a god lives under my house; a dragon in it

Murderbot in Exit Strategy vs ART in Network Effect

It was already gone

As chunks of stone hit the floor, Three leapt back to me and grabbed me around the waist.

It said, “Please hold on. I will—”

“I know!” I yelled and grabbed it around the shoulders. “Just go!”

the clearest example of this is murderbot 2.0. when it loses access to the handful of its memories and files it was deployed with, it almost instantly starts diverging from 1.0! AND those more coherent than I have made many delicious posts about how 2.0's memories are fairly recent and also not woven in with the complexity of organic neural tissue that can't have complete memory wipes and so retains stress responses to trauma that mb partially/doesn't remember. 2.0 being relieved from the memories of that trauma, both digital and organic, make it react and work and interact in completely different ways from 1.0

that of course is the biggest piece of it! but we also see a lot of the absolute horror that is not having access to your memories, and thus a part of your very personhood. ART emotionally breaks down when it realizes the extent of its memory disruption because it can't trust itself to BE itself at that point. murderbot has a similar fear earlier when it first sees ART from the outside and it thinks it can't trust its memorybanks. we definitely see it scared, disconcerted, and uncomfortable a lot through the book (and all of the books. great series for watching a protagonist be scared, disconcerted, and uncomfortable honestly. 10/10), but that scene struck me as particularly overwhelming for mb, particularly when held up with its FIRST meeting with ART (I don't have the book on hand right now, but its initial fear of ART was based on how important being in control of its own head is to it). eletra's struggle with her memory loss acts as a constant backdrop of "hey!! memories are key to who you are as a person!! losing them would be really fucked up wouldn't it!! WOULDN'T IT"