Duty Dodgers
There are no direct instructions, deliberately misdirecting a 'bot. There are no overt actions or words. Instead, there are the subtleties of pictures and sayings, simply assuming that something is so. Off the edge of the map, here there be dragons. Why is the map safe from the monsters? Lines cannot protect the known from the unknown; why do they teach through underlying plans that the map is fully explored?
Banish the drawing, because that's all it is. It is merely a compilation of lines and directions; an attempt to sort out the limits of what can be proven, all the while knowing that it isn't for certain. It's self-deception at its most insidious and infectious, for once it is believed it spreads from 'bot to 'bot like a mental plague. It's easier to push everything into two brackets, convince oneself that life is black and white, than see the shades of gray. It is a fictional world of good and evil, safe and dangerous, explored and unexplored, and myth and truth.
Yet it is not. It is an illusion. But isn't it so hard to remember that, even when speaking of the innate deception within?
Like children listening to fairytales, raised to see the hero and villain as complete opposites, no one understands when the lines are crossed, or worse, erased. How can a villain possibly be good? Isn't the definition of villainy to BE evil? But that is another line, isn't it. A definition, like a map, that lays down a boundary that exists only in the mind. Forget the dichotomy and simply exist, and therein lies a world that boggles the common mind.
Good versus evil? There is no good. There is no evil. There are only reasons held by different people for why they do what they do. Death on one hand may seem wrong for those who die, but what of the world left for those who live? Do the ends justify the means when there is no cause for justification? It's not an idea held often or for long because the lines only fade. The mind cannot comprehend the immensity of a life without a defined system of ethics of SOME kind. It makes up its own map, sets the lines in place, and only in dreams may the boundaries be crossed.
Dreams are escape from the map. In fantasies the mind is free from assumptions and limits it set upon itself. It explores the known and finds dragons in the everyday where the waking mind blithely insists none exist. This is the ultimate freedom, a blank space for the villain to be just a 'bot and maybe find that there is more than two dimensions.
But it is only a temporary escape. Eventually reality must be returned to, and each 'bot will be trapped again by the drawing. The sugar buzz will wear off, the wasp will be caught, and two friends flying loose on a sunny day will become Predacons again. Dreams cannot last forever, and the dragons will wait to play another day, or perhaps only lurk where the mind is blinded to them, waiting to strike. For now, Terrorsaur will drag Waspinator back by his wings and pretend he hadn't done it out of any sort of feeling for the 'bot. They'll probably get yelled at. They'll probably be punished. And they'll slip subconsciously back into their place inside the boundaries, not to dare cross the thick black lines again.
...until tomorrow.
.
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See LD. See LD get philosophical. See LD sulk at 2D characterizations.
More Waspinator and Terrorsaur, getting the most of their time away from the base. This is based off the familiar but fictional quote of map fame.