Chapter 327 - 324: Safe House

Chapter 327: Chapter 324: Safe House

The moment the robot entered the room, it went completely limp.

It was clearly a machine, yet it somehow managed to look like it was panting for breath.

It stared at Li Luo in shock. "You’re really not one of them? You were in the safe house, but you didn’t disappear."

"I’m not."

"Then who are you?"

"A Fire Thief," Li Luo replied.

"Uh, I know that. Where are you from?" the robot asked curiously.

"Paradise Island." Li Luo didn’t hide anything.

Hearing this, however, the robot looked confused.

"Paradise Island?" It lowered its head, seeming to ponder the meaning of the words.

Seeing that it had stopped asking questions, Li Luo turned her attention to the room’s interior.

The brass gong on the desk still seemed to be swaying slightly. From the ceiling, a hanging bucket dripped water from time to time. The crisp sound of the drops was incredibly distinct in the silence.

Li Luo strode confidently to the desk, standing before it as if she’d been there a thousand times.

"I remember we walked a long way. How did we end up back here?"

She turned to look at the robot and asked, "Have we been walking in circles?"

With all the turns they had taken in the dark, Li Luo couldn’t be sure.

"No, we walked a long way."

The robot made a gesture with its hand. "We’ve gone about a quarter of the way across the island."

"Really?" Li Luo still found it hard to believe.

Everything here was so strange that she could only nod in acceptance.

There were more important things at hand.

She studied the robot and saw that it had completely relaxed. All traces of fear seemed to have vanished.

"The safe house... is it really safe?"

"Absolutely safe! Trust me," the robot said with certainty.

"Since we’re safe, you can tell me in detail what exactly happened on this island."

"Of course." The robot patted its chest confidently. "I guarantee I’ll explain everything clearly."

It stood up from the floor, dusted off its hands, and extended one to Li Luo. "Since you’re not one of them, then you must be a friend. My name is Jin Lou."

After extending its hand, it seemed to think better of it, and its mechanical arm froze in mid-air.

"I guess humans don’t consider machines to be friends, do they?"

Li Luo, however, didn’t seem to mind. She grabbed its mechanical arm and gave it a shake.

"Fire Thief."

Jin Lou seemed a little embarrassed by Li Luo’s directness.

"I haven’t had a friend in a long time. This island is full of madmen."

As it spoke, its tone became dejected again.

"Let me tell you about this island... I can’t remember the very distant past clearly. I just remember that when I was activated, I was already here. Back then, the island was still normal..."

Jin Lou was activated in a factory—the factory on Hell Island.

Back then, Hell Island was still pitch-black, and the humans were odd—they often wandered the island, but they never attacked anyone.

The robots didn’t know why they had been created. Jin Lou was also very naive back then, unaware of its purpose. After its activation, it just stood motionless in the factory for a very, very long time.

Robots don’t get bored. As long as they have no tasks, they can remain on standby indefinitely. The Jin Lou of that era wasn’t as "smart" as he is now; he was more like an infant, simply standing still and observing his surroundings.

The other robots were the same. Most of them had nothing to do, so they simply remained in the factory after being built.

Jin Lou had never seen the factory’s owner, only those wandering humans.

They would occasionally wander into the factory by mistake. When that happened, the factory owner would issue a command for a few robots to escort the humans away. Shortly after, those robots would return to the factory and resume their idle staring.

This was when Jin Lou grew curious. He wanted to be like those other robots and go outside, even if only for a moment.

But the factory owner never sent him out, so all he could do was wait.

Hell Island has no daytime, only night. Jin Lou sometimes wondered why the island didn’t have the day-night cycle recorded in his data, but he could never find an answer.

He was always like that—curious about everything, but unable to find any answers.

Jin Lou grew used to it.

Until one day, the factory owner issued a command:

"All units, deploy. Eliminate all humans on Hell Island."

And so, all the robots in the factory poured out in full force, locating the humans as instructed.

Jin Lou was of course among them; he couldn’t disobey the command.

However, robots cannot harm humans. This is an ironclad law.

After locating the humans, the robots that had poured out of the factory simply crashed. Most of them couldn’t process the conflicting directives. They could only follow the humans, stuck indefinitely at the point of needing to take action.

However, Jin Lou found a way to resolve the directive conflict.

He continuously rolled back the directive, forcing the "Search for elimination target" step into an endless loop. This allowed him to move about the island freely, as his system would simply register that he was still "searching for an elimination target."

’Anyway, the factory owner only said to eliminate all humans on Hell Island, he never said to do it immediately.’

And just like that, Jin Lou was free.

He was still bound by the directive, not completely free, but at least he wasn’t frozen like the other robots.

But he wasn’t the only robot to find a workaround.

Some robots came up with even more outrageous solutions. They found cleverer ways to bypass the conflicting directives.

For example:

"If we must eliminate them, we must do it thoroughly. Therefore, we must find a way to eliminate all humans on Hell Island simultaneously."

"We must find a way to eliminate the ironclad law. First, eliminate the law, then return to Hell Island to eliminate the humans."

"Human lifespans are finite. We must wait until all humans on Hell Island ’self-eliminate.’ Then it won’t be a violation of the ironclad law."

"From human history, we can see that humans are constantly self-destructing. Humanity will eventually go extinct. The humans on Hell Island will naturally go extinct then too. We just have to wait for humanity to die out."

"All things have a beginning and an end. The universe will eventually die. When all things turn to ash, everything will become nothingness. Everything on this Hell Island is, of course, also fated for destruction."

The interpretation of directives is very flexible. The vaguer the command, the more loopholes there are to exploit. The factory owner’s directive was the easiest kind to find a loophole in, which is how so many robots gained their freedom.

Robots won’t disobey human commands, nor will they try to slack off. But when faced with a situation like this, their only choice was to find a way to avoid the directive conflict. It was their way of saving themselves.

All their methods had one thing in common: stalling.

As long as they could buy time, they could escape the conflict between the directive and the ironclad law, postponing the contradiction indefinitely.