The Disortion Is Kinda Hot

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.

In the past, any needle-related appointment on my calendar was this big looming kraken of dread. It felt like the end of the world. A black hole that I couldn't envision the future beyond. I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say some part of me thought of it like the date of my scheduled execution. (It doesn't help that the fainting episode I have immediately after physically feels like I'm dying.) The more logical side understood that this was irrational and I would survive, but that I'd also surely need to spend a week or so mentally preparing myself beforehand, plus a day or two of just moping around afterward to recover from the ordeal. You know. #SelfCare.

I made this enormous multi-day sea monster with a hundred hungry tentacles out of something that is, on its face, a shitty 15 minutes at the most.

And it sucks, right? Because I know why I did that. I had a traumatic early childhood experience—2 years old or so, held down on a cold metal table by strangers with a hundred rubbing-alcohol-scented hands and twisting dark shadows on the wall shouting HOLD STILL while they jabbed me with multiple shots at once as I thrashed and screamed and begged them to stop because for all I knew, they were going to kill me—that gave me a primal, visceral fear of needles and everything around them. And then, as I grew up, family members and friends and medical professionals saw my disproportionate fear and told me to quit being so dramatic about something that doesn't even hurt that bad! (As if I don't know that. As if the problem was ever the pain and not the loss of control, the shattering of trust.)

My kraken of fear was a big deal for me, and when people dismissed and invalidated my feelings by telling me it wasn't, the only natural response for a contrarian like me was to dig my heels in and make it an even bigger deal. That meant I was in control, right? A perfect plan with no flaws whatsoever! Except for the part where it could've gotten me killed.

It didn't, thankfully, and my abdominal pain turned out to be a couple of ovarian cysts that resolved on their own, but the hours I spent writhing on the floor in agony last June because if I go to the emergency room they are going to put needles in me might've done me in had my initial suspicion of appendicitis been correct. Didn't matter. To that deep part of my brain that deals in adrenaline and tiger attacks, the kraken was certain death, and possible death was preferable to that. I could only be taken in once the pain burned through my ability to resist.

Gorging itself on all the ground I gave it, the kraken had grown larger than my capacity to reason, my judgment, even my desire to stay alive for the people I love. But in therapy, I learned the way to shrink it down was to...well, give it less space to take up!

It wasn't comfortable or easy. Often, giving the kraken less space meant getting closer to it myself. But it also meant bringing other stuff with me—a bag with helpful items, like an ice pack (to put on my face as a mammalian dive reflex hack if I go into a freeze response + also for fainting recovery) and a jacket (helps with the irrational fear I have in every doctor's office that someone's gonna sneak up and jab me when I'm not expecting it). I brought a trusted support person in with me, too, and every inch of space he took up was an inch that the kraken couldn't have.

I scheduled the appointment for first thing in the morning on a Saturday instead of ceding the whole day to anxiously awaiting the kraken, and planned a fun movie day with my friends for the afternoon, and suddenly the shadow the kraken cast was so much smaller that I could see the future on the other side of it. The appointment approached, two weeks away, then a week, and when the old familiar doom-dread tried to creep in, I turned it away until the appointed 15 shitty minutes arrived.

Those 15 shitty minutes are 45 minutes away when I order donuts for pickup in an hour and now the kraken is no larger than an errand. I reach the lab. A kind-eyed young woman in scrubs ushers us back. I mention "a little needle anxiety." She asks if there's anything she can do to help me. I smile and assure her I have it under control, just don't be alarmed if I get dizzy. "But I don't think it'll be bad." She agrees.

My partner is sitting in the chair opposite me. I take off the left side of my jacket and stick out my left arm. Tear open the extreme sour candy in my right pocket that I purposely didn't try beforehand and pop it in my mouth like it's a magic elixir of courage. Sour isn't even the right word. A lemon is sour. This just tastes loud. Staring at the sun while a fire alarm goes off. Make a fist for me? Good. Like a poison dart frog nestled on my tongue. Caution tape, high-vis. Spray paint? The space a dime-sized piece of candy can take up! Half the RAM of my awareness for the space of thirty seconds and the other half is making a wish when the needle goes in like Lorde.

We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.

The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.

My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?