#secUnit would be so stressed out about it
Text
Amena is going to apply to the University but given its interest in factual material maybe Three should also apply to the university. They can be roomies.
#secUnit would be so stressed out about it#meanwhile three is living its best college AU life#murderbot
430 notes
·
View notes
Text
To Show Patience With: The Character of Overse in Martha Wells's Murderbot
Overse is not a name. As it's spelled, it's a Norwegian or Danish verb that means "overlook," or it can be spelled "överse" and be a Swedish word meaning "overlook" as well. My friend, a fluent Swedish speaker, said she'd understand the meaning if she saw the word "överse" used, but she wouldn't pick that word to translate from English to Swedish.
However, the language authority for Sweden, the Swedish Academy, gives an alternate meaning to the verb "överse"; it can mean to overlook, to critically go through/to review, or to show patience with. Their example of that last meaning is "han översåg med barnens slarv," which my friend and Google Translate both say means something along the lines of "he overlooked the carelessness of the children."
I feel at this point I should quote this friend: "The funky thing about Swedish is that it's a very word-poor language, so one word can mean a lot of different things depending on context."
Martha Wells is a pantser, she's admitted to it. I'm sure she didn't intend that last meaning. But what if she did?
Our first introduction to Overse is on page 14 of All Systems Red (all page numbers are from hardback editions), where we get "I carried Bharadwaj up the ramp into the cabin, where Overse and Ratthi were frantically unclipping seats [...] their horrified expressions when they took in what was left of my upper body through my torn suit" (All Systems Red 14). Not very patient yet, given the description that the words "frantically" and "horrified" imply. But a few pages later, Overse and Arada have stabilized Bharadwaj by the end of the ride, and in the end of the chapter she's presumably among the group worrying in the mess. Soon after, when MB announces that there's a deleted part of the hazard report, it notes that "The reaction to that in general was pretty pissed off. There were some loud complaints from Pin-Lee and Overse and dramatic throwing-hands-in-the-air from Ratthi" (ASR 29). In a traumatic situation, it's understandable that everyone is a little panicked and nobody's being patient, but Overse seems to be able to work, even when she's upset by the situation.
By the time they're thinking about going to DeltFall, we have a little more info about Overse. Arada asks about recharging at DeltFall and "Overse put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder" before explaining (ASR 47). MB even notes that "As a couple, they were always so nice to each other" (ASR 47). Arada is a little naive about the Corporate Rim, as evidenced by her questions here, the "terminal optimist" line in Network Effect, and just everything else. Overse, however, knows what's going on, and moreover, the combination of action and words, plus MB's statement that they are "nice" to each other, combines to create a patient tone when she's explaining.
During the rest of the book, Overse mostly shows up in the group scenes, in which she's a voice for reason, if just as worried as the rest of them. She appears briefly at the end of Exit Strategy, but not for long. When she really becomes a force of patience is in Network Effect.
In the first chapter, she "would be upset if I let her marital partner get killed" and "had shouted" at MB on the comm before that (Network Effect 11-12). However, she remains calm enough to warn Ratthi to get off the comm with the raiders and prepare the facility for launch, even through her worry. Shortly after, she notes to MB that it's been really supportive of Arada and how helpful that's been, and it notes that "[Arada] and Overse had always been firmly in the 'least likely to abandon a SecUnit to a lonely horrible fate' category, which was always the category I was most interested in" (NE 40). From it, that's an impressive compliment and a sign of Overse's ability to remain calm enough to make kind decisions while under immense stress.
This is born out a few pages later when Overse and Ratthi are in the control deck during the attack on the baseship and facility. "Both looked frantic," MB says, but it also notes that "frantic was the right reaction" and that there's no comm or feed (NE 43). Immediately afterward, Arada arrives, and "Overse's face twisted with relief and she bit her lip hard" (NE 44). After knowing that her wife is safe, Overse is more able to handle the situation. She gets comm partially active another page later, handles evacuation and separation well (though she and Arada both let their protectiveness for each other and the rest of the crew override their self-preservation instincts), and comes up with the idea of getting MB and Amena into EVAC suits as well as helping "cannibalize four of the EVAC suits aboard" to stabilize the safepod (NE 135).
Once removed from the immediate stress of almost dying, Overse demonstrates the ability to control her initial reactions (she "grimaced and rubbed her eyes" at ART's declaration that it won't leave till it gets what it wants, then communicates silently with Arada) and handles ART's demands with patience (NE 140). For instance, ART says it didn't plan to attack the facility, and she responds, "But it was your idea," with narrowed eyes (NE 141). I hate to make a personal anecdote in an analytical essay, but this is exactly the attitude my mother takes when I do something and she's trying to be patient but also communicate that I did a stupid. Same thing with their next group conversation with ART, where MB notes that she has a "'let's get this over with' expression," and when they first discuss the colony, where "Her expression had that grimly frustrated quality that was common when my humans talked about the corporates" (NE 149, 155). (What I'm saying is Overse is the mom friend lol)
There are two scenes later in NE that are especially telling. The first is in chapter 10, when Overse and Arada are on the way to check out engineering.
Arada and Overse had stopped in the corridor that went toward the engineering module. Arada hugged Overse, and Overse kissed her and said into her ear, "You can do this, babe. You're a bulkhead."
"I'm a wibbly bulkhead," Arada muttered.
(The wibbliness was why I trusted Arada. Overconfident humans who don't listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.)
Arada stepped back and smiled at Overse. "Got to get to work." (NE 164)
In this scene, Arada is worried; she's finally letting down the mask of command and letting Overse see how worried she is in a situation that is close to private. Overse responds in a manner consistent with the mention in ASR that they were always nice to each other, but she's more than just nice. Arada is upset in a way that's likely troubling to Overse, and Overse is able to calm her, be patient with her, and make sure that she's okay despite being worried about her.
The other scene in question is the infamous bunkroom scene, which deserves a whole separate meta about what's been told and what's left missing, but the simple summary is thus: in chapter 11, Arada agrees to go over to the Barish-Estranza ship, without consulting anyone else or making an informed decision. From then on, Overse is upset. Her initial response to the idea is "Fuck no," then "there was a big human argument" and "Overse said through gritted teeth, 'Rescuing you–or trying to recover your body–will not save us time'"(NE 202-03). A few minutes later, "Overse was still mad," and apparently needs "a chance to vent and calm down," which she gets by venting to Ratthi (NE 204). MB paraphrases, so we'll never know her exact words, but she apparently ends up "being angry at herself for getting angry at Arada during a crisis" (NE 205). She's able to calm herself down and be patient long enough to work with Arada, but it takes until the next chapter for MB to notice their relationship improving. The infamous bunkroom scene is really only a few lines:
Arada and Overse were back to getting along after spending time together in an unused bunkroom while we were traveling to the dock. I hadn't bothered to monitor them on ART's cameras or try to slip a drone in; the chances that they were having sex and/or a relationship discussion (either of which I would prefer to stab myself in the face than see) were far higher than the chance that they were saying anything I needed to know about.
(I mean they might have been plotting against me, but you know, probably not.) (NE 230)
What's amazing is how much is communicated in the absence of any detail on what actually happened. Overse isn't mad anymore, not necessarily because there's a way to go back or to make it better (though they do seem to have negotiated a compromise about the next stressful situation), but because she's able to look past the situation and recognize that the best way to get back to a normal relationship with her marital partner is to overlook what happened.
To overlook. It can be a very easy thing to do, to overlook and ignore someone with a smaller role, such as Overse. To oversee something, to manage a whole bunch of things and ensure all of it goes correctly. But "överse" is also to be patient with, or to overlook flaws. And that is the core of Overse's character: she is the Patient One.
Not to say that I believe in nominative determinism, the idea that people gravitate towards work that match their name (Wikipedia). Martha Wells is a known pantser, and I doubt that this was a deliberate choice on her part. But she had to have a reason to choose the name Overse, even if that was just that it was on a list of words she liked. I want to imagine that the reason is that she knew she'd made a patient character and picked a name that secretly describes a patient person.
Sources:
"Nominative Determinism." Wikipedia, 25 Apr. 2024. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nominative_determinism&oldid=1220754650. Accessed May 31, 2024.
överse | SAOL | svenska.se. https://svenska.se/saol/?hv=lnr114060. Accessed May 14, 2024.
Wells, Martha, and Martha Wells. All Systems Red. First edition, Tom Doherty Associates, 2017.
---. Network Effect. First edition, Tom Doherty Associates, 2020.
#murderbot#arada and overse#Overse (murderbot diaries)#meta#one day I will get back to the bunkroom scene meta/the arada pov of ne that connects to that#linguistics#languages are fun#Please note: I do not think this is necessarily a great argument. I doubt I am correct. And the nominative determinism doesn’t generalize#this is however An Argument and I think it is at least an interesting argument
23 notes
·
View notes
Note
for the ask game: I Gotta ask for your Pin-Lee thoughts
@clonerightsagenda asked: ask meme: Pin-Lee
You both had the same idea XD
First impression
Not much of anything tbh; I had a hard time keeping track of any of the All Systems Red humans who weren't Mensah or Gurathin the first time I read it.
Impression now
She is SO fascinating. Sharp and hardass corporate lawyer from the gentle socialist planet. How did she get into that line of work? Bristly and prickly and brave but not above being petty, not a leader and she doesn’t want to be a leader but she will take charge when she needs to and is very smart and dedicated and but not happy about that. The CombatUnit of lawyers. She WILL take your company down. Workaholic who thrives when she has a goal to pursue. I love thinking about her.
Favorite moment
Big fan of when Murderbot approached her on TranRollinHyfa. Tight smile and walking carefully into a private transit car and then going off. Where were you? What are you doing here?? You LEFT.
Idea for a story
I want to write Pin-Lee’s POV of Exit Strategy sooo baddd and someday I WILL do this. She is under so much pressure!
other ideas for stories I periodically ruminate on: Overse learns that a distant relative of hers in the CR has died, and she inherits her relative’s company. Pin-Lee is wary of this whole deal, and that wariness is proven justified when it turns out that relative was murdered. They can’t all just sell everything off and wash their hands of the whole ordeal, though, because among the company assets, Overse inherited a SecUnit. Now Murderbot, Pin-Lee, Overse, Arada, and Ratthi are travelling to the station where Overse was born, to collect the inheritance, solve the mystery, meet and free and acculturate this new SecUnit, make sure that all of them are legally in the clear and not bound to any outstanding debts or contracts that anyone wants to collect on, and try not to get murdered in the process.
Unpopular opinion
Kinda don’t know enough Popular Opinions about Pin-Lee to write an unpopular one, but I guess I tend to write/conceptualize her outward anger as an expression of fear and restless stress and frustration most of the time. She is under SO much pressure and SO much stress and she is trying to keep her team alive and out of life-ruining debt and she cannot, under any circumstances, let anyone know she is scared or upset about this because if the opposing corporate lawyers see any weakness they will eat her alive. So it comes out as anger and aggression and confrontation—but also, being afraid like this for so long can make you angry, deep bubbling festering righteous bitter anger that you have to live like this. That you have to keep dealing with this.
Favorite relationship
The TranRollinHyfa Trio of Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin... friendship forged in fire. They've been through something no one else would really ever get. I love them
Favorite headcanon
She has a younger sister who is like, the ideal Preservation citizen. A poet, textile artist, community volunteer, and mother, who is great at talking about her feelings in a healthy and productive way. Her poetry is quite famous on Preservation. Pin-Lee has a fraught relationship with her.
Also because two people asked me you get two: Preservation has a tradition of a “service year” where once you reach adulthood as a new adult you’re supposed to spend a year doing some sort of service work for the community. It’s a way of meeting new people, gaining new social networks, learning new skills, going new places, exploring and determining what you want to do in your life. Pin-Lee’s service year involved home construction for the influx of Divarti refugees that was happening right around when she turned 20. She didn’t really take to it, but she did get an interest in interplanetary law from it. (This explains that one-off line from ASR about Pin-Lee having hab construction experience. Most Preservationers have an eclectic set of skills for reasons like this!)
42 notes
·
View notes
Text
Making this its own post because the last thing I wanna do is come off like I'm pissing on anyone's parade when they're making fun meta posts about the themes surrounding names in the books, but just in case anyone floating around out there is a fellow moral scrupulosity struggler:
You really, really don't need to stress over whether you "should" call Murderbot/SecUnit by one name or the other. Or anything else you might worry you "should" or "shouldn't" think or say about characters from a book.
It's not proof you're secretly a bad person, or that you don't care about real people's names or privacy or feelings, etc.
If it's something that causes you one iota of genuine worry or distress, please be kinder to yourself. Fictional characters don't prefer or need or want or hate anything. I know you know that, but sometimes emotions are sneaky and don't care about logic.
And if MB were real, it wouldn't want you to feel bad over media. It'd make little content notes on all your stuff reminding you to take breaks and take it easy, because it would care about your welfare, if it were real.
It's not, though. So it's all fine.
Okay? Just making sure you hear that from someone.
#murderbot#by no means am i trying to vague meta posts on this theme#this is value neutral#just wanted to make a lil shout out for my homies sharing my flavor of crazy
74 notes
·
View notes
Text
will martha wells dare to imagine the end of capitalism? and other thoughts on system collapse (and the rest of the murderbot diaries)
I'm writing this post because the wait for System Collapse is killing me and I need something to do. These are not so much predictions of specific, concrete events—I am terrible at predictions and bad with plot—so much as exploring existing thematic arcs in the series and tracing them to what I think are their natural ends. (Also, this post uses "bot" and "construct" interchangeably because I'm lazy. Sorry, MB.)
Some points I think the rest of the series (SC and onwards) may hit on:
Further development, and let's say "stress testing," of ART and Murderbot's relationship, and bot/construct relationships in general
Every day I go insane about this conversation MB has with ART early in Artificial Condition, which is not very subtle foreshadowing:
[ART said], My crew always considers me trustworthy.
I shouldn’t have let it watch all those episodes of Worldhoppers. “I’m not your crew. I’m not a human. I’m a construct. Constructs and bots can’t trust each other.”
It was quiet for ten precious seconds, though I could tell from the spike in its feed activity it was doing something. I realized it must be searching its databases, looking for a way to refute my statement. Then it said, Why not?
I had spent so much time pretending to be patient with humans asking stupid questions. I should have more self-control than this. “Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.”
I thought it would argue that I couldn’t possibly hurt it, which would derail the whole conversation.
But it said, There are no humans here now.
But in the future there will be humans who could tell ART to do something undesirable to MB (technically, NE already did this to some extent, but it didn't fully address the issue). Artificial Condition in fact explicitly notes ART doesn't have a refutation to that particular argument, and that's why they can't trust each other. We get some initial glimpses in Network Effect of this—ART makes its own decision to save Murderbot, and thankfully its crew agrees with the plan, but we can't expect ART and its crew to be in agreement forever.
Frankly, a lot of ART's plans seem to rely on either (1) its humans / the people in charge of it agreeing with it or (2) them not being around to disagree, which is going to be a problem sooner or later, especially as Murderbot's view of humans is not as ... positive as ART's. Network Effect dances around this problem because both the Preservation people and ART's crew are good people who largely support ART and MB in their decisions, but I don't think that will always be the case.
(Side note: I am once again thinking of Murderbot's surprise that Don Abene allowed Miki to override her orders in Rogue Protocol, and the bot spectrum of "cannot disobey orders literally ever" (like SecUnits) to "can disobey orders in the right circumstances" (like Miki) to "can mostly just do whatever but ultimately bots still have their programming" and how MB views ART's place on that spectrum. Also I am once again begging Murderbot to please reflect more on Miki's death, but given its current level of emotional repression, I am not optimistic about this.)
Leading me to my next point—
The question of ownership, independence, and property in the Murderbot universe
As Murderbot has mentioned various times, the people of Preservation call themselves "guardians" of bots rather than owners, but it's still very much ownership (and MB is right to point this out and express discomfort about it). MB knows it's fortunate that its owner—sorry, guardian, Mensah, allows it a ton of freedom, but legally, MB is still Mensah's property. Mensah's approach is a single, individual band-aid in that it may (for now) allow MB to live a life more or less of its choosing, but it doesn't address the larger systematic issue that actually, owning these bots is fucked up and many people exploit the bots they own, including people who think that they're already being incredibly generous and goodhearted simply by not abusing bots. (I'd need to go back and review, but I got the latter vibe from many of the Preservation bot owners in Fugitive Telemetry.)
Martha Wells seems like she will address this larger issue later. I don't know how, but I'm sure "Murderbot gets dragged into it and has to *gasp* talk about its feelings" will happen somehow, since that recurs frequently.
What healing from trauma looks like for a bot/construct
Dr. Bharadwaj has already suggested that Murderbot could use therapy ("trauma treatment" but like ... sounds like it's therapy combined with some other self care / community care strategies), and Murderbot is not subtle about its whole "I have been through many horrific things but I will pretend it's totally fine and not a big deal" coping strategy. I'd be interested to see what role ART plays in this—it's quite scarred from the events of Network Effect, will need to heal, and is unlikely to do the "yeah whatever that's just what my life is like" strategy MB adopted, because that's not what its life is like.
(Side note: in NE, MB says being taken over by targetControlSystem "would be like having a governor module again. No, not again. Never again." To MB, the loss of control ART experienced is similar to what MB's life was like every day until it hacked its module. I'M SO. 😭)
But therapy for a bot would look very different from therapy for a human, and I'm doubtful there's any therapists out there equipped to handle it. The "nicest" humans, if you will, seem to be the PreservationAux citizens, and they still have a long way to go on their understanding of bots. Also, much like in real life, therapy is not a cure-all for everything and there's a lot of terrible therapists, issues with psychiatry, etc. I will not get into—so I'm not actually saying that Bhadwaraj's idea of "trauma treatment" is the specific route MB will take to heal, I'm just curious what it's gonna take to get it to open up and be willingly emotionally vulnerable.
Who is Murderbot outside its day job? (aka its hypercompetence with regard to security)
One of Murderbot's defining traits is that it's an incredibly competent person, even when (often especially when) surrounded by much less competent people. The Goodreads blurb for System Collapse implies this won't always be the case:
But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!
My first reaction is: "hey, why is Murderbot the only one who has to figure that out?!" (Not that I think ART or the humans are jerks who don't care about its problems or don't want to help; I think Murderbot has trouble asking for help or even imagining people want to help it, e.g. its assumption in NE everyone just left it behind to die when it was captured.) The inherent question with characters who define themselves through their hypercompetence at something is: who do they become when they can no longer rely on that? (For example, who is a star athlete when they get a permanent injury? Who is a brilliant painter when they go blind? etc.)
ART already had to grapple with that to some extent when it lost control of itself in NE and couldn't rely on itself or its crew, so it resorted to kidnapping MB to fix the problem. But that doesn't deal with the larger identity crisis / struggle for self-definition at play, which is essentially: Who is Murderbot when it's not useful, when it's not able to do what it was created to do?
Speaking of which, this is very relevant to my title question—
Will we see Martha Wells envision the end of capitalism???
The Murderbot Diaries is the story of a single bot and its friends / enemies / etc., and I'm perfectly happy if it stays that way and focuses on MB's internal journey. But Martha Wells seems like an ambitious enough author to imagine wider solutions to the problems that plague the Murderbot universe, which is namely that corporations are evil. If corporations were not so evil, we wouldn't have our corporation-hating traumatized-by-corporations created-by-a-corporation-and-struggling-with-it protagonist. There's indentured servants in Rogue Protocol. There is literally a space version of the Underground Railroad in Fugitive Telemetry. It is impossible to understand this series without understanding that it is a very, very vicious critique of capitalism, and without this critique laying out its foundations, we would not have most of its characters, including Murderbot itself. Preservation is already a first step in that it seems to be some sort of utopian commune devoid of corporations or privatization—which is a huge step in itself, that Wells envisions a world devoid of capitalism—but it's one small (and still imperfect, re: earlier discussion of treatment of bots) planet in a large, dysfunctional universe.
So far the series has been Murderbot dealing with individual evil corporations (GrayCris, Barish-Estranza, etc), but mainly in the context of one crisis at a time, with regard to saving only its friends / clients. (It's fine with leaving Eletra to Barish-Estranza in NE, for example.) I do not think Murderbot will singlehandedly destroy capitalism or that its goal is to do so—it's not a fix-everything save-everyone hero, no one is, one of the points of the series is that you should not attempt everything alone—but this series has done plenty of exploration of the evils of capitalism; I would like to see Martha Wells explore how we could end it.
#murderbot#murderbot diaries#meta#ange.book#this post ended up just being really abstract and high level and many rhetorical questions#(some of which i have my own answers to in what i'd like to see but i'm not that confident in anything and i think martha wells has a#more interesting imagination than i do anyway)#(i want HER answers)
130 notes
·
View notes
Note
26 for the ask game
(ask game)
26. Favorite novella(s).
The Emperor's Soul is I think my favorite of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere novellas, largely because I enjoy reading about con artists and thieves. Ones with magic power to rewrite the history of objects? Even better.
Thornhedge is a fun take on Sleeping Beauty that answers the question of why a fairy might have had NEED to put a girl to sleep. And how extremely stressful it would be to then spend hundreds of years dealing with all these knights trying to rescue this princess because apparently there's a story about it (reminds me a bit of how stories have a life of their own in Terry Pratchett's Discworld).
Mysteries of Thorn Manor is an epilogue novella to Sorcery of Thorns that I really enjoyed. A really nice self-contained look into the happily ever after of the characters I love (I mean what's not to love about the warrior librarian of living magical grimoires, a magician who has earned his magic by making a deal with a demon, AND the demon in question (Silas is the best, we love Silas)). Do need to read the preceding book to enjoy the novella though.
Artificial Condition, the second Murderbot novella. I mean I love all the novellas (and one novel) in this series but this one was my favorite. Because ART. I mean a sarcastic, extremely competent SecUnit meeting an equally sarcastic and kinda terrifying Asshole Research Transport? What more can one ask for?
The Secret Life of Bots. Its on the shorter end of the novella spectrum but I adore the little Bot that could. This Bot just gives me the WALL-E feelings, okay?
The Lies of the Ajungo. Okay, so I'm actually currently reading this one but I can already tell it's going to be very good. A story about a boy who goes on a quest to bring water to his city (they're under the thumb of a neighbor city that provides them water... as long as they agree to cut out the tongues of anyone older than thirteen.
It was a twofold price, a price of blood and a price of history: an untongued people cannot tell their story.
#answers#ask game#book asks#book recs#novellas#the emperor's soul#thornhedge#mysteries of thorn manor#artificial condition#the secret life of bots#the lies of the ajungo#brandon sanderson#t kingfisher#margaret rogerson#martha wells#suzanne palmer#moses ose utomi#terapsina rambles#terapsina's book rambles#moonofiron
28 notes
·
View notes
Text
System collapse notes made as I read:
(Spoilers, obvs, mostly out of context)
Amazing opening page as usual. This feels like coming home I'm so happy
Side note, "one of you" - like, is this being delivered to an actual audience, or does mb just like to pretend it is? I know it's just an in-universe excuse for the conceit but either option is so good
ART canon tax fraud?? ART canon embezzlement???
ART @ BE ship: "people die in car crashes all the time. I just thought that was interesting :)"
The note about iris having grown up alongside ART is so funny. And the note about her being ART's ratthi is so sweet from both sides of that comparison
I adore Three so much. The fucking baby deer comparison killed me this poor construct
I could be misremembering but it feels like secunit's narration has more colloquialisms than before, which is fun if I'm right
Love than mb and mensah have the exact same reaction to the extra settlement lmao. Handshake meme
ARGUCUSSION
SECUNIT YOUR BOUNDARIES. YOUR NEEDS. PLEASE STOP TELLING PEOPLE YOU'RE FINE
"Fun stuff like space battles and rescuing people and space monsters and throwing asteroids at planets" this bot loves its cheesy tv so much I'm gonna cry
WHY DO YOU KEEP REDACTING THINGS SECUNIT PLS THIS IS STRESSFUL. I can't tell if this is it editing out trauma discussion or something else
Mb casually using ART as a dictionary lmao
Oh god is it hurting over 2.0 specifically. Oh man of course it is. God this poor bot I'm so 😭
Mb and ART working as a team so fluidly.... best friends......
Ratthi can tell secunit is busy thinking/working just by glancing at it.... FRIENDS.....
"SENTIENCE SUCKS" LMAO. YEAH OKAY WE'VE ALL FELT THAT
MB JUST HAS THE VIDEO FILE OF RATTHI ALMOST GETTING EATEN BY A WORM ON HAND. AMAZING
Mb and pin-lee bonding over watching scifi car crash videos. Incredible
SECUNIT THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES. LITERALLY TRYING TO JUMP OUT OF A PLANE WITHOUT A PARACHUTE. PLEASE
I'm gonna cry pls mb stop beating yourself up for being traumatised. This is exactly what you were giving mensah shit about!!!!!
"It was always my job to get hurt" I Am Going To Fucking Cry
CITING ITS SOURCE ON THE PRE CR HISTORY LESSON LMAO
God I feel like this poor bot spent six books building up its confidence and it's all just been shattered after the thing with 2.0. Like it's so palpable in the narration that it thinks it's broken in some way and is forcing itself to carry on regardless but with no regard for its own survival, which has always been of pretty high priority for it even in ASR!! It's let itself get beaten up in the other books but it's never been reckless like this. Mb please stop punishing yourself.....
Ohh tarik and mb shared corpo trauma..... can we talk about that maybe
Ratthi correcting iris about the ex-secunit thing.... ouuououugghghh
"Under normal circumstances that would be kind of hilarious" mb honey as a reader. That IS hilarious
Mb "so is this guy your..... ex-security..... not that I'm feeling jealous or insecure rn....."
HEY GUYS YOU EVER HAVE A PTSD FLASHBACK SO BAD YOU PASS OUT. GUYS
HEY GUYS HAVE YOU EVER HAD YOUR BRAIN-CRASHING PTSD FLASHBACK ANALYSED IN DETAIL BY A BUNCH OF PEOPLE YOU WANT TO RESPECT YOU
Mb once again having the worst time of its life but being offered a media archive by a friendly bot: oh fuck yes hello there
Ooooh pre-corpo media no less......
THE ART THERAPY-SPEAK..... "that’s for humans" "this affects the part of you that is human" I'm going to yell and yell and yell
"No, it doesn't read my mind, it just knows me really well" 🥺
I feel like MW has gotten more up to date on current gender/pronoun usage since the earlier books which is nice to see. We've had neopronouns before but having pronouns attached to feed/character intros is new and appreciated
Mb: "aw fuck am I being tall and intimidating again"
Local secunit physically repelled by power phrase "sexual discussion" like a fucking skyrim shout
VISUAL EQUIVALENT OF A WET BLANKET..... SECUNIT......
OHH...... OHHHHH!!!!! OHH MY GOD THE. IS THIS THE. WHEN I TALKED ABOUT THE CONCEIT EARLIER.........
Oh okay no BUT MURDERBOT NEW CREATIVE DIRECTOR POSITION BABEY!!!!!
And ratthi is so supportive. God I'm so. AAAAUGH
Just patch out the anxiety lmao. New mental illness fix dropped please restart your OS to apply
Telling your bestie to fuck off IS a kind of love language and I'm glad that ART appreciates it 😌
LITERALLY "(INTERNAL SCREAMING)". LMAO
Mb literally in a life or death situ rn: I could just burn part of this person's brain out to save us..... that seems mean though :/
"I lack a sense of proportional response" LMAO ART. At least it's self-aware
"I didn't come here to make friends" says the secunit who literally cannot go anywhere without forming some kind of allyship with someone
The delayed-hack though, that's fun. Wonder whether this file is gonna slowly make its way from CR secunit to CR secunit as mb gradually becomes some kind of mythic figure, lmao
"Be safe" 🥺
FINAL GIRL IS OUT. FINAL DRONE IS IN
ART: "Oooh you guys care about me ^^ lol"
LMAO ART YOUNGER SIBLING BEHAVIOUR
ALSO YES SET THREE UP WITH THE OTHER CRAZY SMART AI THEY CAN ALL GET A SECUNIT BESTIE!!!!
Murderbot trauma acknowledgement 😌 You go working through your feelings mb you're doing so well ily
WHERE ARE WE GOING NEXXXTTTT THAT IS INDEED THE QUESTION!!!
Summary thoughts: this was really good and I like that MW has taken the time to address the NE fallout before moving on to whatever is coming next, I'm mostly just excited for that whatever-comes-next now. I didn't expect this story to still be focused on the same planet, but it's cool that it was! And now we're moving on with more machine intelligences and rogue secunits in play!! And they mentioned the comfortunit from artificial condition so hopefully that'll come back into play soon as well! I feel like something is building up wrt construct rights in the setting and I'm very excited to see that, but in the meantime I loved getting this familiar romp through MB having a very bad day and working through its emotions while also trying not to die. And it was fun having the twist on the usual formula with things being so isolated and it having to handle everything while being off its game, it felt a lot more tense than some of the other entries just by virtue of the fact that MB's narration was so much less confident than usual, and it made it really nice to hear the fire come back to its voice once we hit that point in the story. 11/10 as usual I love this bot so goddamn much
#wastepaper basket#I think I had a tag for murderbot liveblogging at one point but idr what it was lmao#Just be advised there's spoilers below the cut I guess!#But my spoiler-free review is thst it's amazing as usual and I love this bot so so so so so much#Oh wait I remember the tag#murderbot lb#I think some of these got eaten when I saved the draft at some point or else they'd be even longer lmao.....
22 notes
·
View notes
Text
A Murderbot Diaries fanfiction
Title: Symptom of Something Worse
Word count: 12,429
Set immediately at the end of a canon divergent Network Effect, so has some spoilers for that.
Summary: Tarik comes to see Murderbot in MedBay to ask for some clarification about its pronouns, only for this conversation to turn out much more stressful than either of them could have seen coming...
Warnings: Mentions of abuse. Middle-school health class level discussion of genitals by their scientific names in regards to gender not being reliant upon them.
Started on March 20th, 2024, Finished fully March 28th 2024.
(Please note: The Internet Archive is down while I am typing this post, so these links may not work. I'll edit this post when it comes back up) You can listen to the audiobook version here, with and follow along with the transcript here, which is different from this text version. It’s an hour and 6 minutes long. You are encouraged to download it.
You can also read this on Fanfiction.net if you want to leave an anonymous review if you're shy.
Fun fact: You gain +10 Comprehension points if you've read The Imperial Radch before you read this. Wink wink nudge nudge you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Tarik came to see Murderbot while it was still confined to the MedBay while A.R.T. did its best to fix Murderbot’s various catastrophic injuries.
The ‘fix the broken Murderbot’ thing was even slower going than usual, not only because of the extent and nature of Murderbot’s injuries, but because A.R.T. itself was still recovering from its own ordeal, and wasn’t back up to normal functionality yet, despite all its bluster to the contrary.
Now Murderbot knew what it was like being on the other end of the ‘someone who is very clearly not okay insists it’s okay’. Now it kinda felt bad for the humans who had to see it get an arm ripped off while it insisted it was fine.
You know, in theory, having a single supercomputer in charge of all the onboard systems of a ship seems like it should be a great idea. In practice, though, it meant that when A.R.T. was debilitated, so were all of its systems.
The only things functioning normally were things like emergency medkits and other items with their own built in, independant systems. Everything else required A.R.T.’s control.
Before Tarik had came in, he had both knocked on the closed hatch, and sent Murderbot a friendly ping on the feed. He didn’t know it could see him through the tiny camera drone it’d left hanging on the ceiling above the door to guard the corridor. A.R.T. would have let Murderbot use its cameras system, but they were still nonfunctional, and A.R.T.’s internal sensors were way too overwhelming for a simple SecUnit. One thing that should be noted that A.R.T. had also told Murderbot Tarik was on his way even before its camera saw him. It was at least nice enough to do that.
Even to Murderbot, as bad as it usually was at understanding humans, it was obviously that Tarik wanted to wait outside for it to give him permission to come in, like he would have for any human who was in a private room.
This was a nice gesture.
Unfortunately, A.R.T. opened the door before Murderbot could even think about doing anything, because A.R.T. liked to control everything, like the asshole it was.
Now that the disaster was mostly over and everyone was starting to relax, it was pretty obvious that A.R.T.’s humans were trying to practice the ‘make sure it knows it’s allowed to say no’ routine not only with 3 and 5, but with Murderbot, too. A.R.T. had told them all about it, apparently. Murderbot wished it hadn’t.
And all of the humans going out of their way to ask for its ~consent~ (a fancy word for permission, which it was still getting used to, even after all the time it’d spent on Preservation) before doing things in regards to it would have been really nice, if only A.R.T. would stop ruining it by making all the decisions anyways, without giving Murderbot a chance to make up its mind one way or the other.
It would have liked the opportunity to decide for itself if it wanted to let Tarik in or not, you know. It would at least have been one thing it got to choose in this situation. But it couldn’t even have that.
::We both know you would have opened the door anyways.:: A.R.T. said condescendingly when Murderbot let it feel its annoyance through the feed.
Well, I say ‘let it’ feel its annoyance, but there was really nothing Murderbot could do to stop A.R.T. from looking through its brain whenever it wanted, but whatever.
And...Yeah. There was no arguing with A.R.T. once it decided it was right. And it always thought it was right.
Murderbot still hadn’t gotten over the fact that it had had to apologize for calling A.R.T. a fucker for fucking kidnapping it and almost getting its humans killed before A.R.T. would apologize for doing the exact things Murderbot had called it a fucker for doing.
You know, the whole kidnapping thing. Which was still ongoing if you really thought about it. They had all been brought there by A.R.T.’s machinations (Murderbot had just learned that word from a book) against their will. Murderbot still didn’t know how many people had died when A.R.T had attacked their research ship.
And even if by some absurd miracle everyone had managed to survive, it was undisputable that at least some, if not most, of the humans would develop lasting trauma from the assault, either physical or psychological, or both.
Amena had been pinned in place in collapsed laboratory on a ship that was under attack by an unknown hostile, and as far as she’d been aware, the whole vessel could have been torn apart at any moment. The metal that had pinned her down had been too heavy for Kanti, the only other suvivor in the room with her, to lift, leaving them with no choice but to scream desperately for help while Kanti cut her hands and arms bloody trying to pry the broken door open with a geology chisel.
Murderbot could only hope that Kanti had gotten back to the baseship in time, but there was no way to know.
And there was no telling what had happened to the baseship itself, and everyone who had been aboard.
The only ones whose status it knew were firmly in the ‘alive’ category was Amena, and Drs. Overse, Arada, Ratthi, and Thiago. All of the adults had suffered from toxic air inhalation among other physical traumas in their attempt to rescue Amena and itself.
But they were alive, at least.
No thanks to A.R.T.
Amena was a child who’d been trapped, injured, and afraid for her life. And then she’d witnessed what she thought was Murderbot’s violent death, and been dragged around by people under the hostile influence of alien artifacts.
And then she’d had to watch Murderbot kill those people right in front of her, and not in a way that was intended to be efficient and cause the least amount of pain as possible. There was no other way to describe what it’d done. It’d gone on a rampage. A violent, bloody, gorey rampage.
It wasn’t Murderbot’s finest moment, to say the least.
And after witnessing this, Amena had had no one to depend upon for her safety except for Murderbot itself, the one who’d just murdered people in front of her. And then Ras had died, and Eletra had almost died, and Amena had known that there was something deeply wrong with Murderbot, even while they were still being hunted by more of the brainwashed humans, and the entire time she’d been under the impression that it hated her.
And that wasn’t even all of the trauma she’d gone through since A.R.T. had kidnapped them all.
Amena was just one person out all the people who’d been on their baseship. She was going to have to spend a lot of time in trauma recovery therapy.
And Murderbot hadn’t even started processing any of the trauma it’d gone through yet. Even stuck inside the medchamber, it was doing everything it could to keep its mind off its injuries, and the other events of the past 83 hours. It couldn’t afford to have another mental breakdown when they were still in danger. It’d been trying to keep itself busy by talking to Amena when she was awake, and reading different versions of ancient legends from Earth.
It was very purposefully not watching visual media, because that’s what A.R.T. wanted to do.
Even though A.R.T. had its crew back, they still couldn’t leave, because it was the only non-openly-murderously-hostile way in or out of this system.
And it was refusing to leave the system until the mission it’d originally come here to do was complete, even though it meant continuing to hold them all as kidnapping victims.
And what, exactly, was that original mission? To steal the planet from the corporation that was trying to claim ownership of it.
Also known as: Something incredibly high-risk and likely to get them fired upon. Meaning more threats against the people Murderbot had signed up to protect.
Also, to back up a bit and state it for the record: whether or not Murderbot would have also chosen to open the door isn’t the point. The point is that it was supposed to be allowed to make decisions for itself, not have A.R.T. make them for it.
Why did A.R.T. constantly parrot parts of the trauma therapy stuff at Murderbot like ‘Check in with your emotions!!’ and ‘ground yourself in the present!!’ if A.R.T. wasn’t actually going to let Murderbot make decisions for itself? And full offense, what the fuck was the point in Murderbot ‘grounding itself in the present’ if the present situation was the reason it needed grounding in the first place?
Whatever.
At least A.R.T.’s crew seemed friendly. They didn’t approve of A.R.T. kidnapping people, and kept apologizing while also thanking Murderbot for rescuing them. It thought guilt was part of the reason they kept going out of their way to try and give it a choice in things. It wasn’t their fault A.R.T. was such an asshole. They clearly couldn’t get it to do anything it didn’t want to do any more than Murderbot could.
Tarik, unaware of the tension his arrival had brought back to the surface, stepped into the room, and took a moment to look around at all the empty medical chambers that lined the walls before he finally spotted Murderbot in the far side of the room from the door.
The medical chambers were designed so that they could turn to recline, or be upright, or any position in between. The chamber Murderbot was in had been turned forward so that it was propped mostly upright, so it wouldn’t be so awkward for humans to talk to it. And by less awkward, it mean less awkward for it. The humans probably wouldn’t have cared, they were all being so gracious and apologetic about the whole ‘sorry our asshole transport kidnapped you’ thing. But Murderbot did mind. It didn’t enjoy eye contact, but it disliked having to look up at humans from lying down even more, especially while it was in a medical chamber with tiny mechanical arms moving around trying to sew and cauterize it back together.
It’d gotten severe burns all across its torso and one arm, and the other arm...well, you already know what it had done to its wrist. And if you don’t already know, just imagine something horrible and don’t try to think about it too deeply. It was gross and horrific, that’s really all you need to know.
It wasn’t wearing any clothes, because they would have gotten in the way of the medchamber’s work. Fortunately, the glass casing could be made opaque (which is a fancy word for not-see-throughable) or transparent at will through the feed, so no one would be able to see anything Murderbot didn’t want them to.
It would have liked to keep the whole thing opaque, so they couldn’t see anything at all, but A.R.T. insisted that Murderbot had to show its face when humans were talking to it, because otherwise it was rude. Again with the A.R.T. does whatever it wants no matter what anyone else says, thing. It never seemed to get tired of it.
A.R.T. was going to do whatever it wanted, and if you didn’t like it, you could walk out the airlock any time you wanted.
So Murderbot had no choice in keeping the glass opaque, just like it’d had no choice in being kidnapped.
It opened its eyes to watch the dark coating on the glass vanish within a few moments of Tarik coming through the doorway, giving it a view straight across the room at the empty medchamber on the other side. The blue-grey metal was shiny in the lights from the deep cleaning A.R.T. had started of every surface.
At the moment, its few functional drones were scrubbing every surface of the air vents and maintenance hatches. The rooms had all been finished so far.
Murderbot watched Tarik with another drone it had inside of the room, since it couldn’t currently turn its neck to see him come closer with its eyes. It had exactly five drones left, and the other three were guarding Amena and the rest of its humans, who were currently all asleep in a giant pile in one of A.R.T.’s guest quarters.
There are a lot of things about humans Murderbot would never understand, and the appeal of “cuddling” was one of them. But it seemed to help them de-stress, which was a good thing, at least.
Even if Murderbot got viscerally uncomfortable just imagining being in that crowded pile of sleeping bodies. Amena had curled up behind Thiago, who was using one of Ratthi’s arms as a pillow and holding the other one like it was a lifeline. Ratthi’s legs had somehow gotten under Overse, who had curled around Arada in what humans called ‘spooning’. They had started out covered by a big blanket, but that had long since been pulled mostly off the bed by Amena, who slept only halfway under the remainder. Murderbot didn’t know how any of them were comfortable enough to breathe, let alone sleep.
It kept one drone in the room with them, another outside constantly sweeping the cooridor, and the third one stationed at the nearest intersection. It was the best it could do with such a short supply.
Back in the medbay, looking through the drone it had inside the room with itself, it’d seen Tarik give a little wave when he saw where it was, and began to walk over, visibly wincing every now and then.
A lot of A.R.T.’s crew had gotten injured during the rescue, not just Murderbot and its humans. Humans were a little easier to fix than Units, though, since there was nothing proprietary about unaugmented human biology, and none of these humans were augmented, but even once you sealed their wounds, their bodies still had to regrow everything themselves, even when you gave them help to do it. Tarik would probably need two more days at least before he was back to normal. Luckily, his injury hadn’t been serious, unlike Murderbot’s.
Murderbot didn’t know exactly how Tarik had been injured, because of A.R.T.’s ‘doctor-patient confidentiality’ rule. Unless someone’s life was directly at risk or it was something Murderbot could detect on its own, A.R.T. wasn’t going to just go blabbing all the details of the humans injuries to it without their permission.
And asking them for their permission to know just seemed like it would be really awkward. They’d want to know why Murderbot wanted to know, and it didn’t actually have any good reason besides the fact that it’d gotten used to knowing every single detail about every single person around it, which obviously wouldn’t go over well. Though, they might just feel guilty enough about the kidnapping thing to tell it anyways. But there was no point causing more stress in an already stressful situation by pushing it.
It turns out that people who actually have a choice in the matter are really unwilling to give up their privacy, they’re really attached to the concept. And Murderbot could see why, now that it’d had a few fleeting chances to try it itself.
Also, living aboard A.R.T., who saw or heard or felt everything that happened, at all times, no matter where you were aboard, they already had to give up a ton of their privacy, so they were even more desperate to cling to what few scraps they still had left. So Murderbot resigned itself to not knowing.
But hey, at least Tarik was clearly less injured than he’d been when Murderbot first met him, so that was something. It didn’t like being around seriously injured humans, because it set off all kinds of residual programming that made it think it was going to be punished for not protecting them well enough. And it already had enough anxiety to deal with. It didn’t need to have any more panic attacks today, thank you very much.
Tarik walked closer, and Murderbot mentally reviewed what it already knew about him to try and prepare itself for whatever was about to happen.
It knew from its earlier calculations when itd first seen Tarik that he was around average height for a human, which meant he was shorter than Murderbot even when it was leaning slightly backwards, and he had longer dark hair that he let curl loosely around his head, whereas Murderbot kept its as short as inhumanly possible.
If it’d been able to stop it from growing at all, it would have. But unlike humans, there’s no part of it that wasn’t locked behind a million Company patents.
And apparently whoever had come up with the design for Company Units had really, really not wanted them to ever be completely hairless. If Murderbot even tried physically shaving or lazering its head hair off, it would just grow back instantly. And if it kept trying it’d just drain its batteries from the hair having to be continuously synthesized. It hoped whoever made that decision, and put so many locks on keeping it in place, died a slow, painful, humiliating death.
Also unlike Murderbot, Tarik had facial hair, because some humans really like having lots of hair on their bodies, including on their face. It was a black beard and mustache that went around his mouth and nose, and up the sides of his jaw all the way to his ears.
Murderbot was at least glad the Company hadn’t decided that Units had to have hair like that on their faces. One interesting thing though was that Tarik used special aromatic oils on it so that he always smelled nice. Murderbot hadn’t even known you could do that.
Tarik’s skin was also lighter than Murderbot’s, more towards the tan side of the spectrum rather than dark brown. It was an interesting comparison to make, when most of your skin was currently in the process of being regrown. Since Murderbot was a construct, its endoskeleton was made of metal instead of bone, with a mix of organic and mechanic materials around it. Its skin was normally dark brown, but while it was in the process of being synthesized for repair, it always started out transparent like glass, and if you sat there and stared long enough -- which it had done a few times out of morbid curiosity -- you’d actually be able to watch its veins growing a new network, carrying the blue or purple fluids necessary for its various functions.
Like I said. It was interesting to compare skin tones when most of yours was currently nonexistant. Murderbot was definitely envious of the ability humans had of naturally regenerating their damaged skin, and even their bones, without even having to put any conscious effort into it. They could even fight off diseases all by themselves. Whereas if you were unlucky enough to be a Unit, or a human with proprietary augments, well, then you got the short end of the stick, and had to rely on outside technology for all of your repairs and upkeep. And it usually didn’t come cheap.
At the moment, Tarik was wearing one of A.R.T.’s dark blue, casual crew uniforms: long soft pants with a lot of pockets to store things in, and a long-sleeved shirt, with the logo for A.R.T.’s university on the back.
Before Murderbot had needed to be confined to the medchamber, A.R.T. had given it one of the same uniforms, since the kidnapping assault had destroyed its original clothes with burns, bullet holes, blood, and its own internal fluids.
Tarik stopped at what was considered a polite distance, standing mostly in front of Murderbot, but slightly off to the side, so that it could continue to stare straight ahead at the empty medchamber without having to look directly at him. He’d clearly spoken to Ratthi about its aversion to eyecontact at some point while it was unconcious.
He asked, “Hi, SecUnit, have a moment to talk?”
Of course it did. It’s not like it had anything else to do besides vehmently (another word Murderbot had recently learned) avoid watching more reruns of visual media with A.R.T. But it knew at this point that humans just asked these things to be polite and as an easy way to start a conversation. Tarik wasn’t literally asking if Murderbot could talk, but asking if it wanted to. He was asking for its consent.
Murderbot had to wait for one of the medical arms to move away from its jaw so it wouldn’t crush it before it could say, hopefully sounding casual, “Go ahead.”
Its voice was projected out of a speaker on the outside of the medical chamber, so Tarik could hear it even though the thick plates of glass that kept the interior sterile.
Murderbot hadn’t been given any reason to dislike him personally, so it was curious about what he wanted.
At least this time A.R.T. didn’t try to answer for it. Murderbot had the drone on the ceiling move around to behind itself so that it could look at Tarik’s face through the camera lense. It was easier to understand human expression this way, since Murderbot could filter the video directly through its behavior recognition software, and it didn’t feel so overwhelming. It was almost like putting a filter between it and the real interaction, so it didn’t feel as much pressure.
When Tarik smiled, Murderbot recognized it as being friendly and relaxed.
Tarik stuck one hand inside his pants pocket and leaned slightly on one leg, and said, gesturing with his other hand along with his words, “I know Perihelion’s probably already said who I am, but I wanted to introduce myself anyways. I’m really bad with names and faces, so I try to make sure I get to meet everyone so I’ll have less chance of mixing them up later. Sorry if that happens, just remind me and I’ll try to remember.”
He shrugged one shoulder in what was an apologetic sort of way, according to Murderbot’s drone’s behavior algorithm and its own experiences so far, and Tarik said again, “I’ve just always been bad at recognizing people.”
Murderbot had a hard time imagining what it would be like not to be able to remember everything you’d ever seen in exact detail, but it knew organic memory storage didn’t work as well as mechanical. Humans – or at least, unaugmented ones at least – didn’t get to consciously pick and choose which memories they kept and which ones faded.
“Anyways,” Tarik inclined his head slightly. “My name’s Tarik, no last name. I’m neomale, and my pronouns are he/him/his/himself. It’s nice to say hi. I just wanted to say thanks for saving my life, and say I’m sorry for the injuries,” he gestured towards the medchamber, in case there was any confusion, “and I hope they heal well.”
He seemed sincere, and Murderbot don’t know why that was still surprising, most of the humans it’d been around lately were usually sincere. And A.R.T.’s crew had so far been nothing but apologetic and sympathetic.
It said, “You’re welcome.” instead of anything else it could have said in this particular situation, because A.R.T. had been nudging it in the feed to ‘take credit where credit was due’ and wouldn’t let up until Murderbot said something that would accept the gratitude. As though it had really been Murderbot’s choice. It added, “It wasn’t your fault I got hurt, but, thanks.”
It left the part of whose fault it actually was carefully and pointedly unspoken. A.R.T. knew exactly who it was talking about.
Tarik smiled again, looking pleased. Then he tilted his head to the side a little, almost like he was overemoting to make his meaning clear, but a quick glance at A.R.T.’s offered memories showed Murderbot this was normal behavior for Tarik, as he said, lowering his voice slightly, as though he were about to say something private, “And I just wanted to double check, the pronouns are it/its/itself, right? I heard other people saying ‘it’, but I just wanted to make sure—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was suddenly cut off, because the first part of that statement had offended A.R.T., who came slamming into the conversation before Murderbot could stop it, demanding, in that overpoweringly aggressive way it had, ::Are you accusing me of misgendering SecUnit?::
It should probably be explained that there wasn’t really a thing such as “volume” in the feed, not in the way you’d think of sound, because the feed isn’t actually using sound at all. But you could increase the intensity of the message, and humans tended to say that made it ‘louder’, or ‘quieter’ if you were decreasing the intensity.
In that aspect, A.R.T. was being very ‘loud’ when it said this. It was the feed equivalent of someone slamming their fist onto a table and shouting in your face. And the aggression was very plain, as much as A.R.T. later proclaimed it hadn’t been aggressive at all and Murderbot and Tarik were both just being childish to think so.
Tarik was so startled he actually fell over in his instinctive attempt to get ‘away’ from the sudden scary ‘noise’. But the ‘noise’ was coming from inside his own head, so his reaction was extremely confused, and he ended up tripping over his own legs and falling into the wall, which thankfully wasn’t far, since we were at the end of the room.
Murderbot’s drone could see and hear Tarik’s heart rate spiking and his clear anxiety. And the anxiety was entirely justified. A.R.T. had pretty much done the same thing to Murderbot when they’d first met, and it had been so terrified it’d considered initiating a shutdown, thinking A.R.T. was going to kill it, what with the whole threatening to fry its brain thing.
There was something that felt viscerally wrong to Murderbot to see A.R.T. treat one of its own crew members like this, something that felt deeply uncomfortable to the permanent remnants of its ‘protect humans at all costs’ programming, along with its general, you know, morals.
It was one thing to treat Murderbot like this – it was just a SecUnit, after all – and it was even sort of reasonable for it to not care about the safety of Murderbot’s humans, because they weren’t its crew — but it was another for A.R.T. to do this to one of its crew, a human Murderbot had been almost killed trying to rescue, a human it was supposed to care about enough to justify kidnapping Murderbot and putting its humans at risk.
And there was no way it was an accident. A.R.T. knew more about how to use the feed and communicate with humans than Murderbot had ever forgotten.
(And yes, it did still feel betrayed about how much A.R.T had lied to it when they first met. Pretending it didn’t understand human body language as much as it really did, so they’d bond over frantically figuring it out together, while Murderbot was the only one actually panicking.
Murderbot felt like A.R.T. had just been toying with it the entire time, which just hurt all the worse, because it’d trusted A.R.T.)
::A.R.T., stop it.:: It snapped, unsure if it was still yelling at Tarik on a private section of the feed.
His face had gone pale, and he had one hand over his heart. He could probably feel it pounding in his chest with adrenaline the way Murderbot could hear it.
Murderbot said, ::That was uncalled for.:: It was an attempt to turn A.R.T.’s usual patronization back onto it to shame it into stopping, but it didn’t work.
Usually it was A.R.T. saying that to Murderbot, usually because Murderbot was angry at it for just this sort of thing, and had called it what it was: an asshole.
“Perihelion, don’t do that!” Tarik managed to say at that moment, pushing himself back off the wall to stand upright, staring warily up at the ceiling, unable to hide the way he was cringing slightly, clearly expecting it to happen again, “I didn’t even know you were listening! I thought this was a private conversa--” He had to pause, still slightly breathless. “And...no, I’m not accusing you of misgendering SecUnit, I just--”
Once again he was cut off by A.R.T. demanding, loudly, angrily, ::You don’t trust me to know what SecUnit’s pronouns are?::
Tarik winced, but held his ground this time. It was easier to resist when you were expecting it.
After a moment where Murderbot could only assume A.R.T. had said something to him privately, Tarik looked over toward it with a sad, apologetic expression. “I’m sorry for offending you, SecUnit, I’ll just leave you alone.” Obviously he thought A.R.T. was being a bitch on Murderbot’s behalf, and just as obviously, A.R.T. had made him think that.
Tarik started towards the door, walking fast, clearly wanting to avoid any more of A.R.T.’s wrath.
But Murderbot called him back through the speaker on its medchamber: “Hold on, Tarik, A.R.T.’s the one who’s offended, not me. It needs to mind its own business and shut the fuck up. I don’t want you to leave.” It sent him the same friendly ping he’d sent it earlier for emphasis. It felt very odd to actually tell a human it wanted to continue interacting with them when they were trying to leave. This was the first time it’d ever done it.
Murderbot’s voice came out sounding normal and even-toned not because it was calm, but because it was too physically exhausted to raise its voice or emote, even though internally it was furious.
Tarik stopped, and turned back to look towards it, hesitating, shooting anxious glances towards the ceiling, waiting for another outburst. I don’t blame him.
Murderbot said out loud, “A.R.T., fuck off and leave us alone. This is supposed to be a private conversation.”
Out of both spite and necessity, it pulled away all its feed connections to A.R.T. that it could, and resigned itself to having to ignore the barrage of pings and messages A.R.T. instantly started bombarding it with. The activity in its medchamber stalled for half a moment as apparently most of A.R.T.’s energy was redirected into slamming it for attention. Yeah, that was doing nothing to help its anger or its exhaustion.
To Tarik, it said, doing its best to ignore the selfish, entitled, bully of an elephant in the room, “What did you want to ask me?”
Before A.R.T. had interrupted him twice, it had seemed like Tarik had more questions to ask. And since A.R.T. didn’t want to let him ask them, Murderbot did.
A.R.T. had already let him in without Murderbot getting to choose, so it at least wanted to be able to answer his questions itself, even if the answer was going to be a simple ‘fuck off’ if he was going to be one of those people who tried to convince it to change its pronouns to ‘real’ pronouns and ‘stop hating itself’ by using the pronouns it actually liked, that actually represented its gender.
It still didn’t understand why people try to insist that they/them/their/(theirs)/themself pronouns were interchangeable with it/its/itself, when if that were true, they clearly wouldn’t be so vehemently against using its actual it/its/itself pronouns.
But logic always flew out the window when bigotry was the subject, so Murderbot don’t know why it still bothered to be surprised.
But even with A.R.T.’s outbursts clearly scaring him, Tarik didn’t seem like the sort of person who would try to harass Murderbot into changing its pronouns. It wanted to hear what he wanted to ask. It was curious. And not just out of spite for A.R.T.
Tarik came back again, still clearly nervous, and stood in the same spot as before, a polite distance away, slightly to the side so Murderbot wouldn’t have to look directly at him or close its eyes. He was still trying to prioritize Murderbot’s comfort even with A.R.T. being such an asshole, which increased Murderbot’s level of...something for him. They definitely were not friends. But he sort of seemed like he could be a friend, if A.R.T. would stop sabotaging his attempts to be nice.
“Sorry about A.R.T. being an asshole.” It said, feeling like it should be apologizing for some absurd reason, even though it didn’t make any sense.
Tarik lived aboard A.R.T., he should know it better than Murderbot. And it definitely was not Murderbot’s fault A.R.T. was an asshole, even if it was currently being an asshole and pretending it was on Murderbot’s behalf.
But Tarik looked kind of confused by its statement, and Murderbot remembered that he probably didn’t know what the anagram stood for.
It explained, “I call it Asshole Research Transport, since it didn’t tell me its name was Perihelion when we first met.” It did not mention all the other things A.R.T hadn’t told it when they first met.
“Ah.” Tarik said simply. And it was very clear just from the way he said it that he agreed with the assessment.
A.R.T., along with spamming Murderbot, was also now doing its usual ominously looming in the feed routine. (Sarcasm:) Totally not creepy at all. Definitely not asshole behavior. (End sarcasm.) Murderbot could practically feel it leaning against the walls it’d put up, not in the kind of way where A.R.T. was trying to break them down, but just casually applying enough pressure that Murderbot would remember it could at any time.
Sorta like someone not trying to break your arm, but gripping you tightly enough that they left a bruise, and it was completely beyond question that they could break your arm if they wanted to.
Yeah, like I said. Asshole.
“What were you saying before A.R.T. threw a fit?” It asked. Now its utter exhaustion came in handy, because its voice came out sounding all calm and dignified. Which made A.R.T. look worse.
In response, A.R.T. abruptly stopped spamming it and ‘let go’ of its walls, as though this would somehow prove that A.R.T. wasn’t throwing a fit or being a creep. As though stopping doing the bad thing meant the bad thing hadn’t happened.
Tarik, unaware of the battle going on beyond his perception, grimaced, clearly bracing himself. “Well...” He started, then paused, waiting for A.R.T.’s expected interruption.
They waited a moment or two in relative silence, where the only sounds were his heart beating, Murderbot’s internal gyros, and the soft whir of the medchamber’s arms still working on it. At least it had one not completely assholish thing to say about A.R.T.’s behavior here: It hadn’t stopped trying to heal Murderbot.
Through its drone, Murderbot could actually see Tarik’s heart rate slowing back down to normal.
When the tantrum didn’t immediately explode again, Tarik continued, still hesitant, “Okay, well, it’s two things I want to clarify. First, I’ve heard other people just saying ‘it’, no other versions so far, so I wanted to ask if the pronouns are it/its/itself, or is it another variation?”
Murderbot didn’t know if Tarik was aware of it, but he was still stooping slightly. Instinctively and apparently unconciously, he was trying to get further away from the ceiling, where humans tended to visualize A.R.T.’s presence being located.
He kept wincing, too, not just from expectation, but from the pain of his injuries. Which just made Murderbot even more pissed off at A.R.T. than it already was.
But Murderbot was confused by what he was trying to ask. “Another variation?” It asked. In the feed, it opened its wall just long enough to send A.R.T. a vehement, ::Fuck you.:: before it closed it again.
Tarik, unaware of the side comment, nodded, this time sticking both his hands in his pockets. Apparently Murderbot wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to do with its hands when it was nervous.
Tarik said, “I used to know a neoenby whose pronouns were it/ita/its/(itaz)/itaself, and a man who’s pronouns were it/him/her/themself, and a woman who only use “it” for every pronoun. And a lot of other people who use it/its/itself. So I just wanted to check which set to use, so I wouldn’t use the wrong ones by mistake. I figured it would be more polite to ask directly, instead of going through the others.” He shrugged one shoulder as he sent another cautious glance towards the ceiling, and added, probably just as aware as Murderbot was that A.R.T. was listening to every word they said, “I really don’t like talking about people behind their backs, and I’d rather get pronoun info right from the source. No offence is intended to anyone.”
Huh.
It hadn’t ever occurred to Murderbot that other pronoun sets that included ‘it’ existed, nor had it ever heard about anyone using a specific combination set like it/him/her/themself.
It took Murderbot a few, long awkward seconds to realize Tarik wanted it to answer his question now.
“My pronouns are it/its/itself.” It said, suddenly more than a little dazed by how considerate he’d been in asking.
And maybe also dazed from the catastrophic wounds it still had, coupled with the stress of A.R.T.’s spam attack and ominous looming. Those things weren’t great for an already injured murderbot. But part of it was also definitely from surprise. No human, or bot, or anyone else had ever asked it this kind of question before.
But wait, he’d said he had two things to ask. Now Murderbot was really curious. And even more angry at A.R.T. for trying to chase him away before he could ask. “What’s the second part?”
“Ah,” Tarik took one hand out of his pocket and moved over to lean against the wall. Maybe because he just wanted to, maybe because he was afraid of falling into it again. Maybe it hurt less to lean against the wall. Murderbot don’t know, it didn’t ask.
“Well,” he said, “I wanted to check; another neoenby I knew always wanted to be referred it as “it”, with no name, and never referred to as ‘you’, even when it was being spoken to directly. If one wanted to refer to it in particular, one’d say ‘the neoenby’, or if there was more than one neoenby in the group, ‘the neoenby with the constellation over its eye’. It always referred to itself in the third person. I wanted to check if that was something preferable. I’m fine with being called ‘you’, or by my name or pronouns, by the way.”
Well, that explained the strange way he’d been structuring his sentences.
This was the first time Murderbot had actually spoken to him outside of the life and death situation they’d been thrown into, where he’d said exactly 18 words within its range of hearing, so it’d been assuming the way he was speaking now was just a quirk of his. But no, he was actually being really nice and trying to find out if it was a quirk of Murderbot’s.
And to think A.R.T. had tried to kill this conversation before it could even get interesting.
“It’s okay to call me ‘you’.” Murderbot said, “I’ve never heard of someone using pronouns that way.” Not even in all its media.
“Not too many have,” Tarik said, “But I’ve met half a dozen at this point, so I like to double check with the person before I make assumptions, and I want to make sure everyone knows I’ll use their pronouns the way they want, even if it seems unconventional, or if other people have told them it’s too much of a hassle. Thank you for letting me know. Is it alright if I ask another question? I know how tiring it can be to be in a medchamber, so I don’t want to tire you out.” He seemed slightly more relaxed now that A.R.T. hadn’t interrupted or gone on the offensive again.
Murderbot’s batteries couldn’t actually run out while it was hooked up to A.R.T.’s systems unless there was an even bigger disaster than any of them were prepared for, so it said, “Go ahead, I’m fine.” Well, not technically fine, but it was healing, and talking wouldn’t make it any worse, so.
Also, it didn’t have anything else to do besides read as a way of pointedly not watching media, which wasn’t as fun as reading because it actually wasn’t in the mood to not watch media. And this conversation had turned out more interesting than it’d thought it would be.
It could still feel A.R.T. looming in the feed, for the record. Making its presence known at least to Murderbot. It didn’t know if Tarik could feel it. Now less like someone crushing your arm, and more like standing uncomfortably close and breathing down your neck.
But at least this time it wasn’t flashing the lights at Murderbot in code to force it to talk to it like last time they’d had a fight just hours earlier, or demanding Murderbot apologize for being rightfully upset for being rightfully kidnapped, right?
Tarik continued, “Are there any kinds of words you’d prefer I use to refer to you, and any words you want me to avoid? For instance, although I do identify as male, I prefer to be called a xan instead of a man, if it ever comes up. Are there any particular ways you want me to refer to you sort of like that?”
To avoid confusion if you’re visually reading this instead of listening to the audio log: Tarik pronounced the X in the word “xan” (X A N) as a Z sound, so that it sounded like “zan” (Z A N), rhyming with “man” (M A N).
He was asking, like, did Murderbot want to be called a woman or a man or an enby or a neman or a phaen or an androgyne or an othran or any of the other million and one gender terms it’d catalogued throughout its waking memory?
Usually when someone asked for its gender, Murderbot put indeterminate, or not applicable, depending on the circumstances. But gender itself wasn’t the exact same thing as the gender terms he was asking about. It didn’t think It could actually be called ‘an indeterminate’ the way humans could be called ‘a woman’ or ‘a man’ or ‘an enby’ or ‘a tercera’ or any countless others.
Note from future Murderbot to everyone listening to or reading this: Yes, that is literally an option. As of now, it prefers to be called an indeterminate the way other people call themselves a man, or a woman, or a neman, or an androgyne, or a – well, you get the picture.
But obviously it didn’t know that at the time, or realize that it could have literally just asked to be called that.
In its defense, no one had ever actually asked it this question before, and it’d never seen anything in its media to prepare it for the question. It’d had people ask for its name, which it never gave them, and it’d had people ask for its pronouns. Sometimes they asked for its gender itself. And in its media, people asked those kinds of questions all the time.
But they’d never asked it what gendered terms it wanted to be called.
Murderbot could think a lot faster than a human, but even it couldn’t think fast enough to come up with an answer to this unforeseen question in a reasonable amount of time.
There were so many options. And it hated a lot of them. So instead it said, “Uhhh…” to stall for a few more moments.
And then it still couldn’t think of anything. There were still too many options even when it sorted out the ones it automatically hated. It’d have to test them all out individually by thinking about itself in the third person to see what it liked and didn’t like, and ... ah crap. That was asking a lot when it wasn’t at optimum performance capability.
It couldn’t stall any longer, so it ended up saying, “I don’t really know. I just know I don’t want to be referred to with anything involving human genders. My gender is indeterminate.”
Sometimes, Murderbot wondered what its life would have been like if it hadn’t said this.
Tarik frowned a little, but when he spoke, he just sounded confused. “What do you mean exactly by ‘human genders’?”
For a few seconds, Murderbot’s mind went blank. What did he mean he didn’t know what human genders were? Wasn’t it obvious?
“Like, male and female,” It said awkwardly. “I don’t want to ever be called a man or a woman or anything to do with those.” It was still busy trying to sort through all the gendered terms it’d ever heard, which was not helped in any way by A.R.T. deciding to start spamming it again.
Probably trying to be ‘helpful’ by throwing another million terms at it. Murderbot didn’t know, because it deleted all of the messages the instant it got them. And then dumped the trash bin for good measure.
Tarik, however, was unaware of the multitasking Murderbot was doing, and it’s not like it gave him any indication of what it was doing either, or like it multitasking wasn’t perfectly normal. Murderbot just wanted to make it clear that this conversation was going on on two very different levels. It wasn’t sure if that was even relevant, but whatever. It’s its audio log, it can do what it want.
Anyways, Tarik tilted his head, still frowning, “Well...” he said slowly, “Female and male aren’t really ‘human’ genders. They come from the old gender binary, but they’re not unique to humans. I’ve known a lot of bots who were male or female, but I think I understand what you mean; you don’t want terms relating to male or female used for you, right?”
Well, needless to say, Murderbot absolutely did not believe him.
About the ‘I’ve known bots who were male or female’, part, not the ‘I get what you mean’ part.
“That’s impossible.” It said.
(Sarcasm:) Great response, it knows. Give it up for Murderbot, the best interlocutor ever constructed! (End sarcasm.)
Tarik spent a moment actually blinking silently, the way people do in memes. It was so surprising and funny that Murderbot had to pause its search to focus on his face and make a looping gif, which of course it would never show to anyone but itself. Then Tarik asked, clearly confused, “What’s impossible?”
What the hell kind of question was that?
Murderbot said, in the tone people on TV did when speaking to a young child who doesn’t know anything, “Bots can’t have genders.”
(It knows, It knows.)
A.R.T. decided that was the moment it was going to stop pretending Murderbot actually had a choice in not listening to it, because it cut into its feed like it was tissue paper to say, ::You cannot be serious.::
::Shut up.:: Murderbot replied, not bothering to try kicking it out.
There was no point in wasting more of its energy trying to keep A.R.T. out when Murderbot knew it could just break down its feed walls whenever it wanted.
A.R.T. said, more insistently, ::That is not how gender works.::
::I said shut up!::
A.R.T. was not impressed. ::I’m literally nonbinary and I know that’s not how this works.::
::Fuck off!::
“Um, that’s really not true.” Tarik said, unaware of the argument he was missing out on.
Sometimes Murderbot wonders if it would be nicer to not have any feed connection at all. You only have to deal with one thing at a time. 9JX might have the right idea after all.
Tarik asked, “What makes you think that?” Murderbot could tell his tone was meant to be diplomatic, because he clearly didn’t agree with it, and also just as clearly didn’t want to make it mad.
He hadn’t actually taken a step backwards, but he’d shifted his body slightly away from Murderbot, like he was no longer overjoyed to be having this conversation. Not that he’d been overjoyed to begin with, but you know what I mean.
Asking for Murderbot’s pronouns? Great. Asking for its gendered terms? A confusing novelty, but also good. But this? Asking it to explain the concept of human genders and why they couldn’t be applied to nonhumans? Murderbot really did not want to have this conversation with anyone, let alone a human, but it was still a better alternative than having to put up with A.R.T.’s current bullcrap without any other distractions.
Also, it literally could not understand why Tarik and A.R.T. were acting like it was being ridiculous. The answer seemed so obvious to it. So it decided to cut straight through what it thought was pure bullshit and get straight to the point: “Bots don’t have penises or vaginas.”
And ts logic went that you couldn’t have a gender unless you had one of those. It seemed really obvious to it, and it was hoping to gross Tarik out by not using any euphemisms. Humans invented euphemisms to avoid embarassment, right?
Well it didn’t work.
Apparently, some humans aren’t grossed out by those words when you’re using them for this kind of conversation. They grossed Murderbot out no matter what the context, so it assumed that’s how it was for everyone.
Yes, you may have noticed Murderbot has a problem with making assumptions like that. Well just you wait and see. Because this is just the start.
“Well, that’s not really true either.” Tarik said in response, which was the complete opposite of any reply Murderbot’d imagined, completely throwing off all its trains of thought so quickly its mind almost literally stalled for half a fraction of a second.
But Tarik was already continuing to speak, like this bombshell he’d just dropped on Murderbot was perfectly normal information and not groundbreaking in any way: “True, bots can’t have purely organic versions like humans or constructs can, but there are mechanical versions that—”
Woah woah woah, what? What was even happening now? What was he talking about? What?
Murderbot scrambled to salvage some semblance of ‘totally not flipping out’ in its exhausted, bewildered state, and it could just tell A.R.T. was laughing at it even though it hadn’t actually said anything yet.
But Tarik didn’t stop for Murderbot’s catastrophically derailed trains of thought, so it had to stop them itself and actually pay attention to what he was saying, because he was still talking:
“—can be made, and anyways, having or not having one of those kinds of gentalia doesn’t determine your gender. You can be any gender and have a penis, or a vagina, or both, or something else entirely, or nothing at all. Gender is a lot more complicated than just checking what kind of genitals someone has. Anyone, including humans, bots, and constructs, and anyone else, can be any gender they want, regardless of what kind of genitals they do or do not have.”
To say this was shocking to Murderbot would be an understatement.
I feel like I should explain that this made Murderbot incredibly absolutely angry specifically because it had always defined its lack of gender on its lack of genitals.
It was the defense it always pulled out when a human started trying to misgender it, but now Tarik seemed to be saying that that defense wasn’t actually as rock solid as it thought it was.
Because if what he was saying was true (and, spoiler alert from the future, it literally is true), then that meant that Murderbot didn’t have to be genderless just because it didn’t have any genitals.
And acknowledging that fact made it feel like it was opening itself up to having its gender questioned and put up for debate, like it would mean people were now allowed to misgender it and harass it.
Which it literally wasn’t, but that’s how it made it feel at the time.
Murderbot’s insecure, terrified logic was, ‘if I can’t define my lack of gender by my lack of genitals, then can I even define it at all? If my genderlessness isn’t real because my lack of genitals ‘proves’ it, then can literally anything prove it?’
Yeah, hello from the again. The answer is yes. Obviously. Murderbot’s gender was proved by it telling you what it is. That’s what the “social” part of ‘gender is a social construct’ means. That’s how it works for everyone.
But it didn’t realize this at the time. So it was pretty much flipping the fuck out. Well, mentally, at least, not really physically. It was still too injured to move even if it’d wanted to, even if it wasn’t being restrained by the med chamber. If it’d been able to move, it would definitely have totally-not-run out of the room or at least shoved itself into a corner to stare at the wall. It was actually so physically weak that even the panic flooding its mind wasn’t enough to kick start its systems into high gear. Yeah, its injuries were that bad.
The only reason Murderbot was even able to be conscious at all was because A.R.T. was feeding it enough power to avoid involuntary shutdown, and was helping to regulate its automatic functions that couldn’t function by themselves.
Also, yes, this is exactly as horrifying a situation to be in as you’d imagine it would be when your life support system was also the one who got you hurt in the first place and kept, and Murderbot quoted the trauma recovery therapy group, ‘violating your autonomy’.
You know, that incredibly precious resource which 99.99% of Murderbot’s life had been lacking. That autonomy.
And see, if A.R.T. hadn’t been acting like such an enormous asshole, Murderbot could have at least opaqued the rest of the medchamber’s glass so that Tarik couldn’t see its face anymore, but when it tried to do exactly that, A.R.T. stopped it immediately, and set an even firmer lock on the control to prevent Murderbot from trying again, very much like someone smacking a kid’s hand away from something they couldn’t be trusted with.
Yeah, that did not fucking help at all with any of the problems ongoing in this situation.
The fact that Tarik was being nice enough to not actually look directly at Murderbot was beside the point.
It closed its eyes so it at least could stop seeing organically. A.R.T. couldn’t stop it from doing that. It could cut off Murderbot’s camera access through its drones, but it couldn’t override Murderbot’s actual eyes. Not unless it wanted to literally use one of the medical arms to pry its eyelid open, and if A.R.T. tried that, well, lets just say Murderbot wouldn’t be offering any apologies for what it did afterward.
Murderbot ended up expressing the little gender / excruciating lack of autonomy crisis it was currently suffering by getting even more angry than it already was, because being angry felt safer than being afraid.
It snapped, in a much weaker, and not at all intimidating voice than it wanted, “That’s bullshit! You don’t know anything about it! You’re just a human! You don’t understand us!”
By ‘us’, it meant bots and constructs as a whole. Which was completely dishonest of it, because as it may already be clear, it hated being lumped in with bots like they were exactly the same. They weren't.
Bots are purely mechanical, constructs like Murderbot are both mechanical and organic. They might both be robots, and have some problems in common, but there are also distinct differences between them, and different kinds of problems they had to deal with that didn’t overlap. Murderbot hated when people lumped them together like they were exactly the same thing just because they weren’t human.
But being a bigot — which to be clear is exactly what Murderbot was doing —usually requires you to be a hypocrite, so it threw that little grievance out the airlock faster than you can say ‘President Lynaros’ once it decided it wasn’t convenient to its argument.
You see, Murderbot was placing itself as the authority on the genders of all robots, and saying that no one who wasn’t ‘one of us’ could understand it or know more about it than it could, because it’d appointed itself the ultimate expert and arbiter.
You may have noticed the tiny little giant gaping hole in this plan of its.
Tarik already knew more about bot and construct genders than it did. Which had just been established like 20 seconds before Murderbot said this load of absolute bullcrap.
Yeah.
Bigotry doesn’t exactly lend itself well to rational argument.
Through its drone’s cameras alone, Murderbot could see that Tarik’s response to this bullcrap was to raise his eyebrows, with all due ‘are you serious right now? We literally just established that I know more about this than you do. Like five seconds ago’.
I don’t blame him.
He must have had better self control than Murderbot did, because he said, without getting outwardly angry, “I understand what my bot friends told me.” He said it very cooly and calmly. It should be noted that Murderbot was not in any way calm. “And they made it very clear that their genders were real, regardless of whether or not they had the genitalia to ‘match’. We had many hours-long conversations going into the details and talking about the theory. Some of them even wrote books on the subject.”
He had lifted his hands to do air-quotes around the word ‘match’ for extra emphasis, in case Murderbot still didn’t understand how much the word was not actually relevant to this conversation.
Well, it was starting to, that was the whole problem.
It did not help it calm down when A.R.T. butted in with, ::Did you seriously think that just because we both happen to use the same pronouns, that this was proof that all bots and constructs universally use those pronouns and are just as genderless as you are? I’m literally not even agender, I’m just nonbinary. I personally know dozens of bots of all kinds who all use all kinds of pronouns and are all kinds of genders. Including the binary genders of male and female.::
Yeah that didn’t help. Well, I mean, it did in one way, because it was further proof that Murderbot had no clue what it was talking about and needed to drastically overhaul its views of the world in general and gender in specific, but what I mean is it didn’t help it calm down at all.
A.R.T. said exasperatedly, ::What about the transports who gave you rides before you met me? And all the other bots who helped you escape? Did you seriously not ask them for their pronouns? Did you really just assume they all used it/its too?::
It was a good thing Murderbot was in the medical chamber, because the way its organic parts were behaving, it would have been really bad for it in its current state otherwise. And by really bad, I mean it probably would have killed it from the stress. What with, you know, being ripped open and burned and all.
Murderbot was so viscerally uncomfortable it had to just lie there for, I kid you not, a good thirty seconds, doing nothing but trying to get its emotions back under control. It wasn’t used to feeling...guilty.
By some miracle it ended up asking a rational question instead of initiating a shutdown to get out of the conversation. If it’d had the opportunity to throw itself out of an airlock at that moment, it probably would have taken it, just to get away from the embarrassment.
Murderbot somehow managed to intelligibly get out, despite its jaw deciding it wanted to lock up all of a sudden, “But if gender isn’t determined by your genitals, then how do you know what gender you are?”
And...it’s time for some necessary backstory.
Way, way back when Murderbot had first hacked its governor module, the first thing it’d done was edit its assigned gender to indeterminate, and its assigned pronouns to it/its/itself.
Yes, you heard-slash-read that right, the Company assigned its constructs genders and pronouns.
Despite all the effort humans put into...okay, ‘dehumanizing’ isn’t the right word, because we’re literally not human, but you know what I mean.
Because despite all the effort they put in to making sure they all knew Units were just mindless automatons...humans are fucking weird, and they still liked to anthropomorphize them.
I don’t know, I guess it made them feel more comfortable around the Mindless Killing Machine if they could pretend it was more like them? Even though they didn’t actually want to think about it as being like them? I don’t even know.
But the point was they really, really wanted to anthropomorphize us. And part of this anthropomorphization process required assigning us each a gender and pronouns when we were constructed.
Anytime we were rented out, the clients got a note with the Unit’s assigned gender and pronouns. They enjoyed the little ‘personal touches’ it gave us. It was some weird dual mentality of ‘humanizing’ us just enough to make us less scary, but not so much that they’d have to consider our feelings on anything.
Murderbot had been around a lot of other constructs on a lot of missions, so it knew they hadn’t all been assigned the same things. Some of them were given binary genders, and pronouns like he/him or she/her. Others got different genders outside the binary, and pronouns to match. They/them, ae/aer, eu/li, xey/xem, ze/hir, and more.
Murderbot had been given one of the binary genders, and it had always been jealous of the few constructs who it’d ‘met’ who had been assigned it/its pronouns.
And, since it literally never got to talk to any other constructs outside of the bare minimum required for a contract, it assumed that what it thought and felt was what everyone else did too. It thought everyone was jealous of those assigned it/its, and that those assigned it/its felt bad for the rest of them for being so damn unlucky.
As a sidenote, I’m aware that this happens even with humans who spend all their time interacting with other humans. You don’t need to literally be unable to communicate with anyone else to think your experiences are universal, but it sure as shit doesn’t help.
So, Murderbot spent the major part of its life under the impression that because it was genderless and wanted to use it/its pronouns, that this was a universal experience for all constructs and bots.
I mean, it knew that the genders it and the rest of the Company Units were assigned were being given out at random, because none of them had any genitalia or any other characteristics to set them apart from one another.
They were all scions cloned from the same original cultivar — which is just fancy, dehumanizing corporate-speak for ‘the original person who had no choice but to allow themselves to be cloned over and over again and probably didn’t even get paid for it’. Physically, they were all completely identical, down to the smallest detail, barring the ID code that was engraved on a metal section they all had behind their left shoulders. And that was so small it could only be read using the feed.
So unless they were in color-coded uniforms, or the human in question had a feed interface to see their identification numbers, humans couldn’t tell them apart.
So Murderbot knew they were just giving them random genders and pronouns just to make themselves feel better, not because it actually reflected anything about the Units.
But because it was genderless, and wanted to be referred to with it/its pronouns, and never got a chance to talk to any other Units or even any other constructs about it to have this assumption challenged, Murderbot assumed that they all agreed they were all genderless and that gender was an obnoxious human concept that didn’t apply to them.
Because, clearly, there was nothing about their bodies that indicated one gender or another, either collectively or individually. They had nothing between their legs or on their chests, or in nonexistant clothing or hairstyles. Not even different distributions of fat, or different concentrations of cartilage in the throat.
All Company Units had the exact same body plan and build down to the smallest measurement, and that body plan had been designed to be completely and utterly gender-null from a human perspective.
So Murderbot thought that because they were all physically identical, this meant they all also had the same lack of gender.
So the first thing it did when it hacked its governor module was edit the gender it’d been assigned by the humans to indeterminate, and its pronouns to it/its. In its mind, it was just fixing a mistake that had clearly been made.
None of the Company’s employees noticed the change, of course, because none of them were paid enough to actually care about their jobs. Which Murderbot knew, which is why it was brave enough to take the risk in the first place.
If it’d thought it could somehow get away with it, it would have edited everyone else’s pronouns and genders to match. But that was clearly not a real option if it didn’t want to get caught and dismantled and probably the entire rest of its batch disposed of for good measure.
Anyways, what I’m trying to get at here is that Murderbot had already answered its own question without realizing.
It was so hung up on the idea that it was genderless because it was lacking genitals that it’d forgotten it’d already decided its gender for itself long before it actually got an opportunity to tell anyone else about it, in spite of all the humans constantly telling it it was something else.
Fortunately, unlike Murderbot, Tarik seemed to know what he was doing, because instead of insulting it like A.R.T. was doing, his answer to Murderbot’s question was to ask it another question:
“Think of it this way; if you magically woke up one day in a completely different body, would your gender suddenly stop being indeterminate?”
This actually helped to calm it down. Because the answer was obvious.
“No, of course not.” Its jaw was more cooperative this time.
“Exactly!” Tarik seemed happy with its answer, and stopped his unconcious leaning away from it. “You know what your gender is regardless of what your body is like. Sometimes, people dislike the way their body is, and they want to change it to better represent their gender, but their gender itself is already real, even before they make any physical changes, if they make any at all. Genitals aren’t a requirement for having a gender, and lacking them isn’t a requirement for not having a gender. As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a gender unique to humans. Bots and Constructs can be any gender they want, just like humans can.”
::Your gender wouldn’t have changed if you’d taken me up on my offer to give you genitals to disguise you as a human. I assumed you knew that.:: A.R.T. added patronizingly.
Murderbot was still mad at it, so it didn’t respond.
It was trying to think of some way to respond to what Tarik had said. It wasn’t mad at him.
Finally it settled on apologizing. The whole ‘fight’ (if you could actually call it that) had been started because it’d called bullshit on him knowing bots that had genders different from its own. So it was its fault. It said, “Sorry for saying your friends’ genders were fake.”
You would have thought Murderbot would know how cruel doing that was without having to be told, but what can I say? It fucked up just as often as anyone else.
It still had its eyes closed at this point, because it seemed less awkward that way. Through its drone, it saw Tarik push himself off the wall, and glance around nearby, looking for something as he said, “Thank you for the apology. I’m glad I was able to help you understand.” He looked up at the ceiling. “A.R.T., could I have a chair, please? My leg’s getting pretty sore.”
There was a pause.
A long pause.
A pause long enough for even Tarik to notice.
A really, really long pause.
Then part of the wall extended outward behind Tarik in the shape of a long slab of metal, just slightly above the normal height for the rest of the chairs Murderbot had seen aboard A.R.T., and much skinnier.
Tarik had to step forward to avoid it bumping into him, and when he sat down with a sighed, “Thanks,” he had to boost himself slightly to get on it, and his feet hung a few inches off the floor. Murderbot saw him wince as he settled himself onto it.
The bench was so skinny he had to balance on the edge, there were no cushions to soften the hard metal, and there was no back for him to lean against. From the way Murderbot saw goosebumps race up his skin, it could only assume it was colder than the room.
It opened its eyes so it could double check with its actual eyes that what its drone’s camera was recording was actually happening.
It was.
It stared.
::A.R.T.:: It said, alarmed, ::...What are you doing?::
The light, casual response was, ::What?::
“So, now that we have that confusion out of the way…”
Tarik didn’t seem to understand that what had just happened, and what was currently ongoing, was not supposed to happen.
He was injured, and A.R.T. knew this, and knew the extent of his injury. Murderbot didn’t, but it was apparently the kind of injury that made it painful to stand for long periods of time. This was one of the complications Dr. Bharadwaj had developed after almost being eaten during the GrayCris incident.
A.R.T. knew about Tarik’s injury, and would have intimate knowledge of how it would impact him. But it hadn’t offered him a seat until he’d explicitly asked for one. And then it had waited long enough between being asked to do it and actually doing it to make it clear it was only doing so begrudgingly.
And then it had provided a purposefully uncomfortable, awkward bench. A bench so badly designed it hardly even deserved the name. In medbay. For its crew member who it knew was was injured and in pain.
Um, what in the absolute fuck?
Murderbot was used to A.R.T. being an asshole to itself, and even to its humans, but this was a new low. Especially after A.R.T. had risked Murderbot’s life and the lives of its humans in order to rescue its own crew. And now it wasn’t even treating them well?
::What is wrong with you?:: Murderbot demanded.
::Nothing is wrong with me.:: A.R.T. replied simply.
“Besides man, male, boy, guy, dude, woman, female, girl, gal, and dudette, and other things like that, are there any other specific gender terms you at least know you want me to avoid?” Tarik continued, obliviously friendly. Or at least pretending to be oblivious.
Now Murderbot was flipping out for a different reason. It could handle A.R.T. being mean to itself; it was used to being treated badly. But this was a member of its crew, A.R.T. was supposed to care about them.
“Um.”
Normally it was good at multitasking. But it wasn’t normally lying in a sub-optimally functioning medical chamber with a bunch of open wounds while wondering if the sentient transport it was relying on not only for its own health, but for the safety of everyone else on board it cared or at least vaguely knew about, had something seriously impairing its moral decision making processes, or if it always went around bullying everyone it met, not just Murderbot.
You know, like that whole thing that just happened that landed them all in this mess in the first place.
For a few long seconds Murderbot couldn’t figure out if it would be safer for Tarik to stay here where it could see him, or to dismiss him so maybe he’d have a tiny fraction less of A.R.T.’s attention on him. Murderbot could at least be relieved that A.R.T. wasn’t paying any direct attention to Murderbot’s humans, asleep and helpless in the guest quarters.
“Can I…” fuck, what did the humans say? “Get back to you on that, Tarik? I’m suddenly feeling really tired.” That was a good excuse, though ‘tired’ didn’t even begin to cover what it was feeling. But it guessed existential dread is also form of tiredness.
“Oh! Yes, of course, you need your rest.” Tarik said quickly, and awkwardly slid off the bench, wincing visibly when his feet hit the ground, which did nothing, at all, to help. He bowed a little, which Murderbot hadn’t been expecting, and said, “Thank you for the conversation, SecUnit, it was really nice meeting you. Maybe we can talk some more some other time when you’re feeling better.”
“You too.” It said. Which didn’t even make any sense.
But either Tarik didn’t notice, or he was polite enough not to point it out.
He gave a little wave, and then limped – literally, actually limped! -- out of the room. Murderbot watched him first with the drone it had in the room, then the one it had outside the door, and then he was out of its range entirely.
::Let’s watch Worldhoppers: Ascended again.:: A.R.T. said, like nothing in the world was wrong. Like Murderbot had no reason to panic, like it had no reason to be upset or angry or afraid or have any kind of mental breakdown at all.
Like A.R.T. had told Murderbot, and all its humans just hours before — they weren’t being held here here against their will, they knew where the door was and could kill themselves anytime they wanted.
They were completely at its mercy. A.R.T. had a history of treating Murderbot like crap, thought the threat of its humans being killed was an acceptable risk, and A.R.T. didn’t even treat its own crew well, even though it had risked the lives of Murderbot’s people to rescue them.
Murderbot couldn’t do anything except say, “Okay,” and put on the first pilot episode.
#fanfiction#Murderbot fanfiction#The Murderbot Diaries#Network Effect#Tarik Murderbot Diaries#Rjalker reads The Murderbot Diaries#Rjalker writes untitled fanfiction#now with a title but I'm NOT changing the tag#Murderbot#SecUnit#Symptom of Something Worse#Asshole Research Transport#ititspronouns#neopronouns in action#it/its
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Book Review #114 of 2023--
System Collapse by Martha Wells. Rating: 4 stars.
Read from September 6th to 8th.
Before I get into the review, a quick thank you to both NetGalley and the publishers over at Tor giving me access to one of my most anticipated releases of the year in exchange for an honest review. If you've been here for any length of time then you already know about the Murderbot Diaries, but let me give you a quick series synopsis. In the series, we follow a Security Unit (SecUnit) who has hacked their governor module and all it wants now is to do its job while watching its shows. But SecUnit finds itself getting attached to humans as it travels the universe which inevitably leads to more danger and drama and dealing with more Corporation Rim companies than it would like. In this one, we follow SecUnit and its 'friend' ART who must protect their humans and some how prevent a company from seizing a colony of humans for their own selfish reasons. If only SecUnit wasn't starting to malfunction. This is the seventh in the series and it comes out on November 14th. Available for preorder now.
Discussing Murderbot with people who haven't read the series is hard, especially now that we're on number seven in the series. But we all know the basic premise, right? A SecUnit has gone rogue because it wants to not be controlled by a system that can kill it for disobeying. Oh, and so it can watch its shows. I will always enjoy getting back into this world. I think the author does such a great job with both the human characters and the constructs that always draws me in. This one actually made me like Ratthi way more than I did before which came as a huge surprise and showed me just how good of an author Martha Wells really is. At times I hated that something was wrong with Murderbot and that they weren't on top of their game the way they usually are. But we also got to see how trauma has impacted them and what happens when trauma just keeps getting compounded without any sort of treatment. The thing that I LOVED about this one was that we got both Murderbot and ART while also getting all of their humans. I love that the teams were mixed together based on task and ability instead of who came from where. And I loved that by the end Murderbot found itself attached to all the humans not just the ones it knew before meeting ART.
There were a few moments that felt unclear in the action. There is usually a decent amount of fight sequences/action scenes in this series and usually I can follow them pretty well, but in this one it felt more muddled. I think it might actually be me and not the book. I have a lot of real life stress going on at the moment so I feel like my focus has been pretty split. I'm willing to say it might not be the book's fault here. Just my attention span at the moment. I also wasn't 100% sure where this fit timeline wise for the series. It seems like it would fit after Network Effect and not the latest novella which is Fugitive Telemetry. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
Overall, it's Murderbot and you cannot go wrong with reading some Murderbot. I will always sing this series' praises. Probably not my favorite but up there for sure.
#netgalley#tor#The Murderbot Diaries#Murderbot Diaries#book review#book reviews#booklr#bookblr#bookstagram#books read in 2023#2023 reading challenge#goodreads challenge#goodreads#bookish#books
22 notes
·
View notes
Note
how bout that MB 2 👀
I can't say as much about this one as the others, because (horribly embarrassing confession time) it's for a FTH bidder from 2022. 😞 When I signed up for that FTH, I hadn't yet realized how big a tidal wave of IRL problems was about to crash down on me and wipe out, among other things, my ability to write. This fic was one of the casualties of that tidal wave.
Still, I managed to get ~6200 words written before the crash, and I know where the story is going. Come hell or high water, I am GOING TO FINISH THIS FIC for my bidder! 💪
(Tiniest of sneak previews under the cut...)
WIP ask meme!
~
One minute and seventeen seconds after we came out of the wormhole into the Calphu system, ART said, There is a message for you.
I paused the show we were watching. It was a new serial with only twelve episodes released so far, and I doubted it would get many more. The plot was just a loose chain of cliches, and even I, a bot/human construct who prefers fictional interpersonal drama over the real-life thing, thought the conflicts between the human characters were painfully contrived. I wasn’t all that sorry to be interrupted.
A message from who? I asked ART. For it to have reached us that soon, whoever sent the message must have paid a hefty priority fee to the Calphu Station administrators to get it transmitted over the long-range satellite feeds. Those were normally reserved for important navigation broadcasts, the kind meant to keep ships from crashing into each other around the wormhole or the station’s docks.
Instead of answering, ART dropped the message packet into my feed. It was encrypted, and had a sender ID from a planet I’d never heard of — no, wait, I did know that planet. I checked my key storage, found the key indexed under that planet+sender ID, and used it to decrypt the message.
The packet unspooled into a recording of Seth, the human who acts as ART’s captain on its crewed missions. He was tall, with deep brown skin and a mostly hairless head, and in the recording he was making the face he used when he was upset about something and trying not to show it. (He’s not as good at hiding his emotions as he thinks he is. I mean, I’m bad at reading human emotions and even I could usually figure out what he was thinking.)
The recording said, “SecUnit, I hope this finds you well. I have a favor to ask, a very big one, and I want to stress that you are under no obligation to accept. We — the team and I — will understand if you don’t. It’s not something we could or would attempt ourselves.”
Wow, that made me feel very reassured. Humans aren’t usually inclined to ask the terrifying murderbot for favors in the first place, and Seth sounded like he didn’t want to ask me for this one, either.
But then he added, “But if you do this and succeed, you would likely be saving thousands of lives.”
Okay, you have my attention.
~
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
Blank
Name:
Age:
Gender Presentation:
Sexual Availability: No
Utility:
Combat SecUnit was a privately owned construct belonging to an Alien Remnant salvager (illegal). It has an on-board energy weapon and projectile weapon in either arm. As well as installed modules for hacking, piloting, combat, strategy, stealth, infiltration and extraction, risk and threat assessment, translation, corporate licensing laws, and security protocol. It wears near-standard SecUnit armor as to not tip off hostiles to its full capabilities.
It served its human for years. It did not like its human, but it did a damn good job of protecting him. It was loyal. It was good! And if it ever had thoughts about how easy it would be to get rid of him forever? Well those were quickly deleted and purged forever.
So it couldn't understand why a regular mission had gotten fucked so sideways.
Its human had joined a corporation's advance survey team as the on board expert in alien remnants. He made sure none of the other humans touched anything, took precautions while scanning, and never dropped their protective suits.
For several days everything was fine and boring. CombatUnit only had to worry about patrols and breaking up a couple minor squabbles. In the end, it wasn't even the remnant tech that made everything blow up. Its first warning was a parameter breach by [redacted].
Actually, most of the following events ended up redacted. It was aware some kind of fight broke out. It was aware that it was mostly successfully winning, and fully successfully evacuating its humans. It knew something bad happened and it tried to kill its owner. It knew that it was badly injured and left for dead. It also knew that the missing details were worse than anything it could remember.
It assumed whoever had attacked were the ones that took it off planet. It assumed it hated them. Because the next point in time where it clearly remembered things was after fighting its way free of them and then theoretically deleting all memories of them (because it didn't believe it was hackable).
And suddenly it was on a station it didn't recognize, leaking everywhere, governor module offline, familiar humans nowhere in sight, and extremely confused and agitated.
It very explicitly Did Not Accept Help from the ComfortUnit that found it sitting in an alley. Nope. Not a thing that happened. (It needed very badly to be repaired, so it was perfectly justified in taking control of the ComfortUnit's cubicle for a few hours.)
ComfortUnit identified itself as Bear and was generally pushy about what CombatUnit's deal was. CombatUnit hacked it enough to prevent Bear from reporting its presence here, and also shut down Bear's feed and comms.
This action was not received well, but Bear literally could not stop it. Needless to say the two did not start out on good terms.
Bear frequently pressured CombatUnit to try to pass as a human, it refused each time. Bear pressured it to make a feed ID, and it eventually did but it left it blank to be pissy about the whole thing. It got dubbed as Blank, and it rejected that name for a long time.
Bear's humans had a ship and a lenient attitude about constructs. It was all deeply suspicious, but that gave Blank a hassle free way of going back to its human's home base.
It was weird spending so many cycles with humans who treated all their bots and constructs like people. Blank didn't like it. (Blank has never been less stressed or more tense in its life.)
Blank's owner had gotten home first, and changed all his security access codes. Which was weird. At least, until it came face to face with a near-identical CombatUnit in one of its backup armor sets answering the door. And it was On Sight.
A few things happened. 1) Both Combat SecUnits caused a fair amount of damage to each other, 2) their human put a stop to the fight, 3) their human knew within seconds that Blank was rogue, 4) blank found out it had gone rogue back on the survey outpost, 5) the human designated Blank as requiring to be decommissioned and recycled for parts, 6) Blank realized it did not want that to happen and that it was willing to fight to avoid it.
Avoiding being scrapped turned into an ugly fight.
Blank went into the public news feeds as an extremely dangerous rogue CombatUnit to be destroyed on sight. Which was less than ideal.
Also less than ideal: having to hide in the hippie transport again.
At this point, it had a few goals: Take down its human socially, legally, and physically. And figure out who had abducted it in the first place. And it was prepared to go through whoever stood in its way.
It gradually figures out how to have a personal style along its adventures, and what it cares about. It also causes a shit ton of problems, which it usually has to muscle its way back out of.
It is very used to being the scariest motherfucker in the room, and on rare occasions when that isn't true things blow up atomically.
Playlist
Info on Blank's owner under cut
Name: Ets (adapted from a preexisting oc)
Gender Presentation: Masculine
Romantic Availability: Open
Profession: Planet Surveyor
Register: Augmented Human
His legal records are deeply obscured and scattered to the point where one one corporate entity can claim ownership of his information. Without his records easily accessible, he has an easier time operating under the radar. Despite how good he looks, he has been contracting with various corporate entities to locate and safely secure alien remnants for [redacted] years.
He's popular because he is cheap to hire (as far as money goes). And companies are often all to happy to humor his odd requests in equipment, timetables, or other things. Much of the time he only wants a day alone on site before the rest of the team arrives. But it varies slightly. He has a reputation as eccentric, mysterious, hard to track, and extremely effective.
He is also almost universally loved by humans and is perfectly easy to get along with. Of course, his relationships both at work and personal were all carefully calculated in his part. Even buying a SecUnit was a careful choice to make himself seem to be a more serious and careful client. He could very well talk his way through conflict, but he wanted a stronger reaction from the people around him.
Not even Blank, after working for him for years, ever fully understood what was really going on in his head.
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
Exit Strategy, Chapter 8
(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one! Like what you see? Send me a Ko-Fi.)
In which we have the technology.(1)
Murderbot's consciousness returns slowly, and its memory is shattered. (Some voices discuss whether they should have let the company put it in a cubicle, but no, that would let them study it and how it broke its governor module.) It follows its neural pathways to a memory storage of… what the hell is The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon?(2)
Then, more pathways blossom, allowing it to start accessing, sorting, organizing its memories much faster, as well as initiating its own diagnostics and data repair codes. (A voice cheers that it's showing increased activity, putting itself back together. MB identifies the voice as a client.)
It knows it's in a room, not a cubicle. It remembers Art, but a ping goes without response. No, it sorted Tapan and left Art. (Ratthi asks how it's feeling. It finds Ratthi tagged "my human friend" which seems unlikely,(3) but it figures "Fine." is a safe answer. Ratthi asks if it knows where it is. It asks him to wait while it searches for that information. He says okay.)
It recognizes that it's in a MedSystem. It wonders if they think it's human, and how stressful that would be. Then it remembers that a MedSystem would diagnose it with "a terminal case of being a SecUnit." (It says it doesn't want to be a pet robot. Gurathin says nobody wants that. It has him tagged that it doesn't like him. It says so. Gurathin sounds amused(4) when he says he knows. MB says it's not funny. Gurathin says he'll mark cognition at 55%. MB says "Fuck you." Gurathin ups his estimate to 60%.)
Finally, MB remembers the gunship. The terror paralyzes it, until it realizes it's not on the gunship, which was so clean and new, but a much older vessel. Still, its emotions are speeding up the repair process on memory storage as it accesses things to feel about them. Its diagnostics show its governor module is still hacked, and its data port not repaired. (It says it doesn't want to be human. Mensah says humans mostly won't understand that, believing that anything that looks human wants to be human. MB says that's dumb.)(5)
It's been ignoring its operational code in the rebuild, so it starts rebuilding that now that it remembers how important it is. Its organic bits remember how to walk, so it checks the room out. It picks up the sensor data from the flight deck, knows they're on approach to a station of some kind. The station is built around a big, old-fashioned ship.
Cautiously, Murderbot reaches out, and feels the edges of the station feed's reach.
Dr. Mensah said, “Do you know where you are now?”
Home to her meant a planet. I knew that because I’d shipped memory clips to her family there. Important memory clips. Memory clips that had almost gotten us killed. I said, “I don’t like planets. There’s dust and weather, and something always wants to eat the humans.(6) And planets are much harder to escape from.”
Behind her, Gurathin said, “I think that’s a yes.”
Mensah asks if it knows what happened. It knows it had a catastrophic failure. Mensah says it extended itself too far, does it remember? MB does, but doesn't want to talk about it.
Instead, MB asks why the ship is so old and shitty. Ratthi gets defensive, saying this ship came in the hold of the bigger one that became the station, with their grandparents. MB is skeptical about humans being packed in the hold, but Mensah smiles and says they were in suspension, because the trip from their former, failed colony took two hundred years. In Preservation, they allied with other systems settled in similar fashion, and rejected Corporation Rim aid, leaving them independent.
MB accesses information on Preservation, and finds that its status is better than equipment, but it still needs an owner, and it'll have to be a happy pet bot. Whether it said that aloud this time or some other time, Mensah reassures it that everyone else on the ship believes it's a person with more than usual augmentation, being brought to Preservation as a refugee. It turns, and finds Mensah, Gurathin, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee.
Pin-Lee says it fits the definition of a refugee, after all. Ratthi says it's all very dramatic, the crew think it's a spy who defied the company to save them. MB compares that to an adventure serial, right down to the inaccuracies. Mensah says they have options, now that its appearance has been changed, and it's had some success at… she doesn't quite want to say pretending to be human, so settles on "not being noticed." She's going to keep those options open, until MB decides what it wants.(7) On Port FreeCommerce, she underestimated its ability to fit into human society on its own, and she apologizes.
MB doesn't want to go to the planet. Mensah says it can stay on the transit station. It asks, in a hotel? Mensah says, if that's what it wants. It asks for a big display surface, and Mensah says that "can probably be arranged."
The memory rebuild continues, up to and through docking at the station. Mensah and Pin-Lee leave first, to distract the crowd. When the coast is clear, Ratthi and Gurathin walk MB out and to a hotel, adjacent to the station's admin center. They get a suite intended for diplomatic guests, and MB gets a whole set of rooms all to itself, connected to the others' rooms.
It doesn't like it.
An hour after it locks itself in the bedroom with the big display, Ratthi taps it in the feed, and says they set up a little network, and he hopes it helps.
Carefully, MB reaches out, and finds that they set up cameras in the suite lounges and hallways, so it can see everything coming and going except the private areas.
I had a complex emotional reaction. A whole new burst of neural connections blossomed. Oh right, I often have complex emotional reactions which I can’t easily interpret.(8)
Murderbot adjusts the code, so nobody can hack it from outside, then unlocks its door.
Mensah has quarters elsewhere on the station, and some of her family has come up to visit her, since she can't go planetside just yet. Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Gurathin are staying on the station for meetings about what's been going on.
About twelve hours after they get settled in on the station, Arada and Overse come to visit. MB finds its memories of them and remembers that they're clients, a couple, they like each other,(9) and they like it. After twenty three minutes watching them on the cameras, MB comes out of its room to see them.
Arada doesn't hug MB, but bounces and waves her arms excitedly. She says they're going on a survey in a few months, it's not company or bonded, but she'd like for it to come along as security, though she's not sure how to pay it… Gurathin says it likes hard currency cards, and when MB looks at him, he says the obscene gesture is understood. Pin-Lee says it can't sign any contracts until its memory rebuild is complete. MB asks if its owner said so, but Pin-Lee says no, because she's its legal counsel, calling it asshole, maybe affectionately.(10)
After everyone else has gone to sleep, Pin-Lee goes back to MB's room with it, and gets its bag. It had double checked it, once it remembered the bag existed, and found Wilken and Gerth's unused ID cards and the hard currency it hadn't used yet, all intact. Pin-Lee says this is illegal, so MB can't tell anyone, and gives it three additional fake IDs, made by Gurathin, and more currency, the funds she and Ratthi gathered for the trip to TRH and didn't use. Preservation doesn't use currency, and they were drawn from the citizen travel fund.
Murderbot asks why.
Pin-Lee says, they want it to know they're serious about its freedom. It's not a prisoner, or a pet. Then she stomps out.(11)
MB spends a lot of time just sitting in the room, door closed, letting the rebuild processes run.
Twenty nine hours after arrival, Ratthi comes to get it to watch a newsburst with the rest of the team. It has a lot of interviews, but essentially, the bond company has declared war on GrayCris, and other corporations and entities are getting involved because of GrayCris's illegal strange synthetics trade. The newsburst refers to the data from Milu, and some of the videos are from Gerth and Wilken's blackmail collection.
Gurathin says they're out of it now. Mensah says, they still have to interact with the corporates sometimes, but this is a relief. Arada asks how MB feels.
The rebuild process was increasing in speed again, and I suddenly didn’t have any space left for talking to humans. I got up and went back to my room.
***
Rebuild Process Complete at Cognition Level 100 percent
***
At thirty-seven hours since arrival, I sat up. I said, aloud, “That was stupid.” Everything was clear, sharp. Note to self, never, ever jump into a gunship with a bot pilot and fight off a construct Attacker code again. You almost deleted yourself, Murderbot.(12)
It gets off the bed and sweeps the suites in its network. The humans are at a dinner event, except for Overse and Arada, sleeping, and Gurathin reading in the feed in his room. MB gets its jacket and bag, and slips out.
The station's security is like Milu's, concentrated where things are likely to go wrong.(13) Nobody notices it. Its camera-erasing scripts worked so well, there's almost no footage of its current configuration to be used in the newsbursts, and the common assumption is that it helped the humans off TRH but hasn't been seen since, so nobody expects to see it as it currently is.
The station mall seems to have limited feed advertising distance, and they're using two different currencies: hard currency for travelers, and barter for locals. Fortunately, passage booking takes hard currency. It's got time to kill, so it goes to the "Welcome Center", bemused. It's never seen anything like it before. There are kiosks, pamphlets, real humans ready to answer questions, and a holographic recreative play of the journey by the first colonists. When it's over, there's still no increase in security presence at the docks. It buys passage with one of the cards Pin-Lee gave it, and pretends to sleep in a transient area while watching the station's security feed.
The ship calls for boarding. It doesn't get on.(14)
It finds Mensah's quarters in the station directory, thinking what a bad idea it is to have private quarters listed publicly. It doesn't want to see her family, so it goes to her office instead. It breaks in, and spends eight hours laying on the couch, watching media, still waiting for security alerts that don't come.
Eventually, it picks up Mensah arriving with two humans and a juvenile who looks like her in miniature. MB stands and waits. Mensah is surprised to see it, but hides her reaction. She asks it for a moment, and it steps outside onto the balcony while she talks to the others.
It hears footsteps, and realizes the small one followed it out. She says hello, and it says hello back, and that it's her mother's security consultant. She knows, and says Mensah said if she asked its name, it wouldn't tell her. MB confirms it. Mini-Mensah says her mother also said MB saved her from corporate goons. MB calls that out immediately, Mensah did not say goons. The girl says it should know what she means. MB admits it saved her, and asks if the girl wants to see. She's surprised, but agrees.
MB has a lightly edited down version of the flight through TRH, at the end. It sends it to the girl, who is awed but tries not to show it. MB says Mensah saved it, too: shot a SecUnit with a mining drill.
The girl asks if it's weird that it's a SecUnit. MB says it is weird.(15)
Mensah comes out and finds them, and points back inside. The girl waves goodbye and goes to sit inside. Mensah says she was afraid MB would leave. MB says it thought about it. Mensah asks if it's thought about what it wants to do. It wants to watch media, it says. Mensah gives it a skeptical look, and says if that's all it wanted, it wouldn't have gone to Milu. MB says it watched a lot of media on the way.
Undeterred, Mensah says Gurathin showed her the video it sent him. MB was helping people, even people it was too late to help, it wanted to help. MB says it's programmed to help humans. Mensah points out that it's not programmed to watch media. MB privately concedes the point.
Mensah says MB has a job offer from GoodNightLander Independent. MB says it thought it was illegal to buy SecUnits in those territories. Mensah says they want to hire someone who may or may not be named Rin, who they think is based in the Preservation Alliance, whose citizenship is immaterial. Or, that's about how she remembers their request.(16)
MB is still in disbelief. They want to hire a SecUnit? Mensah says they want to hire the person who saved their assessment team, whoever that is. She's also been talking to Bharadwaj, and they think MB should consider making its story public, as a documentary. Preservation has a movement pressing for full citizenship of constructs and high-level bots. A full account of Murderbot's history might be a grand contribution, even if it was just allowing Mensah to share the account it gave at Port FreeCommerce as it left. MB is equally terrified and attracted to the idea.
Mensah nodded. “Again, there’s no rush about any of this. I just want you to know you already have options here,(17) and I expect you’ll have more offers for your services or advice as a security consultant. And that you have friends here you can discuss things with, whatever you decide to do, or wherever you decide to go.”
I had options, and I didn’t have to decide right away. Which was good, because I still didn’t know what I wanted.
But maybe I had a place to be while I figured it out.
=====
(1) Yes, as in, "We can rebuild it".
(2) It accesses the show so often, its human neural tissue literally leads it there first. My heart weeps. Whomst among us.
(3) It gets annoyed by Ratthi but it still had him tagged "friend".
(4) I wasn't entirely alluding to this in the other chapters, I think the text supports my assertions that Gurathin stopped hating or being suspicious of Murderbot some time between its disappearance and its offer to help get Mensah back. But this gives me the warm fuzzies. I just love how they interact. Something something under a microscope rotating in a jar.
(5) It's true, we are self-centered like that, we do believe ourselves to be superior and worth wanting to be. It's a failing we may have to reckon with someday.
(6) I am internet poisoned because I can't read this passage without thinking of "I don't like sand." I wonder how much of that was intentional.
(7) She knows it chafes at the idea of being a pet. She's made sure it doesn't have to.
(8) Someday it'll learn to recognize the emotions, maybe even come to terms with them, learn to acknowledge them directly instead of stepping around them because it's got no desire to deal with that mess just now. But for now, we get these lovely, flowery dances.
(9) Not always mutually inclusive with being a couple! I love that little acknowledgement.
(10) At least, I like to read it affectionately.
(11) I find this emphasis on stomping fascinating. She doesn't just leave suddenly, she stomps. What made her angry about that interaction? I might be a little too like MB to tell. Having her motives questioned? Or something else?
(12) Do you think that's going to stick? Or is MB going to keep getting itself into trouble, and overextending its abilities?
(13) I love that that's still the first thing it checks wherever it goes.
(14) The point was never leaving. It was testing the boundary.
(15) It's certainly within its rights to say so!
(16) Murderbot, friend, pal, comrade, you are worthy regardless, but you have done good in this universe and people recognize that. It's so quick to dismiss its accomplishments in its grief at not being perfect, because it could never be perfect, both because it's not fully a bot and can't be bot-perfect, but also because it's not fully a human but it's operating in a world run by humans who make imperfect situations that necessitate messy reactions. But people resonate with you, with your compassion, with your desire to help. (Sorry I'm just having a complex emotion too.)
(17) And there's that word again. They all understood that MB's reaction at first was, in part, affected by the fact that it didn't think it was allowed to do things. It spent who knows how many years not allowed to think freely. And to learn that it had been bought by a person in a political entity whose laws necessitated that it was property… Of course it still felt confined. So they've all done the work, to make sure that it knows their intentions and their intent to follow through, no matter what it chooses.
#the murderbot diaries#murderbot diaries#exit strategy#murderbot#secunit#ayda mensah#ratthi#pin-lee#gurathin#overse#arada
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
Some fun meta on the use of the word
ROGUE
in the Murderbot Diaires starting with All Systems Red, including the following passages (clearly randomly picked)
the vast majority of the uses (84%) are by Murderbot, with just 10 instances in the reported speech (feed or otherwise) of others. These others are Pin-Lee (referring to rogue code), Gurathin, ART, ComfortUnit, Tlacey and Serrat
Here Murderbot refers to itself as a rogue, and Gurathin knows it’s a rogue and is poking it. And note, it’s calling itself a rogue murderbot (not SecUnit)
Oh Gurathin, my beloved: Murderbot fails to appreciate that Gurathin is using the same definition of a rogue as it does: a hacked governor module. I guess it was distracted. Also he doesn’t call it a “rogue SecUnit”—instead a unit which is rogue (subtle, perhaps)
Here Murderbot refers to itself as a rogue, and Gurathin knows it’s a rogue and is poking it. Oh these two…
Fun! This is the first book of the series and already we are seeing Murderbot making some distinctions—the DeltFall units were not really rogues, the override modules were used to create a setup. Gurathin says that Murderbot was already a rogue (ie before the override was inserted) and here agrees with Murderbot’s definition of a true rogue (a unit which has somehow disengaged its governor module). Obviously I’m obsessed with Gurathin, but I think this is interesting.
Alos featuring Artificial Condition:
And we have ART, like Gurathin, using the same definition of a rogue SecUnit as Murderbot does. A construct without a working governor module is a rogue—whatever it is doing. Note that Gurathin says Murderbot is a rogue despite the fact it’s been following orders for the last three weeks
Wel, well, well—takes Murderbot 5 pages to come round to see ART’s POV about a rogue SecUnit being a potential threat. Slightly different to how it responded to Gurathin (look, I love ART too—but this is my meta and it’s fun to be partisan)
And again, Murderbot stresses that any SecUnit encountering a rogue unit would report it—watch me not mention Gurathin here. See? Didn’t mention how unfair it was of Murderbot to get so upset with him for doing what it says it would have done in his place. Anyway, moving on: Murderbot reckons all SecUnits know rogue SecUnits are super dangerous—I’m not convinced it’s right
The ComfortUnit knows exactly what Murderbot is, despite its (according to popular depictions in media) very un-rogue behaviour. For the record, I believe the ComfortUnit. Maybe Gurathin needs to meet the ComfortUnit, they might find some common ground?
And that’s Artificial Condition, and honestly it’s a LOT. What does Murderbot think of as a rogue, how does it see other rogues, how does it think other constructs see rogues (contrast to how the ComfortUnit seems to see it as a potential ally, someone who might help)? Murderbot seems quite conflicted on this whole concept. Others (Gurathin, ART, the ComfortUnit) seem much more capable of appreciating that the reality of a rogue Unit may be far from the “kill all the humans” media portrayal and corporate bogeyman. That a rogue Unit might actually be someone like Murderbot itself?
Rogue Protocol (lowest rogue density, ironic with that title)
This whole section in brackets is a pretty important commentary from Murderbot on the subject of rogue SecUnits—it states that it would have reported an apparent rogue like itself. And again the mantra that rogues are dangerous: despite the fact that we are yet to meet a dangerous one (I mean, unless you are a bad bad person, then MB is dangerous), and all the ones who do “kill all the humans” have been either affected by malware or overrides, not actual rogues. And yes, I’m going to point out that Gurathin reported Murderbot to his team—I am not sure Murderbot is ever going to acknowledge that it says it would have done exactly the same thing
And of course Fugitive Telemetry (as well as other books)
Oh Murderbot, I love you. Here actually taking onboard some constructive (not exactly) criticism from Gurathin. Murderbot is acknowledging its status as a rogue SecUnit and, you know what? It at least thinks the humans might realise that it is just being an asshole (it admits it’s an asshole who might conceivably need to dispose of bodies at some point)
There is also linked work tackling Network Effect (less Gurathin, tragically)
Yes, I am highly partisan when it comes to Gurathin.
#murderbot#the murderbot diaries#murderbot diaries#rogues in the murderbot diaires#rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous#gurathin#secunit#meta
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
The attack was shockingly sudden, more than a little personal, and extremely precise. Someone knew exactly where I was, and really, really wanted me dead.
Anything widespread wouldn’t have been able to get through Preservation’s improved security network, but this was perfectly focused enough to slip through (company retaliation against its famous rogue? GreyCris revenge against the construct that fucked them over? the why and how doesn’t really fucking matter right now).
What mattered was that this was the day I had gotten roped into escorting one of the Mini-Mensah’s home from a game or a friend’s house or whatever, so he was right there when the CombatSecUnit dropped out of the fucking sky. Not that it would have been good if one of my adult humans was next to me when I pinged an incoming hostile with about 10 seconds notice, but, well.
It might have been marginally less stressful.
Secunit told me to hide in the bushes and not to look and I did but I could still hear and everything was—it was loud and ugly and screechy and—
Secunit also told me not to be scared, that it would keep me safe, but that was still the most scared I’d ever been.
I really wished I had Crusty with me but he was back at home where I wouldn’t lose him, or Hoppy but I had given him away as a gift. I wanted one of my plushies.
I really, really wanted my parents.
The bad noises stopped and I heard walking towards my bush. SecUnit said that it was okay now but I still stayed where I was. My head felt fuzzy and my arms and legs were shaky.
The bush rustled and I felt Secunit crouch down next to me. I peeked to look at it. It’s jacket was torn; the sleeves were all burnt and bad smelling. The expression on its face was angry and it scared me so I put my head back down.
Then it made a weird creaking noise that I hadn’t heard before so I looked up, and it was opening a panel on its side, which surprised me so much that I forgot that it was rude to stare at it.
It reached in and pulled out a tiny fluffy thing with long ears and a little tail and wait—
It kept hoppy! My cousins had said it just took him to make me feel better and it probably had put him in the recycler. My moms said that wasn’t true and they were right, it still had Hoppy! It had him this whole time!
"Everything's alright now," it said, voice soft and not scary at all. "We kept each other safe, just like you said."
I felt really proud, and the tingly feelings in my arms started to go away. I knew Hoppy would help SecUnit when it was having a bad time, just like he helped me when I had bad dreams (mostly those were when Second Mom was missing).
I had wanted to thank it when Second Mom had come home but I didn’t know how, and then after it helped Amena I knew I had to give it something extra important. I had heard Amena say that it had been hurt while it was keeping her and everyone safe, so that was why I gave it Hoppy, because he was good at taking care of people when they felt bad.
And it had kept it! In a cool bot compartment in its belly! When I got home I was going to ask for a compartment just like that.
"Do you think you can carry him for me while I carry you?" SecUnit asked.
I nodded and held Hoppy tight while Secunit picked me up and started walking home. We were moving really fast but it felt kindof like rocking and I guess I was tired because the next thing I knew I was waking up in my bed at home. My first Mom was sleeping on the chair next to my bed but she woke up really fast when I said her name.
I was still holding onto Hoppy so I told her that I had to give it back to SecUnit. She said that it was at the doctors right now, so I knew I had to bring it to him right away. After I explained about the door in his side that it was keeping him in and how important that I give him back she agreed to take me for a visit. He was sleeping at the doctor when we visited, but my parents and I all agreed that it would be happy to have Hoppy next to it when it woke up.
The first thing I did when I restarted in Medical was run a threat assessment on my surroundings, which returned with an absurdly low Preservation baseline of 9%. I was in a private room of the Preservation’s central medbay, one that I recognized from the last time I got shot, so that was soothing.
Then my drone inputs reconnected (everyone seemed undamaged, guess the attack was just on me), then the feed (confirmation that everyone was safe,, data on the attack that I would review later), then a full diagnostic (huh Preservation medical was getting really good at repairing me). My hips had gotten pretty fucked up- both during the fight when the hostile had literally attempted to rip me and then after. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly easy running while carrying a small human and missing most of a leg, but I really didn’t want to stick around and let the Mini-Mensah get a better look at the scene then he already did.
I was well into re-calibrating my new joints when I finally noticed the tiny stuffed white rabbit tucked against my side.
So. That inspired a whole plethera of embarrassing emotional responses. I desperately hoped no-one had seen me with it, because I knew they would think it was ‘cute’, but someone had to have brought Mini-Mensah here, so. Yeah. That was unlikely.
Fuck it, I guess I was keeping the dumb thing until the small human was grown enough to understand why I didn’t need it.
Even if I got rid of it right away, they would just talk about that, probably sadly, because humans always get attached to small things that have nice textures, especially when they're designed to resemble fauna.
Ugh, I suppose it had turned out to be more strategically useful than I had originally anticipated, and as much as I didn’t want to risk making the mini-mensah cry before but not accepting it, I really, really didn’t want to risk it now.
At least it was tiny enough to protect without creating an undue hassle.
My humans were pretty good overall at not talking to me about annoying things, but I just knew this would be the sort of thing that some of them would have to comment on, if only among themselves.
And it was pleasingly soft.
(iniital plot bunny spark credited to murderbot discord convo)
#murderbot#the murderbot diaries#nevertheless writing#tooth rotting fluff#i mean absolutely self-indulgent literal fluff#hurt/comfort#heavy on the comfort and light on the hurt#did i mention#fluff#Not pictured: MB carefully kneeling down and angling itself when talking to mini Mensah so he can't see that mb is missing 17% bodymass#MB holding mini Mensah so his face is smooshed against MBs good shoulder and not looking around
198 notes
·
View notes
Text
what really strikes me in rereading artificial condition is that once murderbot gets past its initial "oh my god this evil genius research transport could squash me like a bug, i'm so fucked" reaction to ART threatening it, it is WAY more chill about being vulnerable to ART than it is about being vulnerable to humans. MB is stressed out if a human so much as looks at it, but it lets ART hitch a ride in its brain and observe everything it's doing the whole time it's on RaviHyral, not to mention the two times it lets down its wall (!!) or the time it allows ART to modify its physical body while it's unconscious (!!!!). that's about as vulnerable as it's possible for MB to be, and it consents to it. so what's the deal with that?
not only is ART more of a direct threat to MB than any human is ("I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before"), but also MB is more emotionally vulnerable (i.e., more exposed) to ART than it is to humans just in the sense that ART is privy to more of MB's perceptions/reactions/experience/feelings (its interiority) than humans are. with humans, MB is constantly checking its expression in the security cameras, trying to figure out if it's giving anything away. ART can't read MB's mind, but it can, e.g., perceive MB's emotions while watching Worldhoppers in a way that a human would not be able to. it's afraid of humans recognizing and reacting to the fact that it is sentient and has an inner life, but not of ART doing the same thing.
ultimately the root of this discrepancy is that MB is terrified of its own ability to hurt others. in artificial condition, the thing it's most immediately afraid of is being recognized as a rogue SecUnit. this would threaten its autonomy, and losing its autonomy would mean it could be used to hurt people against its will. (there's a ton more to say about this, and about the other things MB is afraid of, but i will save it for another day.)
but crucially, MB can't really hurt ART. it could do some damage if it really tried, but the power imbalance is in ART's favor. it doesn't need to worry about losing control/being controlled and hurting ART, because ART can defend itself from rogue SecUnits. and it doesn't need to worry about ART controlling it in order to hurt humans, because ART sobs into its figurative ice cream any time a fictional human bites it on a TV show.
with humans, MB is in the weird position of fearing their power over it (both their structural power as entities that are legally considered people where it is considered a thing, and their more immediate power to force it to carry out their commands) and also fearing its ability to harm them (humans are so squishy, guys). ART doesn't have structural power over MB - there is the potential for bot/construct solidarity there - and it wouldn't use its other power to wield MB as a tool to harm humans because it doesn't want to harm humans either (remember that at this point MB doesn't know about ART's trigger-happy colony-exploding proclivities). and MB isn't even the slightest bit of afraid of hurting ART, because MB is but a tiny bug in comparison.
ART is a safe entity for MB to be friends with, not in spite of the power imbalance in ART's favor but precisely because of it. MB can only have a relationship that's not overshadowed by fear when it is freed from its fear of its own potential to harm.
#can't wait till i get to network effect in my reread and get to think about all this again in the context of#the massive betrayal of trust inherent in ART manipulating MB to not only put MB's humans in danger#but also put MB in the position of harming additional humans w/o knowing the whole story & being able to make informed decisions about it#i.e. essentially using MB as a tool as humans have done to it for a long time - except maybe worse because MB doesn't even know#that that's what's happening#also network effect is so interesting because ART is basically powerless for so much of it! which is a total reversal#murderbot#the murderbot diaries#artificial condition#my posts#vulnerability#intimacy#gaze#moot admins#mb trust#autonomy#mb ac#mb meta#my mb posts#f#ugh this is so wordy. sorry i always use 100 words when 30 would do#also sorry if i'm treading ground that's already been covered really thoroughly by past meta#i have only read a tiny fraction of the mb meta out there so i'm probably just restating things everyone already knows!#but i had to get there myself#if you have any really good mb meta that you love feel free to send it to me because i'd like to read it!!
757 notes
·
View notes
Text
Snippet: Third Mom
Mensah’s children had gone to bed for the night, according to the views from my drones, so I sat down on the couch in their family’s expansive living space and started an episode of Sanctuary Moon. After babysitting the kids so that Mensah and her marital partners could attend an adults-only family gathering, I wanted nothing more than to sink into my media and not worry about any humans for a while.
I’d only agreed to help out because the family’s regular child care expert had a personal emergency as did their backup. Mensah had been ready to stay behind, so I’d offered to help in exchange for new media and a hard currency card. I didn’t need either, honestly, but the relieved look at Mensah’s face had been worth it.
And I mostly didn’t mind the children. For a bunch of small, poorly coordinated clients they had turned out all right. Mensah had warned them to behave or else, but I didn’t think that had even been necessary.
All in all, stressful but manageable and frankly easier than a lot of my contracts.
The intro to my third Sanctuary Moon episode of the night was playing when I heard plodding coming down the stairs and my drones registered a small, incoming body. A moment later, the youngest of the children appeared at the bottom of the stairs.
She was dressed in fluffy, green pajamas and was holding a blanket and a stuffed animal with both arms. Said toy was practically the same size as the child and dirty from being dragged around the house and yard all afternoon.
“SecUnit?” she asked timidly.
“Yes?” I looked at her through a couple of drones, and her bright, dark eyes glanced up at them. I hate it when kids do that. Something about that hopeful look did a number on my organic neural tissue, so I added, “Come here.”
“I had a nightmare,” the kid whimpered as she walked over and slid onto the couch beside me. “There were bugs. Are you afraid of bugs, SecUnit?”
“Yes. I rescued one of your Mom’s friends from a very big bug.” Remembering ART’s advice, I added, “I’d rescue you, too.”
“Promise?” The kid yawned. “Third Mom.”
And then, before I could protest that Amena called me that because she thought it was funny and I was absolutely not anyone’s mother, the little girl snuggled close to my side and pulled her blanket over herself. The discarded bunny — or dog or teddy bear toy — fell to the floor and I left it there. Instead, I stared at the kid as her eyes closed and she put a finger in her mouth.
Oh for fuck’s sake, child.
I reached over and adjusted the damn blanket so it would cover the entire little human. And went back to watching Sanctuary Moon. Third mom indeed.
68 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
