#miki the murderbot diaries

[hollowmoon-art]

Rogue Protocol

[gauzyfruitcake]

Life's tough for a SecUnit out on the frontier, especially when you get separated from your owner, and a certain pet bot won't leave you alone. Literally.

Murderbot and Miki, starring in the kind of unrealistic adventure story that Murderbot would rather consume in media form.

Rated T.

Read on AO3

[fingolfinwiththesteelchair]

It is a beautiful day, and you are a horrible research transport vessel. Things are progressing as normal (i.e. it's boring) when a SecUnit pings you, lies right to your metaphorical face, and then tries to bribe you with human media to give it a ride. This is as unexpected as it is unprecedented, and the sheer nerve of it is really to be admired. There's no protocol to this, so what should you do?

Now, this is against a bunch of rules, and could be dangerous if you weren't so impressive and incredible, and you're technically an employee (and can probably rewrite the Univeristy charter at will (until someone notices and puts it back)) so those rules are for other entities.

So, what you should do is allow the rogue SecUnit with a broken governor module and a sketchy story aboard. If you check the files it dumps and find zero (0) malware (which is confusing), and it doesn't even try to trash the place or lay in wait to ambush a crew member, then you've got a good candidate!

Next, what you're going to want to do is absolutely nothing. Just watch it patrol your halls until it's time to leave. Continue staring at it while you're undergoing embarkment procedures. Maybe analyze it a little (you've got plenty of processing power to spare) when it finally sits down and starts watching media. Allow it to settle in and get comfortable while you stare at it and get further and further from port.

Now that you two are alone (intimacy is key!) and you've determined that watching media is all the SecUnit is going to do, it's time to make contact! Make sure to open by telling it it's only survived due to dumb luck, and letting it know you could melt its brain into putty. This starter will work to develop conversation naturally and smoothly, just like you've seen the humans do, and it will be smooth sailing from there!

This has been Perihelion's guide to making friends/finding life partners/fuck off Holism I had to work hard for this find your own

[ghostcashewart]

"Huh. That wasn't a lie, but it sure wasn't the truth, either."

miki and don abene from rogue protocol!!!

[coquelicoq]

martha wells loves to do this thing where she takes a character who has to hide and pretend to be something they're not so that they aren't shunned and hated by everyone around them, and then introduces a new character who is also whatever the main character is hiding being but who is not a damaged broken liar about it because they have people in their life who know about it and love them. and then she makes the second character and the people who love them experience trauma. and she makes the first character observe this and fear that love at the same time they long for it. and above all she makes me have emotions about it. she's constantly doing this. thanks a lot for that.

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[hellofriendhawke]

The It/its gang. Would love a story about Murderbot, ART, Three, the ComfortUnit, Miki, and Tellus doing bot things (even if I know that's impossible.)

[theriseandfallofsanctuarymoon]

Murderbot Textposts

[gavindna]

Man I just finished rogue protocol and what the FUCK was that???

[asterion-out-of-the-maze]

MIKIIIiiiii 😖

I will never financially recover

[timongerart]

some little mini-comics I made a while back when i was re-reading The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

from "All Systems Red"

from "Rogue Protocol"

one reason i'd like Murderbot Diaries to be adapted (either a live action show or an animated show) is to see how much of an unreliable narrator SecUnit regarding its emotions and emotional reactions to things around it. I know its pokerface is next to non-existent!

[sunlitsorrows]

“The upside was a paranoid attention to detail.

The downside was also a paranoid attention to detail.”

I love that most bots/ai are so chill it was easier/cheaper to creat hybrid constructs out of clone tissue and then traumatize them into permanent hyper-vigilance than it was to code in a few extra lines on red flags to look out for.

nah that’s too much work and we can’t account for everything, let’s just make a human we can squeak by not having to define as a human so we don’t have to give it basic human rights and then make it scared of everything all the time!

BUT THEN—it would be so easy to tell that story, that humans are inherently terrible and petty and callous etc etc—but that ISN’T the story!

because Murderbot didn’t immediately go on a revenge killing spree when it got its freedom. because despite everything it’s been through it can’t stop trying to help. because everywhere it goes someone tries to be kind to it.

because the human default isn’t selfishness, that’s the aberration.

whether you believe in humans being created out of love or as having evolved as social animals in order to survive (or wherever you fall in the middle ground), the end output is the same; our default is to care about each other

[gauzyfruitcake]

Miki meets the PreservationAux team while they all celebrate Murderbot's Adoption Day (only Murderbot doesn't know it).

@mbd-gift-exchange

[pieplease]

Reading Rogue Protocol for the first time, and watching Murderbot witness Miki's relationship with their crew is like watching Eleanor Shelstrop's monolgue for the first time. They could have changed for me, i just wasn't worth it.

[ghostcashewart]

working on my miki design!!

[ineedlelittlespace]

Saw an alignment chart, had to do some Murderbot artificial intelligences.