Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The two young genius inventors Hiroshi Ochanomizu and Umataro Tenma have come to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, bringing their robot Six and Hiroshi’s grandfather Dr Ochanomizu with them, as seen in The Beginning 08. Decades previously the older Dr Ochanomizu designed the N-Eva series of robots with a programming language that became the basis for much of the cybernetic development that followed, worldwide. In the riverside clinic run by Dr Tam, her medical robot, Dian is malfunctioning. It has an operating system built on N-Eva so the boys decide to connect Six to Dian and use Six’s systems to diagnose and repair the defect. As soon as they connect the two robots, though, Six is unreachable. His system has been taken over by Dian. There’s no way to communicate with either of the frozen robots – and there’s no way to disconnect them without destroying Six’s brain.

The Beginning 09 gathers the pieces that will eventually form the birth of Atom a little closer together as a genuinely shocking turn of events sees Hiroshi Ochanomizu gain a visceral understanding of what it feels like to be a robot… in a very personal way.

Tetsuro Kasahara’s drawings of a trippy out-of-body experience brilliantly convey the feeling of dislocation and isolation as connections between past and present float into view. Elsewhere Grandpa Ochanomizu, who has met and worked with the boy robot Atom via a time paradox, is out looking for evidence to prove his theory that the time-travelling Atom may still be present, hidden somewhere in Vietnam. Masami Yuuki and Kasahara make good use of all the effort they have spent on developing the personas of Ochanomizu and Tenma to create a situation that will really push some emotional buttons in the readers of this series. Have you grown to like the two geniuses and their eccentricities? Then you will be hugely invested in finding out if there is any way to reverse what happens in this episode. More intrigues follow in The Beginning 10.