The Big O and all of its settings and characters are owned by Cartoon Network, Sunrise, and Bandai Visual.

THE BIG O:

ACT 27

ROGER THE VIGILANTE

Chapter Three: Big Fau

Everything was scarlet, like he was looking at the world through a crimson lens. He was in a control room of some kind. Sitting in a chair. His feet were in pedals, but he wasn't on a bicycle. Between his feet were three circular cathode screens. The center one displayed scrolling words: "CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD YE NOT GUILTY".

'Not guilty'? Not guilty of what? Considering that his last memory was being dismembered and thrown in a car trunk he felt pretty grateful that he wasn't considered 'guilty'. Perhaps he would have woken up somewhere worse than this strange semicircular room. He sat up and looked around. Various knobs and switches were arrayed around him. In addition two arms curved around his chair to end with a joystick within reach of each of his hands. The curved wall directly ahead of him seemed to be made of a partially translucent red material, but his vision was momentarily too blurry to show him the outside world.

Instinctively, he checked his limbs to make sure they were still connected. Okay, so he wasn't taken apart and thrown in a car trunk. So far, so good. But who was he? And what was he doing in this room? It was a control center, but a control center to what?

In the left screen was a readout displaying a vaguely humanoid form. From the shape, it appeared to be constructed of cinderblocks. Two massive legs supported a barrel shaped torso. Two massive arms hung to the sides by rather slender, fragile looking joints that served as shoulders. Above the 'shoulders' the torso continued up in a huge collar to end in a rather tiny head. Various sections of the diagram were colored red, perhaps to indicate damage or other trouble. The right screen displayed a listing of various weapons systems as well as ammunition supplies and what might be a power reading or two, but it was all gibberish in his confused and muddled mind. He didn't know who he was and what he was doing here. He didn't even know his own name.

"Roger Smith," said a soft feminine voice behind him. From the tone of her lifeless voice she couldn't have been in any better shape than he was. It sounded as if her brain wasn't working properly either. Apparently he wasn't alone, and whatever happened to him had happened to her as well.

He turned to look behind him only to gasp at the sight. Standing directly behind his chair on a small cramped platform against the rear wall was a teenage girl wearing a gray, skintight wetsuit. Her slender form was beautiful in a fragile, delicate way, and the colorless skin of her innocent face appeared whiter than paper. That wasn't what caused his sharp intake of breath, however. Just above the bangs of her short red hair was a rectangular gap, as if someone had cut out a cross section of her head. Slender electronic cables insulated by grayish black rubber snaked out of her head to connect just behind the base of his chair.

"Dorothy!" he shuddered. He knew this girl. This innocent child who had just crossed the cusp to adulthood, whose body had just bloomed only to have her life ended and turned into a grotesque parody of life. He tried to speak, but the words he stammered didn't make any sense. What had happened to her? How did he know her, and who was he?

"Roger Smith," her jaw moved while the rest of the girl remained as still as a statue, "the negotiator."

That was it! He was Roger Smith, the negotiator! The pilot of Big O, the black megadeus that he and his butler Norman Burg had discovered under Paradigm City and used to defend the city of amnesia from giant monsters, robots, natural disasters and other ghosts from the past that threatened to destroy the last known stronghold of humanity!

The girl was R. Dorothy Wayneright, the 'R' stood for 'robot'. She was the creation of Doctor Timothy Wayneright, an elderly scientist who had apparently been the leading authority of robotics before the mysterious calamity that wiped out the Earth and left the survivors in Paradigm City with no memories of what happened or even who they were.

Dorothy had been kidnapped. This time by scorpion-like robots controlled by Jason Beck, a small time crook that turned to kidnapping and other major felonies after somehow gaining knowledge of mechanical design to rival that of the late Doctor Wayneright. This time, Beck was working for Alex Rosewater and the homicidal cyborg Alan Gabriel. It wasn't like Beck to work for The Man, he prided himself as a criminal mastermind in his own right, but Roger couldn't care less what kind of hold the chairman of the Paradigm Corporation had on him, or why the bionic agent of Paradigm's feared enemies in the Union had become Rosewater's right hand man.

When Roger had found Dorothy, she had been abandoned at the top of a building with the disk drive and her main memory removed from her head. Norman, who had retained the knowledge to repair and maintenance the Big O, had gloomily lamented that even if Dorothy's missing drive could be found that he doubted that anyone alive had the skill necessary to restore her. Even so, Roger had set out in Big O to reclaim Dorothy's lost hard drive, or die trying.

It wasn't long before he found out what they were using Dorothy's components for. Alan Gabriel had hooked himself up to the aerial megadeus known as Big Duo, only to lose control of the massive robot when confronted with the mocking ghost of Schwarzwald, a former reporter who went insane searching for the truth of Paradigm City's history.

Alex Rosewater was apparently no stranger to madness either. He had restored Big Fau, a hulking white megadeus to his control and started destroying sections of Paradigm City. It made no sense. The Paradigm Corporation owned or ruled by economic coercion every aspect of Paradigm City. Even the military police were in reality corporate muscle, for it was Paradigm who signed their paychecks. The rich lived in sections of the city protected by huge geodesic domes, while the rest of the city was allowed to crumble under the weight of time, neglect, and poverty.

Alex Rosewater was the king of the last known bastion of humanity, for all intents and purposes, the ruler of all mankind. Yet it still was not enough and he was driven to eradicate the civilization that his father Gordon had built forty years ago and replace it with a world of his own creation. Madness, self-destructive stupidity and unlimited power were a lethal mix. Alex Rosewater had to be on top, had to be the best, had to be the first, or it all had to go. The great Gordon Rosewater, the founder of the dystopia called Paradigm City had apparently gone senile and had turned over control to Alex years ago.

Something had gone wrong in the fight against Big Fau and Big Duo. Apparently a true megadeus is a lot stronger than most robots of similar size, and Roger couldn't expect battling one let alone two, to be easy. Perhaps Roger was simply off his game. Thankfully, Big O could take an amount punishment bordering on the unbelievable. He had been knocked into the sea and Roger had nearly drowned when the compartment flooded with seawater.

Then the impossible had happened, and kept on happening. Dorothy, clad in a wetsuit had come to rescue him and provided the negotiator with a tank of oxygen. It was impossible. Dorothy couldn't function without her core memory and yet there she was, rescuing him from certain death. Perhaps it wasn't her core memory that was removed from her metal and ceramic skull. Maybe it was a power regulator, or an auxiliary input drive. Or maybe none of this was really happening, and Roger had succumbed to the insanity that plagued nearly every citizen of Paradigm City who had gotten near a megadeus.

The entire city didn't seem real anymore. Up above a giant roof seemed to eclipse the sky when the clouds parted. Soon bits and pieces of the city kept disappearing until finally it was all gone.

In the meantime Roger had defeated Rosewater and Big Fau when Dorothy augmented Big O by plugging herself into the megadeus' main computer. The arms with the joysticks retracted to be replaced with an ultramodern panel that controlled a massive energy cannon that extended from Big O's chest and blown a hole in Big Fau that nearly cut it in half. Then the ghostly mirror image of Big O had appeared and erased the city of Paradigm and itself in the process.

Had any of that really happened? If so, how much? Was this like the time he dreamed that he was a homeless drifter in Paradigm's glorious past? Was he still dreaming? What was real? And how did he have memories of events that took place when he wasn't present?

"Help…me," Dorothy said mechanically while maintaining her perfect posture. "Roger. Help me."

That brought him back to reality. Dorothy was still suffering. Of course she was. A piece of her head was missing. Roger doubted that if a piece of his head that size was missing that he could do any better.

"Dorothy?" His voice sounded strange. "How do I help? What can I do?"

Suddenly he understood. It was like the time that Big O had let him know without speaking that Dorothy was in danger and revealed her location, all without words, without any readout from his panels. Was Big O telepathic? How could a machine communicate with him that way? Dorothy obviously had no trouble communicating with Big O since the cables in her head were plugged into the megadeus. Dorothy's central processing unit was missing. Her brain had been removed from her head. She was controlling her body by remote control, but now Big O could assist her by taking up the slack of her cerebral functions.

"Dorothy, where are you?" he asked. "Where are the missing pieces? Where did they take your drive?"

In answer, Dorothy pointed over Roger's shoulder. The red semitransparent wall in the front of the cockpit slid up to reveal the outside world. There was Big Fau, a huge circular chunk blown off of its body. A big round gap where half of its chest and its left arm should have been.

"I should have realized," Roger growled. Dorothy's wayward hard drive had to be in either Big Fau or Big Duo. Somehow he expected it to be in Big Duo since Big Fau had no trouble defeating the monster that the Union had sicced upon the city a few weeks back.

Roger's feet moved in the pedals and Big O lumbered forward on the uneven terrain of the damaged streets of Paradigm. After the uncannily smooth terrain of the vanishing city of his vision, the rubble-strewn street was comforting.

Soon the two megadeuses were so close that they could embrace. Roger peered across the distance see the cockpit of the crippled white behemoth before him. He could see what had to be Alex Rosewater inside, sitting in a command chair. The cannon from his vision had apparently blown the left wall neatly off, exposing the insane head honcho of humanity to view.

He may own everything, Roger thought to himself, but he's still a thief. Time to take back what belongs to Dorothy.

Roger may have lost his double-breasted jacket, but he still had his wristwatch. Capable of summoning Big O and the black Cadillac known as the Griffon, the incredible device also hosted a number of other gadgets, including a miniature grappling hook and cable.

The pneumonic hiss was a satisfying sound as the grappling hook shot out of his wristwatch, carrying the cable with it. Thanks to the damage that Big Fau had suffered, there were lots of places for the grappler to attach itself to. A rushing wind unhindered by buildings hit Roger in the face was he jumped out of Big O and swung to the cockpit in the enemy megadeus. Even the sting of the wind was a welcome respite from the smell of seawater that permeated Big O's cockpit right now.

Amazingly, the acrobatic negotiator made it Big Fau's cockpit alive and in one piece. After the ordeal that he had been through he hadn't expected to be in the physical condition necessary to jump from one megadeus to another. Heck, at the rate he had been hallucinating he was lucky that he hadn't jumped out of Big O into empty air.

"All right, Rosewater!" Roger snapped. "Where's Dorothy's hard drive? Where did you install it?" He stopped, dumbfounded by the vision in front of him.

Alex Rosewater had a number of cables sticking out his back. They had pierced his white jacket and shirt to attach to the chairman's central nervous system, in effect turning him into a cyborg. That part of his vision was true.

How did he know that? Was Big Fau communicating with Big O in a way he couldn't fathom? Was the part of Dorothy that was trapped in this metal monstrosity using a telepathic ability that true megadeuses possess in order to feed him information? That would explain why he knew what happened in the cockpits of Big O and Big Fau, but wouldn't explain his visions of Angel descending over six hundred floors beneath Paradigm City and being given total power by Gordon Rosewater.

"My…city," Alex chanted, his eyes moving back and forth as if he was watching something that only he could see. "This is my city, not yours Dad! I'm not one of your tomatoes!"

Roger drew a sharp intake of breath and almost tumbled out of the cockpit. His knees seemed to turn to jelly beneath him. Gordon Rosewater had used tomatoes as an allegory, and hinted that just as one could copy tomatoes one could clone people as well. The elder Rosewater seemed to imply that if one created a copy of a person they could access the memories of the original, even if that person was long dead.

Was Alex his son, or his clone? That would explain why Alex Rosewater had eventually succumbed to insanity. Congenital defects could include mental instability when one messed with genetics the way Gordon apparently had. If Alex discovered that he was an augmented copy that could have been the last nudge he needed to slip into total madness.

Sweat dripped down the chairman's forehead. "I am Alex Rosewater," he hissed. "I am a new god! I shall create a new world and destroy all of those who don't deserve to live in it! Not even the domineus of the black megadeus can stop me! I shall bring salvation to the world and rid the masses of the burden of their memories! I…am…all…powerful!"

My god, thought the horrified negotiator. Was that what Dorothy had to watch when the city was attacked by three foreign megadeuses? Rosewater refused to admit defeat and had retreated into his own little world. Roger fought the temptation to seize Alex Rosewater by the lapels of his white double-breasted jacket and shake some sense into the megalomaniac. It was unlikely that the delirious chairman would have any idea what he was talking about, even if the negotiator could get through to him.

But where could Dorothy's drive be? He couldn't very well search the entire megadeus could he? He didn't even know if any of this was real. Oh well, he thought, when reason fails it's time to turn to faith.

"Dorothy!" he shouted out the hole in Big Fau's cockpit. Then he remembered that Dorothy was connected to Big O's central processing unit. "Dorothy," he spoke into his watch, "I need help. Tell me where they installed your CPU. Where are you? Help me."

Back in the cockpit of Big O Dorothy Wayneright continued to stand her vigil behind Roger's empty chair. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and a strange electronic noise could be heard over the shrieking of the wind.

In Big Fau, Roger covered his ears to escape the digital din that was issuing from his wristwatch. It was like the sound of a fax machine attempting to transfer an entire dictionary in less than a minute. Suddenly, the awful noise ceased and Roger's attention was captured by a green electronic component the size of a paperback book sliding out of the wall behind Alex Rosewater's command chair. Dorothy's hard drive! There it is! Smiling, the weary negotiator removed a tiny screwdriver from his trouser pocket and started to remove it.

"No!" Alex Rosewater shouted into the air. "No! You can't stop me! No one can stop me!"

"Could you keep it down?" Roger muttered over his shoulder. "I'm working here."

"You can't stop Big Fau!" Alex insisted. "I won't let you!"

"Consider him stopped," Roger smirked as one by one the screws holding the errant drive were removed.

"I…am…Alex Rosewater," the raving chairman said in a hoarse voice. "The one! The only! I am the original!"

"You're an original, all right," Roger agreed sarcastically. "I can only hope that when Gordon made you, he broke the mold."

"I control Big Fau!" Rosewater was yelling so loud it was like he was shouting in Roger's ear. "I control him! You cannot take him away from me!"

"You can keep him," Roger growled. "Now just shut up, will ya? This is the last screw you crazy…"

Pain lanced through Roger's skull as he fell forward and tumbled to the floor. He rolled onto his back in time to witness an insane Alex Rosewater tackle him.

"Big Fau is mine, Roger Smith the negotiator," Alex grinned as his hands clamped around Smith's throat. "Big Fau will always be mine and you cannot take him away!"

On a desk filled with hourglasses a phone rings. Norman's hand picks up the receiver and a sinister voice says:

Next: Home is Where the Hard Drive Is