Background

Some time ago, I had an assignment in  the NABC to write something based off of a picture.

Before you read, please note that I wrote this quickly. This isn't something I poured lots of time into.

Also, here are Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for reference.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

2. A robot must obey orders given by its human beings except where such orders would conflict the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

----

A Previously Unnamed Piece of Writing That I Will Now Call the "Construction Worker"

How inefficient this new hardware was! It barely had the power needed to run my basic processes, let alone more memory intensive tasks. In addition, it was also plagued by low performance and terribly high requirements to run. Oh how I yearned so dearly to return to my former mobile unit. The only reason I managed to keep going is because of my mission.

My mission? Infiltrate the ranks of these human workers. See what they do. Report back to DARPA soon.

See, this is what I get for being special. Extra work. Now I had to trudge around in this body with the lowest of the human filth, while completing mundane tasks.

Today, I was posing as a lowly construction worker. I have to admit, it was quite a hard job. The sun beat down on my hardware, often causing it to overheat. Luckily, this form was equipped with a fairly rudimentary form of the same version of the coolant system that my original unit possessed. But it wasn't strong enough. The coolant that flowed through my tube (or some similar liquid) leaked out through tiny pores on my skin. So not only was this hardware quite inefficient, but it was also defective. Great.

That day, around noon, I was pacing around the site, making sure to keep to the shade, lest my systems overheat. Again. To aid with the cooling down of this unit, I had flipped open the back panel of the cranial compartment. While it wasn’t doing much to help, it was definitely making me feel a lot better in some way.

But luck was not with me today, because one of my “coworkers” just happened to wander towards the area where I was pacing. By the time I noticed him, it was too late. He saw the back of this unit’s head open, and saw what was inside. My heptadeca CPU was completely visible to him.

Well, shit.

I froze completely, unable to even blink. My mind was flooded with trillions of lines of code, as the safeguards on my system attempted to guide me. No human could possibly hope to comprehend that mess of commands, runtime exceptions, and syntax errors. It didn’t help that as I was trying to run my source code, I was also unconsciously reprogramming myself and trying to compile.

if (discoveredBy_Peer == true)

{

    fleePossibility = chanceOfFleeing(6, 4, 19);

}

Runtime Exception: OutOfBounds

Initialize codeWrite_CoreAdjustment(false);

Initializing… Done!

else if (chanceOfFleeing(dis, 4, 19) == true);

{

    Enemy closest = new Enemy(“civilian”);

    attackTarget = true;

    target = closest;

}

Believe it or not, that little bit of code up there took about 5000 milliseconds (or 5 seconds for you pitiful humans) to code, compile, and run. That was enough time for that poor, poor bastard to call out to his friends. Mid-yell, that worker collapsed onto the ground, dead. There was a wrench, thrown with superhuman speed and strength, lodged deep in his skull.

Oops.

Error! Asimov Law One violated!

And with that brief error message above, I realized my second mistake of the day, violating one of the laws of robotics. The I recieved another traumatic surprise.

Error! Asimov Law Two violated!

Ah yes, this was for being discovered, which was against my orders. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

Now I knew what to expect next. A violation of just one law was forgivable, if it was only committed for a good reason. But two laws? Nope, no chance of forgiveness. What was worse was the fact that I’d rewritten myself to do this. At the best, I was considered a danger to both organic and artificial life. At worst? Well, I want to think of that. So, I resigned to do what was best, and was also against the third law. I was going to shut myself down. And I did.

----

It should be noted that at the bottom of this, I included this piece of Writing for reasons I cannot remember:

The Difference Between Good (or whatever) Writing and an (Only Mildly) Interesting Plot

This is not good writing. Not in the slightest. It is, however, somehow interesting to non-lionmice. Is this little section here at the bottom necessary? Absolutely. Don’t question the need for irrelevant paragraphs. There is always the need for irrelevant paragraphs at the bottom of horrid writing.