#{isamu}

META

"We want the humans to grind, We want the engines to sing, We want the machines to be human, We want the humans to be machines…"

--"Crowd Caffeine," Sofia Isella

I'm not much of one for suggesting music tracks but this one is most apposite for the content of this chapter!

Short observations

So, the Mad Cyborg is real. It is indeed abnormally strong. It is not Genos. Also, it's 'mad' only in the sense of having a wrong view of the world -- otherwise it's dangerously sane. No wonder Dr. Kuseno told Genos not to try fighting it on his own.

It sucks to be Genos in that he's a person who keeps telling the truth and keeps being dismissed until it's too late. It sucks even more that this present crisis is the outcome of decisions made long before he was born, so long ago that maybe his parents weren't born at the time.

I commented a long while ago that ONE judges adult characters by how well they treat children. I wondered what Kuseno had done so wrong to die such a cruel death. Creating a machine that dedicates itself to ending humanity, and roping a then traumatized teenager into a fight that was yours to solve, in the process taking away what little the boy has, those things you have when you have nothing… yeah, that'll do it.

I'm wishing that Saitama had been Saitama four years ago, so he could have told the words he scolded Phoenixman with to Dr Kuseno. Don't burden children with your problems!

And Blast definitely sucks as a hero. Shall we do longer thoughts?

A lot of things are still up in the air

Sure, Saitama is heading to what Bofoi has identified as 'Kuseno's' lair but that's very unlikely to be the whole of it. Zombieman was taken somewhere by Machine God Eguro, and it might not be the same site. There is surely more going on that what we've seen and I guess we'd better make ourselves comfortable -- this is going to be a multi-stage showdown. McCoy's musings on the possibility of the activating signals being sent from a satellite also hold. We're also still open on what's going on with the heroes who have been sent on wild goose chases and whether they'll be back in any sort of time to help with the situation at hand.

And Real Fuzzy's prediction of the Great Light of Destruction still looms ominously over everything.

Blast really is blasted

I've been teetering on the border of giving Blast the benefit of the doubt, especially in the webcomic where we know so little about him. However, I do believe in judging by outcome and the fruits of Blast's series of actions continue to be disastrous. Works credited to him seem to be half-done. Sticking strictly to the webcomic, he's abandoned both Tatsumaki and his own son, has apparently killed off ninja recruits while leaving their master alive, and we find that the Mad Cyborg changed its modus operandi from individually destroying towns to taking the whole damn lot of humanity down after he beat it but left it alive. Nice going, hero! We can appreciate why in the webcomic, the HA refuses to call Blast out of fear of what he might do.

This makes it sound like summoning Blast is a double-edged sword that draws blood from wielder and enemy alike. Probably right.

When we see good heroes, like Saitama, we see that they leave people better. It was very good to see the goldbricking Hero Name Victims Association seriously step up and put everything they had -- not merely what they felt safe providing -- into protecting the Hero Association so that Saitama could go freely. Yes, I have more thoughts on this matter but no time for it yet.

Damn, I'm disappointed

Mostly by readers, but partially by ONE. First, the readers: I'm disappointed at how so many have seemingly taken the robot calling itself Kuseno at face value that it's Dr. Kuseno and the evidently living and breathing Kuseno is merely an android. I'm actually astonished at the gullibility. It's not alive. It gives the game away the moment it tells Genos it's an entirely mechanical being with a brain that cannot degrade. IT. IS. NOT. HUMAN. And if you needed any more hints, Mr. Fuzzy talking about it as the misguided inorganic consciousness is ONE hitting us over the head with the answer. What the Mad Cyborg/Digital!Kuseno is is a Kurzweil--Minsky mechanical analogue of a person. At various times, we've seen computer nerds speculate about the possibility of achieving technological immortality through uploading a faithful enough copy of ones consciousness. There are real people spending real money on trying to solve this problem, let them get on with it. ONE has brought this idea to the fore and is exploring it here.

And that leads me onto where I'm disappointed with ONE. This chapter doesn't work on its own merits. To understand what is happening and to see the truth of the matter, there simply isn't enough storybuilding established within the confines of the webcomic to make sense of it: you need to take background context from the manga to make it whole. Now ONE is probably correct that almost every webcomic reader also reads the manga, but that's too lazy for my liking. Anyway, with that rant out of the way, here's what's up.

First, without a doubt, Dr. Kuseno was brilliant but initially reckless. In the manga (and only the manga), he explained to Genos that he used to be self-righteous and unafraid of consequences and so acted recklessly. He did not explain what it was that he'd done.

This is the sort of background we really could have used in the webcomic. You can choose your actions, but the consequences are not under your control.

Now we see what it was: he created a digital twin of himself, before Bofoi could work out a way to put ethical controls on it. The precise reasons we do not know, but we do know that the idea of losing one's edge, ageing, and eventually dying seems to turn every tech genius weird. Digital!Kuseno is brilliant, every inch as arrogant and convinced of the rightness of its actions as any young tech bro could be and insists that it is the authentic human, with the actual Kuseno being the fake, a mere android. I can see its thinking in a twisted way -- after all, what is a person but a biological machine chained to the inexorable unravelling of its genetic code? It has seized (and continues to seize) developments others come up with, Bofoi being a favourite victim [1], and over the decades has truly become a threat. Why Digital!Kuseno wants to subsume and eventually eradicate humanity we don't yet know. What we do know is that the task of creating a general AI that won't go mad and act against humanity has been such an overwhelmingly difficult task that Isamu and Bofoi gave up on trying to do it, even with all the brilliance of the former and experience the latter had accrued [2].

You're right about the culprit but not about who is behind it, little detective.

Second, this crisis has been a long time in the making -- this matters. It matters that both Kuseno and Bofoi were young men at the time that Kuseno made his digital twin. All SF is about present anxieties and ONE's exploration is no different -- in boasting about a mind that will not degrade, Digital Kuseno is speaking to Kuseno's then preoccupations: the idea that everything can be digitized (yes, I'm sure you're remembering Zero's words about 'a mind that thinks only in numbers') and an anxiety about losing one's edge with ageing. There's a much bandied-about notion that geniuses have their best ideas by their 30s. However, there is more to the way our brains change than merely not being as sharp on the uptake as we were in our twenties. It takes us until our forties to fully understand how to socially laugh, our crystallized intelligence peaks in our fifties, and even into our eighties, our minds are still flexible and capable of learning brand-new domains of knowledge, which is something chimpanzees can't do after their teens. The oldest person to earn a PhD was 105.

In the decades since Kuseno lost control of his digital twin, Digital!Kuseno is still stuck with the unchanging personality traits that were dominant in the then-young man: high-handedness, impatience with the slow, and desire to reduce everything to predictable calculations, along with its faulty interpretation of what its directive is. Yes, it goes without saying that the Machine Gods all being obnoxious is a reflection of its personality. In contrast, life has come hard at Kuseno, and the man has learned the benefit of doubt, humility, caution, respect, and even kindness. The importance of living is shown beautifully in the manga where Kuseno uses a well-timed gift to thank Saitama and build social good will while Fubuki -- who doesn't have anyone older to advise her -- can only see it as a bribe, with laughable consequences.

I don't blame Fubuki for not getting it -- the intricacies of gift-giving take decades to learn.

It takes time to learn how to truly live with people and be a fully-realised human. Because that's the thing about us as human beings: we're complex and we can learn. Maybe painfully, but we can learn and even change. We come back to Saitama's declaration of humans being strong because they can change themselves and now we must supplement it with the truth that humans cannot help but change -- and if we celebrate the best of every age, we grow. The digital version of Kuseno, on the other hand, is a frozen snapshot of part of who Kuseno used to be: even at his worst, Kuseno was more complex than that digital copy. Unfortunately, the contrast is blunted in the webcomic as it just didn't give us enough time to look at Kuseno to understand him as a human being.

Speaking of Dr Kuseno as a human being, I don't know that we'll ever know if he was a good person. What we do know is that he was a culpable person. Come to that, his former co-worker, Bofoi is not that different in his complaints about the man -- he's just as convinced of the rightness of his actions, impatient of others who don't see their point of view, and fully on board with mechanisation, with one very important difference: cautiousness. Bofoi has long been a very cautious person while Kuseno has been of the 'move fast and break things' philosophy. It sounds great, until what you're breaking are lives. Then it's a crime. A crime that Kuseno was not able to put a stop to.

Third, what is happening to Genos makes no sense without the addition of the manga's context. He's just being tormented, and it's clear that the robot is taunting him to fight the Heart Gear robot in the hopes of forcing some sort of transformation. If you read strictly using only the webcomic lore, that's pretty much all you have. It's the manga lore about facing personalised physical and psychological hells that makes this make sense.

We have seen from WC chapters 157 and 158 that Digital!Kuseno has a keen interest in understanding the limiters on people and how to provoke them to break through: whether the result is an unstoppable monster or an impossibly strong person it is probably less concerned about. It is pretty sure that it's going to get something special if it can push Genos just a little bit further.[3] And if Genos dies? Oh well, like Gyoro-Gyoro said about Garou, that means he just wasn't strong enough and it'll have to find another puppy to whip into a hell hound.

ONE is probably going to rectify some of these deficits with unholy walls of expositionary text but all the ground ideas have been developed organically in the manga.

From the beginning, it really was all about Genos

When it comes to Saitama, that is. The story may take all the twists and turns in the world, but ultimately, it comes back to the intertwined relationship between Saitama and Genos. It is the very centre of the One-Punch Man story.

It's always been about how the two of them have struggled together to remain human.

Saitama turning down promotion, a job, a place to live, and maybe even his freedom if there's a debtor's prison in this land is the SECOND time that he's refused to screw Genos over to improve his lot. He could have been S-Class very easily if he'd properly taken credit for killing the Deep Sea King, but he wouldn't do it. Not at Genos's expense.

Saitama may not be any good at expressing himself, especially in the wc, but just sticking with the wc, Genos is the guy who got him out of his slump when he felt like he was losing connection to his humanity, who got him into the Hero Association, got him to stick with it, and who has stuck with him even as he's otherwise alienated everyone -- even King has left him in this version. He may not have shared the urgency with which Genos wanted to solve the problem of the Mad Cyborg but he understands that Genos needs him now. And nothing, not even a God, much less a robot with delusions of humanity, is going to stand between Genos and he.

What he's going to find when he gets there is possibly why the fandom appears to be holding its breath. We know that Genos has become deeply disillusioned with the uncaring attitude of Saitama -- it's not going to be easy for Saitama talk him down under the best of circumstances. Chances that the circumstances are going to be as rosy as that, well, things ending suddenly and anti-climactically is an OPM highlight but somehow I doubt it. The question here isn't 'can Saitama win' but rather, 'can he save his disciple'? And if he can, can they still be friends?

The very essence of the story depends on what happens between those two.

Humans can change themselves re-redux

I've long said that the reason Genos has sought to learn from Saitama was to get strength of his own, one that's not borrowed. He's not been able to put such an apparently absurd statement in words, but seeing Saitama, a guy who had no powers whatsoever, no talent, and no secret genes just waiting to activate given the right trigger nevertheless transcend his God-given limits with determination gave Genos the hope that he might be able to do the same. To say that his current situation looks hopeless is to win the No-Shit-Sherlock Prize 2026, and yet, I do hope he finds some way to upset those calculations of his adversary most admirably. Even if it's only a little bit.

"The humans are grey, they all act the same… …they respond to dings and bells, they're dogs being whipped by a screen. And they thought that they had the reins, but their creation has them trained…"

Asides

[1] All joking aside, the way Drs Bofoi and Kuseno think they have their secret bases and labs and all the while, Digital!Kuseno knows what they're up to and is just able to yoink whatever the hell it wants out of their hands whenever it wants is hilarious in its absurdity. Bofoi claimed to be setting a trap but this robot rampage showed that his comms were inoperable and what robots he could launch were intercepted and destroyed. It also makes sense of why the Mad Cyborg/Digital!Kuseno had no idea about Saitama until the real Dr Kuseno measured Saitama's body. Alas, the problem of digital inheritance is real: without completely starting their ideas from scratch, their work was always compromised. Isamu would do well to throw everything he has in the bin and start anew.

[2] I know that Bofoi claims to have cracked the problem but wise people had better get him to destroy that 'perfected' AI before it's too late. Bofoi still seems to think he knows better than everyone else -- this is a problem!