amy huffed a humourless laugh. “Knowing you, I guess you want the long answer?”

“Sure,” he said with a shrug. It bothered him when questions were left only half-answered. 

“Okay. I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I don’t know if it was like this everywhere, but at least in this part of the world, there was no concept of parental obligation to your own child. Raising kids was something communities did together, so once the baby was out of you, it was no longer your ‘problem’, so to speak. All the adults took care of the kids. Someone who had nothing to do with the kid being born was considered just as responsible for their well-being. That’s why most of us don’t have family names. I mean, I have one, but no one here ever acknowledges it. I’m ‘Amy the Hedgehog’, not Amy Rose. No one cares because my parental heritage doesn’t matter here.” She bit her lip nervously, and looked down at him with a pained expression. “Sorry, this is going to sound a bit judgemental. We’re really bad at being parents. The system works better in the villages, where things are a little more close-knit, but it’s not great either. Back then, you know, kids represented the future of your tribe, or nation, or whatever you want to call it. You were connected that way. In the villages, kids might come from people you’ve never met. They might look like animals you’ve never seen before. All you have in common with them is that you were both kidnapped and shipped to the same place by gunpoint. Their parents might not even be around anymore. So, why should you care? Guilt? Species solidarity? There’s a lot of neglect, and based on what Sonic’s told me about you, I think you know exactly what I’m talking about. Metropolis Zone has it worse. Parents feel no obligation to their children, but the community isn’t tight enough to provide backup, so we end up with lots of kids sleeping in their classrooms every night because they have nowhere else to go. It’s sad, but I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t know if there is one. Maybe it’s just something we’ll have to live with forever.” 

Tails frowned and continued walking down the street again, no longer curious about the inside of the classroom. “I have a family name, too. Prower. I never knew my parents, though.” 

Amy followed in-step. “With a name like ‘Miles’, you’re bound to have one. Tails the Fox is a good Mobian name, though. I never bothered to get one. Amy is easy enough to say.” 

“What about Cream and Vanilla? They still live together,” Tails said. Floral Forest Village was still a little strange to him, in the way that families existed as units and lived in their own homes. He’d yet to see another village like it on the islands. 

“Everyone in their village does that. I’m not sure why. Maybe a lot of her neighbours are from human territories or something.” Amy tilted her head in thought. “Vanilla is really protective, though. I don’t think she’d let Cream live apart from her no matter where they were.” 

The conversation stuck with him for the rest of the day. Of course, Tails had never been curious about his parents’ identities. As Amy said, it just didn’t matter here. Tails didn’t care who they were. He didn’t care why they left. It was better that way. When bloodlines were devalued, loyalties and duty of care were spread to the whole community. It prevented the kind of selfishness that had possessed Gerald to want to destroy the world over his granddaughter’s death. 

Although, before Sonic came around, Tails had felt quite lonely. There hadn’t been much of a daily structure for the kids in his village, so they had a lot of time to do whatever they pleased. This led to the daily game played between Tails and his bullies, in which he did his best to hide from them and was taunted and beaten when he failed. The adults never stood up for him. They never tried to help him. There was no one in his corner until Sonic blasted through his village and changed his life forever. In a way, that was the trade off—there were no family units to isolate community members from each other, but when someone was rejected from said community, there was nowhere for them to go. Tails' only choice had been to suffer until his bullies matured enough to leave him alone or to wait until he was old enough to move to a new village on his own—assuming they didn’t reject him the same way. 

He’d never thought to blame that part of his childhood on a cultural practice. If his parents had been around, would he have still been lonely? Or would they have rejected him, too?

In the evening, Amy sat beside him on the bed and read to him from the book again. She didn’t need to, since his head was recovered enough that he could read on his own, but he didn’t protest the gesture. Amy seemed to enjoy reading the book to him. Why tell her to stop? It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. 

Unfortunately, Tails struggled to concentrate on the story. No matter how hard he tried to follow Amy’s words, his brain kept pulling him back to the conversation they had outside the school. He didn’t care about his parents because he’d been raised on the islands. So, did Amy . . .?

“Did you ever know your parents?” he asked abruptly. 

Amy’s eyes widened. “My parents?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew my mom when I was a baby. I remember her a little bit, just flashes of memories here and there. Nothing substantial.” 

“What happened?”

Amy shrugged. “I don't know. On my first day of school, she dropped me off and never came back to get me. I never saw her again.”

“You only knew your mom?”

For a moment, Amy toyed awkwardly with the corner of a page. “Well, not really. I ran into my dad once when I was your age, a few weeks before Sonic brought me here. He wanted nothing to do with me. I don’t think that counts as actually knowing someone.”

“What do you mean? He didn’t like you?” 

Amy put down the book with an exasperated sigh. “Apparently not. I was walking home from school one day and there he was, a pink hedgehog waiting at a bus stop. We made eye contact and I just knew it was him. I could tell he recognized me, too. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to know him so bad, and I wanted him to feel the same way because I was a lonely nine year-old and I loved my friends at school but it wasn’t the same as having a family, you know? But then the bus pulled in, and he didn’t even hesitate—he got on and let it drive him away. He wanted nothing to do with me. What an asshole.”

“Yeah,” Tails mumbled. He didn’t know what to say. The last thing he wanted to do right now was accidentally make her upset. 

Sensing his awkwardness, Amy reached forward and ruffled the fur between his ears. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m fine. It’s just, I don’t know . . . I wish things had been different. It makes me miss them sometimes, even when I have no reason to. I guess it’s not too weird to miss people you don’t like. I mean, don’t you ever miss Eggman?” 

The question was like a kick to the stomach. He almost denied it, a knee-jerk reaction that would have been obvious even to her, but managed to suppress the urge and made himself respond calmly. “I’m glad he’s gone. I never want to see him or hear his voice ever again. I’m excited to be older, because it means I won’t remember him as much as I do now. I want him out of my head. He’s in everything; my instincts, my thought patterns, the way I talk and write. I hate those things about myself because they remind me of him. But . . . if I had to choose one person to have at my side right now, to help me with everything going on . . .” he trailed off, unable to bring himself to admit it out loud. 

Amy generously finished his thought for him. “It would be him.” 

Tails hung his head in shame. “Yeah. I don’t really miss him, because if he was still here then I wouldn’t be free. I just think he would make fighting the aliens a little less scary.”  

Intellectually, he recognized that Commander Tower had said all those things about Robotnik to rile him up. He’d needed him to be angry and not thinking straight so he would miss the bigger picture and fall for the bait with the human navies. But at the same time, a piece of what he’d said was true: Robotnik had kept him in check, too. The Doctor was much better at following strategic impulses to their logical, most morbid conclusions. He saw the worst in people in a way that Tails did not. Where Tails had assumed the nature of the spores would force humans and Mobians to work together, Robotnik would have seen the same outcome that Tower did. He would have realized they were on a path to mutual destruction.

It was weird. Inside his brain, he could feel the part of him that thought like Robotnik. It was locked in a cage, rotting away but not completely gone. He could reach Tower’s level if he embraced it again. He just didn’t want to. It wasn’t who he wanted to be. It wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. It antithetical to everything he believed in. And that was why, in a twisted way, he did need Robotnik in his life—he needed someone to think the bad thoughts for him. No matter how well he’d trained Tails to do it on his own, there was still a young, earnest part of him that held onto the key to the cage and refused to let go. It refused to accept that the worst intentions of the powerful were always going to rule the world. Tails was grateful for its stubbornness. If he was incapable of imagining a better world—if he assumed the logic of the powerful was absolute—then they had won. And at that point, was there really a point to leaving the burrow at all?

Amy reached over to rub his arm in a soothing motion. “I get it. He was the adult in your life. You hate him, sure, but you can still want the support he could be giving you. You can still wish that he’d been a part of your life in a better way. Especially now, when you might want someone like that to lean on.”

The way Amy spoke, confident and quick, suggested that this was something she’d already put a lot of thought into. “Is this how you feel about your parents?” 

“Not anymore. When I was little, and stuck in the government’s stupid dormitory thing for kids like me, I would have given anything to have them in my life. Now, I just kind of resent them for not being there. My life has changed a lot, so I have better things to do than wait around for them to come back.” Amy leaned back until the back of her head rested against the wall, then let out a long sigh.  “Well, I try not to hate my mom. Like, things are different up there—you need money to live, and kids cost a lot of money. There’s a chance she just couldn’t afford to take care of me. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. It feels better than thinking she abandoned me to a child care system run by literal aliens because she didn’t care enough to try.”

Tails carefully searched for the right thing to say. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. He picked at the edges of his socks awkwardly. “. . . I think you’re worth trying for.” 

Amy smiled. Then, suddenly, she put her face in her paws and began to cry. 

Oh, no. Was this his fault? “I’m sorry, I—”

“Shut up,” Amy murmured, but she didn’t sound angry. She sobbed quietly into her paws. Slowly, as though prodding a sleeping animal, Tails placed a paw on her forearm. It was supposed to be comforting, an assurance that he was there, but the touch made Amy jerk as though he’d scared her. Before he could apologize a second time, she snatched him into a hug and squeezed tight. “Sorry, it’s just—I don’t think anyone’s ever said something like that to me before. Thank you. I mean it.” 

Tails allowed himself to be smothered by Amy’s arms. Speaking through her fur, he replied, “I meant it, too.” 

The hug lasted a long time. As midnight approached, they both grew tired, and Amy chose to sleep next to him in the bed that night. They fell asleep with their glove-less paws laced over one another, and Tails finished his recovery in the comfort of a friend’s love.

Chapter Text

You’re too smart to be a doctor. 

I didn’t realize someone could be too smart to be a doctor. 

Medical doctors are fools! They memorize and regurgitate. What was the last time you really thought at your job? When was the last time you had to do anything creative at all? 

I think creatively all the time. Treating humans is easy—as you’ve said before, you are all the same animal. You do not have physiological variance. But I treat Mobians almost exclusively, which means that I must constantly consider how our various physiologies interact with treatments, how they are afflicted by diseases, and the wide range of causes for medical conditions. Does that not involve creative thinking? 

You can do it well because you think creatively. Imagine what you could have contributed to science if your teachers had pushed you into a different field! 

We are around the same age. Tell me: how many Mobians were in your grade? 

I see where this is going. You are going to remind me of how abysmal Mobian education rates were until they were given legal status under the Convention. Then you are going to tell me that you had no choice but to go into a “safe” field of study because one of the first Mobians in university-level science couldn’t risk failure. Yes? 

Not one of the first in university-level science. The first. I was halfway through my bachelor’s when the other human territories started to enroll Mobians in their elementary shools. Do you understand the kind of pressure I was under to do well? 

I recall you saying that you feel no particular loyalty to your species. Was that different when you were younger?

No. But when you talk to me, or when you talk to other Mobians, do you not feel the weight of your species on your shoulders? Like you are responsible for your own reputation?

I simply don’t care. If someone is stupid enough to let one encounter influence their worldview, their opinions are worthless. Those who generalize are not worth my time. Nor are they worth yours. 

I agree. But you cannot tell who generalizes by looking at them, so when someone holds power over you, your only option is to play it safe. You present yourself how you presume they want you to present yourself. You may not even do it consciously! It is like a reflex, wired into our brains during socialization. My hospital is full of humans, so I catch myself changing my mannerisms around them all the time. 

This never happens to you? Not even when you talk to other humans, like someone from a different nation than you? Like women? I hear humans often correct their behaviours around other genders. 

As I said, I do not care what others think of me. Perhaps I do it unconciously but have not noticed. How do you act around humans when you want to appease them?

I assert myself. Doctors are trained to to dumb down their language for patients—I don’t do this when I treat humans. I use big words and let them ask me for definitions when they don’t understand. I correct my colleagues when they make mistakes, even in situations where the mistake could have been ignored. I give them no opportunity to question my intelligence. I learned when I was very young that they will assume I don’t know something if I don’t make it abundantly clear that I do. 

The humans at my hospital think I’m an asshole because I talk down to them. What else can I do? Mobians are seen as passive and incurious. Outside the hospital, when I’m in casual dress, humans sometimes talk to me like I’m a child. I refuse to deal with that kind of disrespect in the workplace, so I am abrasive to everyone. I would rather be hated and respected than loved and ignored.

Aren’t you afraid this will get you into trouble with your bosses?

Go read an article about Mobian medicine in any medical journal. No matter the subject, I assure you that you will find my name in the bibliography. I am highly cited because I was the only fully accredited Mobian doctor for half a decade. Patients used to travel to my hospital specifically to see me becuase they were interested in human medical technology but wary of human doctors. The complex cases that resulted in major discoveries all literally fell into my lap for multiple years. I am not famous generally, but my name is a huge asset to my hospital. Even if they find me personally insufferable. 

So, please, Ivo—tell me again that I have not made contributions to science. 

Of course, you have contributed to science in general. I did not mean to diminish your accomplishments! How do you treat an animal sub-type you’ve never deal with before? 

Carefully. I have never treated an eagle before, so let’s pretend one of them came to me with a persistent fever. I can reference my past treatments for large birds and use them to guide me, but I cannot assume the treatment used for a vulture will work equally well for an eagle. That would just be dangerous. So, when I supply the eagle with antibiotics, I will give them a very low dose and gradually raise it to check their tolerance levels. They may turn out to be allergic to this specific type of antibiotic, but does that mean all eagles are allergic, or just this individual? At what dosage does the alternative antibiotic start working? How long does it take for it to heal the eagle completely? Are there any side effects? Does the patient relapse two weeks later? These are all questions to take into consideration. Mobian medicine must be practiced with patience and caution. 

Have you been lying to me all along, Starline? 

What do you mean?

You told me that you cannot think like a Mobian anymore. Then why do you do so constantly in your practice? 

That is not what I do. 

Sure. When I proposed my theory of how to solve the energy crisis to you, I believe you told me that Mobian thinking is incompatible with scientific research. But it seems to me like you do it every day! 

You realize that trial and error is an essential component of the scientific method, right? 

Yes, of course. But this proves the scientific method and Mobians ways of thinking are not mutually exclusive. You have made room for yourself within the scientific method. Our methods can work together to make major discoveries! 

This is a mistake. I do not think like a Mobian. 

Ah. I think I see the problem here. 

At some point during your education, you came to believe that Mobians are incapable of studying science without assimilating into human culture. You still think like a Mobian but you pretend you do not—and for what reason? To appease us? To prove that you are on our level? 

I fear, Dr. Starline, that there are no levels. If you believe our methods are the only way of correctly understanding the world, then your teachers have successfully convinced you that they hail from a superior civilization. And you will be stuck playing catch up for the rest of your life. 

In your practice, you have proven that Mobian and human ways of thinking can support one another. They are equally useful for understanding the world. I am now fully convinced of my theory: it will not be a human who solves the Chaos Energy crisis, but a Mobian trained to understand physics within their own worldview. Provided, of course, that I can find a way to teach them human physics without making them feel shame . . . 

This is the only way. I’m sure of it. 

A dead tree stood alone in the middle of the clearing. 

It used to look different here. When Sonic was younger, this part of Green Hill was covered in palm trees, sunflowers, and tall, grassy shrubs. He remembered running around the plants, remembered playing with the animals who liked to play hiding game with him in the bushes. He remembered when those animals started going away. He remembered his fight with Eggman here, when he’d destroyed his base and freed all the trapped animals in his machines. He remembered emerging victorious and then seeing what the human’s bombs and weapons had done to the land. He remembered touching the scorched grass and wondering if things were ever going to get better. 

That was seven years ago. Sonic returned here occasionally, seeds in paw, to make the recovery happen a little faster. It would take many more years for the clearing to return to the way it used to be. Still, he was determined, in the little ways he could, to help the process. It was the least he could do. 

Today, Sonic smiled at the state of it. The grass was all better. The shrub and sunflower seeds he’d planted were blossoming into maturity. Bees and other bugs buzzed all around. Soon enough, it would be time for the trees to return, too. The birds would come back with them. Birds were everywhere on the islands, so it was weird to stand in the clearing and not hear them sing above him. Their songs were something he’d missed dearly while travelling to big cities on the continents with Tails, where all the noise came from the ground instead of the sky. He did see birds here and there, hopping around on the street or constructing their nests in building rafters, but they were so quiet it was as though they'd lost their voices. It saddened him, but he understood their silence. It was probably very difficult to summon the strength to sing while they struggled to survive among concrete and metal. 

 “Sonic?” 

The sound of Tails' voice removed him from his memories. Sonic turned to the fox, who stood a few feet away with his tablet clutched in his paws. He glanced up at him over the screen with a raised brow. 

“Well, are we here?” Tails asked. He pointed to the dead tree in the clearing. “Is that where Robotnik’s base used to be?” 

Sonic nodded. “It took up most of this area. I don’t think you’ll find anything useful here, though.” 

“Yeah, it looks pretty banged up.” Tails scowled and then marched forward, making his way to the centre of the clearing anyways. 

Tails had finished recovering from his injury three days ago. Since then, he’d enlisted Sonic’s help to track down all of Eggman’s old bases to look for anything that may have cured him of the alien spores. He said their efforts to protect the environment from him were probably the only reason the cure was still around. Sonic found the whole thing very ironic. Of course, someone like Eggman would have wanted to destroy the very thing responsible for humanity’s survival. It suited his particular genre of greed. 

“I asked Starline for ideas, and he says the curing agent is most likely something he ingested. Robotnik wore gloves and clothes, so it wasn’t like his skin was making frequent contact with anything out here. It has to be something he ate or drank.” Tails looked at the plants around him with a frown. “What was here before?” 

“Nothing you won’t find anywhere else in Green Hill,” Sonic replied. He knelt down to run his paw through the grass. “All the plants here are very new. If the cure was here, it would have burned with everything else.” 

Tails typed on his tablet with impressive speed. “Anything edible?”

“Nothing we haven’t seen already.” Thinking about the cure as food made it easier to come up with ideas for its source. “What did he feed you? You’re both omnivores, so maybe you ate the same things?”

The fox shook his head. “I already considered that. I didn’t know it at the time, but he mostly fed me human food. I haven’t had meat that tasted the same since leaving.” 

“You ate slave animals?”

“Livestock,” Tails responded. 

Ah, an English word. Livestock must have been what humans called the animals they bred for slaughter on farms. It sounded like one of those English words where two words were mashed together. Before asking for a definition, he tried to piece one together on his own. The first half sounded like alive, so it probably referred to the fact that the animals were living beings. Stock sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was supposed to mean. 

“What is stock?” he asked. 

Tails looked around the clearing one more time and sighed. He started walking back towards where they came from, which meant Sonic had been right and there was nothing here for him to find. “Stock is an economic term. It refers to something that you keep or, uh . . . sell—you know, give away in exchange for money—for its value. Does that make sense?”

“Livestock,” Sonic mumbled to himself. The word felt dirty to say. In one breath, it acknowledged the animals were alive and then swiftly denied them freedom. The entire concept was hypocritical. Living beings weren’t meant to be imprisoned, and especially not because their meat just so happened to taste good. If even he could see that, then why couldn’t everyone else? 

It didn’t seem to bother Tails as much. He tapped his tablet a few times and then looked up to Sonic. “Okay, where’s the next one?” 

Sonic hummed as he consulted his mental map of the Eggman Emipre’s infrastructure. The Doctor didn’t have any records of his personal bases, and he’d never shared their locations to Tails during his imprisonment, so it was up to Sonic to bring him around the islands and show him where they used to be. Unfortunately, his memory could be a little patchy at times and he struggled to recall where some of them were. His first encounters with Eggman were a blur to him, much like most things that happened a long time ago, so trying to pull precise details like base locations from seven years ago was a struggle. 

He had to remember, though. For Tails and the planet. So he waded through the tall grasses of his memories, pushing aside the reeds until he found a shard of metal glinting at him from the ground. Where else had he seen metal like this? Where else had he torn through it with his quills, in that brief window of time when he’d been able to fight back? When he’d taken down Eggman all on his own? 

Tails' gaze softened. “It’s okay if you don’t remember them all.” 

“Don’t lie. You know that’s not true.” The planet needed him to remember. If he didn’t, Tails had explained the fallout to him quite simply: they were all going to die. 

Tails remained quiet as Sonic searched through his memories. It took some time to find the metal again, and even longer to place his faded memories somewhere on this island. He grasped at threads until he could braid them into something tangible, a weak rope that could snap at any moment but managed to point him north nonetheless. Before his eyes was a small pond with a large metal tube that led from the water to a big structure in the background. There was a mountain behind the structure. He recognized its crest, the way it was swallowed up by low hanging clouds. Had he really fought Eggman here before? 

Yes, he had. He knew exactly where this was. 

Sonic held out his arms. “Come on, I know where to go next.” 

Once the fox was settled against his chest, he took off towards the base of the mountain. They arrived at the pond in less than ten seconds. He dropped Tails on the ground and let him explore the remains of the building that used to be close by. 

As Tails examined the skeleton of the base, Sonic found a space in the canopy of leaves overhead and stared directly at the sky. He’d been doing this a lot lately. Somewhere out there, aliens were racing toward their planet. The Black Arms. They knew what they were called, what they could do—but that was it. It seemed like no one was curious about the Black Arms in the same way he was. He wanted to know what their plans were. He wanted to know how they thought, how they talked, and how Earth fit into their lives. Could they survive without it? How desperate was their journey here?

There wasn’t much left of the old base. A few metal beams poked out of the ground, but everything else had already been dismantled. Sonic pulled his eyes from the sky to observe Tails as he checked the area thoroughly. He hadn’t thought to express his thoughts to him yet, since the fox always seemed so busy and stressed by what was going on in his head, but Sonic was curious enough about his questions that he decided to finally bring them up. 

“Why don’t we try talking to them?” Sonic asked. One of Tails' ears swivelled towards him, but he didn’t look away from the beam in front of him. This meant he was listening, so Sonic continued, “What if they want something we can give them? What if we don’t have to fight?”

“They attacked us first,” Tails said curtly. He got up from the beam and glanced at Sonic over his shoulder. “We could use the Interstellar Radio Receiver to communicate, since it can transmit messages too, but why bother? Black Doom won’t even tell Starline what he’s planning. I don’t think he’ll change his mind when a bunch of humans contact him instead.” 

This base location turned out to be a bust, too. Sonic searched his memories and brought them to another one. As Tails looked around the site, Sonic kept asking his questions. 

“Starline lied about what the planet is like. He made everyone seem evil. What if that’s why the Black Arms don’t trust us enough to tell us what they need?”

“Their entire species is a hive mind controlled by one person. Starline made it seem like they’ve absorbed other aliens into their hive mind, too. They’re conquerors. They’re going to take what they want without asking. I mean, really, if they were interested in negotiating, don’t you think they would have done it by now?”

The question made him think. The Black Arms had used the radio to talk to Gerald Robotnik, but now they were only willing to communicate through Shadow. Something must have caused that change. The simplest explanations were often correct—did their transmitter break? Fifty years had passed since the last time they’d used it to contact Gerald on the ARK. It could have even decayed from disuse! 

If that was the only reason, though, they probably would have mentioned it to Starline. All they had done was explain their abilities and given him a timeline of their arrival. It was like they didn’t care about talking at all anymore, and were only interested in sharing information if they thought it would scare everyone. But they had once been willing to talk. So what happened? Did they not trust the Earth anymore? 

Tails peered at a pipe sticking out of the ground. Sonic stared at his friend, at his young, unassuming features, and a thought he didn’t like entered his mind. He tried to will it away, but his brain latched on, and he couldn’t help but release it into the air. 

“You lied to Shadow,” he said. 

Again, Tails did not look at him when he responded. “Barely. I encouraged him to do what he was already planning to do.” 

“Yes, but you knew the ARK was going to explode. He didn’t.” 

Tails was smart, which meant that Sonic didn’t need to explain any further. “You think I’m the reason Black Doom hasn’t tried to talk to us.” 

“Starline said that Black Doom doesn’t understand lying very well. He can read minds, so he isn’t used to not knowing what people really think. What if you scared him?” 

Tails sat on the ground and turned to face him. “In that case, I introduced him to the concept of lying for the first time. He can’t read our minds and he knows we can intentionally mislead him at any moment. If he struggles to discern lies from the truth, then there’s no reason to try negotiating with us. He doesn’t trust us.” 

Sonic looked for a sign of regret on Tails’ face, but didn’t see one. Regardless, he said, “It’s not your fault.” 

“I don’t feel bad.” Tails crossed his legs and rested his chin on his palm. “What if it wasn’t all me? Black Doom stopped sending messages our way when Project Shadow was shut down. He would have witnessed the whole thing through Shadow. What if that scared him into not trusting humans? And then I sealed the deal for Mobians, too.”

“A team effort,” Sonic commented wryly. 

Tails rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure,” he said, and then turned back around to look at the open pipe poking out of the ground. “Do you know where this goes?”

“No. Why?” 

“If Robtonik pumped in water from nearby, it would have touched his skin when he washed his hands. He may have drank it, too.” Tails leaned forward to put his eye directly over the hole. “If he mostly ate food imported from the United Federation, which I assume he did, then exposure to water is probably the best explanation for how he was cured.” 

Water? That tickled something in the back of his brain, but he couldn’t quite place it. There had been other bases close to water sources, but water was all over the islands, and his memories only became more and more jumbled as he tried to summon them. Had the base with the dome-shaped roof been close to a river or a pond? Was it beside the ocean? The images he summoned changed each time he recalled them and he worried he was using his imagination to fill in the gaps he couldn’t remember. Someone had once told him brains could do that. The more a memory was recalled, the more it changed over time. 

Sonic didn’t want to change the memories Tails would need soon. He pushed them out of his thoughts and focused on what he could remember with confidence. 

“There’s a little lake not far from here,” Sonic said. He pointed in its general direction. “If he was bringing in water from anywhere, it would be there.” 

Tails followed his finger with his eyes. The little lake was concealed by trees and couldn’t be seen from here. Tails climbed to his feet and began walking in its direction. “Okay, let’s check it out,” he said.

Walking at a normal pace made Sonic a little twitchy, but he forced himself to match Tails’ speed as they passed into the trees. They travelled along a path cut into the underbrush, the kind made by meticulously hacking through trees and bushes with blades and machines rather than the kind made softly over time by walking it each day. The floor of the path was covered in young plants. Eggman had been here, but like the clearing with the dead tree, evidence of his presence was disappearing. It wouldn’t take much longer until the scars of his conquest were no longer here. Hopefully.

Sonic decideed the walk wasn’t such a bad thing after all. He had more questions that needed answering, and now was a good time as ever to speak them.

“Shadow is a hedgehog like me. Why isn’t he immune?” 

“Starline said Shadow has Black Arms DNA. Project Shadow was established to build big weapons that were less affected by Chaos Energy. My guess is that Black Doom offered to help, and used his DNA as some kind of Trojan horse to start his invasion of the planet.” 

Another term Sonic had never heard before. “What’s Trojan horse?” 

“It references this really, really ancient human battle where soldiers got behind enemy lines by hiding in a giant wooden horse they had presented to their enemy as a gift.” Tails huffed out a laugh. “A lot of the ancient human battles are kind of funny. They used to use very interesting strategies.” 

“I thought Black Doom was bad at lying. The horse strategy requires lying.” 

“Starline assumes he’s bad at discerning lies. Black Doom can lie just fine, but he might not be good at telling when someone is doing it back to him.” 

Sonic frowned. “What about Shadow?” 

Tails gave him a confused look. “What about him?”

“Can’t he tell when someone is lying?” 

“Shadow . . . he’s weird. I know he has his own personality and feelings—I saw them in the burrow. Right now, though, I think Black Doom is controlling him all the time. I don’t know how conscious Shadow is when he’s being controlled like that. He might not be present at all, you know?” 

Again, Sonic looked at the sky between the canopy of leaves overhead. “So, was it Shadow or Black Doom who wanted to blow up the planet?” 

The lake was in view. Tails picked up the pace. “Shadow. Gerald programmed him to want to do it.” 

Strategy was not a part of Sonic’s skillset. Before Tails had made it impossible for him to stop the Eggman Empire, he’d ruined Eggman’s plans by charging through his bases and destroying everything in sight. He didn’t need a plan when he could effortlessly steamroll the Doctor’s forces. In the resistance, when they’d needed to plan their missions carefully, Sonic had never taken part in the strategy meetings. Strategy required calculating probabilities and being confident in how the mission would play out. It made Sonic uncomfortable; how could anyone so confidently assume things about the future? There were too many variables, too many possibilities, that the mere idea of acting upon a prediction inspired extreme anxiety. Strategy just wasn’t something he could do. 

But now, he was talking about the past. And he felt no such discomfort when the events had already passed. 

“I don’t get it. Everyone keeps saying that they don’t know what Black Doom wants from the planet. But if he can control Shadow, and if he couldn’t read Eggman’s mind, then why didn’t he stop Shadow from using the Eclipse Cannon? If he actually wants something from us, like to live here or whatever, then why let Shadow destroy us?” 

They arrived at the lake. Tails looked down at the water, but Sonic could tell he wasn’t really looking—he was thinking. Deeply.

“He could just be here to destroy us. But why go through the effort? It’s not like we’ve ever threatened the Black Arms.” Tails sat at the edge of the lake. He poked the water and watched it ripple. “Well, we’ve never threatened them. We were harmless before the humans got here because we couldn’t technologically advance. Maybe they’re attacking now because our planets are close to one another and they don’t want hostile aliens in their neighbourhood.” 

Sonic tapped his foot as he thought. “Then why not surprise us? They could have waited until Black Doom was close enough to control humans before revealing they were on their way.” 

“Yeah, I’ve wondered about that, too. Their strategy has changed. Instead of killing us from space, they’re giving us time to prepare our defences.” With a strangled noise, Tails sat up straighter. “No, they’re doing the opposite. Black Doom could have used the humans to kill the Mobians in the hospital too—if they had died, we wouldn’t have figured out that we’re immune. He wanted us to know because it would make the humans insecure. He wanted us to be too busy fighting each other to prepare for his arrival.”

“Fighting? Like what happened with Tower?”

“No, I think . . . I think Tower figured out Black Doom’s intentions as soon as he received Starline’s letter. He saw right through him and shut down his plan within a day.” 

Tails’ analysis only inspired more questions. Sonic pressed on, wondering how much would be revealed if he kept pushing. 

“Black Doom used to be okay with destroying the Earth. Now, he just wants us to fight each other. Do you think his plans have changed?” Sonic said.

Tails flopped over onto his back. He looked at the sky like Sonic had done before, eyeing the dim stars as though he could spot the Black Arms’ ship among them. “If his plans changed, then the circumstances surrounding them have changed, too. Let’s assume he doesn’t want to destroy the Earth right away anymore. What has changed between the time Shadow went up to the ARK and now?”

“You figured out how the Chaos Emeralds work,” Sonic suggested. “We’re not harmless anymore since we can build spaceships and stuff.” 

Tails gasped. “The Chaos Emeralds. They were—” He jumped to his feet and began to pace in circles. “The Chaos Emeralds were on the ARK when Shadow tried to blow up the Earth. Now, they’re on the planet again and Black Doom has changed his approach. That must be it. I mean, if he only cares about the Chaos Emeralds, then he had no reason to stop Shadow from using the cannon. What he needed wasn’t on Earth. Now it is. That’s why his methods are different.” 

Sonic watched him pace. He contemplated asking a question, the kind that would push Tails to keep thinking, but the fox continued speaking before he could piece one together. 

“But why would he want the Chaos Emeralds? They’re only useful now because we understand how they interact with the Master Emerald. He would need both of them if he wanted unlimited energy for his ships or his planet. What if he’s just assuming they can work fine on their own? He could be attacking us for no reason!” 

Sonic returned to one of his main rules: the simplest explanations were often best. 

“What if they have their own Master Emerald at home?” he asked.

Tails fell still. “What, like the emeralds are common on other planets?” 

Sonic shrugged. “Why not? We have a bunch of emeralds and the humans had none. There could be some planets that only have a few.” 

“Planets need energy to develop. Energy from the Sun allowed plants and microorganisms to evolve into existence here. If we only had a giant emerald capable of eating energy, that may have happened much slower. Or not at all. I don’t think it’s possible for them to only have a Master Emerald.” 

“What if it wasn't always there?”

Tails was quiet for a long time. He spent a few minutes pacing, chewing anxiously on his paws, and mumbling to himself. Sonic didn’t interrupt. It was clear that he was working through a big problem in his head. 

Eventually, Tails stopped again and faced him. “Let’s pretend the Black Arms have a Master Emerald on their home planet. Other aliens may possess Chaos Emeralds at home, or even know how to make them. Maybe, in the grand scheme of the universe, Terra was the outlier planet for not having any emeralds. Understand so far?”

“Yep,” Sonic said with a nod. 

“Okay. In war, it’s common practice to weaken your enemy as much as possible before or during your battles. Imagine the two of us were enemies. If I thought we were going to fight soon, I would try to surprise you by cutting off your quills while you were sleeping. This would make it much harder for you to beat me. Now, Starline told me that Black Doom has absorbed other aliens into his hive mind. He’s a conqueror. What if this has scared other aliens? What if one of them fought back by sending something like a Master Emerald to the Black Arms’ home planet?”

Sonic blinked. “What would that do to the planet?”

“The Master Emerald likes Chaos Energy the most, but if none is available, it will consume whatever energy it can find. It would wreak absolute havoc on their technology. What they did have would stop working, and their new inventions would eventually fail when the Master Emerald learned to consume their energy. They are now us sixty years ago—unable to advance scientifically and vulnerable to attacks from other aliens. Black Doom needs the Chaos Emeralds to stabilize his planet’s energy. That’s why he’s attacking the earth.” 

If all the technology on Earth stopped working tomorrow, Sonic would be fine. He only used it when he had no other choice. Not everyone could afford to live without it, though, and he knew it would cause a lot of problems for them. If the Black Arms’ home planet was anything like his own, sending a Master Emerald there must have caused a lot of suffering.

“Does this change anything?” Sonic asked. 

Tails waved his paw in a so-so gesture. “It’s better for us. The humans might be reluctant to share their weapons with us, but they will trust us with the Chaos Emeralds. We can try to hide them or find some way to make them impossible for the Black Arms to acquire. But to do that, we’ll need a way to defeat the Black Arms. Otherwise they can just kill everyone on the planet to punish us and then look elsewhere.”

“Right. And we need to find the cure to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Tails gave him an unimpressed look. “I’m sure they still have other weapons. The cure will buy us more time, but it won’t protect us completely.” 

Sonic didn’t like all the assumptions being made right now. How could Tails know any of this for certain? There were always more variables, more possibilities . . . 

“What if he doesn’t? It seems to me like he’s doing everything he can not to fight us directly,” Sonic said. He didn’t know how much he believed his own words, but he hoped it would make Tails adjust his thinking. 

Tails tilted his head to the side. “I . . . the Black Arms are conquerors. They must have weapons.” The question appeared to stump him. Tails sat on the grass and rested his paws o his knees. “Unless they don’t. If his planet really was hit by a Master Emerald, then it would be impossible for new ships to leave the planet. It must have happened when Black Doom was already in space. In that case, he’s been flying around space for way longer than he was probably supposed to. I assume most voyages into space only allocate enough resources to complete their missions. His ship could be low on fuel, food, and weapons supplies. What if he’s out of ammunition? If he had weapons, why didn’t he use them to threaten humanity when he was in contact with Gerald? Why wait fifty years to give Shadow and G.U.N. time to infect the planet with spores? It all makes sense—Black Doom doesn’t have any weapons, or doesn’t want to use them, and his only hope of beating us is by controlling the humans into doing it themselves.”

It was impressive, the way Tails was able to make such huge leaps of logic so quickly. All Sonic could do was nod along. “Okay. Then finding the cure is really important.”

Suddenly, Tails grinned and climbed back to his feet. “If all of this is true, the cure is the most important thing in the world. And it’s my card to play, not Tower’s.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“When I made my demands with the Master Emerald, I was so determined to not take risks that I didn’t use my power ambitiously enough. Tower has proved what a mistake that was.” Tails’ tails wagged happily behind him. “If we can find the cure, I won’t just control science. I’ll control the fate of the planet. I can make whatever demands I want and they won’t be in a position to refuse.” 

Sonic bit the inside of his cheek. “You’re going to threaten them?” 

“G.U.N. and Tower have violated the Convention on Cohabitation without any recourse. The other governments haven’t followed suit yet, but what if they do in the future? They could all decide one day that they don’t want to support the islands anymore, and then we’ll be left to suffer because there’s nothing we can do about it. I don’t want us to be at their mercy forever.” Tails returned to the edge of the lake, where he peered inside the water to presumably look for other end of the pipe. “The planet isn’t being shared. If I do this right, I can change that. I can force the humans to concede power to us. I can make them destroy all their weapons, I can make them change their economies, and I can even make it so we can go back to where we’re from on the continents. Most animals over the age of forty know where they’re from. What if they weren’t stuck on the islands, or in human cities, and could return?” 

Usually, Tails did not strike Sonic as an optimist. This was the most hopeful thing he’d ever heard the fox say in his life. It was almost too hopeful, and he was reluctant to consider it seriously.

“I thought you didn’t like making big demands like this,” he said. 

“If I’m saving their species, the least they could do is stop hurting mine,” Tails replied. 

The response was a little snappy, so Sonic decided not to question it again. Instead, he asked, “Would you leave? Foxes are from up north.”

“I don’t know anyone I’m related to. I’ve also never been there—I have no idea how much it’s changed since humans took over. They’ve changed the environment a lot on the continents. Maybe it’s completely different there now. I mean, that’s the only reason we have the cure and they don’t, right? It’s something that used to exist around the planet, but is only here now because of how we treat the land. If we controlled the continents again, maybe the curing agent would return, too.” Tails moved around the edge of the water as he looked for the pipe. “What about you? Would you stay? Hedgehogs are from a lot of places, too.” 

Sonic kneeled down and ran his fingers through the grass. He’d done this once, in another place during his trip with Tails, where breathing in the air felt like filling his lungs with ghosts. It was a place in southern Mazuri where the grass was tall and dry and there weren’t many trees. He was able to run around there in a way he couldn’t on the islands, where the ocean blocked his path if he ran in a straight line for more than a few seconds. The land itself in that place haunted him. At night, he could never sleep. He sat outside their shelter and stared into the darkness of the grasslands until morning. He never moved a muscle, despite his skin buzzing with energy, because he was convinced that some kind of supernatural force was waiting to strike when one of them wasn’t awake to keep watch. It was only when they took off in the Tornado two weeks later that he realized he hadn’t fallen ill once the whole time he was there—the longest stretch of time since the very beginning of his memories. He watched the land disappear behind the clouds, and with a heaviness in his bones, he finally recognized that he hadn’t felt so strange there because the land was haunted. He’d felt strange because he was home. 

It wasn’t something he would ever share with someone. Maybe Knuckles, if the echidna was in a talking mood, because he knew what it was like to have a home and no animals to share it with. He was the last echidna, who was entrusted with taking care of the last of the Chao. He would understand how it felt to be haunted by losses from before his time. 

Suddenly, Sonic’s paw froze in place. Hold on. 

“You said the cure is something that used to be everywhere, yes?” he asked. 

Tails looked back to him. “Yeah. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have given all of us immunity.” 

“And now it’s only on the islands.” 

Tails fully turned around and took a step towards him. “That’s the idea. Why? Do you have an idea of what it might be?” 

A part of him feared what would happen if it turned out to be true. It would put them in danger. But if he said nothing, they would perish, too. There was no other choice. 

It was a clear day, so when Sonic looked back to the sky, he could make out Angel Island in the distance. He pointed to it. 

“It used to be everywhere, and now it’s not. The cure is in the Chao Garden.”

Chapter Text

The Chao Garden was small. Too small. 

Tails walked around the edge of the garden’s pool, stepping over the Chao who curiously tried to grab his ankles as he slowly, reluctantly, and unwillingly accepted the reality of the situation: 

There was not enough water to inoculate all of humanity. Not even if every human on the planet took no more than one tiny little sip. 

“Can they make more?” Sonic asked. He stood to the side with Knuckles, who watched Tails inspect the pool with his arms crossed over his chest. “You said you were going to move some of them to another garden soon, right? What if they can change the water really fast and make enough for everyone?”

“That wouldn’t work,” responded Knuckles. “Acclimating them to a new garden takes time. I refuse to rush it and risk hurting them.” 

The conversation made Tails think. What if they could make more? 

He removed the backpack hanging over his shoulders and put it on the ground. Before flying to Angel Island, Tails had visited Metropolis Zone hospital to take one of their glass vials made for containing biological material. He retrieved it from the bag, removed the lid, and carefully dipped it into the pool to fill it with water.

“The Chao don’t need to make more. We might be able to do it ourselves.” He held up the vial for Sonic and Knuckles to see. “The cure will be represented by a unique element in this sample. If scientists can figure out what it is, they may be able to duplicate it in a lab. Then we won’t need to worry about quantity at all.” 

“How do you do that?” Sonic said. 

“I don’t know.” As Tails put the vial in the backpack, his paw brushed the edge of his tablet. “But Starline might. We should go. The sooner I can talk to him about it, the better.” 

Tails stood up. Before he could start walking back to the Tornado, Knuckles stepped into his path and held up a paw. Stop. “You made a promise to Tikal.” 

It took a moment to figure out what he meant. “This isn’t going to hurt the Chao,” Tails said. Why would it? They wouldn’t be hurt by whatever was done to the water sample. 

“You said this garden is now the most important thing in the world. How will you protect it?”

Right. He could see what Knuckles was trying to say: if the cure could only be found here, then scientists or even desperate humans might come here to try to immunize themselves. They could contaminate the water and hurt the Chao. Tails didn’t want that. Like Knuckles, he also had a responsibility to protect the Chao. Their safety was the only condition put forward by Chaos and Tikal in order to use the Master Emerald in his plans. Although this one did not involve the large gem, he could only assume the same rules would apply. 

“Okay. Easy. I won’t tell anyone where it’s from,” Tails said. One of the small creatures crawled around on the grass nearby. When he spoke to Tikal, she hadn’t shown him the Chao. He’d thought they would be like the other animals and hadn’t thought to seek them out. Seeing the way they moved and interacted with each other in the garden now made him understand why they needed to be protected. They weren’t like other animals, who had claws and fangs to protect themselves—they were totally defenceless. Like babies. It worried him to think about it, and he abruptly said, “The humans have animal spies. They might send them to look for the source. Don’t let anyone you don’t already trust near the garden.” 

Knuckles barked out a laugh. “Ha! I already do that. If Sonic did not trust you, I would not have taken you here.” 

It didn’t surprise him to learn that Knuckles didn’t trust him. They knew of each other, and they had spoken once, but they weren’t friends. They only had two points of connection: Sonic and the bracelet around Knuckles’ wrist. 

Well, he supposed the Chao counted, too. Three points of connection. Not a whole lot. Not enough for anything meaningful to form between them. 

“Good,” he said. He stepped around Knuckles, who did not block him again, and then continued on his trek back to the Tornado. 

Riverside Village was the largest village on Westside Island. Located on the southwest tip of the island, it was a primary distribution hub for items brought to the island cluster from the United Federation. Before the blockade, a boat of supplies from the United Federation would dock in Emeraldville—on the eastern side of the island, which was closer to the human continent—once a month. The supplies were distributed across Westside Island first and then shipped out to the other islands from the small port in Riverside Village. 

Tails huddled against the outside wall of the village’s gathering building, tablet balanced on his knees as he typed out his message to Starline. After staking out the rest of the building, he’d found a place along the wall where the wi-fi was just strong enough to connect to from outside. There was some kind of meeting going on in the building, so he had to stay outside for now. He couldn’t go inside without drawing attention to his presence, which would then draw attention to his tablet, which would then cause the adults to force him to go outside and play with the other kids. Ugh. Not worth it. 

Strategically, this village was a good place to hunker down in for the meantime. It was big enough to have received all the communication service upgrades available during the Eggman Empire, which meant it had Internet access and a cell tower. He didn’t know what was going to happen now that he had the cure, so it would be wise for him to stay connected as much as possible. The last thing he wanted was to miss major developments because he was stuck somewhere with no service.

Sonic was already gone, off to tell Amy about the cure. It would probably be a day or two until Tails saw him again. The two of them had just spent a few long days hiking around the islands together, and he could tell by the end that Sonic was itching to run around without a routine again. The hedgehog didn’t like to be weighed down by anything. He’d put up with a lot of pressure lately, so he deserved a nice break to himself.

Tails, unfortunately, did not have time for a break. He finished writing his message and hit ‘send’. 

I found the water source that contains the cure. Problem: there is not a lot of it.

Be more specific. How much? 

It’s a single pond.

Not enough to immunize all humans, I assume. 

Yes. If we can find the curing agent in a lab, can it be duplicated?

Slow down. Have you ever studied biology? 

No.

I can tell. If you asked me to analyze the water sample, I would have no idea what to look for. How can I find a curing agent if I don’t know what it is? I might mistake it for something else in the water. Isolating the cure in the sample isn’t possible when I don’t know what the cure is. 

What if it’s the whole sample?

Haha! You’re funny. If it’s in the “whole” sample, it means we cannot replicate the water in a lab. That pond is all the cure you are going to get. 

Do you really think we would have enough time to vaccinate every human on the planet, anyways? We would need to produce enough vaccines, which could take months, then ship them out and inoculate everyone one-by-one. It just wouldn’t work. You can reserve the cure for specific humans, but I fear that is all you will get out of it.

Then what’s the point of having it?

It’s not totally useless. Let’s say a human must drink a pint—around half a litre—of cure water to immunize themselves. How many humans could you cure with the amount of water available to you?

100.

That’s a lot of cured humans! 

It’s not enough. How are we supposed to choose who gets cured and who doesn’t?

The same way the humans chose who got to go on the Long Voyages and who was left behind. Cure the humans who possess skills you need. 

There are no humans with skills I need.

Then why are we having this conversation? 

Tails groaned and smacked the back of his head against the wall. He hadn’t expected Starline to steal the wind from his sails like this. If the cure couldn’t be used to save all humans, then it couldn’t be used as leverage for the kind of big changes he wanted for the world. The humans wouldn’t need to listen to him. He was powerless. 

Don’t let me discourage you. There are scientists who specialize in studying the Earth’s effects on human bodies. They might have techniques I don’t know about that could find the curing agent in the water. 

But that would mean handing it over.

I see. Do you intend to use it to pressure the humans into doing something?

Yes. The planet is not being shared. I want to change that.

I apologize if this is an insensitive question, but why now? Why not change the planet with the Eggman Empire? Ivo would have done it for you. 

Why would he? He didn’t care about that kind of stuff.

That’s precisely why he would have done it. We both knew him well. You should have noticed that he held no particular loyalty to his species. He would have shoved them all onto the islands and moved you to the continents if you asked nicely enough. 

That’s not what I want. I don’t think it’s wrong for humans to be here in general. Terra is dead, so they need somewhere to live. It’s fine if that’s here. We can work something out. But we have to work it out together, so we can share the planet in a way that’s good for both of us. That’s what I want to use the cure for—to put us on equal footing so we can fix what happened. What’s still happening.

It’s probably too optimistic. But I can still try, right?

What an elegant way to avoid my main point! Fine. We don’t have to talk about Ivo if you don’t want to. 

You claim it’s too optimistic for us to live together equally. Do you know anything about Victoria Island? 

I know you’re not a real island territory. A province of Adabat with a lot of Mobians on it?

Legally, we are a province, yes. In reality, we are an independent territory with our own government and are not subject to laws from the mainland. You are also correct about our population demographics. Only 15% of residents are human. The rest of us are all Mobian. 

We live in a democracy where we all have the right to vote. This means that by sheer numbers, Mobians choose the government, not humans—making us the only territory where humans live under Mobian governance. It has been this way for fifty years. The humans still have power, since they founded all of our businesses and make up the wealthiest section of our population, but they do not own us. Not like how the United Federation owns you. 

It’s not a perfect system, but it is one where we legally exist as equals. That makes it worth noting.

Tails read the messages hungrily. He’d never heard of this before. If it had been around for fifty years, then the voyagers who had settled there had agreed to live in a territory where Mobians controlled the government. It was so outside his perception of them that he almost didn’t believe it. 

How did this happen?

Luck. 

I will lay out the three main factors that led to this arrangement. 

1. Victoria Islanders have a history of empires. We took turns conquering each other and being conquered. By the time the humans arrived, we knew what to expect from an expansionist empire. This gave us a distinct advantage over the rest of the planet, where the majority of Mobians had not even developed the concept of a state. The voyagers did not take us by surprise. 

2.  Look at a map. You will see that our island is rather isolated from other humnan territories, but located closest to Chun-nan, Japan, and Adabat. All three of them staked a claim on our island at the same time. They took over their respective corners and prepared for war over the territory. This put us in a very, very good position. Our leaders understood immediately that we could not beat their weapons. But we had been fighting wars on the land for centuries, so we knew how to use it to our advantage. The humans we decided to ally with would be the ones who won the war. We got to choose which humans would control our territory. Our own pick of the litter!

3. We resemble animals from the region known as ‘Australia’ on Terra. During the Long Voyage, the Thai voyage destroyed the Australian voyage for supplies. They could not handle the guilt of killing an entire nation. The voyagers devolved into a guilt-ridden psychosis in which they were reported to hallucinate koalas and kangaroos around their ship. At the end of each week, they gathered in the atrium to offer a collective apology to the Australians. A shrine devoted to Australians was set up in one of the meeting rooms. Not a single person was immune to the guilt. 

It did not go away with time. If anything, it only strengthened. Then the Thai voyagers landed on Victoria Island and were greeted by the animals from their guiltiest nightmares. 

We saw the difference in how they treated us. The Chun-nese and Japanese soldiers had no qualms over pushing us around or kicking us out of our homes. The Thai soldiers refused to touch us. They stayed in their little military post and did not expand. A Mobian child was spying on them from a tree and fell inside their walls. He broke his arm. When he returned home two hours later, he said that all the soldiers had done was treat him and let him go. Choosing which human army to side with turned out to be a very simple decision for our leaders.

The Mobian leaders formed an alliance with the Thai soldiers. In return for our knowledge, they taught us to use their weapons. We formed a single army and pushed out the other humans in just two months. And then, because we understood empires, we turned our new weapons on the Thai soldiers and told them to get out. 

They told us about what was happening to the rest of the world. We were warned that if they left, someone worse would replace them. We would be treated like other Mobians and get harassed and kicked out of our homelands. The only guaranteed way to prevent this was to form a state with them. After a lot of discussion, we accepted. We wrote the constitution over several years, and when it was done, Victoria Island as a territory was born. 

Were you alive for this? 

I’m not that old! I was born in 1964, around ten years after the battle. 

Were the humans still weird? 

No, their collective guilt over Australia was largely gone by then. Perhaps it was just a symptom of long term space travel. 

Tails was thinking the same thing. Except he had a feeling that his and Starline’s thoughts were going in completely different directions. 

He closed his eyes and recalled the information about the Long Voyage he’d studied in the burrow. There were a few items that stuck out to him. Firstly, the voyages had all followed similar internal trajectories. Their safeguards against totalitarianism all fell apart within a handful of years. It happened to them all at once. 

Five hundred years later, all voyage governments recorded anxiety about a lack of supplies. The Thai and European voyages predicted what was going to happen and destroyed two voyages as a sacrifice for humanity. Their supplies were shared among the voyages who then continued on their way to Earth. The anxiety over supplies was universal. It happened to them all at once. 

Internal elections across all voyages resulted in the winner—whether policy or person—winning over 99% of the votes every single time without fail. This had never occurred before in all of history. It happened to them all at once. 

On his tablet, he looked up a diagram of the approximate position of the voyages to one another in space. They were travelling in a straight line, so they did not move much. What he found confirmed the theory slowly blossoming in his mind. 

In 747, when the Australian and Indian voyages were attacked, the Thai voyage Lok h̄ım̀ was located in the middle of the pack. Australia’s voyage ship was an outlying voyage, tens of kilometres away from the closest ship. The Indian voyage was in a similar position. 

In 1573, when the secret alliance was formed, the surviving voyage ships had formed a tight cluster together. The four Lost Voyages were isolated and distant from the others. They were not close to the herd. 

When the humans arrived on Earth, there was no debate over what to do with inhabitants there. Regardless of each human nation’s background, culture, and beliefs, they swept across the planet in an identical blitz to rid their territories of Mobians and claim the land for themselves. They spent twenty years doing the same thing as each other. There were no multilateral discussions to plan out their approach. They just did it. It happened to them all at once. 

His mind, once riddled with anxiety, was now perfectly clear. 

I think long term space travel creates hive minds.

Explain. 

The humans formed a hive mind during the Long Voyage.

I will lay it out below:

The humans were perfectly in sync for over 1000 years. That has never happened before in human history. This was a symptom of being in a hive mind.

The voyage ships who were destroyed or abandoned were the ones who were the farthest away from the others. Based on what we know about the Black Arms’ hive mind, the ability to join the hive mind is based on proximity. The lost voyages were too far away to be in the hive mind and suffered for it.

Now that the humans are on a planet again, they mysteriously stopped getting along. The Thai soldiers have stopped worshipping Australia. The hive mind is gone because they’re not in space anymore.

Doesn’t it make sense? That has to be what happened to them!

You must have a very negative view of humanity. They form a collective mind and it turns out the majority of them are evil? How dreadful. 

It doesn’t work like that. The Black Arms’ hive mind is a hierarchy. Black Doom is the leader and everyone else is below him. There’s no reason to believe the human hive mind didn’t work the same way.

The top of any hierarchy attracts specific types of people. Usually, it’s people who want to exert their will over others. People who want power.

These are the people who ruled humanity’s hive mind. That is why it turned out to be evil. The same is probably true for the Black Arms.

There are living voyagers. Why haven’t they realized they were once in a hive mind? 

Humans weren’t in space for very long. You said the guilt the Thai voyagers felt over Australia strengthened over time. That was because their hive mind was getting stronger the longer they were in space. The hive mind was still in the early stages by the time they reached Earth!

To living voyagers, a developing hive mind might not feel too different than normal. They probably just haven’t realized that anything weird was happening.

Very interesting. Do you plan on doing anything with this information? 

Huh. Was it possible for Tails to apply this to anything? 

The comparison of the humans’ hive mind to the Black Arms’ was like a tack in his brain. It stabbed into all his thoughts, forcing him to consider it deeply. What did it mean for them to have the same type of hive mind? 

The tack pressed into something sensitive and Tails jolted. He could barely breathe. If they could cure humans, then could they also . . .?

A chime sang from his backpack. Suddenly grounded from his thoughts, his head spun as he opened the front pocket of his backpack and pulled out the cell phone given to him by Commander Tower. A text notification waited for him on the lock screen. 

He clicked it. His phone took him to a text conversation with only one message. 

CMD TOWER
Follow path from Riverside north for 1 km. Look for flashing light. Do not let anyone see you. 

The letters on the phone keyboard were really small, so it took him a minute to type out his response properly. 

I will not walk to your bomb. Drop it on me directly if you really mean it.

It’s a folder of documents.

Why?

Physics problem. 

A physics problem? Why was Commander Tower consulting him on physics? Surely, he had experts he actually trusted who could do this instead. 

Unfortunately, Tails was now thoroughly intrigued. He shoved his electronics back into his backpack and headed over to the trail out of the village, following it north into the forest. It didn’t take long to notice the blinking light in the distance, a little ways off the trail in a bush. As he stepped off the path and closed the last few metres between him and the bush, he told himself that if he died, at least Sonic could pass on the knowledge of the cure for him. It would be up to the humans to figure everything out from then on. 

In the bush, he found a cardboard box attached to a parachute with a strobe light. He untangled the parachute’s straps from the branches and pulled the whole thing out of the bush. The light stop blinking when he detached the straps from the box. Since he had no knife, he removed one of his gloves and used a claw to cut the tape holding the box together. He opened it, reached blindly inside, and then lifted out a thin folder of loose pages. 

Huh. Tower hadn’t been lying. Curiosity now insatiable, he lifted the folder’s flap and let out an audible gasp at the first page. 

CLASSIFIED - TOP SECRET warnings were marked all over the page. Thankfully, they did not obstruct the most important piece of information: 

A photo of the Black Arms’ fleet.

Well, not a fleet. It was a single comet. One big piece of space rock that appeared to have been retrofitted into some kind of moving colony. 

The other documents contained photos from different angles. Pieces of machinery stuck out of the side. Vein-like tubes covered the comet from front to back. There was little light coming from the inside and he couldn’t see any lifeforms in the photos. His head swam with ideas, trying to figure out what this meant for their plans, and once again it was up to his phone to bring him back to Earth. 

This time, it rang with a call. Tails accepted it and pressed the receiver against his ear. “Is this real?”

“We sent probes into space in hopes of intercepting the Black Arms early. We believe this to be their transportation vehicle,” Commander Tower replied. The usual intimidating tone in his voice was gone. Today, he sounded surprisingly neutral. Like he was having a conversation with a colleague instead of an enemy. 

It was weird. Tails didn’t like it. 

“Why are you showing this to me?” he asked. 

“Look at all the pictures. There is no propulsion device. No sail or wings. How is it being steered in our direction?”

That was a good question. If Tails was trying to steer a comet with only the tools available in space to help him, what would he do? 

The answer came to him quickly. “Gravity assist. If they angle it right, the comet can use the gravity of a planet’s orbit to adjust its trajectory. They can also use it to speed up or slow down, depending on where they enter the planet’s orbital path in its respective solar system. They’ve probably been using gravity to slingshot themselves around space. No fuel required. Just physics.”

“There is nothing between the comet and Earth. How is it supposed to slow down before it gets here?”

Immediately, he thought of the exploding badniks he’d designed when he was four years-old. Those used explosions to counter the force of Sonic’s speed, slowing him down before the secondary explosions set off so they would actually cause him harm. Enough opposing force could slow the comet, but it would risk knocking it off course, too. If they had some kind of parachute, perhaps one that emerged from the tail of the comet, then they could use bombs to put opposing force into the parachute and in turn slow down the comet without changing its path. 

If Tails didn’t know what the Black Arms wanted from the planet, that would have been his best guess. However, the parachute idea and Tower’s question about the comet slowing down before it got here were based on the assumption that the Black Arms intended to land on Earth. Tails knew better. The Black Arms wanted the Chaos Emeralds, which meant they didn’t need to touch down on Earth at all. Not when they could just mind control the humans into sending the Chaos Emeralds straight to them. 

“I know this question isn’t too hard for you, Alhazen. What are you thinking?”

The Black Arms expected a package to be delivered to them from Earth. All the threads from the past few days tied themselves together and the erratic beats of his heart made Tails worry it was going to stop working all together. 

Before he could stop himself, he blurted out:

“I know how to stop the Black Arms.” 

He heard a sharp inhale from Tower’s end of the line. 

“If this is true, do not tell me. Don’t speak a word of it to anyone. I don’t trust Black Doom to be honest about his timeline of arrival. He could already be reading our minds.”  

Tails grinned. He’d caught Commander Tower off-guard. He’d beaten him at his own game by figuring it all out before him. 

Tails was now in a very, very good position to negotiate. 

“Why would I tell you? After everything you’ve done?” For emphasis, Tails laughed sarcastically. “I can give the plan to Chun-nan. Or Mazuri. Or Shamir. I can even stop the Black Arms on my own. Maybe someone should push you around for a change. What do you think?”

“I assume you want something in exchange. What they can individually give you is limited. You’re under my jurisdiction. If you’re going to negotiate with anyone, it’s with me.” 

If Tower was willing to negotiate so quickly, it meant the humans had no idea what to do about the Black Arms. Tails was miles ahead of them. They had no choice but to do whatever he asked of them. 

“End the blockade.” 

“Done.” 

“Give back Amy Rose’s citizenship.” 

“Done.” 

“Amend the Convention on Cohabitation. Mobians can return to our homelands, too.” 

“That requires multilateral negotiations. I can amend the United Federation’s domestic policy, but you will have to make your case at the UN to convince the other states.” 

“Fine. Amend the domestic policy and I’ll talk to the other human states later.” 

“Done. Anything else?” 

There were other things he wanted, but they weren’t demands he could make to Tower exclusively. They would need to involve the rest of the human leaders. 

“I want an audience with all human leaders. I will make my demands to them. Then I will give you the plan.” 

“Granted. An international task force is being assembled in Central City. They will meet you there. Go back to Riverside Village. A plane will pick you up in an hour.” 

“Hold on. You have to prove that you’re going to follow through before I let you bring me somewhere.” 

“Call Amy in forty minutes. She will testify on our behalf. Goodbye.” 

The call ended. Tails sat in the forest, phone in hand, body electrified as though he’d just run a marathon. Was all of this real? Had that just happened? 

Dazed, he climbed to his feet and returned to the trail. On the way back to Riverside Village, he took breaks to shake the energy out of his paws and laugh off his success. He couldn’t believe it. For the second time in his life, he’d changed the world in just a pawful of days. And he wasn’t even done. 

Forty minutes later, as he waited for the plane to pull into Riverside Village’s landing strip, he used his new cell phone to call Amy. There was chaos in the background. She excused the noise, telling him exactly what he needed to hear: Restoration HQ was in a frenzy because hundreds of crates of supplies had just been parachuted into the field surrounding the warehouse all at once. The blockade was over, and there was enough to make up for a year-long drought, too. Commander Tower had followed through on his end of the deal. 

When he could see the dot of a plane in the distant sky, he heard a sonic boom from far away. Sonic was at his moments later. 

“What’s going on?” he asked. He followed Tails’ eyes to the sky, where he saw the same black dot in the distance. “What is that?” 

“A plane. For me.” The smile still hadn’t left his face. He felt his tails thump excitedly against the ground behind him. “I figured it out. I know how to stop the Black Arms. The humans are going to pick me up and bring me to them so I can negotiate with them. I’m going to get everything I can out of them before I offer up the plan.” 

Sonic nodded slowly. “I guess you’ll be gone for a long time.” 

“It shouldn’t take too long,” Tails said with a shrug. “The plan isn’t complicated. They can do it on their own. Once I’m done negotiating, I can come home.” 

“What’s the plan?” Sonic said. 

The plane was getting closer. Tails explained it as quickly as he could. 

There were only a few things he knew about the Black Arms for certain. They were a hive mind. They wanted the Chaos Emeralds. They could not easily stop their comet and needed the humans to send them the Chaos Emeralds in space. 

The Earth would acknowledge the Black Arms’ intentions. Since Black Doom struggled to discern lies, the humans would feign surrender and claim this was a fight they could not win. They would send them a package of Chaos Emeralds. Fake ones. One hundred of them, each filled with a pint of Chao Garden water that would explode into a gaseous state upon reception.

The entire comet would quickly become engulfed in the gas. The Black Arms would be forced to ingest it. Their hive mind would be destroyed in seconds. And with it, their ability to mind control the humans on Earth. 

Even if they had other weapons, their advantage would be lost. The humans would have three whole years to build the defences needed to protect the planet. Black Doom’s desperate attempt to start war on Earth proved that he did not believe he could win a confrontation on equal terms. Once the hive mind was gone, he was doomed to lose the fight he’d started. 

The plane descended sharply for landing. The engine was quiet, so he could hear Sonic when he said, “Oh, I get it. It’s like the old horse strategy.” 

Tails gave him a wry smile. “Yeah, like the horse strategy,” he said. 

The plane slowed to a stop on the strip. The door opened. A human G.U.N. soldier stepped outside and instructed Tails to enter the plane. 

Tails pulled Sonic into a tight hug. “Goodbye,” he said, and then boarded the plane. 

It was time to save the world. 

Chapter Text

The floor of the jet was covered with a plush carpet that felt weird beneath his shoes. Muted, striped wallpaper lined the interior walls. There were multiple chairs to sit on, each large and cushioned enough to swallow him whole. Tails had entered the plane with the confidence of a king, but the decor inside made him feel totally out of his element—like he was the alien here, not them.

The two human soldiers assigned to escort him sat near the door. Wary of them, and the big guns in their hands, he sat as far away from them as possible in the back of the plane. There was an oval-shaped window next to the seat, which would at least give him something to do during the trip to Central City. He liked watching the clouds and mountains and oceans pass by whenever it was Sonic’s turn to fly the Tornado. It was calming. As he flew into the lion’s den, he knew he would need the calming effect of nature more than ever before. 

With a quiet rumble, the jet picked up speed and lifted off the ground. He watched the East Pacific islands shrink into small green dots and then disappear beneath the clouds. This hit him with a pang of homesickness that he hadn’t felt during his trip with Sonic, and he was forced to press his forehead against the cool window pane to gather his bearings. He didn’t want to cry here. Not when he could feel the eyes of the soldiers watching his every move. But it was difficult to keep his composure when he realized, all at once, that he’d now spent more of his life above ground than under it and the workshop and forests and beaches finally felt more like home than a distant memory. The islands weren’t just an idea he felt a need to protect—they were a part of him, too. And although he would not be gone for long, it still pained him to leave them behind, like he'd abandoned a piece of his soul there, too. 

The homesickness waned as the plane levelled. As he removed his forehead from the window, a human emerged from a door behind Tails holding a small tray of bottled beverages. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked. 

Tails didn’t understand what was happening. “What?”

“Are you thirsty?” she asked, apparently deciding that he was only confused because he’d misheard her.

The weirdness of it all pulled him out of his sober mood. He surveyed the bottles curiously. A clear bottle contained water, but the others he didn’t recognize. The names on the labels revealed nothing about how the drinks tasted. Before he reached for one at random, he remembered how things worked in human territories and shook his head instead. 

“I don’t have any money,” he said.

The human smiled politely.  “You’re on a government plane. You don’t need to pay for anything.” 

Tails looked over the labels again, struck with indecision. Water would be a safe choice, but he didn’t know when he would get an opportunity to try the other drinks again. The tight budget for supplies granted by the United Federation left no room for unnecessary consumer goods. When he returned home, he probably wouldn’t see bottles like these ever again. Why throw away a chance to try something new?

The human noticed his internal struggle. “Here, take this,” she said, holding out a bottle to him. “It’s fruit punch. Juice. You’ll like it.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Tails accepted the bottle, removed the cap, and lifted it to his lips. A sugary, exotic flavour exploded over his tongue and it took restraint not to down the whole bottle in one go. When he took a break to breathe, he found the inside of his mouth felt a little dry, like the sugar had coated everything inside. It only made him want to drink more and he quickly understood the juice’s inherent addicting properties. 

“You’re my only guest today, so help yourself to as much juice as you want,” the human said. She touched her finger against a button on the side of Tails’ seat. “Press this to call me if you need anything or if you want a snack or drink. Got it?”

“Okay,” Tails said. The human smiled at him again and then disappeared into the back of the plane. 

The interaction perplexed him. He didn’t understand why she had called him her guest. To him, the word meant to be a guest in someone’s home or village. But the human probably didn’t live here full time. So, why did she say that?

By the time he figured it out, the skyscrapers of Central City were popping into view. She had smiled at him and called him a guest and given him a juice bottle because she worked there. Her job was to be nice to travellers on the jet and bring them whatever they desired. She was a server!

This realization made his journey all the more nerve wracking. Commander Tower could have sent him a boring plane with normal seats and no servers, but he had sent him this one instead. Why? There was an angle to it he didn’t understand, and he dreaded what awaited him on the ground. 

Once the plane landed, the soldiers ushered him into a large black car. He struggled to remember its exact type. An SUV? It had big windows and similar leather seats to the ones on the plane. Tails was very happy about the windows; he’d never been in a car before and was excited to watch the car speed past its surroundings. 

The two soldiers had kept to themselves on the jet, but in the car they were stuck in close proximity to him. Tails had been under the impression that they weren’t interested in speaking to him except to guide him, until one of them leaned over and whispered directly into his ear. 

“We’ve picked up others like you. What were you recruited for?” he asked. 

Tails didn’t understand the question. He was scared to talk to the soldier, so he was relieved when the other soldier smacked him and told him off. “Shut up! You can’t ask them shit. I’ll fucking report you if you do it again.” 

The rest of the car ride was spent in silence. The buildings on the side of the road grew taller and denser until the car ducked into a tunnel, and when it emerged back on the surface, they were in downtown Central City. 

It was very busy. Crowds of people walked in every direction. Storefronts at the bottom of tall buildings were bustling with customers. Waiters served packed terrasses that extended out of restaurants. Everywhere he looked, there was something to eat or drink or see—and yet it was merely an illusion of substance. Everything in the city required money. Tails had learned during his trip around the world just how empty cities could be when one could not pass that specific barrier to entry. 

The car pulled into a curved driveway and stopped in front of a building with large glass doors. Tails followed the soldiers out of the car and into the building, whose ground floor was decorated with spotless tile and grand decorations made of crystal and stone. The humans inside were dressed in suits and dresses. Tails’ human cultural immersion had ended with the English language, but even he could tell that this place was expensive. Why was he here? He didn’t get it.

The soldiers took him straight to the elevators. One of them scanned a card against a reader and pressed a button to the side marked with ‘P’. The elevator was so stable that Tails did not notice it was moving upward until he saw a screen above the door counting the floors as they passed them. After floor 59, the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened. 

The soldiers urged him out of the elevator, but they did not leave with him. A soldier handed him the keycard and nodded. “You have arrived at your destination. Goodbye.” 

The doors closed. Tails turned around and found himself immediately overwhelmed by his surroundings. 

The walls were a creamy white. Glass tables were covered with flowers and framed photos of the city. Two large couches faced a wide television. In an adjacent room, he found a glass dining table with multiple white chairs around it. A side table contained many bottles of liquor. By all means, Tails was fluent in English, but he found himself struggling to remember the vocabulary to describe some of the things before him. They did not always have equivalent terms in Mobian. Before him was a dining room. The other room with the couches had been something else. A gathering room? No, that was wrong. He couldn’t remember and became so frustrated that he gave up. 

On the other side of the couch room was a bedroom. The bed was very wide, big enough to fit five animals if they slept side-by-side. It had curved posts at each corner and curtains that could unfold to conceal the mattress. There was a TV in this room too. Down a small hallway, he found a clothes closet nearly the size of his workshop and a bathroom with a shower, bathtub, and two sinks. The bathroom was all reflective tile and crystal. It was very pretty, but something about it made him feel a little sick to his stomach, too. 

After some thought, he came to the conclusion that he was in a hotel room. Was this the task force headquarters? It didn’t seem very secure. Maybe this was where all the other world leaders were staying in the city. It seemed fitting that they would choose a place like this. But why him? Commander Tower hated him. Why give him the same treatment? 

Confused and in need of something to distract himself, Tails sat on a couch and fiddled with the television. There were hundreds of channels to choose from. After watching a few minutes of various shows and news segments, he grew tired of hearing loud voices and turned off the whole system. There were two doors with windows in the living room wall. Realizing where they most likely led, he climbed off the couch and opened the doors to the balcony. 

The balcony was just as nice as the rest of the hotel room. There were couches, eating tables, and another fridge full of beverages available to him outside. It was a lot of furniture for just one animal. He looked over the edge of the balcony railing, feeling his stomach dip at how high up he was. The people walking around on the sidewalks seemed so small now. Something about it made him feel powerful, and he wondered if that was why this fancy room was so high up. It was designed to make the people staying in it feel special. 

This disgusted him. He went back inside and shut the doors behind him. He did not know why he was here, but he had no intention of falling for whatever trick Commander Tower was attempting to pull on him. 

There were a few books stacked on the coffee table. One was dedicated to a big war on Terra, so he returned to the couch and decided to read the book until someone came to fetch him for the task force meeting. The writing was a little boring to read, but it was better than doing nothing or getting his brain melted by the television, so he powered through the dry text with determination.

In the late afternoon, a phone rang beside the couch. He picked it up and pressed it against his ear. “Hello?”

“Good afternoon, sir. Your dinner will arrive shortly. Will you be dining inside or outside?”

His dinner? This must have been another thing the government was paying for, like his drink on the jet. It didn’t seem like he was being given a choice of what he was going to eat, though. 

“Inside,” he said. He didn’t want to go back on the balcony. It scared him. 

“Fantastic choice! Do you require anything else?” 

Tails did not know what he could possibly ask for. “No, thank you. I’m okay.”

“Wonderful! Thank you.”

Why was the person on the phone thanking him? He hadn’t done anything. As he considered the possible dynamics at play in the phone call, the elevator dinged and a human server pushed a cart covered with a white cloth into the hotel room. She stopped when she saw him sitting on the couch and smiled at him politely the same way the lady on the plane did. 

“Would you like me to set up the dining table?” she asked. 

The question made him feel weird. Was he meant to sit there while she did all the work for him? 

“I can help,” he said. He put down the book and walked over to the cart. “What should I do?”

She laughed warmly. “That’s very sweet of you, but you don’t need to do anything. Why don’t you go sit down at the table?”

He was caught in a bind. On one paw, he hated the idea of someone doing work for his sole benefit. On the other paw, he did not want to inconvenience her by getting in the way. What was the right thing to do?

After some deliberation, he chose to sit down at the table. There was no need to turn this into a big deal. The server set the table space in front of him with forks, a serrated knife, and a tall glass of water. The meal itself arrived on a large porcelain plate hidden by a serving cover. She made sure everything was in place and then revealed the food to him. 

Mashed potatoes. Grilled vegetables. And a big hunk of meat that smelled like the burrow. 

His stomach dropped. “What is this?” he asked. 

“Steak. It’s what you ordered, right?”

Not what he’d ordered. What Commander Tower had ordered for him. Why? To screw with him? 

It was working. A guilt he’d long buried bubbled up inside him, resurfacing as he stared at all that remained of an animal who’d been just like him. An animal who had been raised in a cage for a purpose beyond itself. This cow for its meat, and Tails for his brain. But only he had been fortunate enough to escape. 

Tears welled in his eyes. The server noticed his distress and kneeled to be at eye level with him. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?” 

He needed Sonic. Amy. Someone who would understand what he was feeling. Not a random human who was being paid to pretend to care about him. 

“I’m just homesick. It’s okay,” he sputtered out. He just wanted her to leave. 

The server clearly did not believe him. “I can get you a chocolate bar. Is there a specific kind you like?” 

A chocolate bar . . . he hadn’t eaten one of those since his first few days with Robotnik. The memory only made him feel worse. He buried his face in his paws and shook his head.

“I’m fine. Just go,” he said. 

The server’s hand touched his arm for a moment. “Okay. Call if you need anything.” 

She took the cart and left. When he heard the elevator doors close, he let out a loud sob and dropped down from the chair. The smell of beef was making it hard to think. He wandered to the bedroom, climbed into the bed that was soft and cloud-like but not as comfortable as the sand on the beach, and curled up under the covers. The dark, confined space satisfied a primordial need to be safe and he found himself capable of breathing again. 

Sudden breakdowns like this did not happen often. He was reluctant to blame it on the stress and confusion of being in a foreign place. The human territories had not done this to him during his trip with Sonic. But then again, they had not stayed in hotels or consumed this type of meat. Tails had not been forced into a position of power where he was expected to be served by others. He was never forced to abandon the basic ethics of animal-to-animal relationships he practiced at home by assuming a role in a hierarchy. 

When the tears stopped, he was left with a foreboding sense of guilt. He felt bad for dismissing the server. He’d imposed his will on her when she was not in a position to refuse. How could he do that to someone? It was beneath him. And yet . . .

At the foot of the bed, he heard the familiar sound of his phone alerting him to a text message. Usually, he was not relieved to receive communications from Commander Tower, but he was confused and emotionally exhausted enough that he threw off the covers in a rush to get to his phone. The backpack was on the floor. He opened its small pocket and pulled out his phone with desperation.

CMD TOWER

The world leaders will arrive here in two days. Tomorrow, you will meet with me to discuss your plan in detail. I will verify its likelihood of success before you speak to the other leaders. This will ensure the negotiations go smoothly. I do not want unnecessary delays in going forward with the plan. 

When the world leaders arrive, you will meet with them and their teams individually. This will take all day. If we do not need you for anything else, you may go home. 

A guide will be assigned to you tomorrow morning. They will be responsible for bringing you around the city while you are here. 

Welcome to Central City, Alhazen. 

Commander Tower was going to check his plan for him? What if he didn’t like it? Would they work on it together until it was good enough for the other humans to buy into it?

The meetings with the humans made him nervous. Why did they want to meet him individually? Did they think he was going to change his demands if they asked nicely enough? He would need to hold a strong line. He could not relent and compromise as he had for the past year. Right now, he couldn’t be the Alhazen who had liberated science and shared it with the world. He had to be the Alhazen who had pit the humans against each other and come out on top. 

Anxiety aside, he was relieved to finally have an idea of what he was doing here. All he had to do was survive two days of negotiations with people who considered him an enemy. He’d made it through four long, stressful years in the burrow. He could do this. 

Right?

After such a long day, he fell asleep easily. His dreams were big and confusing, and he awoke with a deep feeling of dread even though he could not recall them upon waking. The world felt big again, too big for him to control on his own, and he wondered what his dreams were trying to teach him. Was he being too arrogant in his approach to the negotiations? Or was his plan to stop the Black Arms going in the wrong direction? Either way, he could not shake the sense that he was doing something wrong and climbed out of bed to refresh his mind.

Commander Tower had said a guide would be here to help him get around Central City. Tails didn’t see them when he entered the living room, but he’d woken up quite early in the morning, so he supposed it would be a couple of hours until they arrived. That was a lot of time to kill. 

As he walked aimlessly around the hotel room, his stomach grumbled loudly. He was hungry from not eating much yesterday, but he wasn’t sure where he was meant to get food. It seemed like the telephone in the living room could be used to call for that sort of thing, but he didn’t like the idea of ordering someone to bring the food upstairs when he could just go down there to get it himself. Was he allowed to do that? He probably wasn’t locked in the hotel room like a prisoner. It felt weird to leave, though. Almost as weird as it felt to think about using the phone to order himself food. 

Frozen with indecision, he walked to the living room and stood in front of the phone, His heart pounded in his chest as he tried to convince himself to use it. Humans did this all the time. The hotel workers were probably expecting him to call them for breakfast. He was getting nervous over nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. If he called, they could not say no to his demands. He was a stranger they were paid to serve. He had no relationship with anyone who worked here. He didn’t know the farmers responsible for producing the food, the chefs who prepared the food, or the staff member who brought it up to his room. It was impersonal and he was contributing nothing beneficial to their lives. By using the phone, all he would do was participate in their exploitation. It was wrong. But he was getting very hungry, so maybe just this once . . . 

His spiral was interrupted when the elevator doors opened with a ding. He heard the clicking of high heels, and then a familiar voice called out, “I know you’re here, kid. Where are you hiding?”

Tails snapped his head to face the entryway. In a way only she knew how, Rouge walked into his life again when he needed her most. 

The relief was palpable. He’d almost forgotten that he had an ally on this side of the border, too. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked. A tinge of excitement was present in his voice, and Rouge reacted to it with a friendly laugh. 

“Sometimes I forget that you’re just a cute little kid.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall. “I got a call from my old bosses last night. They said they needed someone to keep an eye on you while you’re in the city. I know I quit, but babysitting on the government’s dime? How could I say no?”

“I live alone. I don’t need a babysitter,” Tails protested. 

“Sure. The fur around your eyes is all messed up, by the way.” Rouge motioned to her eyes with finger, prompting him to touch the fur below his eyes. It crunched quietly between his fingers, a sign that salty tears had been absorbed and then crusted into the fur.

“Whatever,” he mumbled, embarrassed. 

Rouge chuckled and then walked farther into the couch room. “This is a nice set up. They must be desperate to impress you.”

“Why would they want to impress me?” Tails asked. Rouge ran her paw down the side of a couch, nodding in approval at its quality. “They hate me. I don’t get it.” 

“My understanding is that you have all the power in the world right now,” Rouge said. She eyed a light fixture adorned with crystals hanging from the ceiling. “Hmm. Those jewels are fake. Anyways, they said you were going to make some big demands tomorrow. I guess they’re trying to soften the blow.” 

“Soften the blow?” Tails didn’t understand what she meant. 

“Functionally, you’re a bit of an anarchist. You know that, right?” Tails had heard the word before, but he didn’t know how it applied to himself. Rouge looked back at him and must have seen the confusion on his face, because she added, “The islands have no government. No money. No real economy. Everything is shared. You are living proof that a stateless society is possible in the modern era. The government is trying to convince you that its system is good, too. They want you to leave it alone when you negotiate with them. And to do that, I guess they’ve decided to pamper you.”

That explained the special treatment. However, all they had accomplished so far was to confuse and frighten him. Evidently, things were not going as planned.

“We have a real economy. It’s just small and doesn’t involve money,” Tails said. 

Rouge raised an eyebrow at him. “Did Eggman ever teach you economics?”

“Only the basics. He said economists were bad people.” 

“Right.” Rouge’s self-guided tour of the hotel room brought her to the dining room. “You didn’t eat. Were you not hungry?” 

Afraid of crying again, he stayed in the couch room, away from the plate of steak. “I don’t like eating livestock.” 

“Of course,” she said with a laugh. She returned to the couch room and jerked her thumb toward the elevator. “Let’s get some food in you. How about waffles? Kids love waffles.” 

Tails shrugged. “Never had them.”

Rouge smiled mischievously. “Oh, that is something we will have to fix. I have a G.U.N. credit card with no limit in my purse. Why don’t I show you how we splurge in the UF?”

In a little restaurant on a street corner, Rouge ordered him a plate of waffles and let him tap the credit card on the machine to pay for it. It arrived at their table quickly. The stack of waffles was huge and adorned with whipped cream, fruit, and a sweet syrup he did not recognize. The flavour of them combined was all-consuming like the fruit punch had been, and since he had not eaten since the previous morning, he ate the whole thing hungrily.

A full belly and a schedule to look forward to made him feel better. When Rouge hurried him out of the restaurant, telling him they only had eight hours until his meeting with Commander Tower, he tagged along with something that resembled enthusaism. The last time he’d been in the human territories, he hadn’t been able to do anything in the cities because he didn’t have any money. He was excited, in a way that made him feel a little guilty, to experience human life from the other side. 

The next place Rouge brought him to was an electronics store. A section of the store was dedicated to displaying various types of laptops. Rouge told him to pick whichever one he wanted, but Tails had limited experience with computers, so she eventually chose one for him based on its battery life. As they walked out of the store, bag in Tails’ paws, he suddenly became worried that this was a mistake.

“Only Robotnik’s technology works on the Eggnet,” he said. He observed the people walking around them, wondering if one of them could make better use of the laptop than he could. G.U.N. had paid for the laptop, so maybe it wouldn’t be bad if he gave it to someone else . . .

Rouge looked down at him smugly. “Robotnik taught me how to connect devices to his servers. I can do it for you when you go back.” 

Tails imagined Robotnik teaching Rouge to do things, using the same stern and encouraging language as he did with Tails. It made him feel a little weird. “Did you spend a lot of time together?”

“I tried not to. He was pretty annoying.” She hummed and gestured to the buildings around them. “He grew up here, so when he found out I lived here, he liked to complain to me about it. Apparently, this place is inefficiently organized and he could do better. Go figure.” 

The United Federation was pretty inefficient. Robotnik had taught him that the value of items here were determined by feelings rather than reality, which meant that sometimes important resources like land, water, and labour were allocated to things that were ultimately useless. He’d never explained how he was going to fix it, though . . .

Rouge tried to bring him to a few other stores, but Tails quickly lost interest in shopping. He could bring himself to accept a laptop, since he liked computers and would probably use it often enough to not feel too selfish for possessing one privately, but he didn’t see the need to get anything else. The portable video game console she showed him was a little tempting, though he wasn’t sure how he was meant to get new games for it on the islands, so he left it alone. If he wanted to play, he could go outside and find something to do. His current methods for keeping himself entertained hadn’t failed him yet!

For lunch, Rouge took him to a counter that sold slices of pizza. He’d eaten this a few times while he was in the burrow, but unlike the beef from last night, the vegetable pizza did not bring back bad memories. This had been one of his favourite meals to receive in the food chute, to the point where he’d considered asking Robotnik to send it to him more often. Unfortunately, most of the ingredients weren’t available in the East Pacific, so it would remain a rare treat for the rest of his life. 

Rouge checked the time on her phone as they finished eating. “The base where you’ll meet Tower is about an hour out of the city, so we don’t have much time left before we need to go. Is there anything you want to do before we leave?” 

His legs swung off the edge of the park bench. He was content to stay here and watch people pass by, but he felt like there was a better way to spend his time. His nerves were getting all twisted up as the meeting with Tower approached. What if his plan wasn’t viable? This whole trip would have been for nothing, and he would be right back to square one in his efforts to stop the Black Arms. If that happened, he didn’t know what he would do. He didn’t know if he had it in him to come up with a whole new plan. Especially when there was no guarantee that a traditional plan with weapons would work. 

To calm himself down, he reminded himself that the humans apparently had faith that he could do it. They wouldn’t be going through all this effort to impress him if they assumed his plan wasn’t going to work. Either they were desperate because they hadn’t come close to making their own plan, or he’d beaten them in the race and now they had no choice but to concede. It didn’t really matter. Regardless, they believed he’d come up with something that would work. All Tower was going to do that day was likely just finetune it into something they would all approve. Which was . . . kind of weird, actually. 

“Tower accepted all of my demands right away. Why is he trying to convince me to back off now?” Tails asked. Tower had only come into power after his escape, so he didn’t know how well Rouge knew him, but maybe she could provide some insight into his logic. 

Rouge stared ahead for a moment before answering. “You’ll have to ask him that yourself. If I had to guess, he seems a little one-track minded. His job as the Commander is to advance the interests of the state. I think he might be ignoring that to focus on stopping the Black Arms.” 

Tails frowned. “So, this whole tour is just to help me deal with the other humans?”

“Maybe,” Rouge said with a shrug. 

It wasn’t like Rouge to claim ignorance. There was something she wasn’t telling him. Was Tower in trouble for accepting his demands so quickly? Maybe the President would be at the meeting too, and he would try to make him drop his condition of allowing Mobians to return to their original homes in the continents. Was there something he could do, even before their meeting, to send a message that he would not let them push him around? 

As he thought it over, he latched on to the only connection he had to the city. He remembered a time when Robotnik had told him about how the dead were treated in the United Federation, and then he asked, “Did the rest of Robotnik’s family live here, too?”

Rouge blinked at him. “I think so. Why?”

“Do you know where they’re buried? I want to see their graves.” 

Thirty kilometres outside the city, Rouge parked her car at the edge of a country road and brought him into a fenced off area with rolling green hills that were dotted by grey tombstones. The atmosphere was heavy in the cemetery, and he followed her down a dirt path in silence as she led him to the Robotnik family plot. 

There weren’t too many tombstones. Gerald and his wife were first, both dead the same year. The second tombstone had Maria and her parents. She died much earlier than them. Next was Alina Robotnik, Ivo’s mother, and his father. Both dead the same year—killed by an orchestrated car crash to silence them. Ivo had his own tombstone, with plenty of space for a potential spouse or children. Tails was surprised it existed. Perhaps his aunt and uncle had ordered it in advance, knowing no one would be around to do it for him. Unfortunately, they had died before him, and his tombstone had yet to be updated. It read:

Ivo Robotnik

1953 - 

This was it. His message. 

He scoured the grass for a good rock. He found one the size of his palm with a sharp edge, then kneeled on the grass in front of the headstone—which covered nothing but empty dirt, since Robotnik’s remains were scattered in space—and began to carve into the stone with strong, careful strokes. 

It took an hour. By the end, his arm was sore enough he was worried it was going to fall off. But it was worth it. The completed tombstone now read: 

Ivo Robotnik

1953 - 2001

Saviour of Science

The words ‘saviour of science’ were written in Mobian. It felt appropriate to write it that way. He assumed the other humans who visited here wouldn’t be able to understand it, making it something a little more personal. Something for just the two of them. 

“I thought that was your title,” Rouge commented. 

Oh, right. Rouge could read it, too.

“I’ve learned a lot about him from Starline. Everything he did, he did so I would eventually save science.” He reached forward to put his paw on top of the headstone, doing his best to breathe despite the storm of emotions in his core. The version of him who once lived in the burrow would hate what he was doing. But this felt right. It felt like he’d matured, and reflected, and like this was how he was meant to feel about it all. “I don’t like him. I don’t like what he did. But I didn’t save science alone, and he deserves some of the credit. I couldn’t have done it without him.” 

“Yeah, but you’re not doing this for him, are you? What are you trying to tell them?”

Them. The human governments. 

“I’m just reminding them who trained me, that’s all.” They’d all hated Robotnik. His empire disrupted the global order. It put powerful weapons in Mobian territory. It made the other human militaries look weak and stupid. Tails wanted them to look at the headstone and understand that while he hated both Robotnik and the human states, he only held respect for the Doctor. And he was proud of what their empire had done to their militaries. 

Rouge nudged him with her toe. “Come on, we need to go. The boss is waiting.” 

“Your boss,” Tails corrected, and then followed her back to the car after taking a long, near mournful last look at the tombstone. 

The road to the military base snaked through a forest of pine and maple trees. The base was protected by a tall, concrete wall topped with barbed wire. The entrance gate was manned by two guards in military gear who held guns that looked too big for their bodies. To Tails’ surprise, they were not human. 

Mobian soldiers? He knew the humans used Mobian spies to keep an eye on the islands, but he’d never seen Mobian soldiers before. As they drove through the gate, he was so distracted by the guards that he didn’t look out the window until they rolled to a stop. He climbed out of the car, turned in a circle to observe his surroundings, and immediately felt like he’d stepped into an alternate reality.

It wasn’t only the gate guards who were Mobian—it was everyone in the base. More Mobian soldiers. Mobians in lab coats. Mobians in normal clothes. As far as he could see, there was not a single human in the area. The base itself wasn’t large either, mostly open air aside from a pawful of small buildings in the back. What kind of base was this?

“All of your questions will be answered soon,” Rouge said, sensing his confusion. She gestured for him to follow her and then led him to the smallest building, one tucked away in the corner of the base. It had no windows and there were multiple locks on the door. 

Oh, shit—

Rouge grabbed the scruff of his neck before he could run. “It’s not for you,” she said sharply. She inputted a code into the door, pressed a button, and then the door slid open. Someone moved around inside. Rouge whispered into Tails’ ear, “Go with the flow, yeah?”

He didn’t know what that meant. Before he could ask her to clarify, heavy footsteps approached the door and Commander Tower appeared in the doorway. 

His eyes narrowed when he saw Tails. Then he sighed and rubbed the sides of his head, as though he had a headache. “Agent Rouge, I need you to do me a favour. Can you please restore my faith in this organization and tell me that no one gave security clearance to a five year-old?”

“Well, first of all, he’s nine. Also, he’s not allowed to have security clearance because he’s an enemy of the state,” Rouge responded. Her tone was playful, and he realized that this was what she had meant by going with the flow. She’d expected this to happen and was making a joke out of it.

Tails, however, felt like his head was spinning. He’d met Commander Tower face to face. Why didn’t he recognize him?

Commander Tower looked Tails over. “This is Alhazen? You were supposed to bring him later.” He swayed a little, then grabbed the doorframe to steady himself. Tails eyed him closely. He looked different than he did when they’d spoken in the house. He looked unwell. “I haven’t recovered yet. Come back in two hours.” 

“I brought him now because he’s scared of you.” Rouge turned to face Tails. “This is your enemy. Isn’t he scary? Honestly, I’m surprised he’s still standing.” 

Commander Tower gave her an exasperated look. “Goodbye.”

 He pressed a button on his side of the wall, which made the door begin to close, but Rouge stuck her boot inside just before it could shut. The door bounced back open. “Come on, Abe. Don’t be like that. He’s been waiting to talk to you since yesterday. Do it now or I’m sending him home.”

Tails expected her to get yelled at. He expected Tower to double down and close the door. What he did not expect was for Tower to sigh, step back into the small building, and say, “Fine. Let’s do it now.” 

Rouge gave Tails’ back a light push, forcing him to follow the Commander inside. The interior was separated by a curtain into two distinct areas: one with a large computer terminal, a white board, and meeting table, and one with a bed, a dresser, and a number of personal items. It reminded him of the burrow in more ways than one. Clearly, this was not just Tower’s office, but where he lived full time. 

As Rouge guided him to the meeting table, Tails slowly pieced it all together. The Mobian staff, the remote base, and this prison-like room—it was not weird, but rather extremely practical. 

“You lock yourself in here because you’re a human,” Tails said. The Commander collapsed into a chair at the meeting table, where he leaned back and shut his eyes, looking even worse than he did a few seconds ago. “You told me you don’t trust Black Doom’s timeline. You’re worried he’s going to control you earlier than expected, so you’ve put yourself in here.” 

“Did I tell you that? Ugh, it doesn’t matter. It’s true.” Tower waved lazily to the room around him. “I’ve been here since the hospital incident. It’s the only way to responsibly stay in charge.” 

“He can still read your mind,” Tails pointed out, but as the words left his snout, another piece of the puzzle slid into place. “Wait—that’s why you don’t remember me. How? Why?” 

Tower held up a finger, indicating for Tails to wait as the human swallowed with a pained expression. He put down his finger but did not speak, so Rouge took the initiative to bring Tails’ attention to a helmet-shaped device plugged into the wall beside the computer terminal. 

“The voyages didn’t have prisons on board. Waste of space, you know? That machine over there is how they dealt with criminals and rebels on board in the early days,” Rouge explained. Tails took note of the mentioned time frame. As the human hive minds developed, disorder on the ships would have waned, so these likely hadn’t been used at all during the final stretch to Earth. Ancient technology, really. “The machine changes the memories of its user. It can erase them, add fake ones, mix everything around—ideally, in the end, to change how the person thinks. It works very well. The Commander here has been using it to remove sensitive information from his brain. Black Doom can’t read his mind for the defence plans if they don’t exist in his brain, right?”

“The side effects are terrible,” Tower said with a grimance. “Bodies don’t like it when you mess with their memories. I am doomed to suffer from migraines and nausea for the rest of my life.”

 Tails glanced between the machine and Tower. He could understand why he would do such a thing, but he couldn’t figure out the logistics of it all. “How are you supposed to stay in charge if you don’t remember anything important?”

With a flourish, Rouge sat down in one of the meeting chairs. “That’s my job,” she said. She tapped her head with a finger. “I remember everything for him. Whenever there’s an important development, I give him an update and he tells me how to respond. Then we erase his memories and me and all the other Mobians on base carry out his orders.” 

He tried to picture it in his head. After their meeting at the house, did Commander Tower return here and remove his memories of the conversation? And then do it again after the house was bombed? They’d spoken on the phone right before the explosion. Was his mind erased once, or twice? Did he even know the Black Arms were travelling on a comet? Tails couldn’t imagine the disorientation Tower must have felt each time he was caught up to speed on a month’s worth of updates and then asked to make a decision right away. Tails wasn’t certain that was something he could handle. Stress and confusion were not a good mix for him. 

Tails stared at Rouge. There was one thing he now knew for certain, though. “I guess that means you never quit,” he said angrily. It was hard not to feel a little betrayed. Even when Tower was witholding important resources from the island, she had chosen to stick by his side. He thought she was better than that. 

“Congress was out for blood last year,” Commander Tower said. His eyes were still closed, but his eyebrows pinched together in frustration. Or was he trying to keep himself together in light of the memory machine’s side effects? Tails couldn’t tell. “They wanted revenge for what you did to us. I got all kinds of suggestions from them on how to deal with you. Some of them wanted to tear down everything you and Eggman had built, some of them wanted to establish military presence around the islands, and some of them wanted me to find you and then kill you. I could not keep my position as Commander if I did not punish you. Rouge helped me shape our response into something that would hurt but not destroy you or the islands. If anything, you should be thanking her.” 

Tails didn’t know what to think. After the choices he’d made in the burrow, he was in no position to critcize her for sticking around to make G.U.N. less harmful. But Tails had not stuck around in the empire for a day longer than he’d needed to, and perhaps that was what set them apart. “You could have dropped the blockade months ago. Congress has been telling you to stop since December. Why are you acting like you’re still doing me a favour?” 

Rouge shifted awkwardly in her chair. Tower remained quiet. Tails’ question must have cut straight to the heart of whatever they were planning together. They were considering whether or not to answer him. 

Finally, Tower sat up straight and opened his eyes. His gaze met Tails’ and he said flatly, “I have seen Black Doom with my own eyes. This invasion is something I have been preparing for my entire life.” As Tails tried to process what he’d just said, Tower leaned forward on his arms and continued. “After you showed us what you could do, I decided to make you a part of my plans. I don’t know much about how you think, but I know your brain can produce miracles while under immense pressure. I believe you have proven me correct.”

They stared at each other. Tails’ emotions morphed from confusion into shock, and then shock into anger as he realized exactly what Tower had been doing to him all this time. The blockade had kept Tails stressed for months, and then once the Black Arms had revealed themselves, Tower had turned up the heat so Tails felt that his only way to protect the islands was to use the invasion as leverage against the humans. And it had worked. If he had not felt threatened, and if he had not felt that finding the cure or coming up with a defence plan was the best way to negotiate on behalf of his species, then would he have been able to do all of this so quickly? Would he have been able to figure out how to defeat the Black Arms at all? 

Tails did not look away, determined to win this mental battle. “And you thought it was a good idea to tell me this before I shared my plan with you?”

“Don’t be an idiot. You have underestimated our worst intentions before. If your plan has even a single flaw, they will run laps around you during your negotiations tomorrow. I want you to succeed because I want to save the planet. Let me help you fool-proof your plan. Then you can get back at me later.” 

Yeah, sure, he thought. Like Tower would just let him get some kind of revenge for tricking him. But even if that was a lie, the rest of it was not. Tails was asking for big things. Tomorrow, the other human states would use every trick in the book to try to weaken his demands. His plan needed to be perfect if he was going to pull this off. 

Before he started, he had a big question. Tower had made a big claim that needed some kind of verification before Tails offered up his plan to him.

“How did you see Black Doom?” he asked. 

“I was born on the ARK after it was tranformed into a research base. Black Doom never entered the station physically, but after sending a copy of his DNA to the researchers there, I believe he was able to use his spores to manipulate certain people into ‘seeing’ him. I snuck into the lab when he was doing it to Doctor Gerald Robotnik and the effects bled into my consciousness. I have always believed he would return with only violent intentions. It’s why I’m here now.” 

Huh. If that were true, then Commander Tower wasn’t lying about preparing for this his whole life. This must have been what Rouge meant when she called him ‘one track minded’. 

A sudden thought hit him like a train. “You’re like Robotnik,” Tails said quietly. Now that he could understand his goals, the part of him that distrusted Tower quickly deflated. “I don’t think he took a lot of joy in kidnapping me. He did bad things to save science. You’re doing the same thing to save the planet.” 

No response came from Rouge or Tower. They probably wanted to give him time to process things, but Tails didn’t need more time. He’d had a whole year to sort through his feelings abut Robotnik. It was easy now to do the same for Tower. 

“I hate you,” he said, and then finally sat down at the table with a sigh. “But I will work with you. I’ll tell you my plan.” 

Tails went over everything in detail. To respect Knuckles’ wishes, he did not reveal the source of the cure, but assured Tower and Rouge that there was enough of it to fill 100 fake emeralds. Tower asked a lot of questions, and sometimes Rouge did too, and Tails explained his answers carefully. When they finally ran out of questions, Tower sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, and settled in to think for nearly an hour.

When he was done, he stood from his chair with a shake of his head. “It isn’t going to work.” 

“Why?” Tails asked. 

“One day, their home planet is going to figure out how to work around the Master Emerald. We cannot count on them being scientifically ruined forever. And when they figure out how to get into space again, whether in ten or five million years, what do you think they will do?” 

“You think they’re going to come back and kill us,” Tails breathed.

“Please recall the law of double perception. What does my enemy think of me? If I were the Black Arms, and a planet I tried to invade managed to fight me off, I would prepare for their worst intentions. The Black Arms are going to fear a potential human attack on their planet because if they have threatened us once, we must assume they will do it again. They will logically assume that we are aware of their fear of us attacking them. Which means that if the Black Arms want to defend themselves, they will need to kill us before we can kill them. So, if we want to stop that from happening . . .” 

“We’ll need to attack them first. But . . .” Tails had no rebuttal. The logic was sound. And it terrified him. 

Commander Tower looked down at him with a cruel intensity in his eyes. 

“Your plan will not work because you have chosen to spare them. If you really want to protect this planet, you must follow the logic of interstellar warfare to its worst conclusions. You must kill everyone on that comet. And then you must find their home planet and terminate every last one of them.”