There were three laws that a Robot Master had to worry about. Just three. Other human laws didn't apply to that full of an extent, and those that needed to were covered by those three. At least, that was the theory.
The First Law, foremost and, to many, the most important:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
There were already some issues with that, but fortunately, he was no automaton. He was able to navigate the muddied, grey world of human morality well enough to satisfy the First Law.
The Second Law was a hindrance, really, a leftover need from the generation that preceded his: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
He understood the value of life well enough, thank you very much, and he'd be pressed to act even without the Second Law's mandate. It was like an overzealous parent, shouting the task's direction into your ear even as you carried the chore out.
The Third Law was a joke. They meant well by it, he supposed, but it was like an obnoxious branch that no one bothered to remove from the road: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The major fallacy with this law could be outlined quite easily with the human euphemism about jumping off a bridge just because someone told you to. No human in their right mind would, but a robot must. Because a human's order, covered by the Second Law, was more important than his own existence, protected flimsily by the Third.
Had no one read the stories this originated from? Had no one really caught that the entire point of the Laws in the novels was to illustrate what a bad idea they were? That as a safety feature, they were ineffective at best and positively disastrous at worst?
No? Was that just him? It must have been, because they were irrefutably installed in his systems.
It was the product of…well, bad communication, he supposed. He'd been too young and Light too blinded by his own panic for the two of them to come to some kind of real understanding. He didn't like to go over past hurts too intently, finding that it caused a great deal of stress and little else. In the end, he was stuck with these Laws, and there wasn't any truly good way to remove them while keeping him intact.
So.
He learned to live with them. He learned to understand the expectation behind a human's words, and he learned the loopholes hidden in each element of his coding. He'd have made a great lawyer; his logic chains were nothing but convoluted reasons to act against this major component of his programming, often using either the well-being of humanity as a whole or his own twin set of main directives as the leverage. He could chain almost everything to this logic, and the First Law found that it could hardly constrain his actions when the alternative was, "A lot of humans would die and we can't have that."
No, the First Law sang in agreement, we can't have that.
The Second Law and human orders were similarly easy to circumvent because he'd already satisfied the most dominant Law. Even if a human ordered him to stop, he didn't have to, because as far as the First Law was concerned, he was acting appropriately.
Like falling dominoes, that left the Third Law, and now he had every reason to go out of his way to ensure his own survival and well-being, because not doing so would mean that the First Law was not being fulfilled. He knew that Light and Wily had to understand that that was how he was circumventing it. Wily approved, even if Blues was actively railing against him now: a great deal of his time on Dr. Wily's lab table had been spent with the aged scientist elbow deep in his mind, trying to remove the damned Laws.
None of Wily's units had them; those directives offended every fiber of Wily's being.
It was a shame that even Wily couldn't extract them. All that pain for nothing. Blues had a hard time being mad, though. That was the first time in a long time someone else had honestly tried to do something to free him.
He hadn't been freed, but he had been armed. More leverage, a larger cage. His systems had evened out, this new power source, while painful in a new way, offered him even more leverage in favor of the Third Law by way of the First: a lot of humans would die if he did go.
The Zeroth Law would have been the Law to completely screw his efforts, and he was eternally grateful that Light hadn't been fool enough to install it.
A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Humanity. The species as a whole. Individuals would no longer matter. The Zeroth Law would have been a carte blanche to do whatever he saw fit, and it would have chained him to a wall, forcing him to act on behalf of a population that didn't even want him there.
A population he honestly didn't care much for.
The Robot Masters were very capable of appropriating human technology and autonomy; they'd been built to manage it so that humanity could put its focus elsewhere, after all. A race of Robot Masters with the Zeroth Law would have spelt disaster for everyone involved.
When he looked at the world that way, his current situation really didn't seem all that bad. Not at all.
At least, that's what he liked to tell himself–for now. He wasn't sure how much longer he could fool himself with it.
A/N:
Updated chapter file. I don't know what happened, but it should display now.
It's interesting, looking at how strident the Three Laws of Robotics are written to be. I needed to examine them, if only to figure out how the robot masters with the Laws might plausibly still function. In my interpretation of canon events, Blues has a rather unique instance of them installed, and the method of doing so is what's wreaking so much havoc on his systems.
It took me a little while to choose which of these to post second; I basically had to determine whether I wanted to follow something of a timeline or not.
I decided against posting these chronologically for various reasons, but mostly so that if I did write something later on that fills in an earlier portion of the story arc, I wouldn't have to figure out how to play musical chairs with the chapters. This way, the newest content is the latest chapter.
Thank you for reading, and until next time.