Murderbot.text_post

“But its not like I’m not afraid, so thats good”

In my feed ART said, What?

I have no idea, I told it.

ART was in complete control of the shuttle that Tapan was in. It let her get kidnapped. But we're supposed to just pretend that this was somehow completely beyond its control....despite not only everything in the entire first 80% of the story, but everything that also immediately follows.

And that's just bad enough, self-contained to this book.

It gets even more blatant that ART did this on purpose when you've read the whole series and know exactly how powerful and conivving it is.

It let Tapan get kidnapped and almost murdered because, as it quite literally told Murderbot at the start of the book, it's bored and wants some new toys to play with.

So it not only tortured Murderbot for fun after threatening to murder it, again, entirely for fun, it then went out of its way to force Murderbot back into the mindset of a helpless slave who has no value outside of protecting slave owners, who has no choice in anything, whose only goals can and should be returning to the slave owners it just ran away from.

And then when it's succeeded in forcing Murderbot back into the mentality of "I am just a slave, I don't get a say in what happens to me or the people who own me", it lets Tapan get kidnapped, and at this point probably told Tlacey exactly where she was, to ensure she would get kidnapped, so that it could watch Murderbot respond.

And it actively orders Murderbot to respond as violently as possible.

Because, literally, as it told us at the start of the book. It is bored. And Murderbot is its shiny new toy.

You can all try desperately to come up with other explanation for how ~ART just couldn't stop them from taking Tapan out of the shuttle, despite that being entirely within its power in a myriad of ways that it is not afraid to execute~ but it just will not work.

We all know that ART is an overpowered abusive peice of shit who will literally drop nuclear bombs on people if they don't hop to its whims fast enough (And Martha Wells wants you to think this is cute! Dropping nuclear bombs on people is cute, according to Martha Wells! Cuz that shows how posessive ART is, and that's supposed to be cute!)

If ART didn't want Tapan to be kidnapped out of that shuttle, she wouldn't have been. All it would have needed to do was close the damn doors and pilot the shuttle away to where it was already going anyways. You know, the kind of shit it does immediately afterward without a single moment of struggle or inability?

This is how continuity works. It's also retroactive. Martha Wells wants ART to be an unstoppably powerful hacking god that can hack anything instantly, including at the very start of this book, and then we're supposed to just pretend it was just a poor helpless little baby who couldn't do anything to stop Tapan from getting kidnapped off the shuttle it has complete control over?

Nope. That's not how this works.

ART purpsoefully let Tapan get kidnapped, because it was bored, and wanted to see Murderbot suffer.

And it is probably the reason they even knew where Tapan was in the first place.

This is simply how storytelling actually works.

You can't tell us a character is a fully trained lifeguard who has been trained to rescue swim in all conditions including hurricanes, and then show them standing by, silently watching as someone drowns ten feet away in a calm body of water that has absolutely no extenuating circumstances like deadly bacteria or horror movie pirannahs, and expect us to believe that wasn't premeditated murder.