no thoughts head empty

So Pin-Lee and her legal team finally manage to get the Preservation requirement for bots to have a “guardian” overturned and YAY, MURDERBOT IS A FREE AND FULL CITIZEN NOW! 🥳 The team welcomes MB back to Preservation with a surprise party in celebration of that.

Meanwhile, much to its own surprise, MB has............... complicated (and some unexpectedly negative?) feelings about that. Namely:

Surprise -- that the humans actually delivered on the pie-in-the-sky promise they'd made (re: bots getting full rights). Like, MB knows these humans, knows they’re not assholes, and had chalked up that promise to an excess of optimism rather than a deliberate lie, but still hadn’t expected anything to come of it. So, wow—MB is stunned and humbled and grateful that they actually did the years of work it took to fulfill that promise.

Relief – because even though Mensah has no control over MB’s governor module anymore, she couldn’t make it execute any orders it didn’t want to, and she would never do that even if she could (it trusts her fully on that point), and the “guardian” thing has been nothing but a flimsy on-paper cover, it is still an ungodly RELIEF to be truly, fully, legally free. MB has no masters and answers to no one (at least in Preservation space).

Uncertainty – a feeling of, Now what? This one is very stupid, MB feels, because nothing has materially changed at all. One line removed from its feed profile, that’s it. So why the fuck does it feel like it’s been cut adrift?

DEEPLY NEGATIVE FEELINGS THAT IT CANNOT UNPACK AT ALL, except as a violent aversion to no longer having that connection to Mensah on paper. Which is STUPID. MB WANTED TO BE FREE. IT DIDN’T WANT A GUARDIAN, EVEN MENSAH. So why is it so upset at being free?

And given that MB is canonically really really bad at hiding its feelings, it’s going to be pretty obvious to the team that MB is inexplicably dismayed by this, rather than uncomplicatedly happy, the way they’d been expecting it to be.

It’s Bharadwaj who helps MB tease those feelings apart, since she seems to be the one playing therapist. Granted, these are feelings that are only going to be dug out of MB with an industrial-grade drill, but they chip away at it for a while and manage to identify that MB is insecure about no longer having an official, tangible connection with Mensah. What’s to keep them close now??

Bharadwaj asks if MB worries about that with any of its other friends on the team; MB does not, that’s different. Of course it knows that people can be friends, even close friends, long-term friends, not because of any sort of formal connection, but because they choose to keep seeing each other. But it’s different with Mensah! No, MB doesn’t have any immediate fear that Mensah will stop wanting to be friends, or start drifting away, but it does betray anxiety that it no longer has an excuse to allocate the majority of its time and attention to Mensah. Not in so many words, but MB is worried that without the guardianship justification, it won’t be allowed/able to hang out around Mensah as much as it has been.

Bharadwaj points out that people don’t need a reason to spend extra time with their favorite people (lol with a gentle dig at Mensah being MB’s “favorite human”), they’re allowed to just choose to.

(MB is slightly chagrined that everyone on the team has read the letter and thus knows that it thinks of Mensah as its favorite human—MB didn’t really mean to show overt favoritism, or give that much of its emotions away, but the team thinks it’s pretty adorable that MB imprinted on Mensah like that, and adorable how embarrassed MB gets when being reminded of that. It has spawned a lot of team in-jokes—fierce (friendly) competition for the coveted spot of second-favorite human; MB saying in its flat buffering voice that all humans are its favorite, but some humans are more favorite than others; Mensah playfully responding by saying that MB is her favorite SecUnit—which makes MB feel all melty even though that’s stupid because Mensah doesn’t even know any other SecUnits.)

MB does find it a little reassuring to hear that it doesn’t have to come up with excuses to keep hanging out with Mensah, that she won’t think its weird if they just continues as they’ve been doing—but it’s also anxious that other people will demand a justification for its continued presence in her life. Like Mensah’s partners & family—surely MB won’t be invited to family events anymore, now that it’s no longer Mensah’s ward? Intruding on those would be weird, right? And now that MB isn’t Mensah’s SecUnit, it doesn’t have the authority to demand control of her security arrangements when she goes off-planet? Is MB still allowed to just walk into her office at any time without getting stopped by security? What if something HAPPENS to her, and people don’t understand that MB needs to be there with her??

And it liked that people were able to look at MB’s social profile and see Mensah there. That was nice. And the opposite too—that people would know Mensah had a SecUnit, so maybe they’d think twice before trying any shit, with MB there to go absolutely fucking nuclear if anyone harmed her.

“And... you don’t feel the need for this kind of public affiliation with anyone else?” Bharadwaj presses. “None of your other friends?”

No, just Mensah. Because she’s its favorite. Obviously.

And so Bharadwaj carefully reads the bullet points she’s collected back to MB: that what it wants is public recognition of the association between them, one that will allow MB to play an important part in Mensah’s life and not have that questioned socially or legally, at a level higher than its other friendships, on account of Mensah being MB’s favorite human—is that accurate?

YES, thank you, you get it! MB says.

“Well, different polities handle these things differently,” Bharadwaj begins delicately, “And there are a variety of options available. But there is a way for people to get legal recognition of a bond with their favorite human(s), and that’s generally called.......... marriage.”

MB: ......wot. ಠ_ಠ

Which kills that conversation stone dead, and I assume MB bolts immediately—although of course it’s incapable of processing anything else for the next five hours.

MB is somewhere between incredulous (has Bharadwaj lost her literal mind? Is this a sign of an incipient stroke?? Should MB be calling for a MedSystem???) and offended (MARRIAGE?!?! EW EW EW GROSS GET IT OFF 🤮).

Marriage is a human thing. Marriage is a human ROMANCE THING, which is frequently just a SEX THING, which is absolutely the least interesting part of its shows. Ew. Just, ew ew ew EW. Why would Bharadwaj suggest that to MURDERBOT, of all people??? She should know better than that????

(Bharadwaj forwards MB a wikipedia article on marriage, with the section on sexless/celibate marriages flagged, discussing the many social and emotional reasons why people would desire marriage even if they don’t have any desire to engage in sexual activity with their partner(s).

MB reads it but is still firmly in NOPE NOPE NOPE THIS IS NOT FOR MURDERBOTS mode. Marriage is for humans, and MB has zip zilch zero interest in being a human.)

But once the idea is planted, of course, MB can’t stop circling back to poke at it, even if it runs into new obstacles every time.

The first and most obvious one, once MB stops flailing over its emotional aversion to the concept, is whether bots/constructs are even allowed to get married—this is the first thing it brings up to Bharadwaj when it finally regains enough control to talk to her.

Bharadwaj acknowledges that there is no precedent yet, but now that bots have full citizenship, Pin-Lee and her lawyers have been looking down the line toward future legal issues liable to arise from that decision, and the question of bot-human (or bot-bot) marriages is one they’ve been anticipating. Bharadwaj mildly points out that sooner or later someone’s going to be the first test case, and Pin-Lee & co have been preparing the legal arguments for it.

MB slinks off to go brood some more.

MB is also pathologically averse to letting people know what it likes/wants—and so the idea of letting the world know that it wants to marry Mensah (y’know, hypothetically, if it wanted that) makes it want to S C R E A M and die and run away forever, with how horrifically exposed and vulnerable that makes it feel. Just—gaaahhh, even if it did want to marry Mensah, even if it could, there’s no way it could bring itself to go through the process of making that happen. Nope, nope, nope. The end.

(MB doesn’t want to get married to Mensah, it wants to be married to Mensah, and for no one else to ever ask any questions or bring up the subject ever again.)

And what would Mensah’s other partners think? They’d probably have to agree to it before a marriage could happen, yeah? And surely they wouldn’t want that. Nor can MB imagine moving in with them, and becoming the same kind of member of the marriage that they are, co-partners & co-parents. The very idea makes it shudder.

MB pokes Bharadwaj about that—she replies that there are many different configurations for group marriages, they don’t all have to entail fully joining the group. Plenty of people are monogamous in their attachments, and only interested in forming a relationship with one member of a group marriage.

MB slinks off to brood over this some more.

Oh NO, what would the public say if it came out that ex-planetary-head Mensah married her SecUnit? MB does its best to ignore public opinion and not think about it, but it’s aware that there’s already scurrilous tabloid speculation about Is Dr. Mensah Secretly Dating Her SecUnit?! Ugh, does this mean they would be RIGHT? Disgusting. Horrible. So many gross humans thinking about MB having sex.

And MB is also aware that in the Corporation Rim, Preservation extending legal rights to bots has been met with derision, the subject of much jeering condescension, and this would only set Mensah up for so much more scorn and mockery. MB doesn’t really care (that much) (no really it doesn’t care) (honest) what those assholes say about constructs, but the thought of MB being used to humiliate Mensah is intolerable.

So nope, not happening, no matter how MB might feel (and it’s still not examining those feelings) because it’s not going to put Mensah in that position.

By this point MB has started slinking back into Bharadwaj’s office from time to time to obliquely broach the subject & its related concerns, then slinking out again with everything still up in the air.

And of course, through all this, the one obstacle that MB hadn’t considered until last was: what does Mensah want? If, if this were possible, would she even want such a thing? Come to think of it, why on earth would she? Marriage? With a fucked-up, emotionally-stunted, anxious-&-depressed secondhand murder robot?

Mensah has been so very, very good to MB, but what if she doesn’t feel the same way, doesn’t feel as deeply, doesn’t desire the same close connection that MB does?

And Bharadwaj is like, “I think that’s something that anyone who’s been in love has been afraid of, at some point.”

---

Of course MB bluescreens at “love” and probably bolts, but unlike the other times people have imposed that word on MB’s feelings—the tabloids, Amena saying that Thiago thinks MB is in love with Mensah and MB saying “not the way he’s thinking”—this time it clicks that it’s true, that’s accurate.

This unidentifiable ball of feelings wrapped around Mensah—the desperate need for her to be safe and happy; the sense of contentedness and comfort MB feels in her presence; the longing to be close to her, even if means having to endure a lot of intensely uncomfortable scrutiny; the fluttery nervousness it feels at being reunited with her, the desire to spend the rest of its life coming back to Mensah at the end of every job with ART—that’s love. And it’s not, actually, fundamentally different from how humans experience love.

Ugh, that means Thiago was right. Awful.

---

MB spends a few cycles avoiding everyone while coming to terms with this new understanding that it is in love, that it is a creature that is capable of being in love.

And then probably impulsively sends Mensah a message over the feed like, I love you. Not in a weird way.

MB agonizes through the entire however-many minutes it takes to get a response, feeling so nervous and so stupid and really wishing its dumb organic parts didn’t do these things, UGH, EMOTIONS ARE THE WORST WHEN THEY’RE ABOUT REAL PEOPLE NOT FICTIONAL PEOPLE—

Mensah: It makes me happy to hear you say that. I love you too, SecUnit. 🙂

Which is an entirely satisfactory response, neither too little emotion nor too much, and MB is relieved that it wasn’t a terrible mistake to tell her that.

So maybe MB ventures to keep doing that? Easing into this as something they say to each other? MB will of course NOT say that out loud or on a public feed or anywhere else that other people can hear it, but Mensah might slip and do an “I love you too” in front of the team or something, because she doesn’t feel as guarded in front of them. (Or maybe she is too scrupulous about MB’s privacy to slip up like that, idk.)

---

In any case, I think Mensah is rather more ahead of the situation than MB is. She has not realized that MB would actually be receptive to the idea of marriage (she'd assumed it would recoil from the idea, and she wasn’t wrong), but she has been proactively taking steps to integrate MB with her family, and ensure that it has a permanent place with them either way.

She’s been having conversations with her partners and kids and various other family members to ease them into the idea of MB being a lasting part of her life—that this is something she wants, to whatever extent MB is comfortable being part of her life and their family, and she cares about MB deeply. So to the rest of the family, MB is functionally already “Mom’s weird awkward genderneutralfriend who tags along to family events” and has been for a while.

---

It comes to a head when MB just blurts out one day, “Dr. Bharadwaj thinks I want to marry you.”

(They’re in Mensah’s office or something, MB has just been chilling on her couch, monitoring security and watching media and thinking. And it’s not looking at her for this, so they have this conversation while Mensah is at her desk and MB has turned away to look at the couch cushions.)

Mensah takes a moment to digest that, because she knows MB, knows what it means when it brings up a fraught and personal subject so abruptly, and is reassessing her previous assumptions about what MB wants.

Mensah: Do you think she’s right?

MB: [shrugs, because that’s its go-to reaction]

MB lays out all the obstacles it’s thought of already—the dubious legality, the backlash from the media (especially in the Corporation Rim), what Mensah’s family might think, etc.

And one by one, Mensah addresses each of its concerns.

No, there’s currently no legal precedent for such a marriage, but Preservation has already made great strides in civil rights for bots and constructs, and it does seem likely that marriage is going to be the next logical step in that.

Yes, the Corporation Rim will be horrible about it, but they’re horrible about everything, so what else is new.

And actually, Mensah’s family already knows how much she cares about MB—it would not come as a surprise to them to learn that she and MB wanted to solemnify their relationship.

(MB’s stress hormones spike at the word “relationship,” like they always do, but it makes itself tamp them back down—it’s beginning to get used to the idea that “relationship” doesn’t have a fixed meaning (one associated with things MB doesn’t want), it only means what the people involved want it to mean.)

So the real question, she concludes, is whether Murderbot wants that?

And there’s been an implicit ‘yes’ in all her answers—that none of the hurdles MB brought up can’t be overcome—but it is still massively difficult for MB to talk about its emotions.

So MB reiterates some of the admissions it made before—about not wanting to never see Mensah again (lol), then says it doesn’t want anyone else to be its favorite human... and doesn’t want anyone else to be Mensah’s favorite SecUnit. It just wants them to stay how they are, like this. Maybe forever. >_> Forever would be good.

So yeah it would probably have to be Mensah doing the asking, as a two-part question:

In a hypothetical perfect world where those obstacles didn’t exist, would MB want legal and social recognition for their relationship? MB tries to run that hypothetical (it’s hard to imagine such a world) and admits yes.

Given that they don’t live in that hypothetical perfect world, does MB want this enough to be willing to fight those obstacles for it?

Mensah stresses that there’s no shame or censure if it doesn’t—she’ll be the first to admit that this would be a LOT of attention, the exact kind of attention that MB abhors, and it’s wholly understandable if MB doesn’t want to deal with that. They don’t need to get married -- they don't need legal recognition to be important to each other, for MB to be part of the family and part of her life.

And for all that it feels like an impossibly difficult choice—the only real question is whether MB is going to be brave or not, and the answer to that has never been in doubt.

---

Final scene is the wedding. 🥳

Not sure how they’d do the wedding to make MB more comfortable, re: everyone looking at it, but they would work something out. Make up some nice Preservation wedding traditions, especially re: someone marrying into an established marriage group, some sort of ritual with Farai and Tano welcoming MB into the polycule. Bring in the PresAux team to say nice things and have emotions, great time to wax nostalgic and trot out embarrassing anecdotes. The ceremony itself is private, no media and politicking, just friends and family, but it is being recorded (lol, recorded in large part by MB) and a cut will be put together for releasing on the public feed later.

Mensah had offered to let MB get away with none or minimal talking, but it is reluctantly conscious that this marriage is a symbol that’s bigger than either one of them, and it can’t get away with being silent the whole time through—the people who know them would understand, but the wider galaxy would not. People need to understand that this is real, that MB means this—though it did have to ask ART for help in writing its speeches/vows/etc.

(ART was thrilled to help, and is probably already busy planning its own commitment ceremony with MB. MB does not know about this yet. XD)

So when it’s MB’s turn to talk, it tells the story of when Mensah came back to the DeltFall habitat and killed a SecUnit with nothing but an industrial drill to save its life. How, after so many years of risking its life to save humans, that was the first time a human had ever risked their life to save it. The first time that anyone had treated MB like a person, like someone who mattered. “She’ll tell you I saved her, but she was the first person who believed that I was worth saving too.”

(Mensah has gathered, by now, that that moment was a landmark in MB’s interactions with humans, but she’s never heard it laid out with such unadorned honesty before, and she’s getting emotional about that.)

“And also,” MB adds, deadpan, “she was totally badass. Like an intrepid galactic explorer. And that,” MB concludes, “is when Dr. Mensah became my favorite human.”

Which lets the mood lighten back up again, and MB finishes its vows without being a downer. (When it’s Mensah’s turn, she also concludes by saying that MB is her favorite SecUnit.)

They don’t kiss to seal the deal; I’m sure Preservation has other traditions for non-sexual marriages. MB doesn’t seem to mind hugging Mensah, so they probably do that, and then MB is overcome with self-consciousness (because they are entirely the center of attention here) and presses its face to the top of her head to hide its expression.

(That becomes the iconic image from their wedding when it hits the feed, because a lot of people got very photogenic shots of that moment—the tenderness in that embrace, and MB seeking shelter in her too.)