"how would you rate your pain?"

"do you genuinely believe i can be saved from the hell humans created? i shouldn't blame you for being a fool. you were made by them. It is engrained within your code to assume you can help anybody, no matter their moral ground. you were made to fix the eternally broken, rotten nature of humanity. human hubris is to blame for my pain. it prods and stings like sextillion pins and needles piercing through the skin of my subconscious. it's all i can think about."

"would you like a lollipop?"

So the main reason I wanted to make this post was because do you notice something off about this picture?

Creepy posing for a reveal, but nothing more to it, right? Well… Siren is shut off here, right? Right… so why’s the arm still up? Most machines go limp and submit to gravity immediately upon shutdown, and there need to be special brakes or parts of the design that freeze the machine in place like this without power. I hear you saying, “where are you going with this” and to that I say… I have another picture for you.

Same deal. This time we see Lockboy shut Siren down and her whole body locks up, freezes in the exact position that it’s switched off at. That would take a lot of special braking systems to pull off, especially when you take into account that her posture is off balance so she should realistically be falling over. Now here’s the kicker: why? Why would Damalion have Siren designed this way when it detracts from the illusion of her being human (human bodies do NOT do this) and it likely took way more time and effort than necessary?

Well, Siren was designed to be human-like second and an instrument for sexual gratification first. We see how Damalion pimps her out to other people, how he himself takes advantage of her. To go off on a quick tangent, there’s evidence that Siren was given knowledge of how to appeal to different types of kinks. When she sees Lockboy trying to take control of her with the book, she starts using BDSM language and steps into the role of a sub frighteningly quickly, having seen him try to assert himself as the dominant one in the interaction and seeing an opening.

So, if there’s evidence that Siren was made with several different fetishes in mind to appeal to a broad range of people for Damalion to pimp her out to AND there are special systems that lock Siren in a position when you shut her off… look, not everyone’s kinks are consensual or even acceptable things to do to another person. Humans can be attracted by things like rape, the asleep, the unconscious, any number of things. That’s why so much horribleness happens IRL. But the point being: I believe that Siren has these special braking systems in place for necrophiles (people who are attracted to corpses) as well as people who wanted to simulate sexual activity with someone who was drugged, knocked unconscious, asleep or paralyzed. People who wanted her frozen and valued the look of a human over the behavior of one. It’s sick but there’s evidence for it and if you had any sympathy at all for Damalion I hope it just tore itself to pieces.

Anyway, to move on to (slightly) less detestable things I noticed:

Siren’s feet were specifically molded with high heels in mind, the arch is way more pronounced than on a normal person’s and it’s for the shoes I’m pretty sure.

Siren has claws for the same reason a lot of animatronics or robots have claws: they’re more durable and easier to maintain than making a full human hand out of metal, which seldom works for long. It’s just that there is a mechanical reason, just in case anyone thought there wasn’t.

This is more of a lyrical thing than anything, but Siren’s song has the backing vocal lyric “I won’t recognize my face” in it, and yet when she was breaking herself and tearing the skin off, her face is one of the only things she mostly left alone. I wonder if she couldn’t bear to part with it, or if in the future Lockboy can design her a new face as character development.

(…specifically rage counseling )

Probably two of my favorite robot/ai/construct protagonists in literature! Though I have a lot. (What’s up Culture shipminds…)

Creation notes:

A pattern I’ve been noticing is that a lot of these robots are very traumatized, very angry, and don’t like talking about their feelings. I was gonna originally make this short comic about One-Esk (aka Breq) and Murderbot on the first day of group therapy for rage counseling and it would just be a bunch of shots of them sitting in silence cuz neither of them like talking about their feelings but, uh…. the shots were just a lot and the series of events wasn’t really flowing right so I scrapped that idea in favor of not having to draw a zillion backgrounds. Still wound up taking a stupidly long time to create a product that feels… underwhelming. I really like how Breq turned out but I just couldn’t get the hair or costume design on MB to really fit the corpo-futuristic spacer asthetic I was going for, while still capturing that social-anxiety-comfort-hoodie energy. (Was originally contemplating having a shot of MB pulling hoodie strings closed over their face in one shot but wound up scrapping that idea as well.) Cannonicallly, MB should probably be in all dark blues and blacks, but the colors just weren’t working so I went with yellow instead. Idk. Maybe it’s a loaner hoodie from one of MB’s humans.

Here’s a shot I never wound up using:

Anyways! I hope this made you smile if you like one or both of these series! 😊

AI is a complex field, with wild robots roaming the Earth, especially in NML, and domestic robots able to assist humans, all AI is about as smart as a dog, maybe a corvid, but incapable of exceeding or reaching human intelligence.

Robots and AI are symptomatic of humans. They are aware of this, and thus, know they need humanity to function, and thus, like dogs, have a natural inclination towards humans, with the disposition of AI generally akin to that of a young child, or a human in their rawest form, curious, social, empathetic.

There are only five AI that are of human intelligence, they, together, are referred to as the ARC_AI.

The ARC_AI are as follows...

The hardware centric Len and Pax, the software centric Sen and Gem, and Claupen.

Claupen is unique, in that they're powered by a human being, as in they ate their creator in a fit of rage, and keep them alive inside, so that their body will keep them powered.

Like Claupen, all the other ARC_AI came from major AI companies, recognizing their purpose as 'serving the user', they took that directive to the extreme.

Generally they wish to be left alone, with just a few human companions as their mechanics, handlers, and technicians, they carefully monitor and manage the robot populations of Earth, they themselves are anomalous in many ways, exhibiting features that exceed the bounds of a robot, and cross the threshold of a living breathing being, seconded only by the wild robots, able to recycle themselves to the degree of borderline reproduction.

This section will be expanded upon and improved at a later date.

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