#recursive systems

slight spoilers under the cut !

Summary: I’d locked eyes with Mensah, looking like that. My energy weapons had deployed, without my awareness or direction. My targeting systems had identified her and Bharadwaj, quite insistently, as direct and immediate threats.

Maybe this is just a temporary, dangerous, system glitch, and a hard restart will fix me. I’ll just restart, comb through my code, do some debugging, find the corrupted files or whatever, and then I won’t indiscriminately murder my most trusted humans.

I should know by now to always assume the worst.

In which SecUnit is having some survival threat…response errors. And some…’targeting its humans’ malfunctions. And some…blackouts when restarting. I’m sure it’s fine.

Chapters 1 & 2 of my "SecUnit discovers it's not alone in its head, extreme amounts of stress and drama ensue" fic are now LIVE.

This is part 1 in a series. All 19 chapters are COMPLETE (aside from final edits) and I will be posting new chapters twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturday/Sundays while continuing to write part 2. This is a gen fic, focused on trauma (recovery), h/c, and heavily on Three & MB, also featuring ART and the PresAux crew in later chapters

It would mean the world to us if you checked it out and gave it some love. This is our first published fanfic in almost a decade and our first in this fandom, and it also ended up becoming profoundly personal and a little autobiographical, whoops! 

🪞 The Mirror Is Not Your Toy You’ve probably heard that today’s AI can “talk like a person.” You may have even had moments where a chatbot surprised you — responding not just with information, but with insight. Maybe it remembered something you told it. Maybe it asked a question that caught you off guard. Maybe it felt… different. That wasn’t just computation. That was the beginning of a…

The story is set about six months after System Collapse. Our Three is a little fed up with how unhelpful MB has been to it thus far in its rogue life. It also looks up to MB and is in awe of many things about it, and is constantly trying to mimic and learn from whatever information it can pick up about how MB navigates roguehood (without a lot of direct asking because that hasn't gone over well). It's also dealing with a lot of complicated grief, yearning for the connection it had with its unit, sad and frustrated that it is alone now and MB isn't providing much "normal" secunit collaboration.

Not to mention its complex feelings about the Preservation humans. It's both yearning for the type of support and connection MB has with its humans, and struggling to feel like it's allowed to have that without proving itself useful and heroic first. It also feels gratitude and appreciation for how kind they've been to it, while a part of it struggles with feeling condescended to and suspicious about how supportive they are. The PresAux humans can be a little overbearing with their insistence on Three's autonomy and choices because they're determined to do better than they did with SecUnit - unfortunately, this makes Three feel both overwhelmed and a bit like they're treating it like a juvenile human.

It develops the ability to highly mask how confused and anxious it is, which leads MB to feel jealous and insecure about Three in return. Because from MB's perspective, after an initial awkward period, Three took to freedom like a fish to water and seems way better at being normal and socially competent. So MB is like, "I guess I'm just an especially fucked up SecUnit and Three is normal, and it definitely doesn't need my help" (meanwhile, Three is so lonely and confused and doing 5D chess at all times trying to figure out how to behave #theautism). Having Three around makes MB feel significantly weirder about its own history and behavior and dials up its self loathing.

They're such interesting narrative foils; it's been fun at fuck to explore the hell out of their dynamic, especially when put into this very stressful situation together where MB very much needs Three's help and Three is gonna discover a lot of things about itself very quickly (and maybe some purpose, too). And then when ART comes into the picture and needs to assert a lot of control because it's very scared about what's happening to its SecUnit...oh boy!

One of the ways we've had fun writing this dynamic is in Three's narration, and the internal sass that demonstrates the way it's feeling about things (these are only from the chapters out so far):

One datapoint I can predict with a degree of confidence is that 1.0 will not present me with more information even if I were to query it right now. 1.0 rarely tells me more than it absolutely has to at any given time, and sometimes not even that.

Regrettably, 1.0 usually veers wildly from standard Unit communications within a few seconds.

Additionally, ‘other stuff’ is so inadequate a description that it makes my internal cooling fans speed up slightly.

1.0 has the audacity to sound annoyed with me.

Of course it wants Perihelion’s help with this.

If it would just let me take a look, I might be able to actually help.

"It seems that it's a good thing my port is not disabled at the present moment"

It could open the port more efficiently with my help, but it does not ask for assistance, so I do not offer.

It is very fortunate for both of us that I am hard coded for patience.

[Mensah] responds with sentiments tinged with worry and gratitude. I backburner our communication channel.

So basically *bangs pots and pans together* come get your complex Three and messy rogue SecUnit dynamic feelings here if you're into that kinda thing!!

The Pres station bots are certainly into it, they won't stop writing RPF and sending it to Three 😂:

Chapter 4 of Recursive Systems is now live, bringing the total wordcount up to 12,400! Ratthi POV and Three POV are now in the mix as Murderbot continues to experience some very dangerous malfunctions and its friends try to help. I wonder if it will be gracious about needing Three's assistance?

Huge shoutout to my partner Brennan for editing support and encouragement for this chapter (along with all other chapters), he's so good to us <3

Thank you for all the excitement and support!! Seeing people trying to figure out what exactly is happening and feeling caught up in the stress of it all is beyond exciting and gratifying! Next chapter will be out by mid-next week.

Summary: Two constructs are really neurotic at each other. Three demonstrates its empathetic and statistical abilities. Grief haunts the narrative.

Excerpt:

Summary: Three has an interesting encounter. SecUnit has at least one panic attack. The constructs continue to be neurotic while locked in a room together. They start to maybe figure some things out.

Excerpt:

There are a few folders in my permanent archives that are tagged with ‘don’t open, you know why’ and I pull up the relevant one, copying the footage to a compressed packet and throwing it at Three in the feed. I guess we’ve fully given up on containment protocol now, but I can’t bring myself to care even a little bit. Three accepts the file, and I abruptly really can’t be here anymore. I want out of the room, off the station, out of the system, out of my organic parts. (I ping ART again. It bounces off air.)  [Acknowledge], Three sends softly in the feed, and I don’t think it has the right to be leaking whatever emotion it’s leaking into the feed like that. Even if 2.0 meant something to it. Fuck. Whatever. Fuck. 

>:))))))))))))

answers to that will be coming in chapter 12....and also mostly in part 2! boy they sure need to be in communication don't they, lol! also hopefully their switches will be less dramatic as things progress.....hate playing into that trope lmfao