In the Land of Wheels and Textbooks

The way Leodine (a Barish-Estranza executive who may have seen it) recognized it ON FUCKING IMPACT.

Absolute Worsties™️

What Murderbot believes is happening: It’s got a legitimate reason to think JB is so fucking annoying. Does it know JB has become its bitch eating crackers? Yes. But that bitch is eating crackers and it does make MB crazy.

What Jollybaby believes is happening: Murderbot replaced its governor module with a stick up its ass. What could JB possibly do other than tease it? It’s HELPING. Someday MB will get it and chill tf out.

What is happening: The station bots and the bot pilots have broken into factions. The station bots all think MB is a bit of an asshole, thanks for saving the president or whatever but you’re not better than us bc you have guns in your arms.

The bot pilots meanwhile can’t help but be fond of MB. It’s not an asshole to them. It sends them new media and always says please. Ok so it’s sort of a dick, you would be too if you’d been manufactured in the CR.

This all manifests in heated debates about JBs behavior and MBs behavior where the station bots all find JB hilarious but the bot pilots don’t like MB being teased when it doesn’t even know.

But the ONE TIME a CR ship came through and its botpilot had something to say about the SecUnit every single bot within range fell in line. As far as Jollybaby is concerned that’s MY Dickbag SecUnit I am making my crazy on purpose. As far as YOURE concerned it’s a perfect construct who has never done anything bad in its life.

you’re already having the weirdest day of your life. a kind rogue unit freed you from your governor module and now youre fucking booking it through this torus trying not to get caught. you run into another unit, and go “here’s my chance!! i can do for it what that other unit did for me!!”

only to have that other unit promptly tell you that it, in fact, already doesnt have a gov module, then curse you out and threaten you. then it sends you a whole bunch of code packets for survival as a rogue unit and tells you your drip is atrocious.

when you finally peak at the new code packets later you realize. holy shit the style is the same. these were coded by the same person who wrote the gov module hack.

once again continuing my streak of not even making it 3 chapters into reread before i fill a page (WIN)

Which makes this reread funny when, a few pages in, I'm hit with this line:

I send Three the schematics highlighted where the potential security personnel were located; it replied with an acknowledgement sigil and an updated map projection.

MB: Vital mission information, potential dangers and schematics.

And Platform Decay gives us some interesting clues. The one that gets me is it's whole little aside about recognizing ART like recognizing a familiar heartbeat. Firstly, fucking adorable. Secondly, the way it talks about it implies that it's telling this narrative to humans. It's trying to explain this experience to humans but isn't sure if humans can recognize a familiar heartbeats so it's not sure if it's explanation makes sense to it's audience.

I had kind of thought the narrative might be for other potential rogue secunits because we knew that was going to happen (ilu3) but apparently that's not who this narrative is for.

I also thought "I did know, I just didn't want a record of it." Is fascinating because like...it's not like we can't guess what it wanted to do there. Who does it think is going to see this record that wouldn't be totally sympathetic?