The Truth Comes out in Vault’s Giga #4

Finally reunited with Evan, Aiko reveals a secret that will shake the city to its foundations. Meanwhile, the Order’s persecution of the Dusters passes a bloody point of no return. Allegiances switch and battle lines are drawn as the terrible truth of the Giga’s origins is finally revealed. It’s Giga #4, written by Alex Paknadel, drawn by John Le, colored by Rosh and lettered by Aditya Bidikar.

Ian Gregory: Things are coming to a head this week in Giga. A head like, the head of a giant robot. They’re in the head of – never mind. Zach, as is tradition, do you have a personal anecdote to start off our discussion?

Zach Rabiroff: Why, Ian, if you’re going to make puns like that, folks are going to think you’re making a real heel turn. A heel … because … anyway, funny you should ask about that personal anecdote, though, because:

A Door in the Wall

Zach: I believed in God when I was a kid. That’s not to imply that I don’t believe in God now; I do, but the road from there to here isn’t as smooth as that statement implies. It’s funny, I suppose, because I was never raised in anything like a particularly religious household, even though my mother is actual clergy. We celebrated holidays, we had shabbes dinner with my grandparents and said the brokhe, and otherwise we kids were left to our own theological devices to read and decide for ourselves. And for my first nine years or so, that seemed unproblematic. 

And then, one night, I started to think about cheeseburgers. Cheeseburgers aren’t kosher; they violate the proscription against combining milk and meat at the same meal. This had never been a particular problem to me, and I lived in no expectation of imminent divine punishment as a result of McDonalds. But the more I considered it, the more I thought that if God wasn’t going to smite me for that, then how could I be sure that God was going to smite me for anything. And if I couldn’t count on being smote when smiting was due, then could I really count on anything at all? Could anyone? Was there even a God to begin with?

I bring up all this irrelevance not because I remain to this day a militant atheist (I don’t, and the story behind that is another matter entirely) but because the experience flashed back to me with this issue as we learn, for the first time, what drives Aiko to do what she does. Each issue of Giga opens with a flashback, and this one shows us at last what’s been driving this lonely and ruthless outsider all these years. And what we learn, at least by her own telling, is that it’s not a mission of violence but a mission of truth. For Aiko, the established systems of faith are barriers to real knowledge, not just of the Giga, but of the answers they point to: why things are what they are, and why evil exists in the world. That these answers may point to something bigger and more profound than even the Order of the Red Relay can imagine is only hinted at here, and I’m not sure that Aiko is fully willing even to admit it to herself: When Evan asks her about the true origin of the Giga (“So do you think they were built by gods?”) Aiko is unwilling to either confirm or deny. But in the ensuing years, it seems, that mission to find the real nature of things has led her ever farther into extreme measures. She will preserve nothing but that which leads her to knowledge, and no one who defends the old order is worth saving. But what, Ian, will she find when she finally gets to the end of her search? Where do the Giga come from?

Ian: Zach, I am afraid we may be rapidly approaching Chariot of the Gods territory. If mankind did not create the Giga, as now seems very likely, there are two remaining options: either they came from elsewhere, or they created humanity. Given the emphasis the series has placed on the parasitic nature of humanity, I cannot help but wonder if humans in Giga were always meant to serve as little antibodies, keeping Earth alive and maintaining the Giga as they rest. Of course, Aiko’s conclusions are a little suspect — that her first instinct is to produce her own manifesto suggests an uncomfortable parallel with the mainstream church, but she does have more insight into the inner workings of the Giga than anyone else in this book.

The act of “joining” with a Giga, as described by Aiko, does nicely reinforce the sense of scale Paknadel and Le have been building. Giga are both physically and mentally massive, almost impossible to understand and liable to melt your brain on the spot. If the Giga do wake up (which seems like a distinct possibility, now that Aiko is off to bother the Red King and revolt takes over the city), how will they interact with humans? Can they communicate in a form humans understand (would they even need to? Are their priorities so foreign, so ungraspable, that an awakened Giga would be more like a natural disaster than a religious figure? Aiko seems to think she’s found a way in, a way to understand the Giga, but I think it’s far more likely she’s only on the edges of something bigger.

I am perpetually thinking of 1980’s Space Runaway Ideon (Densetsu Kyojin Ideon for all you purists out there). On the surface, the titular Ideon is an ancient war machine uncovered on one of Earth’s space colonies. The Ideon is actually three machines, combination truck-tank-jets that all three combine to form the Ideon itself. Though intentionally set up as a classic, kids-adventure super robot show, the Ideon turns out to be a portal to a vast cosmic intelligence and power source (known as the Ide). The Ide is uncontrollable, a source of ultimate life and destruction, and using the Ideon results in things generally going Very Badly for both mankind and its enemies (I am, maybe, intentionally underselling exactly what happens in this show because a major appeal of the series is the way it twists super robot expectations). Ideon is one of the foundational mecha series, and one that helped pioneer the mech-as-god analogy, so its overlap with Giga, however unintentional, sticks in my mind. The Giga may well be a portal to the beyond, either as representatives of an alien race or possessing more power than we know. Aiko found the door in the wall, but it may not be one she can close after it’s opened.

Zach: Your comparison of Aiko’s philosophy with the dogmatic religion of the Order is, I think, an apt one, and one that doesn’t escape the attention of the characters in the book. Hearing about Aiko’s wonder at the contents of the Giga’s mind, Evan tells her, “I never had you pegged as an ecstatic.” Aiko blanches at the thought, but it hits closer to the mark than I think she’s willing to admit. It’s worth thinking about how some of the players in this drama map onto real-world parallels, however imperfectly. The Order of the Red Relay is pretty clearly the model of every theocratic government since time immemorial — the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church most explicitly, as reflected in their vestments and liturgies, but it could just as easily be any Eastern or Western church with political and religious authority melded into a unified whole. The Dusters are a bit more complicated, and I think we’ll be discussing them a little later in this conversation, but we find in this issue that they’re as religiously doctrinaire in their own way as the faction they’re fighting.

But Aiko, to her own mind, stands apart from these schismatic wars. She fashions herself as something like a particularly militant New Atheist, a Richard Dawkins with high explosives, and she’s perfectly happy to quite literally burn all the systems of thought and worship to the ground if they stand in the way of her path to Truth: Just look at that incredibly striking final-page splash by John Lê, with Aiko and her companion casually striding across a bridge while the world erupts in flames around her, the scene bathed eerily in hellish red and orange courtesy of colorist Rosh’s tones. And yet, Evan is not wrong to see Aiko’s mission as one that is fundamentally spiritual at its core. She doesn’t want truth out of a desire for intellectual stimulation, she yearns for it out of need and longing. We can think of her as something like the mystics of Kabbalistic Judaism or Sufi Islam, seeking union with the divine outside the strictures and doctrines of the established order. Only, in her case, she has no qualms about letting the rest of humanity perish in her wake.

And as for the roots of that humanity, I’m fascinated by the comparison you’ve drawn here with Space Runaway Ideon, another Japanese classic that I’ve never previously seen, and which I’m now obliged to track down (Don’t feel any guilt about it, though: You managed to turn me into a died-in-the-wool Gundam fan in the space of one article). Thinking about how mankind relates to the Giga — whether we were put in service of servants of a higher divinity, or created by them, or something even more ineffable — I’m put in mind of another parallel, this one from a text older and farther to the West. The Red King seems to take his name, after all, from the character in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in a passage that (for those inclined to books with a high percentage of pictures per page) also inspired the title of Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ “Red King Syndrome” arc of Miracleman. In Carroll’s book, Alice is forced to compete in a chess match against the slumbering Red King. But she must be careful not to wake him, because:

I don’t mean to suggest anything as literal as the notion that all the characters in this book are merely flashes in the synapses of a dreaming Giga. But here, too, a Red King sleeps, soon to be violently awoken by a human interloper. And what that means for everyone’s existence seems very ominous indeed.

A Causeway of Bodies

Ian: Everything’s coming up Aiko in this issue. Her luck (or fate) seems to be that things turn up exactly when she needs them: the interface, Laurel and the dusters. Maybe this is just a product of where we are in the narrative (the darkest hour, the reckoning with the father, etc., etc.) but all of Aiko’s plans, even plans she couldn’t have reasonably made herself, all come to fruition at once. Instead of feeling cheap, though, all of these attacks and plans coming together at the last moment are like the product of divine clockwork. 

I like seeing how the theological rigidity of the Order of the Red Relay (I mean, their priests are referred to by “Your Accuracy”) falls apart under the slightest stress. They slip even just a little bit, as with the (legitimately unforeseen) betrayal of Mason and the Inquisitor, and everything goes to hell immediately. What do you think of the way everything links up at the end here? This is the first time I’ve really felt the structure of a “story arc” make itself apparent — we’re clearly heading into the climax of this first story.

Zach: Ironically, one of the weaknesses of the Red Relay is the fact that they really were sincere in their doctrines. It might have been easier for Paknadel to depict the ruling order as purely cynical and mercenary, manipulating gullible masses with religious phrases while living in secular debauchery. But from the moment we met Father Crowquill, deeply distressed over irregularities in the Book of the Assembly, it was clear that he meant every flawed word he said, however misguided and self-interested they may have been. And it was that Giga-guided confidence in their own belief systems that blinded the Order to the traitors in their midst, a group more mercenary and ruthless than the church servants ever were.

Indeed, this issue makes clear that the most fascistic actions we’ve seen from the Order throughout this series, the escalating war against the Dusters and the consequent crackdown on anyone resembling a sympathizer within Red Relay territory, have been the result of gamesmanship from Aiko and her allies all along. It cleverly recasts the book’s plotline as something bleakly inevitable. The comfortable, hereditary authoritarianism of the older order must fall to the violent, the innovative and the destructively new. And for the average human being, only suffering can follow.

That said, I think there is a sense in which everything comes together a little too conveniently here. That’s more an outgrowth of the limited issue count than anything else, and I wonder if having a little more room to stretch its legs (six or seven issues, say, instead of five) might have given the drama of Crowquill’s murder time to build before the payoff. But that may not have been a luxury this book had, alas, and the creators certainly do an effective job selling the moment despite its compression: As in every issue, there is a deceptively large amount of narrative advancement packed into these pages with such skill and subtlety that it never feels hectic or rushed. Do you agree, Ian? Did the moment work for you?

Ian: I thought back to all of our scenes with Mason in the past, and I don’t think there was any solid indication he had any other allegiance than to the Order. In that respect, his and the inquisitor’s betrayal felt a little too sudden. It didn’t help that I don’t believe the inquisitor has been around before this issue, so the sudden betrayal felt very convenient. Crowquill was also, as you pointed out, a really interesting character: authoritarian and morally bankrupt, but still bound to his own code of ethics. I can’t help but wonder if the Duster Tommaso is also somehow in Aiko’s camp, given the convenient timing of their infiltration of the city.

I like the recurring element of the sewers — at first, Aiko’s way out of the city, away from the influence of the Order, and now the way into the city, into its destruction. As Tommaso says, “They don’t use [the sewers]. They barely know they’re there.” The Order has placed a lot of relevance on height, on Giga, on cleanliness, and they’ve completely neglected the subterranean. When you live on top of a Giga, everything is beneath you, and those things escape your notice. In its fixation on the Giga, on what can be seen above the surface, the Order has allowed its enemies to grow stronger and smarter. I think you’re right that this issue positions the Order-Duster conflict as being intentional by Aiko (and if Tommaso is on her side, then it definitely is, as he is the one who orchestrated the suicide bombing). The Order appears not to be in control but to be completely blind.

My final question, though, is where does Laurel come into all this? She’s been in every issue, mostly just out of sight, and we still don’t know exactly what her relationship is to the Giga. Will Aiko use her as a medium to join with the Red King? Will she inherit the advanced brain of a Giga? Laurel appears to just go along with Aiko at the end of this issue, despite her violence against Evan, and I’m really curious to see if she has motivations of her own.

Zach: Laurel remains one of the great mysteries of this comic, even though she’s been in plain sight all the time. On a character level, she represents a bridge between the otherwise irreconcilable Aiko and Evan — a piece of one another that each of them keeps as a confident, even as the two sometime friends drift into perhaps permanent estrangement. But I think you’re right that Laurel technologically and perhaps religiously stands somewhere between the Giga and mankind, containing aspects of each. So beyond the question of how Aiko plans to use her in her plot is an even more intriguing one: when the Giga awaken, whose side will Laurel be on?

That motif of navigating through the sewers you bring up is another great catch, and to that end I think it’s important to remember a statement Aiko made in a previous issue (and which is repeated here): “This is as high as I go.” Evan has been the sympathetic point-of-view character throughout this series, and not without cause. But in at least one respect, he’s operating from a position of privilege: He was born to a high caste in the Red Relay’s society. Even if he has chosen not to take advantage of that position — to, as he says, “change my world” rather than simply take advantage of what it offers him — he does so in part because his rights and powers enable him to do it with minimal consequence.

For Aiko, it’s a different story entirely, and it helps explain why she feels a passionate drive to dismantle society and religion in a way Evan doesn’t and perhaps can’t. Describing her need to find out the truth behind the Giga, she tells Evan:

The irony is, Aiko craves religious access that the strictures of society won’t give her, and Evan has the access but rejects it in favor of a life he’d rather lead in a world he’d rather make with his own hands. The two of them will never find what the other one has, and I suspect they’ll never find peace until they do.

Finally, there are the Dusters. I agree completely that General Tommaso is a player in Aiko and Mason’s conspiracy, helping to escalate conflict as a distraction for Aiko’s plan. What’s equally interesting is that significant elements of the Duster leadership aren’t remotely on board with his moves. The glimpse we get in this issue shows the Dusters as sincere in their own way as poor Father Crowquill: compensating a farmer for his lost produce after he delivered intelligence to them, and describing themselves as “farmers, not terrorists.” They’re not anarchically destructive in the way Aiko is; on the contrary, they’re simply an equal and opposite dogmatic faith outside the Order of the Red Relay. I compared the Relay to the Catholic Church earlier, but here’s another parallel: If the Order are the Sadducees of Second Temple Judea, the high priestly authority managing the rituals and laws of the Temple and city centers, then the Dusters are like the Essenes and other escapees to the wilderness, who sought greater union with God through a more pure faith uncorrupted by urban society. Not unlike what we saw in Paknadel’s recent Immortal Hulk: Time of Monsters one-shot, which drew a thematic dividing line between nomadic and agrarian society, the split between the Dusters and the Red Relay is an ancient feud between farmers and citizens, overlayed with religious doctrine. But while that split may be old and fundamental, it is not irreconcilable or necessarily violent — or, at least, it wouldn’t be, if not for the machinations of those who would rather see both sides fall.

So that really brings us to the end of this penultimate issue of Giga, Ian. Care to sum up your thoughts on this one?

Ian: Well hang on, now I’m distracted trying to figure out who maps out to the Pharisees — I suppose by process of elimination it must be Aiko’s group (deriving their initial beliefs from Aiko’s oral description of her joining with the Giga (OK, I know this is a stretch)). I think this is, on top of being a great turning point in the plot where all of these different threads coincide, one of the strongest visual issues. You’ve already called out that last splash page, which is wonderful, but there’s also General Tommaso circling the Duster council table with the dead body laid out like hands on a clock, or Aiko burning up inside with the images of the Giga. I also love the page of the Order cops chasing the spice trader, the blue Giga looming over them and cluttering the page. The contrast between that image (the cold blue colors, the cramped city streets) and the final splash (wide open spaces, red burning Giga) really drives home the massive changes in this issue.

An interesting side effect of this issue is that Aiko sort of becomes our central character, and it’s hard to imagine how to resolve this story without mainly following what Aiko chooses to do. Evan is our main character for a reason, though, and I think the story is moving in a way that will force him to make a decision. Evan has mostly secluded himself, as you point out, living an entirely solitary life seemingly without any grand ambition. We first saw Evan driven to act because Laurel was in danger — and that’s exactly what’s happening here. I would like to see Evan have to reckon with his own inaction, and see him articulate exactly what he wants out of life. Until now, he’s mostly just lived beneath everything else, while Aiko and the Dusters and the Order all attempt to build their own ideal society.

I’m also pleased with how much time this issue spends on the nature of the Giga. Aiko seems like she’s been trying to get the answers to questions we’ve been asking (What were the Giga fighting? Why are they asleep? What do they want? What is their relationship to humans?), but I can’t help but think she’s just building her own interpretation. Paknadel has really set us up to see the Giga as dangerous — as the Red King or Ideon — but we still know almost nothing about them. City society has been totally blown open in this issue, and I’m looking forward to seeing some resolution on the religious issues as well.

Zach: I was tempted to say that Evan has been a weirdly passive protagonist in this series, but that’s really just half true: He’s passive, but only in the ways that matter to us as readers. Evan isn’t lying when he says he changes his world, but he means that in a strictly limited sense. It’s his world that he changes, and no one else’s. It goes to that aspect of privilege I was getting at earlier. Evan has the luxury of ignoring the fissures in religion and society that have always been going on around him. He has dealt (sympathetically and understandably, to be sure) with his own problems and challenges, while turning a blind eye to those of the larger world around him. But partly because of that outsider’s insouciance, that luxury has very suddenly evaporated, and his illusion of neutrality has been exposed as the sham it always was. He’s going to have to take a side now to preserve anything he values, but that really just causes us to ask: What does Evan value, aside from his independence? He’s as much a mystery as Laurel in his way, and I think you’re right that our next and final issue will be the moment he comes clearly into focus at last.

So needless to say, I’m looking forward to seeing how all these threads come together next time around. Whether the payoff will be worthy of the buildup remains to be seen. But just on the basis of the journey this series has taken so far — the depth of its characterizations, the stunning, memorable images and colors of its artwork — I think Giga has proven its worth regardless of the merits of its finale. So now we wait, and wonder.

Final Thoughts

• The cover of the next issue (teased at the end of this one) breaks the cover pattern — typically, we see a huge part of a Giga contrasted with our small protagonists. Here, though, the person is the Giga. I’m sure it’s fine.
• Is that … is that Laurel? What’s happening to Laurel? Can you hear me? Laurel? Uh oh.

Ian Gregory

Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.

Zach Rabiroff

Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.