quixlebug

[quixlebug]

Murderbot 1.07 Complementary Species

[quixlebug]

made this for my twitter but there's more fans here so have a murderbot fan cam ✨ (it would hate this)

[quixlebug]

Bitter/Sweet

A brief continuation of the scene in episode 7, in which the tooth monster takes a few more minutes to appear and Murderbot has time to play the bitter/sweet game.

“... It’s safer if they think of you as a person who is trying to help. Because that’s how I think of you,” Mensah said.

My insides melted. That’s the only way I could describe it. After a minute, when I had my expression under control, I folded my helmet back into my armor and walked over to stand with the humans. That wasn’t my first mistake of the day, but it was one of the stupider ones.

“I’ll go first,” Mensah said once we were all standing around in a circle like idiots. Then she made a weird flicking gesture in front of her face. “Sweet: Secunit, earlier today you saved Gurathin’s life - all of our lives. We owe you our gratitude for that.” She made the gesture again. “Bitter: you did it by killing Lebeebee, very suddenly and violently. I think many of us are struggling to reconcile that. We can talk about this.”

“We can talk about this,” the others agreed, creepily synchronized. Then they looked at me all expectantly, like they thought that I should somehow know what the hell they wanted.

“It’s your turn, Secunit,” Mensah remembered to clue me in after a moment. “You choose a memory of someone else in the circle, and share something sweet and something bitter about it. It’s something we do to encourage open communication and resolve conflict within the group.”

That was so fucking stupid that I couldn’t come up with anything to say for a full ten seconds. My buffer wanted me to ask them to please wait while I searched for information, but I didn’t let it, because I was kind of hoping that if I just stayed very still and quiet they would go back to thinking of me as an appliance like all the normal humans did.

“It’s not going to do it,” Pin-Lee muttered, like that meant I couldn’t hear them. “It’s obviously not going to do it, Mensah, this is a waste of time-”

“Give it a minute, babe, it’s thinking,” Arada said.

“Yeah, it’s thinking, definitely,” Ratthi said, nodding vigorously.

“You don’t know that!" Pin-Lee snapped. "You can’t know that, because it’s still not fucking saying anything, which is incredibly creepy, by the way-”

“Shh, don’t be judgmental, it doesn’t have to talk if it doesn’t-”

“Judgmental?” Pin-Lee had given up on muttering and was getting progressively louder. “It just blew a woman’s head off right in front of us and you’re worried about being judgmental?”

“Since you brought it up, maybe you should be a little more worried about pissing off the thing that just blew a woman’s head off,” Arada said, which was a pretty good point but still didn’t feel great to hear.

“Can we stop talking about blowing people’s heads off?” Bharadwaj asked. She looked like she felt sick, but her vitals were holding steady, so she wasn’t dying and it therefore wasn’t my problem.

“Talking about it is kind of the whole point of this,” Ratthi pointed out. 

“It’s clearly not going to happen, though, because the person blowing the heads off isn’t fucking talking-”

“Sweet,” I said, and Pin-Lee shut up right in the middle of their sentence. There were a lot of things I could have said: you’ve never taken a blow torch to my hand just because you know I can’t stop you was one of them. So was: you’re the only humans who have ever talked to me like I’m a person. But what I said was: “You’re good clients because you don’t make my job harder on purpose. Bitter…” (I didn’t do the flicking gesture, because it was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. I should have just let that stupid tooth monster eat me days ago.) “You make my job harder by accident all the time.”

“And what is your job, as you see it?” That was Bharadwaj. I felt like she, at least, should have been willing to give me a break, since this was the second time I’d saved her life.

“To protect my clients from harm,” I said.

“By killing people?”

“If necessary.”

“And you believe that murdering Lebeebee was necessary.” From Bharadwai’s tone, I got the sense that she didn’t think it was necessary. That’s why I’m the one in charge of security.

“Yes,” I said. “She was a threat.”

“She was a person!” Arada said.

Well, yeah. “A person who was a threat.”

“You can’t go around just shooting people because you think they might be threats!” Pin-Lee said. “That’s the complete antithesis of the values Preservation was built on, it’s not okay and it’s not how we operate!"

“It was when you killed the hostile secunit at DeltFall,” I said.

That shut them up for all of about four seconds. “That was different,” Arada said, startled.

“How?” I asked.

“It was trying to kill us!”

“So was Lebeebee.” Seriously, had they not noticed that? Maybe they were even more helpless than I thought.

“No, no, it’s not the same,” Bharadwaj said. She sounded upset, and to be honest, I wasn’t feeling great about this either. “Lebeebee was just misguided, we could have talked to her, we could have come up with some other solution. The situation wasn’t the same!”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Lebeebee was a human, which means that she chose to do everything that she did, and I killed her for it. The secunit was a construct, which means that it never chose to do anything in its life. It followed orders that its governor module enforced with electric shocks to its neural tissue, and then you killed it for that. You’re right, that’s not the same.”

I wasn’t looking at them while I talked, because rogue secunits don’t have to make eye contact if they don’t want to, but no one said anything for such a long time that my threat assessment module started getting twitchy and I glanced down at them just to make sure they were still there.

They were. They were just standing there in our stupid circle, staring at me. Bharadwaj looked shocked. All of them did, except maybe Mensah, like I’d said something that had never occurred to them before. Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe they hadn’t thought of what they did to that secunit as “killing” at all, because you couldn’t kill a machine. You just shut it down.

“Secunit…” Mensah was the first one to remember how to talk, but I didn’t get to find out what she wanted to say.

“I hear something,” I said. It looked like I was going to get another shot at getting eaten by a giant tooth monster after all.

[quixlebug]

Bats Fact #27

Whole Apple

[quixlebug]

mind if I come over and behave somewhat like a scared animal before I adjust

[quixlebug]

Sometimes it feels like you've lived your whole life in a house that's always a little bit on fire. Like it's usually just in one room and you make sure to wet the walls around it so it doesn't spread and that usually works. You were expected to take more responsibility over fire containment when you were like seven because it's not like you can expect your parents to always be 100% on guard about making sure the whole house doesn't catch fire, and you figure that's just how things are like.

And sometimes as a kid you visit your friends' homes and some of then whisper to you - grimacing with embarrassment - about how they're not supposed to tell anyone this, but there's a whole room in their house that's currently on fire. And you're like yeah it's ok I'm not supposed to tell people about the way our house is a little bit on fire all the time, too. And then you visit some other friend's house and there's no trace of fire anywhere, and you think "wow, these people are really good at hiding their house fire."

And one day you show up to work like "hey sorry I'm late, I forgot to wet the walls before going to bed last night and my whole house burned down", and you're startled by the way people react, acting like that must be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. And you're just like "chill, it's been years since the last time this happened, and it wasn't even that bad this time", and that just makes people more shocked, acting like that's the weirdest and most concerning thing they've ever heard anyone say, which only confuses you more.

And then someone tries to explain to you that people aren't supposed to have an ongoing house fire. Most people actually never experience a house fire in their lives. Like not even once. Not even a little bit. The normal amount of having your house be currently on fire is zero.

[quixlebug]

[quixlebug]

daily affirmations:

i am kind

i am in control of my emotions

it does not bother me when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

everyone in the house has the right to be in the kitchen

i am kind and in control of my emotions even when someone is in the kitchen while i was planning to be in there alone

[quixlebug]

the funniest and most tragic moment in steven universe is the scene that implies that Pearl pulls bitches like a professional dog walker but doesn't know how phones work so her place on earth is being a life-changing futch fling for every dyke on the east coast there's probably a gay bar in maryland where they talk about the twiggy bird chick that eats milf pussy like it's the last edible thing on earth and they dont even know about the city full of thousand year old neon lesbian amazons who are pent up 24/7 from The War and leaving room for jesus cause they're always hanging out with their softboy nephew who might be the second coming of christ

[quixlebug]

if anyone thinks there’s a better gif than this one then theyre dead fucking wrong

[quixlebug]

[quixlebug]

Part of the reason I'm so adamant about encouraging people to get comfortable with bugs, my own interests aside, is because we cannot have a bright, solarpunk future without them.

A green future is not a bugless future. It is, in fact, a fairly bugful future. If you care about ecological stability, then you need to start with bugs, because they're the most at risk with our current use of pesticides.

[quixlebug]

Creature vaugly similar to a turtle dove

[quixlebug]

touch-starvation needs to be written with emphasis on the starving part. you are hungry to be touched. so hungry that even the very taste of it makes you nauseous. it has been long since anything has ever touched you, ever fed you - that your body has grown more used to that gnawing emptiness more than anything else. it's better for you to be held, to eat but it makes you sick to try. you know

[quixlebug]

Baby, don't forget your medicine!!

[quixlebug]

[quixlebug]

Chimera

Acrylic on canvas, August 2024