Original subtitles

Holy crap, the water!

This whole thing is massive!

We actually made a dam...

and a large-scale hydropower plant!

We're making electricity with this?!

Ginro and them were going nuts spinning that thing in the beginning.

Yeah, Ruri's team has been putting in good work this whole time, thankfully.

We need all the manpower we can get for a mission of this scale.

Which is why we're about to revive a crap ton of people.

Maguro tuna.

Heya, newly-revived people of Japan.

Have you ever seen me on TV? Thank you!

What's happened in the post-petrification world?

Welcome to my explainer.

Ta-da!

We got the mysterious device that petrified all of us,

but it turns out Why-Man, the one behind it all, is on the moon.

So now we're setting out to go to the moon before he attacks us again.

And for that, we need materials to build a rocket

along with the knowledge of how to build it.

I guess I'm not surprised everyone's in a daze.

Now that we have so many people revived,

we need to make sure we're all in the same place emotionally.

I want entertainment media!

Entertainment...

...media, you say?

That's right!

The more people there are, the harder it becomes to maintain order.

Everyone ends up wanting different things.

Which is why we use entertainment media to

get everyone thinking in the same direction.

What do you mean by that?

I know what Ryusui's talking about.

People can't live without joy in their hearts.

To think about all the times video games

saved me when I was stuck doing math all day...

That's part of it, but I'm talking about something else.

Those who control the media control everything!

Am I right?

In the olden days, it was the TV stations.

Then, search engines, streaming sites...

And the new world has now arrived at that moment.

You can barely tell you two are siblings from the way you act.

Well, it's done, but is this "media"?

Television acquired!!

We already made a cathode-ray tube when we made radar.

Move the beam vertically, and the afterimage creates a picture.

The world's first TV was made in Japan, incidentally.

And we've recreated that here.

How many channels does this TV get?!

Aw, nuts. I forgot we don't have TV stations in this world!

D'oh!

I'm sure you knew that when you made it.

Yup. It isn't TV shows that we're showing.

What else, then?

It arrives on today's regular shipment from the US.

Sai, it's what you've been waiting for!

We've built some kind of huge thing!

Good going, you big oaf.

Man, how much wiring does this thing even have?

Wasn't it about ten thousand donuts and hundreds of thousands of magnets?

That's vague.

The CPU, the brains of the machine, is 16-bit, running at 60 kHz.

There are 129 memory core units making up

512 kilobits of memory and a 16-kilobit bank, equivalent to common SRAM.

I'm even more confused after you gave me the details.

The point is, its specs are comparable to a Nintendo.

Computer acquired!!

Writing programs is a bit complicated.

It's called a punch card.

The machine reads code represented as holes in paper.

This sheet of paper makes up a game program and stuff?

How are you supposed to play games on this thing?

All done.

Say what?!

Well, let's get started.

Damn!

You actually made a computer game in this world!

These kinds of falling block games

are actually simple enough to write in a single line of code.

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

You're about the only one who could pull that off, Sai.

I lose.

This chess AI already surpasses my human abilities.

Long ago, the chess champion, Kasparov, fought against Deep Blue, an AI.

Human versus computer. It was the match of the century.

In the legendary 36th move,

the best move for the AI would clearly have been to attack with its queen.

But it was a trap set by humanity's best chess player, Kasparov.

The AI, Deep Blue, suddenly went into deep thought.

And it moved just a pawn.

Although it looked like a bad move, it was, in fact,

a move so clever that no one in the world would have thought of it.

It was the moment science gave birth to something

unknowable and beyond human comprehension.

Indeed!

I want to know everything unknowable and beyond human comprehension.

I want all of it!

Science is the greediest thing of all!

It wants even the forbidden power

that Why-Man created through his petrification device!

What's this?

Are you shrink-wrapping the Medusa or something?

Now that we know we can't use it if it becomes weathered,

we're doing all we can to make it last longer.

Yo, don't we need to worry

about someone shouting "something something meters" from outside the case?

Not from this distance.

What? What was that?

I think we should open it and check.

Where's the key?

What was that click?

What the hell?

No one ever...

Damn it!

The petrification device lit up on its own!

It can't be... That light!

Wh-Why?!

Has it begun? Is Why-Man attacking?

Shit, we're screwed!

If he comes now, we're actually done for!

Is this far enough?

Yeah.

Let's give it another two meters just to be safe.

The petrification beam moves faster the bigger it is.

We've seen it countless times.

At this speed, it'll have maybe a twenty-meter radius.

We're saved.

Wait, is that really all my hair?

I'm opening it.

Yeah.

First, we'll have to ask our precious witnesses.

What happened?

I-It wasn't me!

Well, sure, we did joke about shouting at it from outside the case, but...

Don't worry.

We didn't do anything.

Not Yo-chan. I promise.

I'll just list the events as they happened without speculation or analysis.

A noise from inside the safe.

The sound of glass breaking.

"Click."

"Flash!"

The noise might have been nothing more than the vacuum vessel cracking.

No one talked to or touched the safe or the petrification device.

So it flashed on its own?

Does this mean that Why-Man's

launching a new petrification attack on humanity from the moon?

How did he control it remotely?

With radio waves or something?

If he could do that, he already would have.

And he's nice, too.

Why did he spare most of the world?

There's so much we don't know.

We have no idea what he'll do to us anymore.

We ought to assault Why-Man immediately.

I don't know...

Yeah, I guess.

Here we go with Kohaku-chan's advocacy for immediate attack.

Although, where exactly on the moon are we supposed to assault?

We don't even know where he is.

Crap!

We can't let them attack too soon,

or they're going to be set on building the one-way rocket!

That's step one.

We have to determine

where Why-Man is on that grand lunar world.

Can't we just figure it out once we're there?

There's no way.

The moon's diameter is over a quarter that of Earth.

It's that big?

The moon does look mighty small.

I thought it might be about the size of the lake that Ishigami Village is in.

In any case, we don't have any new information to go with our new situation.

I'd love to experiment with the Medusa to reproduce what happened, but...

That's too dangerous.

We need to remove the battery until we absolutely need it.

Yo-chan.

Yeah?

Just curious, did you touch the Medusa while it was being shipped in from the US?

I told you, I haven't done anything!

Ukyo was holding on to it by himself.

Senku-chan, I'm sure you already know, but there's a possibility that someone...

Someone...?

Oh, right!

If someone told it something like "three months, twenty meters,"

they could commit the perfect crime.

Crazy! Awesome theory, Gen!

Shh! Shh! Shh!

Who the hell would do that?

It wouldn't do anyone any good.

Right. Everyone's besties here.

True.

It just means it's physically possible,

But until we can investigate what happened,

we have to consider every possibility.

We'll put the Medusa under strict surveillance

where no one can ever touch it.

How?

With naumannite from the mines in Kagoshima.

Selenium acquired!!

We got selenium!

What's that?

I've never even heard of it.

Selenium

Arsenic

Tellurium

Now we just need the arsenic we got from the skarn formations, and tellurium.

I've never heard of any of this stuff.

Oh, arsenic is poison, isn't it?

It's all poison.

This is sketchier than I thought!

The high-voltage surface made from the poison coating

converts the light—what the lens sees—into electrical signals.

Send that signal to the TV screen we made the other day, and...

TV camera acquired!!

Security cameras?!

Yeah. It may not be able to record,

but it's good enough for surveillance.

In other words, we can use it for live broadcasting!

Er... Uh-oh...

Haven't I told you that

I'm going to use entertainment media to bring the people together?

It isn't just the Kingdom of Science doing it.

The whole world is the same way.

Those who control the media take everything, even in the new world.

Hi, American folks!

This is a live broadcast of a baseball game between Japan and the USA!

Banzai!

A TV station in the Stone World?!

No one's going to turn against you now!

It looks fantastic!

You actually became a media tycoon.

I can't believe you actually stuck to your word.

The TV camera isn't for your fun and games, Ryusui.

It's for surveillance, isn't it?

No, we're using it for something ten billion times more important.

Where on the moon is Why-Man?

We aren't going to get a decent view of it from the surface,

no matter how huge a telescope we use.

But you see, we can check it out from space

and send the live footage back to earth.

That way, we'll have a view of the lunar surface.

No way!

You mean...

Yeah.

In other words, in order to flush out Why-Man,

we're launching an artificial satellite...

into this world of stone!

Challengers of Science

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Challengers of Science

This is a work of fiction, but the plants, animals, and production methods described are based on reality. Foraging and making things on your own accord is extremely dangerous and, in some cases, illegal. Please do not imitate without expertise.