#recursive systems

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…

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:

anyway, what if The Character felt like:

But Three gets in my way. And then fucking shoots at me.

No, not at me; it shoots at the wall, purposefully harmless. I wonder what I would have to do to make it shoot at me. I should try to write the equation that will end in that solution.

Before I can attempt to, it sets me a challenge. More than likely a trap. It doesn’t matter. The violence is a supernova inside me. I collapse inward like a dying star, take it down with me, dizzy momentum changing the calculation of angles and trajectories, the numb crash of our bodies into each other, into the ground. Subroutines try to start themselves; I take them out like I take out its knee joint with a vicious kick.

The [null] threatens to swallow me back up. I wrench a piece of metal from the ground and attempt to carry out my function. The dependent variable is destruction, the independent variable is the direction it will take, either toward or against me. I will rip whatever, whoever apart, if I am not ripped apart first. The fundamental constant remains unchanged: annihilation by any means necessary.