my children

anyway obviously this drone is a daemon by another name. they don’t change shape partially bc they don’t know they can, partially bc the gov module will zap em dead if they change

It is making me think that after murderbot goes on the run it discovers its beloved drone has like. Idk. Multiple settings? Little spider drone that can skitter. Little lizard drone that can stick to walls. It can even do things like, lil cat drone that can claw up someone’s face real good (:

Ignore the people who think that this apparently means murderbot’s drone is a daemon. those people are stupid bc humans have daemons and murderbot is a CONSTRUCT and this is its DRONE thank you

be very interesting to see how the 'primary drone as detached part of construct, which goes in the repair bay with it,' unlike all those other drones that get trashed all the time, is handled conceptually. both by the companies that make and use constructs, and by murderbot personally.

like, humans in a daemon-having society would to some extent treat that drone as filling the societal niche of daemon! a lot of people would assume it was there for their comfort. some people would get a huge kick out of toeing the line of taboo by interacting with the construct's pseudo-daemon in ways that would be socially inappropriate with a real one.

nicer clients would sometimes get weird and apologetic if a situation required them to touch the primary drone, just because they were instinctively extending normal societal courtesies to the secunit. in the same awful kneejerk way people sometimes do when they see its face, and start processing it as a 'person.'

possibly everyone who works with secunits a lot systematically ignores that a construct's primary drone mysteriously collapses into nothing when it's fully deactivated, and probably anyone who works in manufacturing is ignoring even more that they don't actually. make those. they just show up.

Constructs are part flesh, part robot, so what is their daemons need robotic parts, too?

For ages, it was impossible to make constructs that were more than ineffective robots. Until one day they were trying to see if a swarm intelligence could boost the effectiveness, and the construct ... worked. It was showing MUCH higher performance than any previous construct had, even though it didn't seem to actually be part of the swarm intelligence. It interacted with the other bots, but seemingly not in any special way? But it immediately stopped working when they isolated it.

So, constructs need to have some sort of network they're part of, and it can't be with other constructs or humans. It needs to be bots. Drones are cheep, replaceable, and useful to secunits and combatunits, so that's what they get supplied with.

Nobody makes the connection with daemons, because a daemon that's a construct makes no sense. Daemons show up, they aren't manufactured things!

Daemon constructs may even be able to survive separate from their drone host for short periods of time, as long as they separate before the host is injured. The main construct immediately has a huge drop in performance, and will continue deteriorating until the daemon can rebond, but since constructs usually only risk their last drone when they're already injured and in extreme danger, most people haven't noticed.

Maybe most of the constructs haven't noticed, either! Some drones getting damaged are a LOT more distressing and painful than other drones, but as long as those drones make it back to other undamaged drones, everything will be fine, eventually. Pain is normal.

But ooooh these concepts make me think

What if construct daemons are more like, well, Murderbot 2.0? Killware. Something that exists separately from a construct but can “inhabit” something else - in this case, usually a drone, but it would be able to “hop” between available bodies if necessary which would also help with the misunderstandings on what it is tbh

I’m imagining that not being separate/being hosted in a constructs code in case of emergency is uh. Costly. Think “Murderbot post exploding its brain via mind melding with the gunship” levels of costly. Like DOABLE but only in a very technical and very temporary sense because it’s kind of like running the same software on top of software you are already running and it glitching all over the place as they’re basically clipping through each other

I like the swarm idea… Maybe people assume that constructs need bonus tech to boot up as part of them initiating their ability to interact with the world? To “turn them on” so to speak. I’ll be honest I doubt people thought too much into it beyond “if it works it works” - the load bearing pineapple jpeg of the construct world and I mean, hey, drones are pretty useful anyway so why not. Maybe they think that not being connected to something outside them causes a feedback loop that leads to catastrophic failure idk

Now I’m picturing construct daemon shifting looking like transformers sequences lol

“Wait how the fuck did the drone change shape in a way that somehow gains mass this ain’t animorphs”

And I am blaming that on ✨ dust ✨