Undocumented Features

[Jake]

(This is a continuity reboot of something I wrote a few years back, and is a sequel to a story called Skyfox that can be found on The Pit. All you really need to know is that it's set about ten years after the events of Shadow the Hedgehog, and a few months after Tails scores with Sonic's semi-estranged sister.)

The old man had been tending these graves for as long as anyone could remember, and if anyone thought about it all they would have taken him for a distant relative. This was the excuse he would have given if anybody had troubled to ask, but he was extremely glad that nobody ever had. It would have been... awkward.
But nobody ever asked. So far as he knew, everyone who had ever cared about the people named on the headstones had died a long time ago.

And yet, as he approached the two plots, he saw a bouquet arranged neatly in front of one of them. "What the-?" The man looked around sharply, then crouched down to examine the flowers.
White lilies. Her favourite... Gerald Robotnik straightened abruptly. "Who else could have-? No. No, it couldn't be... could it?"

"Hey, they never found my body. What's your story?"
The small bag of gardening tools in Gerald's hand clattered to the earth unheeded. "Shadow... Oh, my God, you're-!"
They embraced desperately, unashamedly weeping. "I'm so sorry..." Gerald mumbled. "Told me you died... heard rumours when the Black Arms came, but I never found any proof before..."
"It's alright," Shadow sniffed. "I'm glad you didn't see what I nearly became... Professor, I've done some bad things... things I promised you, promised Maria I'd never do. If I hadn't started to remember..." He buried his face in his mentor's shoulder and sobbed like a child.
"Shhh, shhh, it's alright," Gerald soothed. "You were tricked into it, and you stopped yourself before you could hurt anybody. And you saved us all."
"That's what I keep telling myself," Shadow said miserably. "Doesn't help much. Almost wish I'd never remembered any of who I am; that way I wouldn't hate myself for what I almost turned into."
"The operative word here is almost," Gerald pointed out. "And you wouldn't be the first honest man Ivo tricked into wrongdoing. He's had years of practice."
"More than you think," Shadow replied bitterly. "The GUN came out of the Black Arms thing looking pretty bad compared to yours truly, so I did a little arm-twisting and got them to take a second look at the intel that got us shut down. Turns out it came in as an anonymous tip-off in the mail, it got logged and scanned in... and then someone went in afterwards and attached a couple of faked photos that a trained intelligence officer would have spotted in a second, but since they were flagged as the real deal nobody noticed."
Gerald's eyes narrowed. "Ivo."
"Who else? Oh, they can't prove anything; the computer-forensics people don't think anyone got through the firewall from the outside, so it looks like someone in Intelligence was paid off or coerced. The chances of finding out the full story are someplace between slim and zero, but as soon as they get done following up a few leads you're officially off the hook. Which reminds me..."
"Those greatly exaggerated rumours of my death?" Gerald managed a wan smile. "Advanced technology, fast thinking and sheer dumb luck, my boy. Remember that bio-mechanical replicant program we worked on for the Secret Service?"
"They fell for that thing?" Shadow exclaimed. "You've gotta be kidding me! It crawled right out of the Uncanny Valley!"
"They didn't send the sharpest bayonets in the GUN armoury on that operation, apparently," Gerald agreed. "Nobody caught on until after they pulled out, at least. My escape pod came down a few miles off the coast of Singapore, and I've managed to stay off the radar ever since. I... heard about Maria when they announced my own apparent death, and yours. They claimed Maria's death was accidental, a stray bullet, but..."
"They lied," Shadow replied, in a tone devoid of all emotion. "We ran for the nearest escape pod, but there'd been a shootout in the corridor and the internal release controls got smashed to hell. I was still trying to jury-rig them to work when we hear the GUN coming back. Maria jumped out to work the external release, said she'd surrender to them." His eyes darkened. "They shot her when she jettisoned the pod. I watched the whole thing. The way she was hit shouldn't even have killed her; bust her collarbone but missed the major blood vessels. Ten seconds and some basic first aid and she would have lived, but they were in a hurry or something. And there was nothing whatsoever I could do, not even kill the son of a bitch who fired the shot; they had almost a full brigade waiting when I made landfall, stuffed me in a cryopod the minute I put my hands up, and when I finally break out the man responsible's two years dead.
"Really sucks to be me sometimes, huh?" Shadow concluded with forced levity.
"All you could do for her was live," Gerald said quietly. "Live and make sure justice was served."
"I'll settle for vengeance," Shadow replied darkly.
"Get me aboard the Ark and you don't have to. I'd begun to suspect Ivo was up to something untoward in the last few months before the GUN raid, and I used my security clearance to do some checking up on his activities. I was still trying to pin down something conclusive enough to take to the authorities when he got his retaliation in first, but what what I have on file up there ought to go some way towards corroborating his role in staging the raid."
"Then let's go."

* * *

"You live here?" Gerald enquired dubiously.
Club Rouge was somewhat unprepossessing in outward appearance, a four-storey edifice of spectacularly ugly design and cheap materials. Much of the front of the building was obscured by scaffolding, and the mournful wail of a disc-sander could be heard from an upper floor.
"It's nicer on the inside," Shadow agreed. "The owner's a friend of mine. She got this place for next to nothing as a fixer-upper; the club part used to be a basement car-park, and we lease the apartments to the university to use as a dorm starting next semester. She offered me a rent-free apartment 'cause she couldn't afford to pay that well, and I needed a place to crash with no questions asked, so here I am; club manager and live-in building superintendent." Shadow smiled wanly. "Not quite what you had in mind for your finest creation, huh?"
"Don't worry, lad, Superman needed a day-job too," Gerald replied with a chuckle. "So where's this ship you... acquired?"

It was less than impressive, a roughly cylindrical craft some six metres long with a rounded nose and an almost cartoonish rocket exhaust at the rear. It was painted in a mottled grey/black/white intended to be difficult to spot from above. "Snagged two of these the last time I hit one of Ivo's supply caches," Shadow remarked. "They used to be cargo UAVs, but a friend of mine retrofitted this one with life-support and a cockpit in return for getting his hands on an intact countergrav drive to back-engineer. And I'd appreciate it if you'd not mention any of this to the FAA, because I have no idea if this is exactly legal."
"It probably isn't, so I won't."
"Thank you." Shadow unlocked the door to a totally conventional garden shed in a corner of the car-park and emerged with a ballistic vest and two army-surplus equipment belts bearing an assortment of pouches. "Respirator, flashlight, radio and medical kit; everything we should need," he explained. "You want a sidearm?"
"I've got my own," Gerald replied, shrugging off his coat to reveal an old GUN service automatic in a shoulder holster.
"Good. I figure Ivo's going to notice when we bring the Ark back online." Shadow reached behind his back and tugged a clip-in holster out of his belt. Gerald noticed without surprise that he was already wearing body armour. "You know, I'm actually kind of hoping he does. The look on his face when he sees you oughta be quite something."
"Indeed. Um... one question. How are we going to get this thing off the ground without anyone noticing?"
"Smart-paint and active stealth gear. There's not much we can do about infrared, but nobody's shot at us yet."

The transport wasn't much more prepossessing on the inside. Whoever modified this thing appeared to have salvaged the seats from a twenty year-old people carrier, and the flight controls looked like they'd from a spaceflight simulator game Gerald had seen at a theme park several years ago. "Your comment about the FAA begins to make sense," he remarked in doom-laden tones.
"Yeah. I'm pretty sure their jurisdiction only applies to craft that use physics principles we currently understand, but I'm erring on the side of caution... and that wasn't what you meant, was it?"
"No. No, it really wasn't."
"It's safer than it looks," Shadow replied reassuringly.
"That would not be hard."
"You think you could do better on our budget?"
"I doubt I could have shot an episode of Blake's Seven on your budget!"
"You don't have to come with me."
"Yes I do, lad," Gerald replied with a sad smile. "I have some ghosts I need to lay to rest."
"You and me both," Shadow said quietly. "Let's go."

Gerald's reservations aside, the nameless little craft left the ground as smoothly and soundlessly as an ascending elevator. Shadow tapped a control on the multi-function display to engage the stealth systems, then lifted the nose and headed for orbit. "We're probably going to have to bring the reactor back up," he pointed out. "The solar panels are probably fried by now, and the air quality's not going to be great."
"We may not need to stay long," Gerald replied. "If the server boots I'll be able to grab what I need in ten minutes."
"Big 'if'. I might have to pull the file servers and hand the drives over to the forensics people. We'll be lucky if we have a full set of... There it is."

The Space Colony Ark was spinning gently in its geosynchronous orbit over the South Atlantic, surrounded by a tiny constellation of dust and junk. The blackened scar from an internal explosion was clearly visible at the central hub. "The Eclipse Cannon," Shadow explained. "I put a bullet into the aperture lens and it... suffered a blowback, I s'pose. How the Ark didn't get knocked out of its orbit I have no idea."
"We did build the place as a weapons research facility," Gerald pointed out. "Design allowances were made for things exploding from time to time."
"A fact you neglected to mention when you told me I couldn't have a chemistry set," Shadow pointed out.
"I said we made allowances for things exploding. I didn't say we didn't mind."
With a deft touch of attitude thrusters, the transport came alongside the main passenger airlock and locked in place with a faint hum of electromagnets. Shadow opened the transport's hatch and worked the manual release on the outer airlock door. It swung open with a ghastly screech of metal on metal.
The airlock beyond was in semi-darkness, lit only by the transport's interior lights and the reflected light of Earth through the Ark's windows. Shadow drew his pistol as he approached the inner hatch, lightly resting his thumb on the safety as he pulled the lever to release the hydraulics.
"Expecting xenomorphs?" Gerald asked dryly.
"Expecting the unexpected," Shadow replied, switching on his torch and reversing his grip on it, then laying his gun-hand on top of his other wrist. Gerald conceded the point and drew his own gun, switching on the miniature torch mounted under its barrel. Shadow pushed the airlock door open with the tip of his shoe, waited a moment and then stepped out with his gun upraised.
The corridor beyond was empty and silent. The air was stale and musty but seemed beathable, so they stepped out of the airlock without donning their respirators. There was a muffled clink as something skittered along the deck and bounced off a bulkhead; Shadow shone the torch on it, and discovered it was a cartridge case. He winced.
"Are you sure we ought to split up?" Gerald said quietly.
"We can work faster that way, and the sooner we get this done the sooner we can get out of here."
"Alright. Keep the channel open." Gerald donned the radio headset and headed for the interior of the Ark. Shadow glanced up at a sign to get his bearings, then went back into the transport to retrieve the portable generator.

The corridors were pockmarked with ricochet marks and littered with spent brass, with occasional pools or spatters of dried blood. That wasn't the hard part for Shadow, oddly enough; he'd been in so many firefights that he'd become somewhat inured to it, he supposed. No, what forced him to avert his eyes and screw them tight-shut to keep the tears back were the sights that reminded him of what the Ark had been to him once.
The storeroom where he'd strung up a cargo net and played badminton with Maria. The little alcove he'd claimed as a reading spot. The mess-hall where he and Maria had once had a picnic, and she'd actually kissed him on the cheek afterwards...
"Maria..." he whispered sadly.
"She died saving the person she cared about most in the world," Gerald's voice informed him over the radio link. "If it's any comfort, I don't think she would have had it any other way."
"It's not," Shadow said miserably. "Damn it, why her instead of me? I'm the one who was supposed to be the hero-"
"What could your death have given her?" Gerald replied. "Maria was dying, Shadow. She had less than a year, and the last few months would have been a living hell. If nothing else, we can be thankful she was spared that."
"Yeah, I guess," Shadow agreed half-heartedly. "I'm at the server room."

The servers powered up instantly, and Shadow was mildly surprised to see that the backup batteries were still showing a full charge. He kept a wary eye on the gauges as the boot-up sequence carried out. "Huh," Shadow said to himself. "Did you carry out the security lockdown? I didn't get time."
"I didn't even know it had been carried out. The only other person who could have was..." Gerald trailed off. "She must have used the datalink prototype. You remember her needing some minor surgery a few weeks before it all went to hell? The new project we were working on?"
"You mean you actually got that thing to work?" Shadow exclaimed.
"First round of beta tests were a complete success. Nobody's come close to replicating them since; those commercial ones that came out a few years ago had problems we never even ran into."
Shadow input the password known only to the three of them, and waited. "Guess she must have logged in and performed the lockdown... before..." Shadow screwed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw, refusing to let the tears come. Don't. Think. About. It.
"Network's online. I'm logging in down here so I can access the reactor diagnostics."
"Okay. Looks like we won't need the generator; the UPS is as good as... Hey, that's weird." Shadow peered at the waterfall display of network activity levels that formed his user account's desktop wallpaper. "Are you doing anything else down there? There's a lot of extra traffic..."
"It might be connected to the datalink. The server probably thinks Maria never logged off."
"No, someone's sending and receiving data. Too many packets for just you and me. There's someone else up here with us!" Shadow tapped a short command into the workstation's keyboard and brought up the user account list. If someone was logged in besides himself and the Professor, he could narrow down their location by the ID number of their workstation...
"What the-? It's Maria's user account! I don't know what the hell it's doing, but it's doing something alright; did we have some kind of malware issue or holy shit!" Shadow yelled, stumbling backwards and nearly falling over.
"Shadow! Shadow, what's going on?" Gerald demanded.
"I'm getting a voice-conference request," Shadow whispered. "From Maria. Professor, I think we need to get the hell out of here, because this does not make any fucking sense! Don't do this to me," he said softly. "Please, don't do this to me. I saw you die. I had to watch, and I wanted to help you so badly, but I couldn't. I'm sorry. I didn't want you to die, damn it! I love you! Please, I... I can't have you looking over my shoulder all the time. I can't live with you here but not here like this. I'll miss you, but you have to go on, go... wherever it is you're supposed to go. I'll follow you soon, I promise..." He shook his head. "No. No, this is ridiculous. I am a grown man, I know better than that. There has to be a perfectly rational, scientific explanation for all this because there is no such thing as ghosts and I am not being haunted! Rational, scientific explanation. Rational, scientific explanation..." Shadow's eyes narrowed. "This is somebody's idea of a fucking joke, isn't it?"

An instant messenger window appeared on the desktop.
MagicKnightMaria: Shadow? Are you there?
Shadow: Yeah, I'm here. Who is this? I need to know what to put on the headstone when I get done explaining why this is not remotely funny.
MagicKnightMaria: The Ghost of Christmas Past. Who do you *think?* Okay, okay, fine. Ask me something only Maria Robotnik could possibly know.
"Got you now," Shadow muttered.
Shadow: What was the last thing Maria said to me before being gunned down?
MagicKnightMaria: I made you promise to be the hero you were born to be, the hero I believed you could be, and to promise not to let anger and bitterness turn you into the monster you've always been afraid is inside you. Then I said "sayonara, Shadow" and told a GUN assault trooper to kiss my ass. Satisfied?

Shadow blinked. "What...? How...? It's not possible. It's not possible..."

Shadow: Okay, so if this isn't some kind of malicious practical joke, when did someone write an app for communicating with the dead and why didn't anyone tell me it had been installed?
MagicKnightMaria: Wait, what? How long has the server been offline?
Shadow: A while. What's the last thing you remember?
MagicKnightMaria: I logged into the datalink, locked down the file servers and used the external cameras to make sure your escape pod was okay. I got a weird error message, something about a ping timeout from the implant and how it was saving my login data, then nothing 'til a few minutes ago. I thought I'd passed out or something.
MagicKnightMaria: Shadow, *what is going on?* How long have I been unconscious?

Shadow swallowed.

Shadow: Maria... the GUN troops left you to bleed out, and then stuffed me in a cryopod until a few years ago. You, or at least your body, died over half a century ago.

There was a long pause.

MagicKnightMaria: Cover your ears. I need the PA system.

Wincing inwardly, Shadow complied. It was going to hurt more than his ears hearing how she took this...

"Yeeehaaawwww! It worked! It worked, Grandpa!"
"‽" Shadow said, eloquently.
A sweet, musical laugh he'd thought he'd never hear again echoed through the server room. "Grandpa never told you about this, huh?"
"‽" he repeated.
Maria sighed heavily. "I think his brain's kernel-panicking... Oh, for- Grandpa! Can you do your happy dance somewhere with no security cameras before I join him, please? It might be unpleasantly literal right now."
Shadow regained some of his composure, and took a deep breath. "What. The. Fuck‽" he demanded.
"Okay, back when the datalink was in alpha testing, one of the volunteers had a heart attack while he was logged in. He was clinically dead for a couple of minutes, needed complete life-support for two days afterwards. And throughout all that, he stayed logged in and never noticed a thing 'til someone told him. So Grandpa and I set to thinking, what if I... well, wasn't there when I died? And it worked!"
Shadow screwed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You know, that information would have been real useful when Ivo was using your apparent death to headfuck me into helping him try and take over the world." Then the ridiculousness of the entire situation finally got to him, and he burst out laughing. "Okay, okay, I'm convinced. Nobody else could possibly make my life this weird."

[Cy-Fox]

Not bad at all.