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Recovering from cryogenic freezing is a difficult enough process at the best of times. Even when everything goes right biologically, the strain of being frozen is hard on a brain. The more - for lack of a better term - aware one is, the more obvious all the things they've missed become. Raizo is not so modest that he'd downplay how efficient his own brain is. That means that from the moment he's brought out of stasis, he is constantly, painfully aware of the year he's lost.
There's the Devil Gundam, for one. But the subtle things that happened while he was asleep bother him as much or more than the corruption of his magnum opus.
Domon and Rain have both grown up. There is a darkness around his younger son's eyes that he doesn't remember seeing in the video calls to Earth. Rain walks like there's a weight on her shoulders she can't put into words. They carry his failures around their necks without him ever having entrusted that responsibility to them. If Raizo was going to ask anyone to make up for his mistakes, he would have asked Kyoji, but...
Another problem with recovering from cryogenic freezing while a genius is that Raizo can compensate for most of what he doesn't know by noticing implications and subtle cues. However, he can't put two and two together and come up with something too outlandish to imagine. Which is to say, it takes nearly a full day for Raizo to realize that his elder son is not, in fact, deceased.
Domon has calmed down enough to be awkward around Raizo. It's understandable. Raizo can't claim he knows what to say to Domon either. He's tried apologizing for bringing the boy into the world imperfectly, but that only seemed to make things worse. But when Raizo expresses a desire to stay in Neo Japan and analyze the skeleton of the Devil Gundam, Domon speaks up.
"Um, Dad? You should come back to Earth and check on nii-san first, right?"
Raizo drops his recently-reacquired phone. "Kyoji's alive?"
"Technically," Rain cautions. She's barely left Domon's side since the Devil Gundam crumbled. Not that Domon is any better.
"Technically?!" Raizo repeats, his voice raising an octave.
That's how he learns Kyoji made a doppelganger out of DG Cells and a handy corpse, uploaded a fork of his own personality to it, and entrusted the task of stopping the Devil Gundam to his creation. That the copy, going by the stolen identity of 'Schwarz Bruder', proceeded to flagrantly interfere with the Gundam Fight in his desperate attempts to save the world from the monster Raizo and Kyoji built. And finally, that the copy promised Domon he and Kyoji would both survive before going inactive during the finals.
"And... he's just lying there?" Raizo asks. His horror mounts with each word. "In the dirt?"
"He said not to disturb him," Domon says defensively.
Rain frowns. "Gundam Spiegel was giving off some pretty unsettling readings. Even Ulube didn't want to touch it, and he... 'retrieved' the rest of the wreckage."
Raizo stares at his surviving child and the girl he watched grow up and seriously considers screaming at them. How could they not tell him this immediately? Did they think he wouldn't care? If there's any chance for both his children to be alive, then...
His good sense and scientific curiosity reassert themselves before he can do something foolish.
He clears his throat. "Show me the readings."
The entity that called itself Schwarz Bruder is a marvel of engineering and biology. Raizo would have happily subjected himself to the hassle of descending planet-side for the chance to examine it before all of this. As it is, they're all back on Earth in a handful of hours after a half-hearted check. Raizo has spent more time in quarantine waiting to study dangerous substances. Of course, back then, he had company. First Mikino, then Kyoji would keep tabs on him, chattering away about their current projects from the neighbouring disinfectant rooms or over comms.
Rain and Domon do their best, but it really isn't the same. For starters, neither of them understands what Schwarz is or what he did.
"I'm a medical doctor," Rain grumbles. She's still wearing Domon's cloak as a dress. Someone tried to get her a change of clothes, but she grabbed the red fabric and refused to let go. "I can't tell you if this sleep is natural or not. I don't even know if he is asleep." She holds up her tablet and shakes it. Deep scans of Schwarz's biomechanical body flash on the screen. "He doesn't have organs!"
"Technically," Raizo starts, then forgets what he's saying in favour of leaning against the car door and peering outside. "Are they letting us in?"
"They'd better," Domon says.
He's getting twitchy the way he used to as a kid. This at least is familiar.
The car door opens. All three of them pile out into the crisp air of Lantau Island. The sky above is still red and pieces of the Devil Gundam have fallen on most of the planet, but this landscape alone is soft and green. Raizo steps onto vibrant grass that wouldn’t be out of place in a colony greenhouse. Earth's biosphere has suffered significant degradation since the beginning of the Gundam Fight. While it recovers somewhat between events, it hasn't even been a week since the 13th Gundam Fight ended. This should be impossible.
"Remarkable," he mutters to himself. He squats down to examine the plants in question. "Look at the length. It's like the island was never hit by a single blast."
Domon and Rain clear their throats in unison. When he glances up, they're both pointing at the massive shell of metal and greenery lying a hundred or so feet away.
Raizo coughs and rises to his feet. "Yes, of course. On my way."
The wreck of Gundam Spiegel seems to be the source of the greenery spreading over the island. It's fascinating what seems to have occurred here. He keeps up a running narration of his thoughts as he follows the path the pair select for him. They're in much better physical shape than he is, after all.
"It's clear from the growth pattern - see the rings around the Gundam? - that the plants are using the machine itself as fuel. And yet they don't seem to be damaging the metal at all. How... oh, of course, it's the nanomachines!" He claps his hands and grins. "Utilizing the nanomachines designed to keep the machine at full functionality to instead promote full functionality from the surrounding plants. Theoretically possible provided one has an in-depth understanding of the local environment's biology down to the molecular structure. The question is how..."
His voice trails off. He knows how. This is what he built Ultimate Gundam to do.
This island of perfectly terraformed grass and trees should be the norm, not the exception, for a place his creation touched.
They make the rest of the walk to the broken Mobile Fighter in silence. They only pause once they're standing right outside the motionless grey plates. Most Mobile Fighters have an air of awareness to them, even when switched off or dismantled. Gundam Spiegel does not. Its dark optics, scarred armour, and the placement of its limbs - curled on its side, as if to protect something within - create the impression of a corpse that died defending something.
Rain taps at her tablet. "He hasn't moved."
Raizo exhales slowly. "Let me take a look at him."
She hands him the device. He stares down into the cockpit. It's tighter and more cluttered than the vast, empty chamber at the heart of the Devil Gundam, but it's nearly as dark. There's no power. The only light is coming from near the floor: a bright white gleam that reflects off the cracked screens. As Raizo watches, the light grows ever so slightly brighter.
"Hm." He turns the tablet to the side.
Rain clenches both hands fists in the skirt of her impromptu dress. "What do you think?"
"I think I'll need a closer look."
Domon is the one who goes in first, carrying a flashlight. Rain follows with her bag, the tablet, and some of the tools they brought. Raizo picks up the rear with the rest of the equipment. There's just enough space in the cockpit to fit everything. At least, there is when Raizo sets most of the monitoring devices to hover.
Schwarz Bruder lies motionless on the cockpit floor, half-curled, his long limbs frozen in exactly the same alignment as Gundam Spiegel's. He hasn't aged, decayed, or even changed since his appearance during the battle royale. He also hasn't moved or woken up in a week. The tablet reports microscopic nanomachines crawling over his body like invisible ants.
None of them are harmful. And yet the tablet cannot pick up any signs of life.
Raizo rotates the tablet a few times. "Hm."
"What do you think?" Domon asks, bristling with restless energy.
"I think I need a stethoscope, a heart monitor, and some scrapings."
The stethoscope picks up nothing but the faint hum of a computer working very, very hard. The heart monitor is a failure because Schwarz Bruder's robotic body does not contain a heart. But the scrapings are useful, and two harmless failures for a single success is a good trade. Raizo and Rain pour over the samples together. She's so good at predicting what he wants that it's almost like working with Kyoji again. But Raizo can't cling to that illusion for long. How could he, when every time Raizo glances away from the readings, he spots his oldest son's blank, dead stare again?
"We already ran most of these tests," Rain murmurs after a while.
She sounds tired. How long has it been? A few hours? Raizo has never been terribly good at tracking the passage of time.
"So you did," he says. "But I need to establish some baselines with these tools before I get to work."
Finding a baseline for a new device is very important. It also helps Raizo confirm that he is not seeing things. Half the readings from the medical gear turn back nothing or just junk data. And no wonder. There is very little left of Schwarz Bruder that qualifies as human. The body lying on the cockpit floor is 99% robotic. Its only connections to humanity come in the form of lingering traces of cells and a general body structure, at least on the surface.
Everything else is a complex mesh of nanomachines, a supercomputer running a personality engram, and reinforced alloys. This discovery would probably break the heart of another father.
Raizo lets out a shaky sigh, shoulders slumped with relief. He can do something with nanomachines, supercomputers, and reinforced alloys.
"Okay," he says eventually. "Baselines established. Rain, please get me the soldering iron, a pair of wire clippers, and..." He pauses for a moment. "Are they still making the nanomachine fluid suspension I used?"
"No, it was discontinued while you were asleep," she says.
He sighs again, this time with annoyance. "Is there a suitable replacement?"
She presses a bottle into his hand. He turns it around, grimaces at the unfamiliar logo, and starts pouring drops onto slides. He asks Rain for some cables and receives them. Then he stoops down, his bones protesting, and searches the back of Schwarz's neck for plug sockets. He finds them.
There's a satisfying little click as he connects Schwarz to the monitoring gear.
"What are you doing?" Domon asks.
He has no contribution to make to the scientific side of this examination. As such, he is hovering in the back like a gargoyle, fingers twitching with the suppressed need to move. His eyes linger on Schwarz Bruder's partly-lit up gaze even more often than Raizo's.
"I'm checking what he's downloading," Raizo says.
Domon blinks. "Downloading?"
Raizo should have expected that Domon wouldn't understand - should have explained himself earlier. But he wasn't expecting Rain to give him the same look of worried confusion.
"He's downloading something?" she asks. "Is that... possible?"
Domon crosses his arms. "He said it would be."
Rain bites her lip. Raizo is no expert in reading people, but he gets the impression that she did not trust Schwarz's words one bit.
"This body certainly qualifies as a data terminal," Raizo tells them. "Though it's not got the level of storage or processing I'd expect from something meant to back up the Devil Gundam's programming. It could certainly store a personality engram. Possibly even two... ah, so that was the plan."
He shakes his head. Even if Schwarz's body is nothing but nanomachines and steel, his schemes still scream of Kyoji's desperate compassion. That poor boy.
"So, he was telling the truth?" Rain asks.
There's something brittle yet hopeful in her eyes. Cells growing in a petri dish, a sapling pushing up through concrete, a fresh life struggling to be born in an unwelcoming environment. Domon's gaze is less brittle, but no less bright.
"I can't confirm or deny anything until I get access to his files, even if it's only read access," Raizo cautions them. "But at the moment, it appears that Schwarz Bruder is perfectly functional. Merely forced into inactivity by an ongoing download too demanding for his hardware to run his personality at the same time."
They both exhale shakily at the same time. Then each notices the other's unsteadiness and goes to support their partner. Raizo hides a smile and busies himself trying to find a way into Schwarz's inner workings.
Whoever handled Schwarz's cybersecurity did a very good job. But after a few hours of work, Raizo manages to worm his way into basic viewing permissions. It involves answering a lot of bizarre password prompts for information about Kyoji. If he wasn’t well aware of how much the Devil Gundam must have learned about his older son – and why – he would be deeply concerned about privacy. As it is, he’s mostly just sad.
Shadow_Mirror_Core.ENGRAM download process: 48%.
Raizo doesn't know what that file name implies, but Domon's breath catches in his throat.
"Schwarz called himself Kyoji's shadow. Or his mirror," the boy says, tongue tripping over his words in his haste to get them out.
When Domon was younger, Raizo would have chided him for his clumsy speech. But doing so never seemed to help. It didn't help Domon overcome the habit, and it certainly didn't make them any closer as father and son.
"And this platform certainly doesn't have the space to run the Devil Gundam, so it's almost certainly meant as a back-up for Kyoji," Raizo says instead. "It is an engram file, so it contains someone's personality. And the hardware specs should have just enough room to run them both, though only one engram will be in control of the body at a time."
Rain falls to her knees. A moment later, she's crying.
"Thank goodness," she sobs. "I thought... I didn't heal him. At the hospital... I didn't have time..."
Domon goes down with her without hesitation. Her words come to a stop as he pulls her into a hug.
Raizo glances away and focuses on the screen. If he says anything about her worries now, it will surely come out wrong. Awkwardness and grief become weapons of bitterness in his mouth. Better to focus on what he can do.
On the screen, the number ticks up to 49%. At the same time, the light in Schwarz's blank eyes grows slightly larger.
"A visual progress display?" he muses. "You really thought of everything, Kyoji."
Assuming, of course, the engram being downloaded really is Kyoji. Assuming that the engram currently occupying the robotic body still wishes to live as Kyoji Kasshu instead of Schwarz Bruder. Most of all, assuming that either of them will ever want to reclaim that identity.
It wouldn't be a surprise if they both want to make a clean break. To start over with different names and different faces. Somewhere nobody will recognize them as the men who nearly died because of their father's mistakes.
If they choose to leave the way Domon once did, Raizo won't stop them. All he can do is make sure their body is in good condition before they go.
Raizo has already failed his sons. He won't do it again.