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The world does not love geniuses. Ivo Robotnik absorbed this bitter truth—like the taste of the first medicine—at the age of three. At an age when other children were just beginning to string words into sentences, he was already reading scientific tomes whose pages were larger than he was.
On that fateful day the house was filled with an unusual, ringing silence. His parents had left for a scientific conference—an event that was supposed to become their triumph. Ivo had been left in the care of a nanny, a plump woman with kind but vacant eyes. She sat knitting in an armchair, occasionally casting glances at him filled with quiet bewilderment. She could not understand how someone could spend hours bent over a book, ignoring toys. And Ivo paid no attention to her, immersed in the world of formulas and theorems. He felt the excitement hanging in the air but could not make sense of it. It was anticipation of something great, like the moment before a rocket launch.
His parents, Theodore and Eliza Robotnik, were not merely scientists. They were the “golden couple” of modern science, dreamers bold enough to believe in a better future.
Theodore, his father, was an ecological engineer and architect with the soul of a poet. He did not see mere buildings—he saw living organisms; not cities, but ecosystems. His concept of the “City of the Future,” his project “Eden,” was a symphony of glass, living plants, and pure energy. Theodore believed that technology should not conquer nature—it should become its harmonious continuation. He was a gentle, kind man with warm hands that smelled of ozone and soldering rosin. Ivo loved sitting on his lap when his father traced a finger along the lines of a physics textbook, explaining the secrets of the universe to him as though telling a fairy tale.
Eliza, his mother, was the heart and soul of their family. A biochemist and neurobiologist with an incredible gift for empathy. She seemed to see the invisible threads that connected the world. Eliza studied how music, scents, and light could heal the deepest wounds of the soul, how they could rewire neural pathways to defeat depression and senile dementia. Classical music—Bach, Mozart, Chopin—always filled their home. She said it was “gymnastics for the brain and balm for the heart.” From her Ivo inherited this love for complex harmonies that seemed to impose order on the chaos of the world.
Their “Eden” project was too good to be true. Self-sufficient cities under domes, with clean air, recycled water, and infinite energy drawn from the very heart of the planet. It was the end of the era of oil, gas, and coal. It was the collapse of multi-billion-dollar corporations whose wealth was built on poisoning the planet. Their “Eden” was simpler, cheaper, and incomparably more effective.
They were offered money. Enormous money. When they refused, people from G.U.N.—the military alliance—came to them. They wanted “Eden” for themselves. Environmental control technologies, new weapons, absolute advantage. But Theodore and Eliza had created their project to save worlds, not destroy them. They gave a firm refusal. It was their final wish—that their genius serve the world, not war.
A wish that burned away in a blinding flash of fire.
Ivo tore himself away from the book when he heard the nanny’s muffled cry. She stood by the television, hands pressed to her mouth. On the screen twisted metal blazed against a thick black column of smoke. The ticker at the bottom reported a terrible accident on the highway. Passenger car… collision with a fuel tanker…
He did not understand the words, but he felt an icy cold spreading from the tips of his fingers throughout his body. The music in his head—the Mozart he loved so much—broke off on a piercing, false note.
The onboard computer of their car had been hacked with surgical precision. The brakes locked at the exact moment an oncoming truck veered into their lane. A perfect murder disguised as an accident. Flash! And nothing remained of the “golden couple” except charred memories and a line in the news.
Official version: technical brake failure and tragic speeding. The world accepted the explanation without question.
The extinguished, lifeless gaze of a three-year-old child slid over raindrops running like tears down the smooth granite of the headstone. He felt no cold, heard no howling wind. His entire world had shrunk to two freshly engraved names. Someone held him in their arms, but these were not the warm, familiar hands of his father. These hands were strong, hard, alien.
It was Gerald. His grandfather. Ivo had almost never seen him in person—only in old, faded photographs his father had shown him, accompanied by quiet, slightly sad stories. He knew this man was a great scientist, but to the little boy he was merely a stern shadow from the past that had suddenly become his present.
After the funeral—conducted in silent, oppressive haste—Gerald took him without a single word of comfort. Their path did not lead to the cozy home that smelled of books and his mother’s perfume, but upward, through dense layers of clouds, to where the blackness of space was pierced by the icy light of distant stars. The space station “Ark,” floating in the void, became his new home. And his prison.
The little boy buried himself in books again. But if before it had been an exciting journey into the world of knowledge, now it became a desperate escape from the real world. He surrounded himself with stacks of monographs and scientific journals like an impregnable fortress wall. He plunged into them headfirst, soul-first, with everything he had left of his former life. A traumatized, lonely child’s brain absorbed information at feverish speed, finding in the strict logic of formulas the only refuge from the chaos of loss.
He hardly spoke to anyone. There was hardly anyone to speak to. Faceless lab technicians in white coats glided past without noticing him. Food became tasteless, slightly gritty nutrient paste squeezed from tubes, devoid of color, smell, and memory.
Occasionally a ray of light broke into his sterile world. Her name was Maria. She was a fragile, pale girl whose eyes seemed to reflect all the stars of the galaxy. She came to him, sat beside him, and tried to talk. To teach him… social life. She brought him drawings, told him about her dreams, about how beautiful the blue planet below was. And he—slowly, with difficulty, as though rediscovering a long-forgotten language—learned. He listened to her quiet voice, and for a moment the wall of books around him grew just a little less dense.
But then Gerald would come, and the wall would rise again, higher and thicker.
Gerald… did not love Ivo. He saw in him not a grandson, not a continuation of his son, but merely imperfect material, a weak link. He looked at Ivo and saw disappointment. Punishments were frequent and cruel, dictated by cold, scientific expediency. Thin but searing switches left crimson stripes across his thin back. Starvation—when nutrient paste was replaced with nothing but distilled water—brought him to the edge of consciousness.
How many times had Ivo stood on the brink of death? He had lost count. His body failed, breathing stopped, but the station—crammed with the most advanced medical technology—did not let him die. Automatic manipulators injected stimulants, life-support systems dragged him back from the darkness. Back for another cycle. For another lesson.
Every miscalculation, every display of childish weakness or emotion was punished immediately. Again, and again, and again. Gerald’s voice—devoid of any warmth—imprinted itself into his mind, becoming his inner monologue.
“You are too weak, Ivo. Emotions are a flaw your father could never overcome.”
“You are not Maria, Ivo. Her genius is pure. Yours is tainted with sentimentality.”
One year. Two. Three. Four. Five. Time on the space station “Ark” flowed thickly and monotonously, marked not by the change of seasons but only by the silent turnover of numbers on the chronometer. His birthdays passed unnoticed, blending into the endless succession of lessons, simulations, and punishments. He was Maria’s shadow—the bright star in this cold void—even though she tried so desperately to become his light, his only friend.
And on one of those gray days… they came. The roar of emergency sirens tore through the station’s artificial silence. The same ones who five years earlier had extinguished the light in his life arrived. Those who did not seek peace. G.U.N. soldiers in black armor.
Ivo did not panic. The instinct honed by years under his grandfather’s oppression worked flawlessly. He slipped to the nearest ventilation grate, opened it with a familiar motion, and vanished into the labyrinth of air ducts. He often hid there. It was his own world within the station—a world of dust, humming cables, and darkness. He knew a blind spot, inaccessible to surveillance cameras, a secluded corner no one would ever look into. Because… who would think to search for an eight-year-old child there? Who would even care? The answer—cold and clear—had long taken root in his mind: no one.
From his hiding place he listened. Heavy, measured tread of army boots on metal flooring. Short, sharp gunshots echoing in narrow corridors. A scream cut off mid-word. And he felt no fear. He felt curiosity. He analyzed the sounds, built a mental map of events, noted movement trajectories, tried to predict the next step. It was simply another unforeseen variable in his harsh reality.
He emerged only when absolute, dead silence fell. The station was plunged into the half-darkness of emergency lighting. He was alone. Completely alone… or so he thought at first.
And then he found Maria.
She lay on the floor beside the control panel, right next to the large red emergency purge lever. A lifeless, pale doll in a white dress stained with an ugly dark blotch. She looked dead. But when he—driven by the same cold curiosity—approached closer, he saw. Her chest rose and fell ever so slightly, betraying the last, desperate signs of life. She was still alive. For now.
She lay right by the lever, like… like an idiot. Stupid! Fool! Why? Why didn’t she hide? Why did she go toward them? His mind had no room for grief or horror—only for icy, contemptuous analysis of her fatal mistake.
And in the next second he rushed to her. Not to comfort. To repair. He saw before him not a dying friend, but a complex, damaged mechanism that required immediate intervention. His small fingers—accustomed to delicate work with microchips—set to work. He tore a strip from her own dress to fashion an improvised pressure bandage, recalling diagrams from medical atlases. He did everything he could, everything he had been taught, to stop the leak of life. He even succeeded. Barely. His arms were soaked to the elbows in her warm, sticky blood, but his eyes remained completely dry. Emotions are weakness.
Dragging her limp body into the nearest cryopod, he—without hesitation—entered the command sequence on the panel. A hiss sounded, and frost covered the glass. She would most likely die. Yes, that was inevitable. The injuries were too severe. Survival odds—negligible.
He looked at his bloodstained hands, then at the frozen capsule.
But he had survived. He was smarter. He had found cover. He had not stepped into the line of fire.
Therefore, he was better than Maria. Better because he was alive and she was not.
But of course, one could not remain on this dead, desecrated station. No, impossible. It was illogical. Resources were finite, life-support systems damaged, and the very atmosphere saturated with failure and death. For Ivo it was a simple equation with one correct solution: evacuation.
Waiting for rescuers would have been the height of foolishness. He was his own only rescuer.
His hands—still bearing the sticky trace of Maria’s blood—set to work with cold, mechanical precision. At his disposal was the genius of three generations of Robotniks stored in the station’s database, and his own intellect—honed to razor sharpness. He did not build from scratch. He adapted. Cannibalized service drone components, gutted the navigation module from a research probe, repurposed emergency life-support gear. It was not an elegant lifeboat but a grotesque, asymmetrical cocoon of wires, welded panels, and desperate ingenuity.
The most valuable cargo he took with him was not nutrient paste rations or a tool kit. It was a small, crude device he had secretly assembled over the years, hidden from his grandfather. He called it a telephone for himself, though its capabilities went far beyond that. It was his personal key to everything. A mobile terminal that maintained a wireless connection to the Ark’s central database. All knowledge, all blueprints, all research of Gerald and his parents—everything was now in his pocket.
The undocking was brutal. Atmospheric entry turned his improvised craft into a fireball. It tumbled wildly, metal groaning and melting, but the calculations made by an eight-year-old genius proved correct. He survived.
The landing was not particularly soft. With a deafening crack the pod smashed through treetops and plowed into the forest floor, leaving a furrow of broken branches and churned earth. Then came silence, broken only by the crackle of cooling metal.
He crawled out, coughing from acrid smoke. And froze.
Instead of polished gray corridors and artificial light he was surrounded by a chaotic, unimaginable world. Giant tree trunks rose into the sky—toward a real, blue sky not shielded by armored glass. The air was thick, humid, filled with millions of unfamiliar smells: decaying leaves, damp earth, pine. Instead of the hum of ventilation systems—chirping of unseen birds and the rustle of wind through branches.
Now it was just him. Now he was alone.
He sat on a fallen tree, took out his “telephone,” and activated it. Familiar lines of code lit up on the screen, granting access to an ocean of information. He was physically cut off from the world, but intellectually he remained connected to humanity’s greatest scientific legacy.
And he could study. Anything he wanted. Without supervision. Without punishment. Without anyone else’s expectations. Study the beetles crawling at his feet. Analyze the chemical composition of the soil. Calculate the trajectory of a dew drop falling from a leaf. The entire universe had become his personal, boundless laboratory.
Wasn’t that fun? Wasn’t it… beautiful?