04x31 - Unknown Known

[bunniefuu]

That water is gushing like crazy!

I can't believe how big and bad it is!

It's incredible.

We actually pulled it off.

Our own hydro power plant.

This thing's making electricity for us?

That definitely beats Ginro and Kinro spinning those wheels like madmen.

Yeah, we have Ruri's team to thank.

They've been working themselves to the bone while we've been away.

We're lucky to have their help.

But if this is going to work,

we're going to need a lot more manpower.

And that's exactly why we're about to revive

a crap ton of fresh workers.

Enjoy some maguro sushi.

Eetingsgray.

Hello to the newly revived people of Japan.

You've probably seen me on television,

but hold your applause.

A lot's happened since you were turned to stone.

Allow me to fill you in.

In short, we got our hands on the mysterious device that petrified humanity

then found out Why Man, the creep who sent it, is on the moon.

And now we plan to blast off into space

to stop him before he tries to launch another nefarious attack.

But to do that, we need the materials

to build a rocket, paired with the know how to get it done.

I guess it tracks that they all look super duper dazed.

We just massively increased our population,

so we need a way to get everybody on the same page.

I want entertainment media!

You want what?

Entertainment media?

Ha ha! That's right!

The more people there are in a group,

the harder it is to maintain order.

Conflicting interests are inevitable.

We need unity.

And nothing can bring people together like a solid piece of entertainment!

Really? The power of funsies?

Yes, he's right.

Never underestimate it.

Without a source of joy, life can be unbearable.

When I felt trapped and frustrated,

video games were my escape.

That's just a bonus, not the real angle.

Whoever controls the media, controls the whole world.

Am I wrong?

The old world had television, then the internet,

then a sea of streaming sites!

And now the new world is finally ready to return to that stage of absolute influence!

You two may be brothers, but you clearly couldn't be any more different.

We finished making the big box, but I don't see how this will help.

Television acquired!!

We already had cathode ray tubes from our radar-crafting adventure.

If we give the scan lines vertical motion,

the after image creates a picture.

The first TV receiver was produced in Japan.

It's quite fitting.

History has a way of repeating itself.

Let me at it.

How many channels does this baby have anyway?

Yeah, about that.

Forgot we don't have TV stations in the Stone World.

Nooooo!

I don't buy it. Pretty sure you knew that the whole time you were making it.

Yep, and we're not gonna use it to watch some sitcom.

Then what did you have in mind?

You'll see when our scheduled shipment arrives

from the US of A.

Sai, it's something special I know you've been wanting.

All right!

We built some kind of big machine that's gonna help everyone!

You did real good work, you big oaf.

That's bad!

There are too many wires to even count them all!

I think it has somewhere around 10,000 donuts

and hundreds of thousands of magnets!

Probably.

The CPU, its brain, is 16-bit and runs at 60 kilohertz.

It has 129 memory core units, giving 512 kilobits of memory and a 16-kilobit bank,

which isn't bad for SRAM.

Uh, somehow things only get more confusing when you explain them.

That means it's basically

a Nintendo NES.

Computer acquired!!

Writing programs for it can get ridiculously nasty.

This is called a punch card.

It has holes the computer reads as code.

So that's a video game, not just some holey paper?

From where I'm standing, it's a lame piece of paper.

It's ready!

Already?

It's time.

Execute.

Holy hell!

You actually made a frickin' video game in the Stone World!

Falling block games are simple.

You only need a single line of code

for a limitless supply of joy.

I can crank out a ton of these games in no time flat.

I knew you were the right man for the job.

Of course, I wasn't wrong.

Oh, high score!

I lose.

It's a good program.

The AI is solid.

It's already managed to surpass my human limitations.

A long time ago, there was a chess grandmaster, Kasparov.

He played against an AI called Deep Blue.

Human versus computer, the match of the century.

In the now legendary 36th move, the AI's obvious best option was to attack with its queen.

But it was a trap set by Kasparov,

humanity's best chess player.

The AI hesitated.

Deep Blue was deep in thought.

After that, it moved just a single pawn.

It seemed like a bad move at first,

but it was genius, a move that no one in the world could have thought of, not a human anyway.

In that very moment, science birthed an unknown,

something beyond human comprehension.

Ha ha! I want it!

If something's unknowable and beyond my reach,

I want it more!

Nothing less will do.

The only thing greedier than yours truly is science itself.

It wouldn't settle for anything less than the forbidden power of Why Man's petrification device!

What is that for?

Trying to keep the Medusa minty fresh?

Well, we know these little buggers don't work if they get too weathered

so we're trying to prevent that.

Yo, aren't you worried?

Someone could yell the magic words from outside the case and screw us all over.

That wouldn't work from this distance.

I don't know if that was a good sound.

Right?

We should check and see if something weird's going on.

Where's the key?

You heard that click, didn't you?

Yeah.

What the hell, man?

Nobody said anything.

The hell could this happen?

The damn Medusa fired up all on its own!

That light.

Not again!

But I don't understand how!

We're too late.

Why Man must have launched a new attack!

Suddenly it's going from bad to worse!

If it's him, we're finished!

I think we're far enough.

Yeah.

But let's give it another couple of meters

out of an abundance of caution.

The bigger the range of the petrification beam,

the faster the light will travel.

We've seen it plenty of times at this point.

At the pace it's moving, I'd say that beam should roughly have a 20-meter radius.

Nah, that was aryscay.

Wait, I could have sworn my hair was longer.

Let's take a look.

Yeah.

Lucky for us, we have a couple of witnesses who can tell us what they saw.

So what happened?

Don't try to pin this on me.

Yeah, sure, I may have made a stupid little joke about accidentally setting the thing off,

but that's never gonna hold up in court.

You can calm down.

We didn't do a single thing.

I swear, even Yo is innocent.

This is precisely what happened in the order it happened,

without any speculation or analysis.

A noise from inside the safe--

- the sound of breaking glass--

- a click, then a flash!

A noise they heard before it happened.

It's possible that was just the vacuum tube cracking.

Here's the real mystery.

No one spoke to or laid a hand on it.

Not a living soul was near the safe or device when it was activated.

But how could the darn thing go off on its own?

Huh, that attack's gotta be Why Man's doing.

He must be getting ready to unleash more Medusas on humanity.

And how the hell was he able to control it remotely?

Radio waves potentially?

If he could do that, he would have pulled the trigger a long time ago.

He was totes playing nice.

Otherwise, he would have stone whammied the whole stinking planet!

There's still an awful lot we don't know about what happened.

One thing's for certain. We can't guess what his next move is gonna be.

So our only real option is to go up there and attack him right away!

Is it really?

I'd like a second opinion.

Yet again, she's on team Jump to Action.

Right! We've gotta do something!

But it's not like we can just go up to the moon and attack.

We don't have any idea where he could be.

This is bad.

We can't let them leave yet.

Otherwise, they'll blast off without a way to get back home!

That's our next mission.

We have to figure that out.

Where can we find Why Man

on the vast expanse of that grand lunar world?

Shouldn't we get a move on and then track him down once we're up there?

There's no way we'd find him.

The moon's diameter is actually more than a quarter the size of Earth's.

Huh? It's bigger than I thought!

Somehow, up in the sky, it looks a whole lot smaller.

Honestly, I always thought it was around the size of the Ishigami Village Lake.

So things have changed, but we still don't have any new information to go on.

I would experiment with the Medusa and try to reproduce what happened.

But it's too risky.

We'll remove the battery

until we're ready to use it.

Question.

Yeah?

I'm curious.

Did you happen to touch the Medusa while it was en route to Japan?

I already told you, I didn't go anywhere near the damn thing!

Go and bother Ukyo.

He was the one in charge of it.

Listen, Senku, you may already be aware,

but someone could have set that in motion before it arrived.

Yeah.

That sounds cray.

Yowza, I get it!

Someone could have said, hey, Medusa, do 20 meters in three months.

That's straight-up supervillain territory.

Like, whoa!

Good thinking!

Scandal.

Who the hell would go through all that trouble?

Nobody would benefit from it.

Truth.

We're all besties around here.

Even so, I'm just saying that it would be physically possible to do.

He's right.

And until we have a solid lead on what happened today,

we should consider every possibility.

We'll place the Medusa under strict surveillance,

somewhere no one can lay a finger on it.

Do I even want to know?

We'll grab naumannite from the Kagoshima mines.

Now we've got selenium.

I'm overjoyed.

What is it exactly?

We'll throw in some arsenic from the skarn formations.

And the last thing we'll add to the mix is tellurium.

Uh-- I don't think I've ever heard of any of that stuff.

Except isn't arsenic a poison?

Oh, it's all poison.

Do you realize how evil that sounds?

The high-voltage surface we scored from adding our poison coating

converts whatever the lens sees from light into electrical signals.

If we then send those signals to the TV screen we've got ready and waiting--

TV camera acquired!!

Security cameras?

Yep.

It may not be able to record, but it'll help us keep watch.

In addition to surveillance,

we can use it for live broadcasting!

Huh, I guess so.

Don't forget, I'm going to use entertainment media to bring us all together.

We're not just influencing the kingdom of science anymore.

The whole world is in our hands now!

Even in the new world,

whoever controls the media controls everything!

Hello, American viewers.

Please stay tuned for our live baseball game broadcast.

It will be between Japan and the United States.

We brought TV to the Stone World!

That's a heck of a way to earn allegiance, you little brats!

An entrance fit for an empire.

Seems you legitimately became a media tycoon.

I should know better than to be surprised.

You done screwing around?

The camera isn't only for entertaining the masses, you know.

I'm guessing surveillance?

Nope.

It's for something else,

a mission that's 10 billion times more important.

We're gonna locate Why Man, then go and pay him a visit.

We won't get a decent view from the surface,

no matter how big our telescope is.

Instead, we'll scope it out from space,

all while sending the live footage back here to Earth.

That'll give us a prime time view of the lunar surface.

You can't mean--

He totes can!

Yeah, to track down Why Man.

There's just one little thing we have to do first.

From right here in the Stone World,

we're launching a man-made satellite.