Deja-Vu

Dr. Ochanomizu faced the mob of reporters and tried to keep calm. Yuko had warned him about the news media wanting an interview, but he hadn't been prepared for the sheer number of media crew members that showed up.

"Professor, several years ago when you first presented Astro to the news media, you claimed that he was your creation," one of the press representatives exclaimed. "Yet now we know that he was actually the creation of Dr. Tenma."

"You're misquoting me," the professor blurted out, with some anger. "At the time I said that Astro was a creation of the Ministry of Science. Since Dr. Tenma was the head of this organization when he originally built Astro, my statement was not false. Also I was the person in charge of reanimating Astro after he had been discovered in the storage facility where Dr. Tenma had left him."

"But why the deception, Hakase?", another reporter asked. "You could have come out and mentioned Dr. Tenma at the start."

"I think the answer to that is obvious," Ochanomizu replied. "Considering the way that Tenma Sensei departed the Ministry and later almost started a robot revolution, it would have been unwise of me to associate a robot as powerful as Astro with Dr. Tenma. That would have led to quite an outburst from the news media. I wanted to give Astro a fair chance of proving himself, which he has done many times over."

A young female reporter pushed her way through the crowd. She stepped on a few toes with her high heeled shoes while moving towards the front of the room, and managed to get the professor's attention. "Ochanomizu Hakase," she asked in a loud voice that carried above the rest of the mob. "You were mostly unknown in the science community until you replaced Dr. Tenma as the head of the Ministry. You are now respected as perhaps the second most expert person in the field of robotics, but little is known of your previous background. Can you fill us in on how you came to succeed Dr. Tenma?"

"Now that is a very interesting question, young lady," the professor laughed. "And it's something no one has asked me until now. The truth is that I had been Dr. Tenma's assistant for several years before the tragic events in his life drove him mad, so I was simply in the right place at the right time to be recommended to take his place."

"Yes Hakase, but how long have you been working with AI and robots?"

"Ah, so you want to know my full back story don't you?" the professor laughed. "Perhaps I should write an autobiography on the subject, for it would take too long to properly tell it right now."

The professor took a few more questions, and then left the room. Yuko escorted the Forth Estate from the building, and then returned to Ochanomizu's office to find him deep in though. "Something wrong, Hakase?" she asked him.

"Oh nothing, Yuko." He then removed the portable radio link he kept in his pocket and activated it. "Astro, would you mind coming over to my office?" he spoke into the device.

In a few minutes Astro arrived, entering the room via the window. "What's up Hakase?" he asked.

"Astro, have we ever met before?" the professor asked.

"Before when?" Astro asked.

"Before I had reactivated you." Ochanomizu voiced.

"That's a strange thing to ask," Yuko laughed.

"I don't understand," Astro replied. "No, I don't have any memory of you before the day I was first activated here, unless you mean while I was living with Dr. Tenma. Those memories are a bit incomplete, but I think we did meet back then."

"No, I meant many years earlier than that." the professor said. "Yuko, when that young girl reporter asked me about my past, it sparked a memory that I hadn't recalled for many years. Not only that, but the image of Astro's face has now triggered a weird feeling of Deja Vu. It's all slowly coming back to me now."

"Care to explain?" Yuko asked.

"I'll try." the professor replied.

"I was a graduate student back in the late 20th century when computers were still a rather new thing. I had always been a science fiction addict, especially for the robot novels written by the American author, Isaac Asimov. Back then I was working at the University in Tokyo where I became an assistant physics teacher and a part time researcher. I must have been one of the first scientists fooling around with robots. My first creations were very primitive, they were built out of junk that I'd found discarded in the dumpsters around the university campus. None of them actually worked very well, if they moved at all I would get very excited."

"Gosh Hakase," Astro said, "I didn't know you had been building robots that long ago. I thought robots like me were a new thing."

"They are, Astro." the professor laughed. "I didn't meet Dr. Tenma until many years later, and I was amazed at how quickly he advanced the robot state of art. But his story comes much later.

Anyway, after many months of painstaking work, I had finally built what I thought at the time was my ultimate robot. He was a big guy, larger than myself and he weighed several hundred pounds. He also had a rather primitive brain, really just a bunch of relays, vacuum tubes, and some transistors. That's all I had to work with in those days. I hoped he'd be able to move about, and avoid obstacles, but he just kept falling over. Nobody knew how to make a machine that could walk on two legs like a human back then, in hindsight I should have put tank tracks on him.

After I failed to get that robot to work properly, I got very mad at myself, and I just left that robot standing in my office. I actually ran outside into a bar and ordered a very large bottle of Sake. I wanted to get very drunk."

"Wow, I never thought of you getting that depressed!" Astro said.

"Humans are like that sometimes, Astro." Yuko replied.

"Then what happened?" Astro asked.

"An earthquake struck." The professor sighed. "It was only a small quake, but several buildings under construction shook apart and some workers were buried under a pile of steel beams. Suddenly, I saw the robot that I'd built barge out of my office building and run over to the site where the building had fallen down. The robot grabbed at the steel beams and rescued several of the workers. It then disappeared."

"So your robot wasn't a failure after all, Hakase!" Astro said.

"Oh it was an utter failure, Astro." Ochanomizu laughed. "I hadn't thought about what happened next for over 50 years now. When I got back to my office my robot was there. I knew there was no way that it could have rescued those workers. Those steel beams weighed tons! My creation didn't even have a fraction of the 100,000 horsepower that I later calculated it would have taken to lift them."

"Then how?" Astro started to ask.

The professor looked strangely at Astro. "I quickly yanked the head off of my robot to look inside of it. There was something hiding inside of my robot, using its body shell as a disguise."

Astro made eye contact with the professor and his mind activated the truth telling program. "It was me hiding inside of that robot, wasn't it?"

"That isn't possible!" Yuko cried out.

"It's been 50 years since that happened," the professor said. "That memory has been hiding deep within my brain until just now. Yes, it was you Astro. You told me you were a robot from the future, and you then flew though the ceiling of my office and disappeared. That was a traumatic moment for me. I eventually forgot the details, but I continued to work building robots, because then I knew it was possible."

"But how could I have gone backwards in time?" Astro asked, "and why don't I remember it?"

"I suspect that you haven't yet done so," the professor replied. "That's why you don't remember it, for you it hasn't yet happened!"

Author's note: This story is based on part of the "Once Upon a Time" story arc that appeared in the Dark Horse Manga series.