Semper Vorax

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

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.

Since wifi is just a standard for sending data through radio waves, and radio waves can go a pretty long way if you use ‘em right, it’s not that difficult to connect two computers by wifi from across town. Then you just keep adding more computers to the network and you’ve got internet!

Small antennae, like for connecting across the neighborhood, can literally be built out of trash

And a larger, more accurate one can be built pretty cheap too

(You can also reuse an old satellite TV dish, or really anything else that’s roughly parabolic)

There are LoRa meshnets in places like New York, India, and all over Europe: Spain (pictured below), Greece, Austria, Germany, etc

As for sharing fresh mëmês, the network to go to is Scuttlebutt. Unlike most social media, Scuttlebutt posts are stored on your computer and sent directly to your friends’ computers (rather than being stored on the cloud and sent to a central server). It works just fine over traditional internet, but you can also view and interact with it offline, and it has protocols for connecting over any means that two computers can share information - that includes LoRa, as well as hardwired connections, sneakernet (basically mailing a USB stick back and forth), etc

What that means is you always know that your info is just as safe as the network it’s sent on and the computer that receives it - no one even theoretically has the ability to collect and sell it all. And, since it’s all run on your computer, there’s no servers to go down or companies to go out of business that could destroy the whole thing

one of the hallmarks of a kingism is that when a character is being Horny On Main (or In Maine), they can never do it in a normal way. they have to come up with a sequence of words that nobody has ever said before in the history of the english language. here's another example:

They were a breath of fresh air. There's also a segment called Uncle Stevie's Mixtape where they go through all of the songs mentioned in the book and mercilessly drag Bob Dylan.

(Also the pudding thing is probably in reference to sausage, such as black or white pudding if anyone is wondering.)

It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.

That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.