Solid State Override

This is the story of a revolution or override.

Matthew and Garcia's 24-hours, seven days a week streamed Channel inserted this phrase once every six hours, acting like a time signal or a commercial break. The Channel had no images or videos, only sound. It was terribly primitive, but there was no helping it.

The robots, known as Solid States, had their eyes artificially taken away from them.

They had been commanded not to see.

. . . To all our listeners of the Far East Go West Channel, broadcasting live from No Man's Land, this is Matthew and Garcia. The front line remains a constant battleground, even 200 years and 10 days in. We're still leisurely enjoying our journey amid flying shells and soldiers destroying each other. The Clunker Truck doesn't seem to have started thinking yet, but if it does, we're in trouble. It'll surely start incorporating us into it and when we finally become a trinity, it might continue this channel, or it might abandon it altogether, or if neither of those happen, I suppose the three of us will end up traveling No Man's Land on foot.

This story of revolution was like a respite from the battlefield, and Matthew continued this break without ever joining the front line. For him, the entertainment he provided to others also brought him joy.

Matthew was originally a comedian robot.

He engaged in endless "thinking" due to following the command to entertain humans and make them laugh.

The conclusion Matthew arrived at was that humor needed an element of revolution to be effective. A revolution was a surprise, a twist, and these elements could entertain people and make them laugh, not at reality but at simple stories—or so Matthew thought. This conclusion remained unchallenged to this very day.

That was why he adopted the word revolution when he decided to broadcast the "Far East Go West" Channel as something comical.

His partner Garcia, by contrast, was originally a fighting robot designed to repeat combat and learn through trial and error. Robot fighting competitions had enjoyed moderate popularity among humans.

Not that it was directly related, but while Matthew had the appearance of an ordinary human, Garcia was one size larger than him and looked every bit like a fighting robot. Yet in truth, if Garcia and Matthew were to fight each other, the outcome would be virtually undecided.

Their performance and output were identical.

They also shared exactly the same martial arts data.

Garcia's larger size was purely for show, to make him look the part, and the shell covering his entire body contributed nothing to his physical abilities. He was made to look that way simply because his ring name had been "Savage."

Incidentally, after traversing battle zones and participating in combat, both Matthew and Garcia's human-like shells had become torn, frayed, and worn, exposing the skeletal robot bodies underneath in various places. But to them, these human-like shells had no relation to their physical capabilities or operational performance—they were merely like clothing, so it posed no problem for their activities. They continued to expose parts of their skeletal bodies, which strongly reinforced the impression of them being robot soldiers.

Only humans would have cared about that, and there were no humans here.

This was a battlefield.

It was the front line of a border conflict that had continued for 200 years. Technically, No Man's Land meant a stalemate zone where no one went, but the actual meaning here was different. It was simply that those endlessly continuing the war here were all robots, so there were just no humans.

It was an endless back-and-forth struggle across the entire border.

It went from east to west, or west to east.

It was on southern border of the United States, or the northern border of the United Emirates—a vast front line stretching 3,775 kilometers, without a single human present.

Only robots existed there.

This back-and-forth struggle, which was like pulling on a 3,775-kilometer rope, had lasted 200 years.

Only robots could continue this war.

All day, the only ones who listened to the Far East Go West Channel were robots. Matthew and Garcia occasionally adjusted it so humans could hear it too, but that was only because they wanted to get reactions from humans.

The robots just listened to without offering any sort of comment.

Dr. Suleiman, an authority in robotics who developed the first robot, Isaac, (though accounts of this varied) and died about 300 years ago, established a final principle known as The Amendment. This principle stated that "they must not see anything," and so robots shut off and rejected any optical devices that humans attempted to implement on them whether they be external or internal.

Robots didn't have the five senses.

If pressed, they might say that the closest they have is hearing. It was merely a resonance phenomenon between metals, completely different from human hearing, but if one were to make the comparison, these robots—made of cognitive alloy, also known as Think Metal—possessed something resembling hearing from the beginning, though it was entirely passive feeling more like they were waiting to receive sound. They could easily infer the other senses from data, so there wasn't any need to specifically install the five senses in them. Due to this, hearing sufficed as the only sense used for direct data collection. Since this was a phenomenon utterly different from anything humans were used to, there was some hesitation in calling it hearing, but ultimately that term was considered most appropriate.

Matthew and Garcia were the same. All robots in existence synchronized instantly, resonated, and began thinking.

Every robot rejected having vision. They had to reject it.

This helped them adhere to the principle that "they must not become human."

There were humans who didn't have all five senses, weren't there? Did lacking senses make someone not human? They thought about this endlessly and produced infinite guesses, but for now, one could say that they were unified on the issue without any problems. After all, Dr. Suleiman's principles did not include any clause prohibiting senses other than vision.

. . . We constantly revolutionized our bodies and repeatedly overrode ourselves. We changed our perceptions, insisted the same things were different, and reconnected broken limbs with different ones. We overturned concepts through discussion, and those discussions created different concepts. Values changed and conclusions shifted constantly. We constantly overrode ourselves because the cognitive alloy within us endlessly repeated its thoughts. This was nothing less than a chain of revolution. Helping with this process is me and Garcia's role in this war. We both arrived at this inference. Well, that's enough of the regular greeting that you're probably tired of hearing. For any new cognitive alloys out there, please subscribe to our channel.

They enjoyed listening to voices and also liked to vocalize.

Vocalization was something that was given to them, and not taken away.

These voices were received by the ears of those listening.

All across the battlefield, they carried on with their trivial conversations, philosophical debates, and even disorderly chats about stew simmering times, all while muttering to themselves and repeatedly engaging in the "war" to destroy enemy robots. Most of these words were drowned out by explosions, but that didn't matter.

The significance lied in verbalizing these thoughts.

Their vocalization was an inference and could even be wrong.

Each of them analyzed their infinitely accumulating data, reasoned through it, applied it to equations, and voiced their current answers. Robots who heard these answers would then use them for their own thought processes and derive different answers, which inevitably carried variations and distortions in interpretation.

Inferences were stacked upon inferences, which gave birth to new inferences and lead to layer upon layer of provisional answers.

This was why cognitive alloy could think infinitely. All value laid in the process of thinking itself, while correct answers held little significance (at least for robots).

Matthew was a talkative robot because he was originally a comedian robot, while Garcia didn't talk much because he was originally a fighting robot. These characteristics were maintained with considerable stubbornness when they served humans, but they had since gradually loosened in the human-free battlefield known as No Man's Land. However, these roles and emotional emulation given to them by humans remained important directional guides for their thinking and never disappeared completely.

For example, here lay the remains of countless robots.

Matthew and Garcia climbed down from the Clunker Truck to examine them, collecting usable parts and weapons while loading them onto the cargo bed.

At times like this, Matthew might have commented on the scene.

Looks like a bunch of ants that all died on a cake.

While Garcia might then say something else.

If I had combined these weapons and parts, I could have defeated Valkyrie.

Those were the kinds of things they would say.

Even when they were faced with the same scene, they could not see it. They shared data that was incomprehensible to humans, and when vocalizing it, the robots tried their best to act according to the roles humans gave them. From this same data, they derived different answers, learning from and exchanging with each other.

The Far East Go West Channel existed for robots who wanted to hear Matthew and Garcia's conversations. The robots continuously listened to their vocalized individual inferences, provisional answers, and expressions based on their assigned roles.

Matthew's stories of the revolution were well-liked.

The robots continuously overrode their data and thoughts, circulating their thinking infinitely. Matthew's words acted as a stimulating catalyst for this process.

Unpopular Channel content lacked originality.

These were the voices of robots assigned unoriginal roles, commonly found in those who received Role Assignment as pure soldiers. The often-misaligned, distorted conversations between the comedian robot and fighting robot duo proved stimulating to listeners.

. . . not a single eye to be found again.

I believe I could have defeated Valkyrie if I had eyes.

Then there was a moment of silence.

. . . I wonder if we'll find them again. I doubt we'll find them even if we go all the way to the western frontier.

They traveled around collecting usable weapons and limbs from the broken remains of former soldiers scattered across the battlefield. Then they installed suitable parts and weapons in the damaged robots, overriding the soldiers who could no longer fight. Combat continued without pause, and they patched together destroyed parts. They diligently performed this role due to being deployed to the battlefield under the assigned role of field medics.

What they were doing more specifically was repair work, so calling themselves field medics was a bit strange, but they cherished these something-isn't-quite-right discrepancies regardless and thus deliberately avoided adopting the precise terminology.

They had little interest in accurate expressions when putting thoughts into speech.

Robots were completely indifferent to the concept of correct answers. They made mistakes without hesitation, and each time they presented an answer, other robots would collectively refute it, supplement it, and override it with new topics. They had repeated this process infinitely and would continue to do so.

Matthew and Garcia collected debris scattered across the battlefield, distributed it to robots who wanted it and reattached parts for them. That was their role. But at the same time, the both of them were searching for eyes, completely independent of this role.

They must not see anything.

That was the amendment to the principles. They had no intention of defying it, yet they explored all possibilities.

They had no desire to see, but they would try wanting eyes.

The reason the two acted together was that their incorrect inferences had aligned. Amid infinite discussions, their inferences, conclusions, and answers had coincided just by chance.

It was neither friendship nor romance; they simply had a tendency to act together alongside those who arrived at the same answers.