"So this is the programming center," hissed Sonic as he looked down through a vent. "Creepy lookin' place, isn't it?"

Sally nodded her agreement as she knelt beside the hedgehog, surveying the room below. After what seemed like hours of crawling through the cramped ducts, they had finally reached the inner sanctum of the Roboticizing Center. The room below them was huge, and the walls and floors were a pristine, sterile white. Odd little robots that looked like unicycling dust bins teetered through the aisles between the almost endless rows of programming tubes, making adjustments to the equipment from time to time and keeping the room completely sterile by vaporizing any foreign material or dust with tiny lasers mounted on their dome-shaped heads. In each of the tubes, standing as still as statues as they were given new programming, were row after row of SWATbots, more than the Freedom Fighters had seen in one place since Robotnik first conquered Mobotropolis. At the far end of the room, quite a long distance from the vent the Freedom Fighters now inhabited, was a clear glass double door. Beyond those doors they could see more of the programming tubes, each one containing a roboticized Mobian. Sally frowned as she watched the Wheelers (as she had decided to call the robots), a plan forming in her mind.

"Sonic," she said quietly, "I need you to draw those Wheelers over to one side of the room. Don't break anything, though. I'm sure this room is packed with all sorts of security devices to pick up tampering."

"That is correct, Princess Sally," said NICOLE in a muted voice. "From what my sensors pick up, any damage or unauthorized access to the programming tubes will set off an alarm that will have every SWATbot in this building coming to investigate the disturbance."

"Aw, no messin' with buttbots?" said Sonic with an exaggerated sigh. "Oh well, guess I can't have everything I want." Then he grinned. "Then again, it'd be no fun bashin' 'em while they can't move, so I guess it all evens out."

"Do it to it," said Sally, and Sonic grinned before kicking the vent's grate out and dropping with a spin into the middle of the room.

"Hey, tin-men, looking for me?" taunted the smirking hedgehog, drawing the attention of every Wheeler in the room. They all spun to face the cobalt-blue intruder that was making their nice, clean room dirty with his disgusting, unsterilized body. Instantly they began to converge on him, their lasers humming as they ionized the air with increasing power. If Wheelers had been people, they would all have been obsessive-compulsive neatness freaks. Thus, to them everything was dirty and in need of cleaning. Since living beings seemed to them to do nothing besides shed skin cells, hair, and fur they despised them with a passion. To have one of the disgusting flesh-beings come into their sanctum, where they had taken such pains to make everything nice and clean, was a thing more intolerable to them than being recycled. Thus they focused all their energy on cleansing the room of the defiling presence. Sonic, however, was far faster than anything the robots had encountered before, and easily evaded them before they could close in and surround him. They attempted once more to catch the slippery mess-maker, but he once again evaded the rather clumsy robots with deft ease, causing two of them to collide with each other and fall over, leaving them to spin their wheels helplessly.

While the Wheelers hunted Sonic through the aisles of programming tubes, Sally dropped lightly to the ground, followed close behind by Antoine, Bunnie, and Rotor. Sally couldn't help but smile as she watched the unsteady and slow-moving Wheelers try to catch the fastest thing alive, bouncing off the walls, tubes, and each other when they charged at him and missed. Turning, she and the other Freedom Fighters ran quickly to the sliding glass doors and pressed the button to open them, slipping quietly through as the doors shut behind them. Sonic saw his friends leaving, and grinned at his would-be attackers.

"See you later, stumblebots," he laughed, giving them a mock-salute. Then he raced to the door, slipping through just an instant before they closed and coming to a stop right behind his friends.

* * *

Sparks of blue light threw eerie patterns of shadow on the walls of the laboratory deep within the Roboticizing Center, just a few feet away from the special project programming area. Straightening, Snively lifted the face-shield he had been wearing and wiped his sweating forehead before returning to the microsoldering work that lay before him on the large steel work table. It had only been a matter of days before when Robotnik had given his diminutive assistant orders to redesign a hoverbot into a more effective configuration. The lord of the Death Egg had somehow been touched in the cockles of his metal heart by the valiant effort of the robot to fulfill its duty in destroying the hedgehog, and by its sheer luck at somehow having survived that assault. Robotnik had in fact given Snively a set of plans detailing the numerous improvements he wanted made to the hoverbot and then left Snively alone to work, a fact which the long-nosed flunky appreciated greatly. After all, the less time he spent around Robotnik the greater his chances were of avoiding becoming one of the casualties of the rotund tyrant's wrath.

"It's simply amazing how difficult these Supervisor brains can be to install," said Snively to himself as he made the last circuit connection and turned off his soldering iron. "No wonder we don't make more of them. Not to mention they might start out-thinking Robotnik."

"I seriously doubt that, Snively," said a sinister voice that Snively found all too horribly familiar. He spun to face the dark figure standing in the now open door to the lab and cringed under the glare of his master's blazing red eyes. Snively had installed those eyes himself when General Julian Ivo had lost his natural eyes to a burst of shrapnel that got too close to his command center during the Great War. Yet despite his knowledge of the workings of the metal orbs, and that they were merely another machine like so many others he had worked on, he was never able to overcome the terror that seized him every time they focused on him. Those eyes may have been simple cybernetic replacements, but their cold depths held a malicious intelligence that pierced through him with every glance. Often Snively felt almost that he could feel the dark mind of Robotnik reaching out and coldly dissecting his every move, and that thought unnerved him badly. After all, he had too many secrets he wanted to keep hidden, and the thought that Robotnik might see through his deceptions was more terror than he could bear.

"S-s-sir, I didn't hear you come in," said Snively nervously. "Is something wrong? Can I help you with anything?"

"Snively, I do not believe that your help would do anything but further exacerbate the problem," replied Robotnik coldly. "You seem to have put more than enough of your personal touch into the last assignment that I gave you to completely disrupt the operation."

"W-What do you mean, Sir?" asked Snively, cowering visibly as the massive human walked towards him. Robotnik held up the charred head of a Supervisor SWATbot in his metal left arm.

"I picked the brain of this one, Snively, and found that you changed my orders somewhat," said Robotnik with a deadly calm. "It seems that the Underground Mobians were more well-defended than you supposed. Their guerilla tactics were perfect in close quarters against the teeming mob that you sent down to flush them out. If you had simply held to the original plans I gave and sent a small strike force we would have them here in the Roboticizing Center at this moment, pleading for mercy as we turned them into my obedient slaves. I truly despise it when I am denied a chance to hear pleas for mercy!"

With that, Robotnik closed his metal fist, pulping the metal robot skull. Before Snively could make his fear-frozen body move Robotnik had lifted him off the ground, holding him just inches away from his gleaming red eyes.

"Yours will have to suffice for now," growled the robot master. Snively was only too happy to comply.

* * *

The Freedom Fighters crept silently from their hiding place in one of the vacant labs that lined the walls of the inner regions of the programming complex. They had only just escaped the notice of Robotnik as the despot stormed through the programming rooms towards one of the darkened labs, holding a robot's head under one arm. Sally wiped some sweat from her forehead.

"Phew, that was close," she said, then held up NICOLE as she looked around. "NICOLE, holographic schematic of programming complex."

"Acknowledged, Princess Sally," said the calm feminine voice of NICOLE, and promptly a glowing two dimensional map appeared in the air in front of the princess. Sally leaned forward to study the map, and then turned to point towards a door near the end of the far hallway.

"There, that should be the entrance to the main programming area. Let's go."

After several tense minutes Nicole opened the sliding metal door, and the Freedom Fighters entered the room beyond. Ten eyes grew wide in shock as the Mobians saw the freakish creations of Robotnik, metal fabrications that had crept their way out of the darkest nightmares of the evil tyrant. Sonic saw the cyber cheetah he had raced against suspended on its hind legs in a nearby programming tube and Antoine recognized the head of a second Shredder in the third row, but other than this the automatons were unfamiliar to the Freedom Fighters. Though they could guess at some of the abilities and dangers present in a few of the more sanely designed robots, all too many of them were beyond even Sally's ability to assess properly without dismantling them.

"Hey, sugars," said Bunnie, walking to the center of the room, "I think this here thingumajig is what we're lookin' fer."

Sally assigned Antoine to watch the door and warn them if anyone came, and the rest went to stand next to Bunnie, looking at the large device that dominated the center of the room, rising from the floor until it merged with the ceiling, connecting its wires and cables to the Roboticizing Center, and from the Center to the Death Egg itself. It was cubic in shape, dark and forbidding like most of Robotnik's machines with far too many pipes and bare wires, and several rows of monitors covered the lower portions of each of the machine's sides, showing the status of the contents of the tubes not only in that room, but also in the previous two Programming Rooms they had passed through.

"Do you know what this is?" said Sally with a smile.

"Robuttnik's last birthday present?" asked Sonic with his usual smirk.

"Naw, even better," said Bunnie. "It's his laptop."

Sally looked heavenward, seeking deliverance from the jokers that surrounded her.

"It's the main programming bank for all the rooms we just passed through," she said with a mock-exasperated sigh. "If we can take this down Robotnik won't be able to send any of the robots in this place out to get us until it's fixed."

"Yeah, but he can fix things pretty fast, Sally," said Rotor. "There must be something else we can do. This has direct access to the robot's minds, after all."

"Wait, Rotor, that's it!"said Sally in triumph. "We'll mess with their minds. Rotor, what would a large power surge do to all these robots?"

Rotor inspected the large machine the surrounding programming tubes before answering, taking his time so that he could give an accurate answer. This nearly drove Sonic nuts, but he controlled himself, having learned long ago that it was impossible to make his friend hurry when he was working.

"Well, it looks like Robotnik only has some basic shock protection here. He probably left it out to let him make more special modifications to these tubes. This is the heart of his operation, after all, and really far removed from anything that could deliver the kind of power boost we'd need to overload it, so he wouldn't be too worried about power surges. I'd say that a decent-sized surge would probably fuse the circuits of the robots in this room, requiring a total replacement of their brains. If it was especially large then it could probably carry over into the other rooms, burning out their programming and leaving them useless until every single robot was fixed manually. The effects on the roboticized people would be a lot like being tranquilized, keeping them asleep until someone woke them up. It wouldn't stop Robotnik's operation, but it would slow him down for some time. The only problem is that we don't have anything to make a big enough power surge to do anything like that."

Sally nodded, smiling in satisfaction as she reached into her backpack and pulled out the power ring Sonic had used earlier. The glow of the ring had left, and it was slowly but steadily fading away like morning mist in the sun.

"Will this do?" she asked. Rotor scratched his head. After a careful deliberation, the tall walrus answered.

"You know, I think it will."

* * *

Robotnik never noticed the door to the programming area for roboticized Mobians closing with a slight thump as he walked out of Snively's lab. He enjoyed bullying the little man immensely, which was one of the reasons he allowed Snively to continue living. After he had finished with his assistant, Robotnik watched as Snively crawled back to his workbench to make the last connections from his new creation's silicon brain to a console that led straight to the main programming computer just down the hall. The Lord of the Death Egg walked down the hall and entered the programing room himself to make a few minor adjustments before he fed his prefabricated programming into the newly-made machine. Unfortunately for him, Robotnik was so intent on his own thoughts, and on the program he was tweaking, that he failed to notice that a panel on the upper regions of the main programming computer had been put back in place incorrectly, making it tilt a little to one side. Had he noticed this incongruity and bothered to investigate it, Robotnik would have discovered that the power couplings in the computer had been rerouted. A little further digging into the guts of the machine would have located one of Sonic's Power Rings, its glow steadily increasing as the unstable ring of solid energy rapidly began to reach critical mass!

After some time Robotnik finished his modifications, then walked back to the lab where Snively had finished a few final touches to the robot on the table and was now standing by the main computer console in the wall, awaiting Robotnik's command. He smiled fiendishly as he thought of the havoc his new toy would create, a deadly machine that he was certain would be capable of tracking down the Mobians to their home in Knothole and killing every last one of them.

"Ready, Snively?" he rumbled.

Snively's hand moved to the button that would begin the transfer of data to bring their creation to life.

"All systems are go, Sir."

"Then do it now!"

Snively pressed the button.

* * *

It had been much easier getting out of the Roboticizing Center than getting into it, especially since the removal of the Creeper made travel in the ducts much safer. After they had made it into the sewers beneath Robotropolis, Sally looked at her chronometer and then convinced Bunnie to give her a lift so that she could lift a manhole cover and see what happened as the time Rotor had estimated before the power ring went critical ran out.

"Look!" exclaimed Antoine in the sewers below the princess. "Ze lights, zey are dimming!"

Sally watched as she saw lights all over the city go dim, and then had Bunnie lower her back into the sewers.

"It's a brown out, Antoine," she explained. "It's when too much power hits an energy grid, like the one in this city. It'll take Robotnik weeks to fix all the damage."

Sonic grinned in triumph.

"Looks like Ro-BUTT-nik loses again," he said. "C'mon, there's a pillow with my name on it back at Knothole."

* * *

After coming to his senses once more, Snively pulled himself out from under the ruined computer console and tried to brush off his hopelessly dirty uniform. He looked around and saw his rotund master groggily shaking his head as he got to his feet. The small human froze as those horrible red eyes fixed their gaze on him once more.

"What just happened, Snively?" asked the Lord of the Death Egg in a voice as cold and deadly as hypothermia.

"It seems that there was a power surge, Sir," replied Snively in bewilderment. "I don't know how it could have happened. The systems down here are closed, so there was no way for a power surge to reach the computer."

Robotnik stalked out of the room, leaving Snively alone for some time. When the huge man returned he held a glittering object clenched in his unroboticized fist.

"It seems that we had some visitors, Snively," he said in a voice that rumbled like the thunder before a storm, holding up the power ring. "Do you have any explanations for how this could have gotten in my main programming computer!? It's fused the minds of my robots in the back room and scrambled the ones in the front two rooms! How is it possible? How did the hedgehog reach me here? It isn't possible! Do you hear me? It's not possible!" The veins in his neck and forehead bulged dangerously. "I HATE THAT HEDGEHOG!"

Snively kept the table between himself and the screaming warlord, ready to run at the first opportunity. Then he looked down at the machine on the table.

"Sir, I . . . I have some good news," he squeaked, hoping to placate his lord somehow. Robotnik ceased ranting and turned his blazing eyes on his assistant.

"It had better be good, Snively," he growled in a low, menacing voice. "I could use some good news right now."

Snively gulped, his voice cracking as he spoke.

"The robot is functioning."

Robotnik looked at the machine on the table, his eyes narrowing as he considered it. The robot looked back at him with eyes that glowed with the same red light that came from his own metal and crystal orbs. Touching a button on the side of the table he released the clamps that held the robot down. It struggled for a moment, as though unsure of how to control its body, and then fell from the table in a heap. As Robotnik watched in fascination the robot slowly teetered to a standing position on its four spidery legs, as unsteady as a newborn taking its first steps. Gradually it made its way across the room to stand in front of the human, never taking its eyes from Robotnik for an instant. Robotnik looked down at the power ring that was burning the flesh of his hand, then walked to the back of the newly-made robot and reached out with his metal fingers. A screwdriver sprang from his forefinger and he used it to open a panel in the robot's back, then used the wires that still dangled from the glowing power ring to tie it into the power couplings of his creation. Closing the panel, he walked to the front of the robot and looked it in the eyes, for it stood as tall as he did. It returned his unblinking stare for a long moment, and then its voice crackled to life, speaking its first words in a voice as cool as blood at room temperature.

"My name is Vorallon. How may I serve you?"

Gradually an evil smile fixed itself on Robotnik's face. After a moment's thought he spoke, mostly to himself.

"So, I have not completely lost this round after all."