mangafreakazoid

[mangafreakazoid]

One thing that is so interesting about the murderbot series is that it (as of rn) doesn’t put any focus on its wealthy class, and only the people that they exploit. We never meet the cruel and generationally wealthy decaquadrillionaires in charge GrayCris, DeltFall, Palisade, Barish-Estranza etc corporations and we probably never will.

I know a lot of royal family historic drama/crazy rich people fight for power type narratives give a lot of space for the fantasy of being at the top of the economic pyramid and glaze over what’s happening at the bottom. It’s all fancy galas and backstabbing and no sweat shops and slavery. And then there is left leaning fictional media that tries to put focus on every class level, with certain people at the top working covertly to help the little guy. But Martha Wells doesn’t let us humanize or even really give our attention to the corporations because there are no characters up there. There’s no singular villain or villains causing this. It’s just a vague systemic culture of exploitation and trauma; it’s turtles all the way down but make it oppression all the way up.

[mangafreakazoid]

I think if you can figure out what is causing Symptoms that the inside of your brain should go DING DING DING and then the Symptoms say Fuck, you got me! and leave

[mangafreakazoid]

seven episodes into murderbot and i gotta say, i really love the reaction of the crew when murderbot blows leebeebee's head off - like, it's such a wonderfully jarring moment all around. i love that it's such a gruesome shot, in a way that undecuts the ~heroic last minute rescue~ of it all, i love that everyone's reaction is this shocked horror and reconsideration of their fairly naive perspective on murderbot, i love murderbot's baffled hurt about it all - it DID save the day, after all! come on! to it, the sudden gruesome violence to save the crew wasn't meaningfully different than taking its helmet down to calm arada down - it's helping! why is everyone mad at it all of a sudden!

idk, i love that despite the borderline black comedy of the moment, it's still treated seriously - that the death of a person, even a bad person, is still given weight.

[mangafreakazoid]

you should be addicted to shutting the fuck up

You wanna fuck me so bad it makes you look stupid

[mangafreakazoid]

Murderbot + low self esteem

A defective unit that's just one thought away from killing everyone around you.

[mangafreakazoid]

FINALLY got around to dumping Spotify after their CEO continued to prove he's a fresh turd. (As if being a billionaire, not paying musicians, shoving AI garbage at us, and having an atrocious carbon footprint wasn't bad enough, he's now the chair of a AI-based weapons manufacturing company.)

I used TuneMyMusic ($24 annual fee you can cancel immediately, effectively paying only once) to transfer almost every single song from our Spotify account to Tidal. Tidal already has much better sound quality and they pay their artists much better. It migrated over 99% of our music, too, so there wasn't a huge loss.

[mangafreakazoid]

Loved that moment in System Collapse where there’s a little philosophical debate about whether the colonist’s system (can't remember what it's called atm) is trying to get them to trust it: Iris asks ART about it, and ART responds with being skeptical about ascribing human motivations to machine intelligences (MIs). and Ratthi is sooo down to debate about what qualifies as “human” motivation.

Like it’s such a great example of why Ratthi is so knowledgeable about constructs. He’s thinking about MIs in really interesting ways, which, coupled with how intuitive and empathetic he is, makes him such a great ally. Ratthi respects Murderbot so much 😭 and their relationship is very charming.

And I find it sooooo interesting how Murderbot doesn’t chime in at all… I mean, it’s in character for it (and it is Going Through It™️), but MB absolutely treats every MI or system it comes across with some level of respect or regard. It wants to foster trust and be kind… I think this has something to do with SecUnits being social beings whose only outlet for that (especially with an intact governor module) are systems and then bots.

That post (via @iridescent-glitter-dragon) about ART being better with humans but not knowing how to talk with other MIs, and Murderbot being so much better with MIs than humans, makes so much sense for both of them. Like, ART was raised alongside a human and mostly works with other humans (and it has NO PATIENCE <3). MB, on the other hand, was dehumanized and completely alienated from people, with systems and other bots as its only means of socializing. of course it would have a great deal of empathy for them <3

[mangafreakazoid]

An aspect of Rapport that I really enjoyed was how well it illustrated that Murderbot, unreliable narrator that it is, has an extremely high opinion of ART.

Because there's no point in Artificial Condition, or even later in Network Effect, where SecUnit ever assumes that ART simply can't do something, aside from parsing the full emotional/visceral context of media by itself. If there is a thing SecUnit can think of doing, naturally ART could do that too, probably better.

But we see that's not the case during the mission on the corporate station. We kind of knew this already from its difficulty keeping track of Tapan and the ComfortUnit on RaviHyral, but here we see that ART just isn't the hacker SecUnit is. It's extremely powerful, but only in areas that it already controls--i.e. itself and any system that SecUnit gives it access to. The team is surprised that it even got into the security system at all. That, by itself, is a huge leap forward for them. But it can't simply reroute the security drone somewhere else, or cut the team out of the security cameras the way SecUnit can, even after SecUnit showed it how to doctor surveillance footage. It can't hack the weapon scanners so they can smuggle more equipment in. ART has immense processing power, but it doesn't have the innate ability to convince resident systems that it's just a regular component and it's supposed to be there.

ART has limitations, and it is keenly aware of them, which I think is what prompts its sarcastic suggestion to the mission team they blow up the corporate station: It's sending its crew into an active war zone, and the only thing it can really do to help is talk them through it, and it's really feeling that powerlessness, even after all the new tricks it learned from its new BFF.

This mission would be trivially easy if SecUnit were here. Without it, they're in constant danger from everyone on the station.

It calls into question a lot of the points in Network Effect and System Collapse where SecUnit blithely assumes that ART is just humoring it. Because it sees ART's abilities as greatly superior and not different. (And ART is a know-it-all and a sarcastic asshole with better processing hardware, but it's also a spaceship and not a security system specifically built to anticipate, identify, and resolve threats.)

(Which is also why ART is bad at de-escalating conflicts and leaps to threats when things go badly despite the fact that it is a huge softie who can't even cope with bad things happening to fictional people on television. It's a gunship. It doesn't have any tools for de-escalating things. It has concealed rail guns. That's what it's got. SecUnit may have energy weapons in its arms, but it was designed to keep damage minimal to humans and expensive company property.)

The disparity between the perspectives of Iris, who thinks of Peri as her precocious sibling, and Murderbot, who thinks of ART as an omniscient nigh-otherworldly being (but still an asshole), is really enlightening.

And now I want something from Seth or Martyn's point of view.

[mangafreakazoid]

the "art doesn't lie actually" post

this post has been rotating in my head for weeks now, so i decided to actually write it out. thesis: despite what murderbot claims, art doesn't actually lie.*

this is gonna be long, so buckle up!

*obligatory disclaimer: we're cherry-picking a specific definition of "lie" here, because art actually lies by omission all the fucking time. but what's interesting to me is that art's words are factually true. so here we're taking lie to mean (shoutout merriam-webster, y'all i did homework for this), an untrue or inaccurate statement. in the real world lies of omission are still lies etc etc etc., but afaik english doesn't have a word for "factually true but missing backstory". so really this is a manifesto on how when art says something, its words are factually correct, you just might need to look a little further. (and how that ties into its interactions with murderbot in particular. our most funky and fabulous unreliable narrator.)

okay! so!

art doesn't lie, in the sense that the words it speaks are factually true. in a way it reminds me of the fae - it is very careful with its wording, and you have to be wary of double meanings or missing context, but it does not lie to you. art 100% means what it says.

examples that come to mind, in no particular order:

i have a debris deflection system, it says. murderbot says, you have a weapons system. it says, for debris deflection. rating: technically true! it has not lied. however. those are in fact guns. and guns by any other name can still kill you.

art says, my crew has the means to produce the original charters. murderbot, who knows art really well, goes so you mean forge. and art ignores it. because forgery is, technically, the means to produce. rating: true! wholly missing context.

arada goes, transport can you please explain what the fuck happened? art says, i am prioritizing the medical system. it could definitely respond! but it definitely does not want to! (it's fine, secunit will explain when it wakes up, right? right?) rating: probably true! most likely, it is prioritizing the medsystem!

and the most recent, from rapport: art says, completely truthfully, No intel drones have been aboard me. it is correct. (as far as i can remember,) secunit didn't have its drones with it during artificial condition. rating: true! technically! but leaves out the much more alarming fact that oh my god art you let a secunit aboard???

(sidebar: that last one convinced me of this theory. that is such a specific statement that is so clearly meant to cover up a bigger secret. art, you obfuscating ass, you haven't had drones aboard you but you have had a fucking secunit!! i am so full of affection for this absolute menace of a transport.)

there are probably more examples i'm not thinking of. but as far as i can remember, art does not lie. it omits, and it obfuscates, but when it tells you something, you can be pretty fucking sure it means what it says.

so, why does it lie? is it, like our beloved murderbot, completely devoid of self-esteem? or does it just enjoy lying? no! this is the Asshole Research Transport, the Perihelion, the machine intelligence who will demonstrably do absolutely anything to keep its people safe. no, art lies because it has something to protect.

in each of these examples, art is protecting something. its identity. its crew's mission. its prospective relationship with secunit's humans. secunit's entire existence.

(you know, the more i write about art, the more i become convinced that protectiveness is its #1 defining character trait. as a side note.)

so, when art says something, you can be pretty sure that art is telling the truth. but wait a second. murderbot calls it a liar. why could that be?

(theory over now, by the way. this is about to diverge into headcanon/make fun of murderbot time. shoutout @marvelousmawn for the idea, because her brain is so big and sexy!)

yeah, why would our funky little secunit decide that art is a liar? what could art possibly tell its favorite construct that would make it decide that art is lying through its metaphorical teeth? what has secunit consistently, constantly been wrong about throughout the entire series? any guesses? i've got one!

yeah, my bet's that art complimented it one too many times, and murderbot decided it was full of shit.

what a way to get a reputation for being a liar. by being too nice to your bestie.

seren end theory.

[mangafreakazoid]

I think a lot of how I look at ART's relationship to the University is informed by Crux's insane rant to Gideon in the first scene of Gideon the Ninth, where we really get to see the stakes of living in a necromantic economy for the first time. Gideon is trying to argue that her running off to join the military should be fine, because she'll bring more honor to the Ninth house that way, but Crux doesn't give a shit what she does with her life. He's upset because if she dies in the cohort, the Ninth will potentially lose access to her /body./ Theyre in a closed ecosystem. They need her body - her fat to make soap with, her skin to make books with, her skeleton for labor. And so she's trapped forever, because no amount of their belief in her personal autonomy will override their economic interest in the physical material of her body.

And that, I think, is very reminiscent of a certain bot pilot whose personhood seems to be respected on paper, but who is still held captive by the fact that even if the University doesn't own its mind, they very much own its body.

[mangafreakazoid]

After System Collapse and Rapport, I can't help thinking about how completely and utterly insane ART and Murderbot's first meeting was from ART's perspective.

UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART's home station. In Mihira and New Tideland's system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren't any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they've been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn't either. They're not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it's a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.

And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.

So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That's point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.

And ART's paranoia is easily on par with Tarik's, generally speaking. Even though it's never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit's got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it's wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it's supposed to be mistaken for a human -- okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.

But there's no point in it trying to pretend it's a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It's not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can't get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can't get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it's doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.

And it just pings ART directly.

Not even... trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.

That is... possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART's crew (who aren't even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They're really bad at this.

And then it asks for a ride--which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily--wait. What the fuck? It's offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.

There is no human handler.

ART doesn't even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.

Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.

And apparently it's hitchhiking?

This raises so many more questions than it answers.

Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.

ART's explanation of, "I was curious about you," for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.

This is the equivalent of a frigging walrus ringing your doorbell.

[mangafreakazoid]

Loved that moment in System Collapse where there’s a little philosophical debate about whether the colonist’s system (can't remember what it's called atm) is trying to get them to trust it: Iris asks ART about it, and ART responds with being skeptical about ascribing human motivations to machine intelligences (MIs). and Ratthi is sooo down to debate about what qualifies as “human” motivation.

Like it’s such a great example of why Ratthi is so knowledgeable about constructs. He’s thinking about MIs in really interesting ways, which, coupled with how intuitive and empathetic he is, makes him such a great ally. Ratthi respects Murderbot so much 😭 and their relationship is very charming.

And I find it sooooo interesting how Murderbot doesn’t chime in at all… I mean, it’s in character for it (and it is Going Through It™️), but MB absolutely treats every MI or system it comes across with some level of respect or regard. It wants to foster trust and be kind… I think this has something to do with SecUnits being social beings whose only outlet for that (especially with an intact governor module) are systems and then bots.

That post (via @iridescent-glitter-dragon) about ART being better with humans but not knowing how to talk with other MIs, and Murderbot being so much better with MIs than humans, makes so much sense for both of them. Like, ART was raised alongside a human and mostly works with other humans (and it has NO PATIENCE <3). MB, on the other hand, was dehumanized and completely alienated from people, with systems and other bots as its only means of socializing. of course it would have a great deal of empathy for them <3

[mangafreakazoid]

the phrase that keeps popping up in my head is “ART’s personhood is humored by PSUMNT.” it was created as a tool for the university to further their crusade against the corporate system. it is a person bc they believed that making it one would best serve its purpose. it does not have bodily autonomy. its autonomy to take actions is also limited. its second in command of itself. its obvious anger and frustration and anxiety is brushed off as Peri being Peri by its crew.

i keep thinking about how it’s so desperate to protect its crew but its tools for doing so r limited. it cannot hack or make friends with bots and bot systems. it doesn’t have cameras or sensors to watch them once they step out of its hull. it can pretend to be human on coms but does not understand humans (and humans do not understand it). the only weapons it has is for blowing large objects into small objects. it cannot do neat, precision strikes. it does have its shuttles but it cannot extract its crew from situations preventing them from getting on the shuttle under their own power except w a drone not rly designed for that.

it found someone who does have those tools. SecUnit can watch and protect ART’s crew. it can make friends with bots or hack them if it can’t. it tries to avoid violence but can do it with enough precision to avoid hurting its clients. it understands ART and its desire to protect its crew. i wonder how PSUMNT will feel about that.

EDIT: minor corrections

[mangafreakazoid]

this situation is potentially just as fucked up fro Seth, Martyn, and Iris. they cannot have any meaningful separation between their personal and professional lives. i wonder if Seth and Martyn choose the university or were raised in it like Iris. any of them quitting their jobs means leaving their family. the three of them could choose to leave together but that would mean abandoning Peri.

ART cannot quit w/o risking its family being reassigned, if it could quit at all. it’s unknown if it has any rights w the university.

SecUnit keeps saying it hates hostage situations. i wonder how long until this escalates into one.

[mangafreakazoid]

you're so pretty. like, you're absolutely gorgeous. have you thought about tidying your room slightly to temporarily but significantly increase your quality of life? you are so beautiful

[mangafreakazoid]

this isn’t the first time the DHS has tweeted literal nazi propaganda but uuuhhhh I feel like things are going to get Very Bad unless we do something. about the nazis. who are running the US government

[mangafreakazoid]

It’s not an ex-SecUnit.

You can’t be an ex-SecUnit until you’re dead.