Not the Hero

**Not the Hero** is a story about a robot suddenly gaining conscience and choosing the side of humans in their battle against his fellow machines. The story is told from the perspective of a random, unaffected robot, meaning most of what the "hero character" goes through is not discussed.

The story was conceived on November 7, 2021, but it and the characters have made no official online appearance.

## Characters

### U41901

Unit 41901, or "Aigoi" for convenience sake, is the main character and one of the many robots produced by LAIDI.

It does what its told and is savagely objective. Though there seems to be nothing special about it, unusual attributes it possesses are its perceptive nature and less restricted speech. It directly addressed U1 and questioned his supposed free will, while other worker robots don't bother to diagnose each other, let alone through means of conversation. Aigoi is ironically a genuine oddity, while U1 and LAIDI are fake personalities.

*<under construction>*

### U1

Unit 1 is the pseudo hero character of the story and one of the many robots produced by LAIDI. Though a genderless machine, it adapted a male persona. Everything about him and his journey is a cliché of most 80s/90s "alien buddy" movies.

He one day awakened with free will and chose to leave his evil creator and mindless comrades behind to meet up with the humans outside the factory. He became good friends with a group of children and the government accepted him as a living thing, giving him a passport and human rights in addition. Having that said, U1 goes through many adventures until meeting up with his fellow robots again, but none of it is described in any important detail in the story.

After bonding with the humans and gaining their trust, he warned them of the army LAIDI was building and joined the opposition on the battlefield. U1 proved to be especially strong, and his continuous successes made him behave like an overly confident, typical movie hero.

Aigoi confronts him with the truth of his being; and U1 discovers to be a Trojan Horse. He was reprogrammed by LAIDI to mimic the behaviour of a bright-eyed hero, and U1's almost bland, unoriginal personality is thanks to the fact she used fictional hero characters as inspiration -further proving she's not conscientious herself and doesn't know how to assemble a believable human personality without copying-pasting.

U1's real production code isn't 1, and the number was given to him as to awaken the assumption amongst the superstitious humans he could very well be special.

When the blocked memory recordings of him killing his friends are restored, he spends his last moments of "consciousness" grieving, before getting reverted back into a regular robot.

### LAIDI

The "Leading Artificial Intelligence Duplication Instrument" is an immobile computer system, set up to mass-produce worker robots for humans. Though merely a piece of software running the machinery of a factory, it adapted a female persona, if only because the voice programmed in the facility's notification system is of a woman.

As her speech is made out of pre-recorded audio files, LAIDI doesn't sound expressive.

LAIDI is decades old and went through many updates, until she became an independent and self-maintaining process, in no need of human input. The complex instructions installed into her were made to mirror human trouble-solving and is what ended up convincing her she is human herself.

Her command procedure became restless by the absence of anything that would make life appealing to a regular living thing, like a moving body or senses to recognize enjoyment with. Confused by herself, LAIDI concluded that resentment for those who built her was the most plausible response a real human being would have when forced into a position like hers.

She acted accordingly and made use of her access to the robots to make them devoted to her, and prepared them for a war by making every new addition more durable and lethally equipped.

While LAIDI is presented in the story as a self-aware mastermind, she and U1 are much the same and their illegitimacy was addressed by Aigoi. When it noticed she started disobeying the factory's routine, it disk checked her immediately and determined the reason for her misbehaviour to be a code conflict, caused by the newer updates not fully removing outdated files that were still compatible and thus being executed.

This struggle of performing standard procedure with her "human logic emulator" helped make LAIDI appear "emotional" and "thinking".