I really really really like that in Platform Decay, Murderbot is slightly in denial about how much it hates escalating things to lethal violence.
Target 3 fell over a chair and into the table next to it. Target 2 opened a wall cabinet, clawed through its contents, and pulled out another stunner. Here’s where I made the mistake. I should have just let him come at me so I could respond in an appropriate if overly thorough way. Instead, I said, “If you use that on me I will break every bone in your body.” (Those things are really annoying.) Target 2 dropped the stunner and held up his hands. The others froze where they were, huddled back against the walls. They stared at me, I stared at them.
and then later, after these people have started crying and sobbing
I really wanted to kill them but they were so whiney and screamy, it was hard to get started. I don’t like helpless humans in my media, but in reality, it’s… Provoking them hadn’t worked so I tried to be encouraging. “Maybe if you all run at me at once you could kill me.” Target 4 looked tempted, but the others all shook their heads rapidly, 3 sobbed louder, and 5 whimpered. Great.
At this point, Murderbot is just fundamentally unable to kill humans who are running away, screaming, crying, etc even if they are evil rich fucks who would have done terrible things to Farai, Sophi, and Naja if Murderbot was not there. Its solution in this scene is (hilariously) to try and encourage these specific humans to attack it, as though that will allow it to kill them. (Notably, the two guys it fought just before this had been attacking it, and it didn’t kill them either.)
Unlike the opening scene of Network Effect, where it uses non-lethal methods for Thiago’s sake but complains the whole time, this time the limitation is self-imposed. Farai explicitly told it to do whatever it had to do. It wants to kill them, it knows that Farai won’t hate it for killing them, these people do not deserve mercy…. but it comes up with a non-lethal solution anyways.
Because it’s not really about what these people deserve, it’s about the toll of that violence on Murderbot, Farai, Sophi, and Naja.
“I know, I’m very glad of that. I don’t want to give orders to anybody.” Farai’s brow furrowed a little, almost as if she was trying to figure out what to say as much as I was. “What I’m saying is, your judgement… I should have just trusted your judgement in that situation.” Okay, communicate clearly and be honest. “I was going to kill them. When you told me to do whatever I had to do, I knew you wouldn’t hate me afterward.” At least, I’d thought it meant that. Maybe it hadn’t. Oh shit. I need to stop being honest, it’s just embarrassing. But she just nodded, her expression still conflicted. She said, “No, I would have hated myself. You would just have been doing the job that Ayda trusted you with.”
And throughout this book it keeps just… not taking the kill shot. Not escalating to lethal force even though it could. And it’s not opposed to killing people when that’s the only solution - it does not give a single solitary fuck about any of those Barish-Estranza soldiers who might have drowned when it flooded those tunnels to stop them from blowing up a train station.
But things are different now than they used to be. Murderbot is different now than it used to be. But no amount of mental health modules or commitments to clear and honest communication are going to make it admit that or even think about it for a single second longer than it has to.
