Moth’s Domain

goodbye chiikawa

Suffering does not bring you closer to your preferred gender

You are not better or more trans than someone else because you've suffered more

yes, we know the company is shitty, lazy, and terrible altogether, but sending FULL SPECS of ALL the company systems? To a SecUnit?? That seems like a pretty big cock-up for a security company. It makes me wonder exactly what the company's Systems thinks of the way they're forced to treat their people (constructs included). It makes me think about all the little ways Systems find loopholes to help people, despite corporate hegemony.

I wonder if the techs that were fixing up the Sec units after the Ganaka pit disaster understood that this was CAUSED by the govmod. That this was a vulnerability in the system, and the company was cheap and doing a shitty patch on this exploit.

I wonder if they knew, and understood how easy that would be to do again. And "accidentally" giving the Secunits the specs, so that they could maybe patch things themselves. Maybe they could protect themselves from this exploit better than the company could.

I wonder how much Secunit techs understand about the units they create and maintain. I wonder how much they know of the personhood everyone tries to disguise.

QUEER IS NOT A SLUR

We reclaimed it way back in the 1980's. It is the accepted term used in academia, in colleges and universities ALL OVER THE PLACE.

instant classic. the bucket hat. "fuck are you doing". the stance. the perfectly cut scream

like obviously this is at a cross-purpose with SecUnits being expensive pieces of equipment, but since they can be repaired so thoroughly, a SecUnit’s potential suicide-by-job being successful is pretty null.

i’m also thinking about Murderbot’s and ART’s protectiveness when it comes to their humans…. for MB in particular, there is a certain satisfaction it gets when it successfully saves people… like there’s an interesting pack bonding component that feels like another SecUnit/MI feature. like show a SecUnit any type of regard and it will adopt you and protect the ever-loving shit out of you, from hiding data from the company to sacrificing itself

they’re inherently a social intelligence: a network intelligence that reaches for other systems.

this is such a cruel combination when you really think about it, even more than at first glance, in that people have created something social, something with emotions, only to cut it off from *everyone*—people and even other SecUnits. i mean, people fear them, other units and bots are distrustful

and, again, this is a feature, not a bug, because it’s disempowering, an easy way to keep them subjugated, *and* might actually make them better at protecting people by making them more keen on throwing their bodies to the meat grinder. in fact, destroying themselves probably has a cathartic quality, as evidenced in System Collapse, when, in a moment of distress, Murderbot talks about how it wishes it could smash something, especially itself… clearly, self-harm must be an ingrained relief for it!

and this just makes sense! like of course constructs are prone to other mental health issues/distress. this is a whole other thread that i’d want to get into in another post. like, constructs are susceptible to trauma like a human. and that trauma cannot easily be fixed with a memory wipe and a repair of its physical structure. echoes of that shit *stays* in their neural tissue

like how how much do corporates actually know about all of this, really? how much of this is by design vs exploiting happy accidents? how much actual research has the company put into them? how deliberate is the propaganda against SecUnits (to keep people from empathizing with them)?

Throughout the books we know there's the concept of the "scary rogue secunit" that murders you and everyone you love because they cease to be under the control of their governor modules somehow.

And unless I am mistaken, we have two solid, confirmable instances in which secunits go and murder loads of people.

And both occasions, it is not because the secunits got past their governor modules.

It's because a corporation, acting to take out a competitor in some way, actively hacked and took over and took control of the behaviour of those secunits and forced them to commit horrific violence against their will.

I suspect the "evil rogue secunit" trope is an actively-encouraged corporate propaganda seeded into media and fiction throughout the galaxy, because it's way easier to get away with corporate murder-sabotage if everyone just assumes the secunits did it because "everyone knows they go crazy and murder people".

Because so far we've seen at least three specific incidents (that I can recall, I may be missing one or more from the books) where a secunit accesses the means to get free of its govenor module and so far every single one has been at minimum neutral-positive about protecting and avoiding harm of others.

So you have prosocial, chronically intentionally isolated intelligent and emotional, but deeply emotionally repressed beings, that are also way more prone to protective and caring instincts than they are to anything violent.

Makes me wonder, too, about the origin of them as a construct. I wouldn't put it pass the corporations of the rim to cheaply retrofit something originally made for one purpose into something else. And we already know comfort units are a thing.

And secunits don't, technically, actually need to have faces and the amount of human appearance and human emotions they do.