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Horrible new headcanon for my oc Terry the combat unit: itās had to pretend to be a human for a decade now, and that involves eating food, but constructs donāt have stomachs and so the food just goes into the lungs until they throw it up later. So Terry has asthma from the residue in their lungs and canāt get it out because that would require a med system and that would mean reveling their true nature.
I actually drew this a long while ago and forgor to post iiiit. I'm bad at uhhh a lot of things apparently. But mostly sharing art and fic here. Also very cropped because I wasn't terribly happy with how the rest was turning out, I may redraw it later but the caution stripe lower arms were chewing on my brain and I Needed To.
From @polyhexian's Loverboy series. Go give it a read!
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So I have more thoughts because apparently thereās no bottom to the murderbot mindhole Iāve fallen down.
(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)
Iāve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). Thereās also been some interesting related discussion of MBās distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.
And Iāve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!
Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:
We donāt see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MBās pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.
Iām very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.
The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!
I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):
So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled āBodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diariesā. Iāll link the article here:
(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)
In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think itās reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think itās more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.
But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.
We donāt learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and thatās it. What little else we know comes from MBās thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).
When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, itās as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real āmurderbotsā that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, itās fucking terrifying! Thereās a collective āoh shitā moment as both MB and the reader realize what itās up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldnāt have survived the encounter if its humans hadnāt helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.
And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an āevil robotā that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what Iād call a āTerminator-esqueā manner: telling MB to āSurrenderā (like thatās ever worked) and responds to MBās offer to hack its governor module with āI want to kill youā (ES, pp 99-100).
(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they ākill all the humansā because thatās how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that Iām not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe Iāve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit wouldāve talked like that. Iām just suspicious.)
(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks theyāre assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. Iām not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that āeverything deserves autonomyā is very much at the heart of the series.)
So itās clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. Iāll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:
OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions arenāt rigid- MB has implied that itās been forced to be violent towards humans before, and Iām sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a āCombatUnitā plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).
This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it couldāve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and thatās why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think itās important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just canāt know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they donāt have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?
I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think thatās because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world thatās not always the case. But, critically, this canāt be the case for CombatUnits because theyāre enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).
There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that thereās a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). Itās a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldnāt help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnitās core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because Iām very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just donāt buy it.
Iām not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. Thereās a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ARTās function to its own to explain why there are things it doesnāt like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. Iām not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they donāt) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in itās own unique way). Itās just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I canāt even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.
@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of āfunctionā when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldnāt be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?
Iāve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways itās been more difficult than I expected. Iāve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldnāt, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldāve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didnāt have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didnāt have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? Iām not sure that I would have.
Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting āsomethingā in the very near future!
Would really appreciate anyone elseās thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ Itās been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.