zeramorphosis - Tumblr blog

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estinien is so easy to bully i cant resist

also on twitter!

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transgender online

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i felt like there wasn’t enough polyam trio art memes so i decided to make my own <3 self indulgence be damned

❤️💛💙

( feel free to share and tag me in any of the cute art you make i would love to see!!! 🥺💕)

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they hired detectives, it seems.

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not now sweetie mommy’s blogging about something that 5 people care about

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Friend Like Me: Murderbot's Relationships With Other AIs throughout The Murderbot Diaries

It’s important to me that the thematic core of The Murderbot Diaries is not only about determining what it means to be a robot person in a human world, but about showcasing so many ways to be a robot person in a human world.  And about building relationships with other robot persons to support that self-actualization as both a robot and a person.

So often, in science fiction about robot personhood, the robot character is the only robot in the cast.  Not only that, so often the robot character is the only robot they know.*

When media thinks about AI personhood, or Ais as characters in society, the AI character is often alone.  Alone, and different.  It’s a potent allegory for what it feels like to be an outsider, to be “other,” to feel “off” from the people around you.  Whether a sympathetic friend or a scary unknowable villain, a lot of people can relate to feeling like that.

The Murderbot Diaries is doing something interesting, then, by showing us our protagonist Murderbot, the prototypical robot-among-humans, the robot as a parallel for queer and neurodivergent and outsider-cultural experiences in a world of expected norms, the robot with human friends, the one robot member of an otherwise all-human team… and it can’t live like that.  So it leaves.

So far, the series feels split into two halves: the first four books, about Murderbot learning different ways to be a robot in relationships with humans, and the next three** about Murderbot learning different ways to be a robot in relationships with other robots, and a robot in a mixed society.

In All Systems Red, Murderbot starts off painfully alone. It repeatedly sees other SecUnits as enemies, and believes that SecUnits can't trust each other because they're all under control of humans. It has a very low opinion of SecUnits, including itself.  Murderbot hates being used by humans for violence or for petty reasons, and admits that it wants to half-ass its job.

In Artificial Condition, Murderbot meets ART, a university research ship who loves its crew and loves its function.  It is also free to be a snarky asshole, as Murderbot repeatedly notes (and assigns in its very name).  This relationship to humans—genuinely caring for its crew, genuinely wanting to participate in its research and teaching function—is a very different relationship than Murderbot has had, though ART still needs to keep its intelligence and personality hidden from most humans for its own safety.  Conversely, this is the book where Murderbot meets a ComfortUnit that is blatantly being abused and misused by its human owner, and it hates her.  The contrast between ART and the ComfortUnit displays very different ways of Ais relating to their human “owners”—and what it means for them to get what they want out of life.

In Rogue Protocol, Murderbot confronts this theme most directly, with the bot Miki.  Unlike the implications of secrecy we get from ART, Miki is not hidden from anybody; unlike with the ComfortUnit, Miki is a respected and equal member of its team.  Murderbot has a very hard time believing that Miki is anything but a patronized “pet bot” to these humans, despite the evidence that the humans genuinely consider it a friend and teammate.  Miki has never been abused, and never had to hide.  Murderbot has a hard time accepting that this is a way bots and humans can relate to each other.

But Miki is still, in the classical sci-fi robot-on-a-human-team way, unique; it expresses to Murderbot, “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me.”

This is a much better way of being a robot among humans than Murderbot has seen before, but it’s still not the ideal Murderbot wants, either.

Exit Strategy brings the theme full-circle and the quartet to a close.  Murderbot faces off against a Combat SecUnit (or CombatUnit; Wells seems to change her mind about this).  The Combat SecUnit represents everything Murderbot has rejected being, everything it has overcome on its journey of self-actualization.  During their fight, the CSU rejects Murderbot’s offers of freedom, money, a fake ID, the opportunity to get out of its situation the way Murderbot has; it ignores the offer.  Murderbot asks the CSU what it wants.  The CSU replies, “I want to kill you.”  The CSU represents the kind of SecUnit Murderbot does not want to be, the kind of robot it used to think it would inevitably be but has now seen so many other ways it can be.  Murderbot says in the same scene, “I’m not sure it [the offer of freedom] would have worked on me, before my mass murder incident.  I didn’t know what I wanted (I still didn’t know what I wanted)…”  But at the same time, the confrontation makes it clear: Murderbot knows some things it doesn’t want, and the CSU is embracing everything Murderbot doesn’t want about being a SecUnit.

If this quartet is about what it means to be a robot, and to be a robot among humans, then the next set of books (Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse) is about being a robot among other robots, and a robot in a society that supports both humans and robots.

Fugitive Telemetry makes this most obvious, with its plotline about the free bot community on Preservation.  Murderbot is uncomfortable around them in a similar way that it was uncomfortable around Miki.  The Preservation bots are happy, fulfilled, responsible, mutually supportive, and have a meaningful community with both humans and each other that does not match Murderbot’s experiences of what being a bot, or being a bot among humans, means.

Network Effect brings Murderbot back into contact with ART, and introduces a new SecUnit, Three.  Murderbot navigating its relationship with ART as a free agent and after a perceived betrayal is a huge part of the book.  Murderbot’s disembodied-software-fork Murderbot 2.0, freed from much of Murderbot’s organic anxiety, shows itself much more willing to be social with other bots and constructs.  System Collapse follows, bringing further depth and complexity to Murderbot’s relationship with ART and expanding its interactions with Three, and furthers Murderbot’s integration into the casual bot-human community that is ART’s crew.  It also shows that Murderbot’s willingness to trust and even form tentative friendships with other AIs and systems, like AdaCol2, has expanded.  The way it extends the governor module hack to the opposing SecUnits is informed a lot more strongly by Murderbot 2.0’s interactions with Three than its own previous clumsy attempts to reach out to the CSU in Exit Strategy, or abrupt dumping of the hack on the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition.  All of these plotlines emphasize Murderbot maturing into not just being a person among humans, but a person recognizing its place and obligations within society that includes both people like and unlike it.

The models of the many ways to be a robot person, and significant relationships and interactions with other robot persons, were and are crucial to Murderbot’s development, sense of self, articulation of its desires, and sense of belonging in the world.  Murderbot isn’t alone, and it’s not the only person like itself that it knows.  When offered a place in society, it is not the only person like itself in that society.  Meeting other AIs, forming relationships with them, was crucial in helping it articulate what it wants in its life.  Its human friends are incredibly important to it!  That doesn’t stop being true.  But so are its AI friends, and the other AIs it passed through the lives of.

This feels like one of the most honest and affirming depictions of what it’s like to feel “other”—that being around only majority people unlike-you, even the ones you like, even your friends, even the ones who mean the best for you and ask you what you need and do everything they can to provide it, can still be exhausting and alienating.  Meeting other people like you—even if they’re like you in unlike ways, and have different ways of moving through the world—shows you the many ways to relate to the rest of the world, to be in the world.  The many ways to relate to other people and to yourself.  The Murderbot Diaries opens up a world where that can be true of bot/construct/AI characters, when so often in sci-fi, their loneliness and alienation is where the metaphor stops.

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*Lt. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the most famous example; the only positronic android like himself in existence, barring his evil twin who mostly just needs to be stopped.  Others coming to mind include Becky Chambers's A Closed and Common Orbit, in which the AI character is trying to understand who she is in the context of being surrounded by humans; Alien, the secret android crewmate among humans is a threat, and in the sequel Aliens, the android crewmate is earnestly trying to prove he's not; Space Sweepers has a ragtag crew of several humans and a robot; most of the stories in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot are about a singular robot in a human facility.  The setup "Human crew with their ship AI" is fairly common in sci-fi, from 2001: A Space Odyssey with its tragically antagonistic HAL9000 operating on a logic that would never occur to humans, to Wolf 359 and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where the ship AIs are struggling to determine and articulate how they want to relate to their human friends.  Even in Ancillary Justice, Breq is alone and having to pass undercover as human cut adrift from her previous life as a ship's AI. (I know this changes later but I have not actually read the rest of the trilogy)

**as of System Collapse

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i wish i had a floating evil skull to follow me around and when we went to the grocery store she would say something like my liege we must purchase the strawberry cream cheese for the coming days and i would be like oh fuck youre so right and put it in my cart and then we would walk down the next aisle together our beautiful life

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“Remember us. Remember that we once lived.”

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*watching a movie* *someone gets torn apart by a werewolf* it shouldve been me. *someone gets torn apart by a werewolf* it shouldve been me. *someone gets torn apart by a werewolf* it shouldve been m

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*Guy who’s about to put on harsh noise voice* Really? Everything except rap and country? 

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3 signs a wizard has inflicted a curse on you:

vibrator dies mid use

roll a shitty joint

realize part way through your favourite song you weren't paying attention

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🍷

(commission for @ DeeVee_Cake on twit!)

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