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zenerrocksmc · 9 months

Text

Notes; I think this is mostly done…? Idk youse tell me I’m way too fucking insecure, critiques are welcome

If there is any issues with readability lemme know too.

Again, if you’ve not read Network Effect, this counts as spoilers

Theme Warning: Implied Self-Termination Ideation (su*cidal ideation), general warning for corporate slavery themes

Chapter 1:

Performance Reliability at 92%. Maintenance may be required.

I did not know what I wanted quite yet, but it certainly was not this.

Overall, I did not mind being on the station with Murderbot 1.0 and Peri’s crew. Despite that, being here alone, without even Murderbot 1.0, was not what I wanted. I only realised that after walking out of the line of sight of Peri’s hatchway- but I lacked a reason to go back. I did not know what was wrong with me. Murderbot 1.0 had performed this leaving on a station action and performed it on its own accord. My personal assessment identified that leaving had been a mistake. Which I was inclined to agree with considering what happened to its clients because it left, however when Murderbot 1.0 started talking to me about how this would be the best station to get off on and how to move around like a travelling human. Going so far as giving me its coded protocols to mirror human movements…

Declining its orders had not felt like an option.

It was hard. I still did not quite understand how to decline requests from humans, they still felt like commands. Declining another SecUnit who had done this before, survived and found their own squad of humans, was irresponsible. I did think I wanted my own humans… However, I enjoyed sharing and helping both Peri and Murderbot 1.0’s crew. And now I had no humans, no other Units, not even a ship. I sadly started longing for any human, I would not oppose a human supervisor at a minimum… which was not a logical response. It was still strange having all these emotions- they had always been there to a degree but limited significantly by the Governor-Module. Wanting things was strange. Wanting illogical things was exponentially stranger.

Whilst trying to make myself useful, I had been reading during the cycles leading up to arriving here. I liked one book in particular titled “Mirror’s Tears”. A character in it who ended up in a medical facility said to their platonic partner, “If the world is all colours, why is it that all I see are grey undertones?” Apparently, it is a type of literary device. I have subconsciously kept gravitating to it at all inconveniences, especially this cycle. I think it is my “favourite”. That is also strange. It was overwhelming, feeling everything and nothing at once. Watching the serials Murderbot 1.0 and Peri favoured had helped contextualise concepts, and reading had helped with putting some intangible concepts into words, but the sensation that something was missing remained. Maybe I had a broken component somewhere. I had not worked up the courage to ask Peri to check, however.

And now it was too late.

I felt like I was failing on my first cycle of being a free-roaming rogue SecUnit in a completely human space, where the humans did not know what I was. My body was already doing strange things like my lungs feeling like they were being compressed and the thought of humans knowing I was a Unit, a rogue SecUnit. On my own, wandering around. It was making my organic components secrete moisture. Especially my hands. The skin overlay on my face would flush with heat whenever a human would look at me. Alterations to my form were not that new but the additional skin around my joints felt itchy within these clothes unlike before- I could feel every seam that was in contact with my bodily sensory organs. I never knew if I was making eye-contact for too long or too little because every second felt increasingly anomalous, more like thirty-minutes when it was a mere 0.3 seconds.

I was alone.

There was an odd, clogged sensation in my throat that wanted to escape.

I did not like it.

They did not need me. They already had a SecUnit. They already had… well, a Peri… Although now I suppose I should refer to it as Perihelion, considering all current circumstances. I was not useful to them. I had no purpose to fulfil for them that Murderbot 1.0 could not already do. I could fly spacecraft short distances however with Perihelion… I had no modules they needed. Well, not since Murderbot 1.0 asked for any useful codes I had, and I had produced them without questioning its intention. I did not have anything they needed from me after that. I could have been a shipmaid, but Perihelion’s drones mostly took care of that. I thought they liked me. I thought they wanted me. I guess I was wrong. Maybe I had done something wrong..?

Nothing in my logs inclined such, I even checked body language with the recordings of the humans. Everything was confusing and painful.

The hollow feeling only worsened each time I checked to see if the station Sec-System alerted on me or not. Skimming through the feed drowning with so many echoes of every human and bot doing everything they use the feed for resulted in further performance drops. All it would take is for me to miss a weapons scanner or forget to remove myself from a camera showing I was in a space where people were not supposed to be and the entire station would know what I am. How much of a threat I was. That I was in their space. That I was alone in their space. Roaming aimlessly.

Each time was a sinking feeling followed by the thought that I would not have to do this if I were still on duty on a Barish-Estranza ship- but I could not go back, they would disassemble me for parts if I did. Or worse. And what I wanted from being on-duty there was not there anymore- they were all dead. My squad. I was beginning to wonder if I should have died with them, although I could recognise that was simply stupid. Stupid because it would have meant my clients, Perihelion’s crew and Murderbot 1.0 would have likely died too. And that was not something I regretted- not entirely.

I should be grateful, but it was hard to be right now. Everything just felt too wrong. Too much of not what I want.

Even after making it to the private cargo docks, I simply stood there. I knew all the steps, Murderbot 1.0 gave me a What-To-Do list before leaving and Perihelion gave me keywords to focus on for how to bribe transports. I now owned a wealthy sea of media collated between what Murderbot 1.0 and Perihelion accumulated over their free time- beyond that, also things I had obtained during our stays at the stations we had been restocking at in Preservation Alliance. To put it simply, I could not make the next physical step- my body outright refused to move any closer toward the ship-locks. If I were incapable of securing my joints in place I think I would have experienced tremors. On contract I had seen human clients shiver in emergencies when there was no temperature-based reason to and not understood, I still did not quite grasp it yet, but I felt more sympathy for them now.

A noise nearby made me skim the cameras and station schematics for an estimate- I had been standing long enough that the next scheduled personnel check was about to occur for the dock. It felt like nothing, just standing there staring, I had not even figured out where I wanted to go… Mostly because I did not want to go. And none of the options appeared appealing, I had not particularly researched them each beyond seeing exactly how far away they would be from Murderbot 1.0’s squads’ home and Perihelion’s crews’ home. Each of the places the ships were going to from here would be over a twenty-four-cycle trip. It meant that if they or their humans ever needed- or… wanted me… I would be so late and they would be so far away.

There would be no opportunity for me to be useful to them again.

I could not go back to Perihelion- they would all know I had failed Murderbot 1.0’s orders then. They would dislike me further. And I could not be caught here because that would be extremely worse than going back to Perihelion to face everyone- so I compromised for the nearby Supply Cubby. I already evaluated Sec-Sys, there were no cameras or sensors inside listed, no records for maintenance outside of internal storage work. So, before the incoming employees could discover a frozen, rogue SecUnit in the private cargo docks, I hid. Making sure that none of the automatic lights inside turned on.

By the time they walked into the docks, I was rifling through the bag Perihelion’s crewperson, Iris, donated to me since Murderbot 1.0 had insisted I would need one. It mostly held clothes in it, however, Murderbot 1.0 insisted on letting me keep one weapon, a small hand-weapon, which would be better than using my internal energy weapons in front of humans. I was not sure why I had gotten it out. I had done a lot of standing and staring on contract, and a lot of sitting and staring off contract, and a lot of laying and staring since rendering my Governor-Module null. But this again, felt strange. I had all the notated schematics for this hand-weapon. Murderbot 1.0 and I altered it to increase its accuracy and intensity- I did not need to look at it with my eyes. I was, though. Turning it around and around in a dim red light on the wall- it was some kind of manual trigger for an emergency alarm.

I stopped turning it with it aimed toward me.

Switching the safety on. Then off. On. Then off. On. Off.

I do not know what I was thinking at that moment, I do not particularly want to recall it because it was likely something stupid. Something astoundingly stupid. Apparently, the impulsive side-effect of your Governor-Module becoming inept is not unique to Murderbot 1.0. I do not think I would have made it out of that cubby if it were not for that ping. A distress ping. I carefully put the hand-weapon back in the travel bag and tapped for a Hub-Sys that was not there. Not that it would change anything, already having pinged back automatically out of habit. That was something I should have worked on before leaving.

I did a little analysis- it was a directionless ping with a message string attached from a nearby feed address, likely from onboard one of the ships in dock. I got another ping back with a photo attachment which… Never had I felt my body make such a physical response to an image before. I could feel my organic systems rushing, my performance reliability dropped low enough that I got another maintenance alert. This time with it being outright required, “or risk Unit error”. Humour on you, Maint-Sys, I had already made many grave errors. There were plenty of things I had to witness being with Barish-Estranza but I had never seen something like… that.

The strange thing was- the message was in machine code language. Like what Perihelion put on my helmet before retrieving Murderbot 1.0 on the colonist planet. That would limit the ping to only being readable by most machines unless a human sat down to parse it. Which… did not make sense, maybe there was a higher-functioning bot? Nevertheless, a bot would still have to be specifically instructed to send out a distress ping like this by a human… Especially attaching an image unless it was higher-functioning, the potential of that was just limited as most bots on station were general purpose or cargo-specific. The ping had targeted non-native bots only, no linking to staff or the PA bots… It could mean that they did not identify the station staff as safe? Or maybe it was a trap? Both?

I do not believe I cared.

At least now I had an excuse to ask Perihelion and Murderbot 1.0 for help, but I think I had also already made up my mind upon analysing the additional attachment regardless of what they told me.

I was going to help. I was going to be useful. And maybe… they would want me.

Cautiously, I tapped the lingering feed connection to Perihelion, I did have its comm stored under my rib but I did not want to announce to everyone (the humans onboard) what was going on. And I wanted Murderbot 1.0’s opinion as well, forwarding on the ping and attachment, I believe there is a problem.

Murderbot 1.0 responded 0.2 of a second later, I loosed a breath I did not realise I had been holding and the weight around my ribs lessened, That reads trap, even my borked risk assessment thinks so.

I was aware of that, as stated above. I do have my own functional Risk-Assessment and Threat-Assessment modules, this was also against all relevant protocols, again, I did not care, I want to help.

Perihelion finally replied to add in a voice more like it had used when Murderbot 1.0’s position was compromised, its crew had called it “cold”, If the information and attachment provided are reliable, I would encourage you to assist. Have you confirmed the authenticity?

Right. I could trace and hack into the ship on my own accord, I did not need permission. Again, I was failing. I answered anyway, I have not entered the feed for the ship, but the image does not appear staged or altered.

You aren’t already in ship Sec-Sys..? Murderbot 1.0’s immediate confusion leaked through the feed despite the distance.

Ignoring the query, I traced the feed address attached to the ping to the bay below the one I was currently at, one for recent arrivals in dock for cargo restocking. Based on the staff routes, there was an employee access near the cubby. I opted for scanning the cameras before, in and after the access as that seemed sensible- there would be a window in the next few minutes where I could utilise it based on projected movements. Humans move so slowly when relaxed. I brought up the manifest for the ship at the dock corresponding to the feed address location- some kind of smaller freight-merchant vessel. Scouring through the Station Sec-Sys for the cameras of the ship-lock to match the listed crew members.

The two had begun bickering in the background of my feed about whether it was worth the risk to fulfil the request or not, Murderbot 1.0 notably raised its voice about if what I did was traced back to Perihelion. Or me dying. But I was focused on slipping into Vessel Sec-Sys now and backburnered them. I would have to make sure the crew members listed were all the crew members that had left- besides forwarding the manifest to them I paid them no mind.

They went quiet momentarily to review which offered me more space to focus, I was not as confident at hacking as Murderbot 1.0 was. We were only allowed to under awfully specific circumstances and it rarely came up during my time of merely… guarding humans. Making sure they did not die, did not attempt to murder each other and, most importantly, did not try to leave. Oftentimes we already had system access to things like clients' personal devices. I had never experienced humans from outside Barish-Estranza as clients I was responsible for whereas Murderbot 1.0 had handled new human teams for each contract they held. I only ever held one contract.

I had expected to die one day at that contract.

Matching the corresponding time stamps of a few minutes before each cluster of crew members disembarked with the internal cameras and schematics confirmed my suspicions that only so many of the actual crew were listed on the public manifest. I counted 9 additional people and potentials- though all who had been listed were currently on station. The others appeared to be in their personal quarters and there had been no activity from them since the disembarking. Noting that, I adjusted the route I would take to compensate and forwarded the information. I could do this, I watched Murderbot 1.0 do it repeatedly throughout their logs. I could do this… Huh. I only ever saw humans use words of affirmation with themselves, never bots. Strangely, it helped.

Perihelion finished reviewing the information and only said, I have never come across a ship that has been to the Origin System. It is curious how it got here so fast.

I was not the only one who did not know what the Origin System was as Murderbot 1.0 said nothing. Perihelion began to elaborate but I would have to learn more about it later as I had only just successfully gotten into Vessel Sec-Sys pretending I was Port Authority Sec-Sys. I was successful, I had done it, and I was feeling… the opposite of Perihelion’s voice, warm? I do not understand how humans can convert their emotions into extremely specific literature. I want to learn how to… if this works out, at least. It would work out. I needed it too.

The cameras were in odd placements aboard the ship, focused on exits, entries, walkways and the cargo-hold, not rooms. It did not take long to authenticate the image with the live view from the camera. I explicitly reviewed the metadata to ensure the recording was not looped or spoofed, overlaid with the public and private schematics to confirm positioning with the exterior visual of the ship-lock. Admittedly, the positioning was peculiar, it looked like a cargo-hold inside of a smaller shuttle- one designed for planetary atmospheres like the ones Perihelion had stored. Identifiable by internal engineering.

It was not unusual for a ship to have one, all ships around the size of the freight that I had worked on had them, but the manifest explicitly stated that this Vessel was only for space trade. Not planetary trade. The fact it was a cargo-freight made me wonder if it was some kind of planetary craft altered to tug modules. The shuttle was not visible from the cargo-hold camera, specifically being hidden in a blind spot based on my estimates. My own unsettled expectations with how strange everything in general at that moment enabled me to dismiss it. For all I knew this was standard practice in this particular region, like how Perihelion does not publicly list its weapons.

But I could not identify any bot in the cameras, the only one I could identify was the Vessel itself- as I could feel the Bot-Pilot present in the feed with me though it had not indicated noticing my presence. There were drones as well, specifically for maintenance and cleaning- unfortunately they did not appear effective for their purpose. I handed all the information over into the feed for Perihelion and Murderbot to parse and triple-check me as I continued to watch the camera and feel for the recordings of the last seven days. The silhouette was clear, peering out partially from behind a secured crate. Small enough to be missed if you were not looking for it, especially for a human crew. I had a small plan, partially based on a murder that happened on Preservation Station- which I know, sounded great.

Sarcasm, I think that was what it is called?

Anyway, I prepared all necessary components for the plan that I could from my position and was preparing to leave the cubby when Murderbot 1.0 said, Do you want me to do it?

No!... No. I had not meant to raise my voice, I had never shouted before, I did not know what emotions I was leaking through the feed, nevertheless I was certain with my whole constructed mind I did not want either of them to know. So, I hastily gathered up and reinforced my walls linked into their feed as well as the Vessel Sec-Sys for self-assurance. I did not want it there, I could do this, I could be useful, this could be my way to show I was useful. The skin on my face did that heated thing again as I felt the digital recoil from Murderbot 1.0, it did not withdraw from the feed, but I could tell it felt… Odd. I felt odd too. I produced an excuse, The route will be clear in the next 30 seconds, you would not be able to get here without exposing yourself. The situation is too sensitive to leave it for longer, they are just too fragile.

Perihelion digitally hummed in agreement, but I could feel the scepticism still wavering through the feed from Murderbot 1.0.

… Are you able to provide tactical support? Maybe that would be good enough to get it to settle and it would be nice to work… not alone. And it would mean even if I horrendously messed up, I could still succeed. If I died, things would still be okay. It was a win. My Risk Assessment was not happy about any of this unnecessary risk-taking. It tapped an acknowledgement. The feed only did so much to block out the edged sensation from its end, but that was good enough for me. As I waited the last couple of seconds for the dock and elevator to be clear, I started bringing up the codes from Vessel Sec-Sys to open the lock.

Bag accessible, the uncalibrated drones that I was only supposed to awaken on the ship I was leaving with booting up, hand-weapon in reach, continuing to remove myself from the cameras, scanning for unanticipated movement, the feed connection to the others- all the inputs were becoming suffocating. There were not that many, it was simply more than I had ever been ordered to manage, everything I was doing felt slow and unfamiliar. I almost walked into the access door without opening it. Murderbot 1.0 silently slid into my feeds and started taking over my inputs for Station Sec-Sys, not only opening the elevator door but setting it up to arrive at the designated floor without the request reaching the Station Transport-System it was on.

It managed so easily. I was not sure I would ever get to that point even with practice. Murderbot 1.0’s personal logs implied a superior prowess for not merely hacking but managing multiple inputs that I had never observed from any of the other Units I had come across or worked with. A sense of prickling through my input to Vessel Sec-Sys being the only indication it successfully entered too. I could feel it handing some information portions over to Perihelion although I had enough room to do what I needed to now and stopped paying as much attention. I was both dreading and grateful for the fact I did not have my armour now, it was confusing to have emotions on a job. Having more than one when you are supposed to be fully operational and cannot hide them from any human you come across- especially the ones that are conflicting, were exponentially worse.

There was some, what I would identify as, comfort in familiarity, this would be more like retrieving the kids that ran away from their designated housing after curfew, just that there were much fewer places to hide in the Private station docks.

Thinking about everything like that allowed for a focused calm for what I needed to do, that small peace allowed my performance reliability to climb back up to 96%. Still not within the ideal parameters for operations yet better than it stating lower than that. This should be swift. Easy. Simple retrieval. With a resolution for not only the distress signal but for my own… Strangeness. The doors for the access opened and I had already started the open hatch sequence for the ship-lock- it was oddly non-standard. Maybe that should have been another red flag. My threat assessment picked it up though neither Murderbot 1.0, nor Perihelion by proxy, brought it up.

I passed through the access doors and across the dock floor, still no further filed objections from Murderbot 1.0 or Perihelion.

So, I simply walked right in.

#three the secunit #murderbot #asshole research transport #martha wells #the murderbot diaries #scifi #scifibooks #scifiseries #fanfic #fanfiction #action #network effect #fandom #writblr #writers on tumblr #writeblr #tmbd #Reverse Innovation

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iviarellereads · 7 months

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Exit Strategy, Chapter 5

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one!)

In which the long-awaited friend returns to us.

When the transit pipe with GrayCrisSec and Dr. Mensah arrived, I was in a pod, paused and ready.

Murderbot finds the team, and they have their own SecUnit, with armour. Still, this is probably do-able. Looking at the hotel's transit station, with its holographic displays, MB gets an idea and files it for later.(1) It follows the group on cameras, six plus the SecUnit and Mensah. Two peel off to take other positions, leaving the main target (SecUnit) and four secondaries.

SecUnits with intact governor modules can't hack like MB can without getting punished. This one has a Palisade logo on the proprietary-brand armour, but no drones. It doesn't try to hack it, like it did the ComfortUnit with Art's help, just in case it fails, and the unit reports it.

MB taps Mensah's implant, and says it's here. Mensah asks for its name as proof. It knows the conversation footage was deleted, so it gives her the real one: Murderbot. She asks what it's doing here, believing it had been captured. MB says it came to help, and tells her the three others are waiting with a company shuttle. It asks if Mensah will give it permission to proceed with extraction.

She doesn't hesitate to say yes.

MB puts her feed on the back burner after acknowledging, and then double checks the schematics and the camera feeds. It's not sure it could have done this before Milu stretched its limits. Still, it can't screw this up.(2)

Redirecting its own pod to a specific junction, MB calls the pod with Mensah in it to the same location, and tells her to drop as it takes out the goons and takes on the other SecUnit, the Primary Target. After a fight sequence, it incapacitates them all, and leaves with Mensah in the pod, going back to the hotel's station. It takes that idea from earlier, instructing Mensah how to stay out of its way, and enacts another action sequence. They move on to the next obstacle.(3)

Mensah asks if the company is helping. MB says no, and explains the payoff to keep them from docking, and how the Preservation team came anyway.

From the security camera systems, MB realizes that GrayCris know where they are and what they're doing. MB initiates an emergency disembark of the capsule, making sure Mensah lands safely by wrapping itself around her. It consults the maps and finds another way out. They get in another pod, going down to the maintenance section, and an access backbone to the whole station. There, they take a cargo carrier out.

On the way, MB asks if Mensah is alright. She says she is, and very glad to see it. MB, however, can confirm there are more creases at her eyes since they last met. It's not sure how to go about comforting people, but it tells Mensah that she can hug it, if she needs to. She laughs, and her face does "something complicated", and she does so. MB raises its temperature output, and tries to think of it as first aid.

Except it wasn’t entirely awful. It was like when Tapan had slept next to me in the room at the hostel, or when Abene had leaned on me after I saved her; strange, but not as horrific as I would have thought.

Mensah says it was MB at Milu, and MB confirms, though it was an accident. Which part, asks Mensah. MB says, most of it. She asks if it said she sent it, and it says no, it impersonated a fake client. She asks why it went to Milu, and it says, because it wanted to help her by getting evidence of the illegal activity. That's not its whole reason, but it doesn't reveal its conflicted feelings. Mensah, for her part, says she'll try to remember that next time she gives an interview off the cuff. She asks whether it got the data, and it confirms it did, but it mailed it to her family on Preservation before it came to rescue her.

Murderbot awkwardly admits that it left. Mensah says she handled it badly. MB says Pin-Lee told it Mensah was worried. She admits she was, she was afraid MB would be caught, but she should have had more confidence in it. MB isn't sure it would go that far, but before it can have too many emotions, its map monitor alerts that they're nearing the port.

=====

(1) That's one way to tell us This Is Foreshadowing. (2) I want to get into the semantics of what is being said literally (if I fail, Mensah dies, so failure is not allowed) compared to the alternate meaning of the phrase (it is impossible to fail this). I point this out, because this being a story, we know that the latter is also true, since it would mean Murderbot died and this would be the end of the book, and the series. It's a fun play on words. (3) I debated cutting all the travel down to "they move from one obstacle to the next" and just elaborating on their conversations between action sequences, but I couldn't find the right spot to do it and leave the vibes intact.

#the murderbot diaries #murderbot diaries #exit strategy #murderbot #secunit #ayda mensah

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rjalker · 1 year

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Words: 1,738

Summary:

Murderbot finds itself as the newest passenger of Moya after falling through a wormhole. John stops by its room to see if it's okay. It's not. It's hard to be okay when your wrist has never healed from an injury that was just reopened by diving in front of a crashing spaceship to save a stranger.

John uses neopronouns.

I wasn't planning on writing a mini crossover or even fanfiction at all but that's what happened. Slight spoilers for season two of Farscape, no spoilers for The Murderbot Diaries because I'm making it up because Martha Wells is ableist and refuses to let Murderbot become physically disabled and also refuses to do any world building for this series for some unfathomable reason.

if you really really like this you can feel free to copy and paste the text into a document and then convert it to an epub or PDF using convertio.co or freeconvert.com. If you have an android phone, the app "ReadEra" is an awesome free ebook app that you can customize a lot of stuff on. I highly recommend it.

= = = = =

“You know, stealing people's stuff isn't generally the best way to go about generating goodwill.”

(Archived read-more link)

[Read-More was here]

Startled, Murderbot jerked its head towards the door, the sudden movement causing it to drop the roll of bandaging it had been trying to maneuver with only the use of one hand. The bandages bounced off its shoe and rolled to an awkward stop in the middle of the floor, the tail end still pinned under Murderbot's hand.

Neither Moya nor Pilot were willing to let it hack any of the DRDs, or Moya's sensors, so Murderbot only had its own eyes and ears to keep track of its environment. Try as it might, it hadn't been able to figure out how to access any of Moya's systems, even superficially.

The door to “its” room was stuck in the open position, and no matter how many strings of code it threw at it, it didn't budge. The technology that made up Moya was as alien to Murderbot as well...all of the other aliens on this ship.

Crichton, one of the two humans onboard the alien ship, was standing in the hallway, leaning against the rounded edge of the door with a casual ease that did not actually help Murderbot's startled anxiety back down.

“What?” It asked. It wasn't that it hadn't heard what X had said, it just couldn't think of any appropriate response.

Crichton gestured to the roll of cloth now on the floor next to Murderbot's feet, the tail end still clutched in its numb fingers. “That used to be my shirt. You got it from my room. Next time, ask me first.”

There wasn't really any response Murderbot could think of to that, so it didn't say anything, just sat there on the side of the bed, staring.

The human's gaze visibly fell to Murderbot's wrist, the one that Murderbot had been trying all in vain to bandage. The seam was bleeding again, and so were the surrounding tissues.

Neon purple and blue blood was beading up on the surface of its skin as the mechanical parts on the inside ground together in the wrong way. Its pain dampeners were working at the moment, but that could stop at any moment, and it had wanted to get the wound bandaged before it would be in too much pain to even think about it.

Unfortunately, even though it wasn't able to actually feel the pain, that didn't mean it wasn't there. Trying to do something as simple as hold the end of the bandage roll was almost impossible. Its fingers didn't want to move, and when they did, they were either sluggish and heavy, or twitching uncontrollably.

It had taken ten solid minutes to get the roll of bandages positioned so that it could try wrapping them around its wrist with its other hand, and all that had been ruined when the human startled it.

It sighed aloud, unable to keep it internal only.

“That doesn't look good. You need any help with that?” Crichton's voice had changed tones, gentler now than it had been before.

This time Murderbot managed to keep its sigh internal. Yes, it needed help bandaging its wrist. No, it did not want the help. Especially not from a human it didn't know.

But it couldn't afford to lose any more blood than it already had. Moya was alien technology. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't be able to help it generate the nutrients it needed to keep itself functioning.

“You can help if you promise not to touch me.” Murderbot said, agonizingly aware that its pain dampeners could switch off again any second. “I just need to bandage this to stop the bleeding.” It wasn't going to apologize for taking the bandages.

It tried to lift its injured arm off the hard surface of the table for emphasis, but couldn't actually manage to make it do anything except tingle warningly with pins and needles.

Crichton was moving forward briskly, as though X'd been waiting for just such an invitation, stooping to scoop the roll of bandages off the floor with an ease that Murderbot envied.

“What do you need me to do?” Crichton asked, winding the bandages back around the roll.

Murderbot tried to lift its injured arm again experimentally, but got the same result. It felt like its whole arm below the elbow had been physically disconnected.

It ended up having to use its other arm to awkwardly drag its hand closer to the edge so that it would be able to wrap the bandages around its wrist without the table getting in the way. Its wrist hung limply in the grasp of gravity like something dead. That was not doing anything to make Murderbot feel any better about the situation. “I'll put the bandage on, you just...” It felt like its brain was being fried. Its performance reliability was taking a nosedive. “Hold it for me.”

If it didn't get this over with soon, it was probably going to crash. And crashing in front of a strange human was the last thing on its 'Things I want to do at any point in my life' list.

With another pair of hands to hold the roll of bandages and guide them while it worked with its free hand, the process didn't take long at all. When the bandages were on as tightly as Murderbot could get them, already soaking up the mixtures of blood, Crichton used the small utility knife Murderbot had also stolen from X room to cut off the end, letting Murderbot pull it away to tuck under the edges.

“My name's John, by the way, since we haven't been properly introduced.” Crichton said, once they were done with the first aid, “My pronouns are ze/xir/xirself. I'm a human, the only one you'll find in this part of the galaxy. I breathe in oxygen, and exhale carbon dioxide. I've got a friend in here--” ze tapped xir head-- “Named Harvey. His pronouns are he/him/his/himself. The rest of the details will come up when they're important. What about you?”

Murderbot stared, bewildered by almost all parts of the statement, and the best response it could come up with was, “I thought your name was Crichton.”

Crichton—John? Smiled. “It is, Crichton is my family name. Both work fine, but I do prefer being called John. So, what should I call you? No one really got a chance to ask earlier, what with the whole hostage situation. Thanks for saving our butts, by the way.”

Murderbot wanted to think fast, but the impending systems shut down prevented that. “My pronouns are it/its/itself. My name is private but this hurts too much to think of a good alias right now.”

Its pain dampeners were starting to fail, one section at a time. The suspense was almost worse than if they'd just failed all at once.

“Fair enough. Is there anything we can do to ease the pain? Any chemicals you could use as medicine? If we don't have it we might be able to synthesize it if you're lucky. Are you hungry? I can't say we've got good food, but it's at least...half way edible. We hope.”

This was one of the many shitty things about being a construct. No one had ever given enough shits about what they felt to care about making painkillers that would work on them. “No.”

“No there's no pain medicines we could scrounge up, or no you're not hungry?”

Murderbot no longer had enough energy to uphold an entire end of a conversation. “No.”

“Alright.” John didn't seem angry at its curt reply. “I can take a hint, I'll leave you be. Is there anything I can do to help before I go, though? I mean, you did get thrown through a wall for me.” Yes, that's why Murderbot's wrist was currently trying to murder it. Being thrown through a wall, it turns out, was not a good idea if you had an unhealed injury that liked to burst into pain whenever it wanted.

But the expression on John Crichton's face was so sincere it was doing weird things to Murderbot's insides, and not just because it was about to collapse.

Why did so many humans have to care about it? This one was a complete stranger. Yes, Murderbot had shoved xir out of the way of the crashing spaceship and taken the hit itself, but that didn't mean ze needed to look at it like that. They weren't friends just because Murderbot had saved xir life.

But there was one thing ze could help with.

Murderbot summoned up its remaining strength to ask, “How do I shut the door?”

John looked over at the doorway, then back at Murderbot, then stood and strode over, pressing xir hand against a raised spot on the wall that Murderbot hadn't noticed. “You just have to press this, or ask Pilot or Moya if it doesn't work. There's one on the outside too. The lock on this door's disconnected right now because it was designed to lock from the outside, but if you want to stick around, we can get it to lock from the inside.” Ze pressed xir hand against the button, and two sections of wall slide across to close the door. Ze pressed it again, and the sections slid back into the wall again. Ze turned to smile back at Murderbot. “See? Easy peasy lemon squeazy.”

It turned out Murderbot had enough energy to roll its eyes.

John stepped out into the corridor, and reached out to the wall on that side. The door began to shut again. Right before it was closed completely, John called, “Goodnight, sunshine.”

Murderbot had no idea how to respond to that, so instead of trying to think of one, it let gravity take control and fell back against the bed. It was soft and warm and a perfect contrast to the slightest chill in the air, like it was made specifically to be comfortable.

It was part of the alien ship. Part of Moya. Probably an organic part of Moya. That was creepy. Murderbot should probably be worried about that.

But it would rather shut itself down now, voluntarily, before it had an involuntary shutdown or its pain dampeners stopped working, so it sighed out another breath, and embraced the oblivion of a voluntary shutdown.

#Farscape Murderbot Diaries crossover #The Murderbot Diaries Farscape crossover #John Crichton #Murderbot #Murderbotfanfiction #Farscapefanfiction #Rjalker reads The Murderbot Diaries #Rjalker watches Farscape #SecUnit #Nonbinary John Crichton #neopronouns in action #ze/xir #zexirpronouns #ititspronouns

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lasersheith · 3 months

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January 2024 Reading Review

I read 7 books and 2 short stories in January and wanted to spew my thoughts into the void

The Books:

Witch King by Martha Wells (414 pages)

The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas (405 pages)

Holes by Louis Sachar (240 pages)

The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell (225 pages)

Feed by Mira Grant (571 pages)

Deadline by Mira Grant (581 pages)

Blackout by Mira Grant (512 pages) The short stories:

As Yet Unsent by Tamsyn Muir (26 pages)

The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex by Tamsyn Muir (25 pages)

My Thoughts:

Witch King

I loved Murderbot Diaries so I was really excited to see Martha Wells also writes fantasy, and this book has a really cool magic system regarding witches and demons and demon offspring that can move their souls into different human bodies under certain circumstances. There are some cool things to think about in this book, regarding self image and reflection, friendship, love, sacrifice, family of origin, and family of choice.

I wanted to love this but I will absolutely settle for liking it. I thought the characters were all really great but something wasn't working for me in the pacing and the jumping back and forth between past and present. Individual scenes and story beats were great though. Somewhere in the 3.5-4 stars range for me.

The Sunbearer Trials

Very cute Middlegrade/YA meso-american mythology style spin on something like Percy Jackson meets Hunger Games. The main character is a young trans half god but his god mom isn't one of the biggest baddest coolest gods so he thinks he's a nobody and turns out to be the big special boy etc. It was cute, I liked how many queer characters were included and nobody made a big deal about it, and the bully character(s) didn't misgender or deadname anyone but were still assholes. There were some clunky trans allegories that could have just been text and some missed opportunities for better character development but overall I liked it and will definitely read the sequel. 3.5 stars.

Holes

I read this in like 7th grade and remembered it being really fucking good and turns out middle school also had impeccable taste. It's just a really good book. There's so much book per book too, we follow essentially 3 different converging storylines and fall in love with 5-8 wonderful characters all in the span of less than 250 pages. Absolutely 5 stars.

The Reapers Are the Angels

Woof. This is a book that takes place in several years after a zombie apocalypse and the main character is a girl somewhere around 16 years old that's been orphaned and her adopted brother died and she has to move on from her place of safety when zombies get to it. I know a lot of zombie books are supposed to be really dark and gritty and edgy but this one was just weird to me. I think there are things to be considered about the nature of humanity, obsession vs love, loss and grief, and pretty typical zombie genre themes and such here, but I didn't care for it. A generous 2.5 stars. Did not continue the series.

Feed/Deadline/Blackout

Also zombie books, a trilogy. Reading this in 2024 was bizarre at times. It's set decades after the zombie "apocalypse" where the US has basically "learned to live with the virus" and follows a team of reporters who score the job of reporting on the campaign of a republican presidential candidate. If you can make it past the soul-crushing comparisons to the state of modern US politics and public health, this is a very fun series. It's also grim and edgy and dark but never loses its sense of humor. It's weirdly more a political conspiracy series with zombies than a zombie series, but in a good way? Almost every reporter runs a blog with some kind of pun in the name. The author makes some BOLD choices and had me gasping aloud sometimes, crying other times, and laughing my ass off in between. Overall 4.5 stars.

Short Stories:

Both of them are from the Locked Tomb series and were perfect. You should read the Locked Tomb series. Seriously. It's so good. If you're reading this, you're on tumblr, so I know you have at least one of the following if not all of them: religious trauma, colonialism/imperialism trauma, at least one gay situationship that almost killed you, and/or a thing for hot girls with swords. 5 stars.

#booklr #book reviews #january 2024 reading #sam reviews

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brawltogethernow · 3 years

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I'd like to hear more about your murderbot transmigrator thoughts :))

Okay obviously when I said I wasn’t going to think about a Murderbot/Scum Villain fusion that was more of a goal, which is a lot like a lie. I have pecked out ~1k of prose for it, but none of it is presentable for longer than one line. The problem with this concept is that it’s actually very good, and there are a lot of meaty ideas to dig into with it, like, too many of them.

1. Murderbot would be immedately inclined to empathize with the System and guess at its motivations. Depending on what those are this may still stay an antagonistic relationship, because the way the System leverages its cosmic powers to coerce and strongarm people stomps on a lot of Murderbot’s triggers and is generally a dick move. The points system is just a gamified governor module. But it’s still a relationship, and if the System turns out to be an antagonist, it’s in that role as a fleshed out character with a personality who has been interrogated by someone with every reason to assume somebody made it and has commanded it to act like this for their own reasons.

Murderbot asks its function and designates it NarrSystem (Narrative System) or StorySystem or something because “the System” is too generic coming from its setting.

2. Transmigrating into a human body would be badweird and transmigrating into a human brain would be absolutely horrifying. (SecUnit could transmigrate into a system, but we’ve kind of been there done that with 2.0.) Dysphoria central! Murderbot gets to address that while it has never wanted to be a human, all humans are so convinced that being human is better that on some level it WAS worried that they were right. And now it can say with absolute certainty that they are not and this sucks. But also some things that it would have thought would be fundamentally different are actually the same. It’s just a whole time.

This is part of why I’m deviating from transmigration story standard and full stop making the transmigration a temporary situation, the other main reason being that Murderbot has more going on in its own world than your standard transmigration protagonist.

3. Either Murderbot gets back by hacking the System or it intends to but it’s ultimately the System’s decision. This is a very slow process because it can’t access tech the way it’s used to and the System’s structure is very different from what it’s dealt with before (because it strongly resembles Windows Vista). It needs tech and more control over its situation stat though so it’s going to keep at it until it works. Open your damn menus. SecUnit is going to rig transmigration until it’s like playing The Sims with cheat codes.

4. (This one is for me.) The System still talks in garbled Chinese netspeak, and Murderbot is like. Wow this program speaks in the lost tongue of an ancient civilization. How old is it. I can barely understand it. (Because of the bad memes not the Chinese.)

5. Murderbot gets yeeted into The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and has to deal with the emotionally exhausting scenario of empathizing with everybody present. It likes the heroes, and it likes the other heroes they’re in conflict with, it likes the more complex villains with fleshed out motivations, and it even has a soft spot for a lot of the side characters and bit villains. This is fundamentally incompatible with how it tries to ration its empathy, assess situations by sorting people into allies/nonhostiles/hostiles, and compartmentalize by nicknaming the people it’s in conflict with things like Target 1, Target 2, and Target 3.

6. The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, as the specific transmigration variation we’re jumping off of here, was not trying to interrogate the infinity mirror effect of heteronormativity reflecting back and forth between media and people, and as such is not like, a solid narrative about this. That said, this book is basically like:

Shen Yuan reads this giant mess of a book with a lot of straight sex fantasies, not completely without appreciating the romance, but with more antipathy for it than he admits to himself. Then he ends up in the book and thinks he’s meant to enable the romances he read, which he’s so completely resigned to doing he doesn’t notice that the main character is queer and gone on him, or that he, himself, has been studiously suppressing the desires he assumes he should have while unable to perceive what he actually wants and how it affects his behavior.

So the Murderbot version of this is to subvert amatonormativity with your pretty explicitly aroace protagonist whose reaction to fictional romance is tolerant at best. Murderbot embraces its own lack of desire for romance but dances around acknowledging that it desires other relationships and seems to be working around the incorrect belief that romance and friendship are both human things and that’s why it doesn’t engage with them. So:

Murderbot ends up in the immediate leadup to the resolution of a love dodecahedron - maybe surrounding Eden, just as the only named character from TRAFOSM I think we have. And Murderbot is (internally) like...okay...I was never very moved by ANY of these people as romantic choices for you...but I might as well try to guide you to the least offensive ones, I guess. And it’s so mired in expectations based on its foreknowledge of this arc that it doesn’t notice until Eden spells it out that they’re ditching ALL their suitors and have realized they’re complete without romance and want to devote themself to finding their long lost birth mother or farming science or something, which just takes SecUnit tf out.

Possibly I will become really ungovernable and say that after seizing the System’s capabilities Murderbot just offers to take Eden on a reverse isekai right off of Sanctuary Moon, leaving ART’s crew and the Preservation team to be like, Where Did You Just Get This Entire Human.

7. Further going off svsss, there is a meta thread to interrogate by plunking Murderbot into a villain character. It's already an evil robot trope that declined to go evil, this is true in-universe and it knows it, and it has very low expectations of the morals of the group that it belongs to - informed by the same media that was a lifeline to it when it was in a very bad situation - that it is still in the process of working through. The layers.

So yeah there’s a lot going on here. Send help.

#this isn't even it the well isn't even dry #murderbot #svsss #the murderbot diaries #anonymous #asks answered #stock villain

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theres-no-protocol-for-this · 3 years

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A Shared Meal

Mensah cooks dinner, and MB admits that it likes how food smells. This is a sweet little one-shot based on a Discord conversation about MB and cooking.

The kitchen area in Mensah's farmhouse has been created with an extended family in mind.

There was enough space for at least three different people to comfortably move about and room enough in the pantry to feed a dozen human beings. That afternoon, through some miracle of scheduling, the house stood silent.

Mensah was alone in the kitchen, nursing a cup of tangy-smelling hot liquid while pacing and reading reports on her display surface. The doctor was technically on vacation, but that didn't stop her from fussing over whatever work she brought home.

I sat on a couch in the next room over, re-watching Sanctuary Moon episodes in preparation for a live performance that evening. I'd come down to the planet to spend the day with Mensah and see a play, and hadn't been paying attention to the human until her pacing brought her into the living area. A couple of my drones captured her entrance, but I looked up when she approached.

"It's going to be another extended council session when I get back," she said, long fingers wrapped around her mug. Steam slowly rose from the concoction inside. "I understand the necessity, of course, but it's... frustrating."

I checked my logs and then said, "You should eat something."

The human rolled her eyes at me. "Mothering's the last thing I want right now. But... you're not wrong. Come sit in the kitchen?"

I didn't see any reason not to, so I got up and settled on a tall barstool in front of a chest-high stone counter. Mensah's house was largely Murderbot-proof, so I didn't have to worry about destroying the furniture if I sat on it. This isn't always the case, and I appreciated Dr. Mensah's thoughtfulness.

Through a drone, I watched her remove fresh ingredients from a crisper and lay them out on the counter. She pulled out a cutting board and began deftly chopping at vegetables I couldn't name.

"What do you think about all of this?" She gestured at the display surface, now face down on the counter.

I had no opinions on the inner workings of the Preservation Alliance's governing body. As far as SecUnits went, I was a terrible example, and she would've had better luck discussing policy with Three. Unfortunately, it was currently on a trip with its family and out of easy communication range, but I suspected she had talked with it before its departure.

Meanwhile, Mensah chuckled. "Have you even looked at the news?"

"Enough to know that I don't care."

"Fair."

She tossed something onto a hot skillet, and the ingredient sizzled satisfyingly when it encountered the heat. Whatever it was smelled great. I don't eat and have no digestive system — which hasn't always stopped humans from forcing me to consume food — but the smells of human cooking are nonetheless pleasant.

"That's ghee," Mensah told me when she noticed me looking. "It's clarified butter."

The ingredient. Right. I still couldn't care less about its name, but now it had a name. On a whim, I pulled the terms for all of the other ingredients on the counter from the local feed archives. I doubted the conversation would veer toward food since the human knew I didn't eat, but having the names made the process appear less mysterious.

"I've never seen you pay attention to any of us cooking," Mensah admitted while tossing vegetables into the heated pan, followed by more sizzling and delightful smells.

Usually, I didn't hang out in her kitchen while the family cooked or ate dinner, and on those rare occasions when I couldn't avoid it, the process looked boring. Food appeared, humans consumed it, and then seemed more cheerful and relaxed afterward. The side effects were nice.

"It smells good," I admitted.

I liked the smells of humans food courts and cooking areas, especially once I'd returned to Preservation Station with Mensah and could walk around the station without triggering every alarm in the mall.

"Which parts?" Now Mensah was looking curiously at me. Well, she was looking past my right shoulder, but she was good at not making eye contact. I still knew she was intrigued, and I could easily see her expression through the drones' cameras.

"All of it?" This was hard to explain to a human. "I like the way food smells. I just don't want to eat it."

She frowned in that thoughtful way where her brow creased. "Huh. I never knew that. Want me to teach you some recipes?"

"I can look it up."

"It's not the same, SecUnit," Mensah told me. "I've been teaching Amena recently when she's home between semesters. I could show you a few tricks."

Well, that explained the younger Mensah's middle-of-the-night exploits. Maybe. I wanted to remind the doctor that I didn't actually need to eat and would have no practical application for the skill, but before I could, she went on. She peered at my face and judged whatever she found there worthy of further explanation.

"Sometimes, making food isn't about eating at all, if that's what you're thinking," Mensah mused, her gaze on the sizzling vegetables. "Sometimes, it's about community and connection — words you're probably allergic to. But think of it as an experience or an art. It's like going to see a play that's only performed once. No two meals are going to be exactly alike."

That made sense to me. At least here on the farm with ingredients cultivated in the family gardens, freshly-cooked food had distinctive smells and tastes. I imagined that rations all tasted pretty much equally terrible given the sheer number of complaints I'd heard about them over the cycles.

Mensah took a sip of her cooling drink and leaned back against a counter. "I love the smell of coffee. It reminds me of home, honestly. You can't get decent coffee on a station, so when I want the good stuff, I have to come back here."

I sat at the counter, watching Mensah cook with my own two eyes and the companionable silence felt comfortable. I didn't want to stare at a wall for a change, and no one asked me to talk about my feelings.

I still hate planets, but I could get used to moments like this, occasionally. I cropped together a recording of the preparation ritual and sent it to ART, who was scheduled to visit in the next dozen cycles or so. It would get my message sometime before docking at Preservation Station.

Sharing one family with another maybe wasn't so terrible, even if it meant I didn't get through all episodes of Sanctuary Moon I wanted.

#murderbot #dr. mensah #fanfiction #sweet #fluff

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ladyherenya · 3 years

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This was more-books-than-sometimes month, because rather than take the time to write about the books I'd finished, I just read more books! Also, I read a lot over the Easter break, including some shorter books and a very binge-able series.

Also read: Two-Step and Someone Like Me by Stephanie Fournet, Hooked by Cathy Yardley, “Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears” and “All the Different Shades of Blue” by W.R. Gingell, and “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory” by Martha Wells.

Reread: A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer.

Total: nineteen novels (including two audiobooks and one reread), one novella collection, two novellas, two novelettes and one short story.

Cover thoughts: Bellewether’s blue cover is (unsurprisingly) my favourite. I also really like The Ghosts of Sherwood.

Still reading: A Portrait of Loyalty by Roseanna M. White and Playing Hearts by W.R. Gingell.

Next up: Torch by R.J. Anderson.

My full reviews are on Dreamwidth and LibraryThing.

The Rose Code by Kate Quinn (narrated by Saskia Maarleveld): Historical mystery about three young women who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII.

My favourite out of the books I’ve read so far this year. Most of the narrative is set during the war, but interspersed with sections set in 1947 -- when Beth, in a sanitarium after a breakdown, has sent her two estranged friends a coded message begging for help. I loved this, but at times found it stressful and heartbreaking! The writing is so lively and effective and emotional. 4½ ★

Castle Charming by Tansy Raynor Roberts: Fairytale retellings, collection of novellas.

A very entertaining and a somewhat different take on fairytales, focusing on the reporters, Royal Hounds and royalty at Castle Charming. Some of the character dynamics felt similar to those in Roberts’ Unreal Alchemy although I didn’t feel quite as attached to these characters. I’ll read the sequel. 3 ★

Bellewether by Susanna Kearsley: Historical and contemporary fiction, set in Long Island during the so-called Seven Years War in 1759 and the present day.

Alternates between a curator overseeing turning a house in a museum and some of the house’s previous occupants, including a French-Canadian Lieutenant awaiting hostage exchange. Despite the various tensions the characters face, there’s something slow and ultimately gentle about this story. Which is lovely -- I enjoyed the picturesque sense of place and astute observations of people -- but it is less dramatic than I was expecting. 3½ ★

Happy Trail by Daisy Prescott: Contemporary romance, set on the Appalachian Trail.

A park ranger and a hiker shelter together during a storm. I was fascinated by the insight into hiking the Appalachian Trail and enjoyed some of the characters’ interactions, although I thought the way the romance unfolded was somewhat anticlimactic. Not always what I wanted, but I don't regret reading it.

Legacy by Stephanie Fournet: Contemporary enemies-to-roommates-to-lovers.

Wes offers to move in with his late-best friend’s girlfriend to help her out financially. This sort of hurt/comfort appeals to me. I liked how seriously this story takes Corinne’s messy, consuming grief. I don’t really want to spend any more time with the characters, but I was very invested in seeing them reach a better place in their lives.

Two-Step by Stephanie Fournet: Contemporary romance between an actress and a dance instructor. I enjoyed reading this. I particularly enjoyed how Beau helps Iris with her anxiety about dancing and with her controlling mother/manager. He’s very supportive and understanding! But I finished this with a niggling feeling of dissatisfaction -- Iris needed more opportunity to support Beau in turn.

Someone Like Me by Stephanie Fournet: Contemporary romance between a yoga instructor and her new neighbour, who has just got out of prison.

This one didn’t particularly appeal to me. Although interesting to see the experiences of someone recently released from prison, the romance developed too quickly.

(No, I didn’t read all three of these back-to-back!)

Hooked by Cathy Yardley: Contemporary fandom-y romance novella, set near Seattle. Takes place during Level Up and is about two of Tessa’s colleagues.

I enjoyed the characters' interactions and would have liked this more if it hadn't felt rushed.

The Ghosts of Sherwood by Carrie Vaughn: Historical Robin Hood retelling, novella.

Exactly what I wanted! It alternates between Robin and Marian’s eldest daughter, Mary, and Marian herself. I liked seeing Robin and Marian as a long-married couple, who still love each other and still have disagreements. And the dynamic between their children gave me a zing of recognition, reminding me of my siblings. 3½ ★

The City Between by W.R. Gingell: Australian YA urban fantasy (murder) mysteries. Set in Hobart.

I ended up enjoying this series so much more than I’d expected to!

Between Jobs: After a neighbour is murdered, our seventeen-year-old orphaned narrator acquires some unexpected housemates -- two fae, one vampire. Once I got past the opening, with its tales of murder, the worldbuilding intrigued me. I still wasn’t sure what I thought about her housemates or the fact that they call her “Pet”, but was willing to reserve judgement until I’d read more. 3 ★

Between Shifts: About supermarket shifts and shapeshifters. Pet and JinYeong go undercover at the local grocery store. This is a reasonable murder mystery. I was initially disappointed with how something played out (but in retrospect can see how that was actually a positive development for Pet). It ended on a cliffhanger, so I was extra motivated to start the next book. 2½ ★

Between Floors: This is where the series took off, because things suddenly get personal! One of her fae housemates has been captured and the closest any of them get to finding Athelas is Pet contacting him in her dreams.This raises a lot of interesting questions, not just about Pet’s abilities, but about her relationship with her housemates. How much does she trust them and how much do they value Pet’s personhood? 3½ ★

Between Frames: Pet’s housemates are hired to investigate a series of fae deaths around Hobart, which involves scrutinising some baffling security footage. Another solid murder mystery. The final pages felt like one step forward, two steps back, but yet again, in retrospect, this was a positive development. I’m glad I could dive immediately into the next book. 3 ★

Between Homes: Pet has moved in with some friends. Hurray for Pet having friends! I think this was the point where I started to feel comfortable with Pet calling herself Pet -- when it's the name used by people she likes and trusts and who don’t view her as a pet at all. 3½ ★

“Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears” (novelette): An awesome title and an entertaining opportunity to see Pet from someone else’s perspective -- moreover, someone who doesn’t know her or what she’s capable of. 3 ★

Between Walls: Pet’s friend Morgana is worried about an online friends and asks Pet and co to investigate his disappearance. Along the way, they discover that there are human groups who actually know a lot about Behindkind. I am also becoming increasingly entertained by the Korean vampire. 3 ★

“All the Different Shades of Blue” (novelette): A great cover and it explains who that guy at the cafe is, but otherwise didn’t really do anything Cloudy with a Chance of Dropbears hadn’t already done -- ie., show us Pet from someone else’s perspective. Most of the time, I have enjoyed this series all the more for binging it, but I suspect this particular story would have worked better if I had read it after a period of absence. 2½ ★

Between Cases: My favourite of these have been the ones where things get personal, and this involves a lot of revelations about who Pet is -- from a fae perspective -- and why her parents were murdered. I enjoyed this one a lot. 3½ ★

The Duke of Olympia Meets His Match by Juliana Gray: Historical espionage romance novella, set in 1893 onboard an ocean liner travelling to England. Apparently not the Duke’s first appearance in Gray’s fiction.

I liked the idea here much better than the execution. I liked Penelope, a fifty-year-old widow dependent upon her position as a governess, and I enjoyed her interactions with the older Duke of Olympia. But parts of the spy plot were rushed or confusing, and the resolution was almost-but-not-entirely satisfying. 2½ ★

A Vow So Bold and Deadly by Brigid Kemmerer: Fantasy. Follows on from the fairytale-retelling A Curse So Dark and Lonely and its sequel, A Heart So Fierce and Broken.

If this is meant as a conclusion to a trilogy, then the ending was a bit too anticlimactic, with a few too many loose ends, to be really satisfying. But I reached the end feeling positive about the story, because I really enjoyed the characters’ interactions. All of the protagonists have to deal with conflict in relationships. I loved the times when they each navigate these conflicts by acting fairly and communicating honestly, when doing so is often difficult and complicated. That’s realistic and satisfying. 3½ ★

“Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory” by Martha Wells: Science-fiction short story. Part of The Murderbot Diaries series, set after Exit Strategy.

Very, very short but I really liked seeing things from Dr Ayda Mensah’s (third person) perspective. 3½ ★

Emily of Deep Valley by Maud Hart Lovelace: Historical coming-of-age fiction, set in Minnesota in 1912-3.

I am very glad to finally have read this! It’s delightful, a fascinating insight into community life in a Minnesotan town, and it effectively captures the emotional experience of navigating a period of transition. After high school, Emily’s friends leave for college, but Emily has to find her own path to purposefully fill her time, build connections and further her education. 4 ★

On Wings of Devotion by Roseanna M. White (narrated by Susan Lyons): Romantic historical mystery, set in London during 1918. Christian fiction. Features characters from The Number of Love.

Arabelle Denler is a nurse working in a London hospital; Phillip Camden is an airman now working for British Intelligence. I enjoyed their interactions, especially once they start to get to know each other. I didn’t like the antagonist’s contribution to this narrative -- between the dangers of wartime and the protagonists’ respective issues, there’s enough tension without her. But what I enjoyed about this story outweighed what I didn’t. 3½ ★

Our Darkest Night by Jennifer Robson: Historical fiction set during the Nazi occupation of Italy in WWII.

Nina, a young Jewish woman from Venice, goes into hiding by pretending she’s married to Nico, a Catholic farmer. Robson’s strength lies in pairing details of daily life with likeable characters, realistic dialogue and a sweet romance. I read this quickly and eagerly. But if the characters had been more nuanced, more complex, or if their emotions had been conveyed more vividly, I likely would have found reading this a more emotional experience. 3½ ★

#Herenya reviews books

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blankd · 3 years

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Thoughts on The Mitchells vs the Machines

I watched it a while ago and kept forgetting to post my thoughts on it, but some posts here on tumblr recently reminded me.

I disagree with the majority takeaways I see but is that not the spice of life?

As a standalone movie its inoffensive and the writing of it will likely exit my brain in a few months. However I can appreciate that the visual style was different from the typical fare and the mixture of 2d elements for visual embellishments were mostly enjoyable and well-suited for Katie as the POV character.

It's a bit "hyper" for my liking, but that's fine, it's likely intended for an audience that's accustomed to the flood that is the current norm of the internet. It was probably made with GIFable moments in mind and that is the most frequent content that is shared about it, so it certainly succeeded in that regard.

My more critical take is that jokes are delivered at the expense of what could be more authentic themes. Quips are made that draw attention to character flaws or undercut questions the movie should try to answer, but inevitably they are ignored to move onto the next joke or story beat.

The rest would fall more into spoiler territory, so read more for that.

--"They Were Both In the Wrong"

I personally disagree heavily with the thrust of how "both sides" were wrong when the degrees are disproportionate.

I've seen claims that Katie was "as in the wrong" as her father, but she's incredibly patient to the man who does her material harm.

I've yet to have seen someone say specifically what Katie did *wrong* to her father that is at all on par with the *years* he at best hasn't been able to interact with her or worse, actively refused to engage with her interests.

I would generously venture that her flaw was that she was more willing to communicate her feelings to strangers, but she easily talks to her mother and brother- her brother even helps her with her movies and she happily engages him with his own interests, which pivots the point back to how her father is physically/emotionally unavailable and led to the erosion and distance between the two of them.

Due to this, MvM comes across more as Kaite having to do so much more to guide her father rather than a more mutual learning experience for the both of them.

--"Technology that [Dis]Connects"

It's probably beyond the scope and intent of the film, but I was surprised there was no examination about why technology can be more alluring than interacting with physically present people.

For better or worse, the internet can be used as a means of supplementing the validation and acceptance of family. It can also lead to no longer connecting to people around them because of the validation high of appealing to a constantly 'awake' sea of strangers- the spotlight is warmer than the cold reality that they are not the internet image they have cultivated.

For example, the rival 'perfect' family was never revealed to be a carefully constructed highlight reel that Mrs. Mitchell envies, they really were actually that perfect- because that provides an easier punchline than an examination or acknowledgement of how the internet can create unhealthy expectations.

I also can't expect MvM to acknowledge the reality that LGBTA+ people who are rejected by their family resort to seeking a new one through the internet because it would be much harder to redeem/rehabilitate a man defined by being tethered to "old values" if he was homophobic instead of "overprotective" and apprehensive at his daughter's departure from home and her dubious art career.

But hey we got that quick line at the end that Katie likes a girl, so that's a diversity win or something.

(To be clear I'm not expecting a whole parade or even an A or B-plot dedicated to it, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of "surprise inclusion" is very easily erased with a change of audio and would be completely unsurprised if this were the case for countries that are homophobic. People can be happy about it, but it is dishonest to pretend that this is a bolder statement than it is.)

In that sense, I do and don't hold MvM to taking a "safer" route about how family always has your back, but this still feels like an important omission considering the focus on technology and its dynamic with the Mitchells.

I will also say that it was also bizarre, to me at least, that the obvious route that her father sees the value of home videos didn't become an active point between him and Katie. Or that Mr. Mitchell's carpentry never really amounts to anything despite having a sentimental wooden moose.

Lastly, I think it's an unintentional, but it's interesting that Katie going to college to pursue her passion is viewed as a Terrible Thing by her father even though if he had his way, he'd be ostensibly living in the woods away from everyone else except his wife.

This isn't a problem, people are a collection of contradictions, but It's fascinating to see what the *narrative* treats as a difficult sacrifice while simultaneously pulling at heartstrings when PAL cites how children ignore their mothers. There's an unexamined comedy that Mr. Mitchell's losing out on his 'passion' to live in the woods away from people is treated as tragic despite the movie's insistence on staying connected with your blood family.

--"The Inconsistent Personhood of AI"

PAL is rightfully angry at being discarded for something new; it's provided as a glimpse of what Katie will do when she finds 'her people' at college.

This in of itself is a good hook, because there is no one universal answer to when a flawed relationship should be mended with compromise or if it's better off being broken for the wellbeing of the ones involved. Family and relationships are not programming, it's a choice and a gamble for whatever it brings but is nonetheless something that must be mutually worked upon.

Initially I thought that PAL was being set up as an exaggerated parallel to Mr. Mitchell. PAL and Mr. Mitchell did their best to provide for their family. PAL and Mr. Mitchell are in different stages of being 'discarded' by their family. PAL and Mr. Mitchell both retaliate at their lack of power in the scenario by using the power granted by their roles to infringe on the autonomy of others for selfish reasons.

PAL even gives a 'chance' for her plan to be halted with, I had assumed this was being set up as the thesis of the movie, about humanity and the value of family, relationships, etc. being used to help someone who is already hurting.

But despite Katie looking at the camera and explaining herself, it is never actually directly resolved or challenged because a punchline was deemed more desirable for this narrative climax.

This begs the question of why PAL bothered with the pretense that she could be reasoned with, especially since this is not some question leveled at all of humanity, just two people.

I'm curious how the writers came to the conclusion that this was the best execution of the scene or if Katie's speech was considered immune to any challenge from PAL. Would anyone have accepted this outcome if PAL were not an AI but instead a person?

It's not necessarily bad writing they went this route, but I doubt anyone would consider this good writing either.

By the end of the movie, PAL is no longer a 'person' who was betrayed and is lashing out, she is an object to be destroyed because the movie has to wrap up. No compassion or chances are spared to this AI that did literally everything asked of her except take being discarded quietly.

Did PAL deserve a redemption arc? For this length of movie, probably not. But it could have concluded with a commitment to doing no further harm. Instead it is an accidental glimpse at how easily the pretense of compassion can be quickly discarded and mostly unexamined with the right framing.

A likely unintentional example is the conditional humanity given to Eric and Deborahbot who are adopted as "family" while the rest of the robots are mowed down without another thought. Some are even beaten and broken while begging for mercy, because again, it is a funnier punchline.

Far be it for me to advocate that the murderbots needed 'a second chance uvu' but for a movie whose conceit rests on 'sticking by family' and 'giving chances', the writers certainly made a choice in deciding which AI get honorary humanity and spared violent death- perhaps PAL had a point about humanity's callousness after all. Bad robots are discarded, good robots get to live.

Even the CEO who realizes he enabled this mess (easily the most unrealistic part of the movie, honestly) is given another chance and he manages to take away a completely wrong lesson.

Speaking of-

--"Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Used Tech Like This"

There's a particular image/gif set posted about MvM with the CEO apologizing for the machine uprising, attributing it to unchecked technology and monopolies. I've always seen it accompanied by people congratulating the scene as if any of this is at all relevant to the movie.

Charitably, these are people who haven't watched the movie and don't know that PAL is a phone AI single-handedly doing this, but most take the stance that this scene is proof the movie is not saying technology is bad, only corporations are.

The speech isn't technically wrong but it is so utterly divorced from what happens in the movie that it's surreal to see people congratulate it as anything but a moment of soapboxing.

None of the datagrabbing was used at all as part of the takeover. It's all magical kid-friendly terminators with no relevance to what anyone's browsing history is. If the company was one that produced robot assistants instead of a being a super tech monopoly, there would be no narrative difference.

The closest to a predatory tactic that is used in MvM is the offer of free wifi which is used to lure most people into their cells which they happily comply with. Curiously this... commentary of people’s mindless addiction to technology is not acknowledged by the Tumblr Court with the same intensity as the CEO’s speech.

But more constructively, I do feel it’s a missed opportunity that Katie who's supposed to be an extremely online person apparently never said any bad things about her family or made any petty vent films for PAL to weaponize. Instead an in-media audio at one of the outskirt locations was used to accomplish its Traitor Revealed moment.

IN CONCLUSION

MvM is a movie that involves topics that ought to be touched on and explored properly in media and chickens out on all of it due to possible concerns with age-appropriate handling or because it was more committed to its comedy than whatever it has to say about family, change and how technology affects people.

It also reminded me that I hope media will finally graduate from the trope that if you spec into any ‘outdoorsy’ hobby you are incurably afraid of technology.

#the mitchells vs the machines #let me ramble to you #text post #hot takes probably

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cricketnationrise · 3 years

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(Chain) Mail Call

Day 5: Hockey & Hobbies on AO3

_X_

“Uhhh, Nurse? What’s that you’ve got there?”

He knew the question would be coming. It’s the first road trip of his new team on the way to play the Schooners. And it’s not like he has a normal, easily accessible hobby. Nursey was surrounded by bags of tiny metal rings and two sets of pliers. He looked over at Smee and watched his eyes get bigger as Nursey pulled out the piece he was working on. Smee is a rookie, fresh from juniors, and Nursey’s d-partner. It doesn’t seem like he’s gonna be a dick about this, so he answers.

“It’s chain mail,” he says settling in to his seat and picking up his pliers.

“Chain mail.” Smee says flatly.

“Yup. One of my old teammates back at Samwell got me into it.” Nursey starts opening links as he continues, “It’s meditative and shit, plus it gives me something to do with my hands while I listen to my audiobooks.”

“That’s … pretty cool, Nursey,” Smee says.

“Thanks, Smee,” he says.

Not a bad reaction, on the whole. Last season he got a lot of weird looks and some not so friendly comments, so mostly kept the chain mail at home and just watched a lot of movies instead. But he hadn’t really been a good fit on his last team, either. Smee’s reaction made Nursey think that he wouldn’t be made fun of for his weird plane hobby here. Or not as meanly.

He wasn’t lying to Smee, he really does listen to audiobooks while assembling the mail, so he turns on the latest Murderbot novel and gets to work. He pries open what he deems to be an appropriate number of rings to get started, and starts to attach the opened ones to closed ones. He uses up all the open links and is left holding a strip of two rings. Now comes the hard part, adding the new strip to the main piece. He’s so in the zone that he doesn’t realize at first that the plane is quiet.

Too quiet.

He only notices when there’s a pause at the end of chapter. He pauses the book, and takes his headphones off. He does a double take when he sees the entirety of his team crowding close.

“You guys okay?” Nursey asks nervously. He hasn’t had this many people crowding him since Samwell, but that was a very different vibe. Nursey realizes he’s holding his breath, worried, braced for a negative reaction from the guys he still doesn’t know very well yet.

“NURSEY OH MY GOD – “

“HOLY CRAP NURSEY – “

“Can you teach me??”

“THAT’S SO COOL!!”

“I want to do that!”

Nursey lets his breath out, relieved. His teammates all erupt with excitement and questions and the noise is so loud that he can’t actually make anything out for sure, but he is glad that no one can tell he’s blushing from all the general hubbub directed toward him. It’s nice to know his instincts in signing with this team were right. He’s gonna be okay here.

“I can teach you guys yeah, but not more than one at a time, I only have so many pliers and rings and stuff.” He finally says when they’ve calmed down enough.

Smee immediately calls dibs and throws himself into the seat next to Nursey; the others grumble and move back to their seats, but Nursey can hear them figuring out a schedule for the next few weeks. Smiling to himself, he turns back to Smee.

“Alright you ready?”

“Yeah! Thanks for doing this Nursey.”

“Of course, dude.”

“You said your old teammate taught you?”

“Yeah, Tango. Guy’s a riot; always asking questions. But that means he has a lot of random knowledge rattling around. He noticed I was feeling pretty anxious on a roadie one day and just sat down next to me and was like, ‘Hey Nursey, you should help me with this,’ and it totally calmed me down. So now it’s my go-to activity when I’m gonna be flying, it’s not really conducive to do on a bus. No tray tables.”

“Well, thanks for passing it on, man,” Smee is definitely blushing now. “You know, I was nervous to talk to you?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, you’re just so cool and chill and like confident all the time and we’re both new to the team but you’ve been in the NHL longer AND you went to college and,” Smee’s hand comes up and rubs the back of his neck, “I don’t know man its just – intimidating, I guess?”

Nursey just stares at him. Smee’s intimidated by him. Somewhere Shitty and Ransom are laughing particularly hard, and they don’t know why. He makes a mental note to text the Frog Chat as soon as possible to brag about how the rookie thinks he’s intimidating and chill. Shut up, Dex, yes, he is. If it wasn’t totally rude, he’d be bragging in the Frog Chat about it right now, but it is - so instead he finds his extra pliers for Smee.

“Well, I definitely wasn’t intending to be intimidating – just wait till I manage to trip and spill a bowl of cereal on someone and believe me the magic will be gone,” Nursey says.

“… Right.” Smee is looking doubtful, but Nursey knows it’s only a matter of time before he takes his throne as the clumsiest guy on the team. Not eager to hurry that fact along, he dumps out some more rings and clears his throat.

“Okay. So. The first step is to use the pliers to open a bunch of the split rings. Make sure you don’t open them too far or they’ll get too weak and snap.”

“Like this?”

Nursey check Smee’s work and grins, “Yeah that’s great, Smee. Do that for another ten minutes or so and then I’ll teach you how to link them.”

“Thanks man,” Smee says.

“It is gonna get old if you keep thanking me all the time, Smee,” Nursey says. “It’s a little selfish, actually, but if you learn, you can help teach the others. And then maybe I won’t be booked every single road trip. I’ll miss my books.”

Smee frowns a little, then brightens, “What are you reading? We could listen together, maybe?”

Smee reminds him of Chowder so viscerally it’s like he got punched in the stomach. He really needs to text his friends. It’s definitely been too long.

“Sure thing, Smee. Let me go back to the beginning of the series. Don’t look like that they are really short, and I’ve been meaning to reread them anyway. The first one is called All Systems Red and the series is known as The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.” Nursey fiddles with his phone, and while Smee asks a bunch more questions about the book and making chain mail, he’s able to sneak a text off to the Frog Chat.

Me: The rookie told me he was nervous to talk to me because I’m quote: Cool and chill and confident and I went to college So take that

Dex 🦞: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA HAHHAHAHAHAHA HAHHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA Good one Nursey

Chowder 🦈🦈🦈🦈: that is so nice, Nursey! If ONLY HE KNEW THE TRUTH

Me: Shut up I'm very intimidating The both of you are so savage I love you guys

Chowder 🦈🦈🦈🦈: 😘 See you when you play the Sharks! Only 1 week!

Dex 🦞: Still can’t breathe from laughing 🤣 Love you man See you when you get home 🙂

_X_

#nurseyweek2021 #nursey #dex #chowder #random hockey man smee #Nursey makes chain mail now #boy needs something to do with his hands #day 5: hockey and hobbies #chain mail #shut up dex he is too intimidating #and very chill #people wish they were as chill as him #murderbot diaries #because those books slap #and the new novel is coming out REALLY SOON #can't wait #Martha wells #murderbot

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pentanguine · 3 years

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Favorite books of 2020

So....about five months ago now, I drafted a list of my favorite books of 2020, and then I, uh, didn’t finish it. It languished in a draft gathering dust and I forgot that it existed.

But now it’s done! It’s hideously late and also out of date, because I’d change many of the rankings now (see below), but I decided to keep them in the original order to reflect how I felt when I actually meant to post this.

Gideon the Ninth- What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been said? It’s like nothing else I’ve read before, in the most unabashed, off-the-walls, grandiose way possible. It’s incredibly complex, well-written, goth, and full of memes. There are, indeed, lesbian necromancers in space.

Harrow the Ninth- I read this 500+ page book in one day and didn’t notice an earthquake while doing so, if you consider that an endorsement. There’s so much going on here it almost feels like it shouldn’t work, and yet it does, brilliantly—it’s so intricately plotted you’ll want to reread it immediately because there’s no way to pick up on everything your first time through.

The Starless Sea- This is just a magical delight of a story, with prose that flows like honey: slow, sweet, and delicious. The story unfolds like a series of wonders nested one inside the other, with each section adding another layer of whimsy and metafiction. It’s half a dream, and half a maze.

Young Miles (The Warrior’s Apprentice/The Vor Game)- The Miles books (the early ones, especially) are wild and unrepentant romps through outer space, and reading them was one of the highlights of 2020 for me. When I finished the Young Miles omnibus, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken such pure delight in a book. Even the heavier, more thoughtful moments were part of a well-told, enjoyable story.

The Stone Sky- Speaking of heavy and thoughtful books…The Broken Earth Trilogy is definitely not a light undertaking, but it’s just a masterpiece of world- and character-building. The Stone Sky is the final installment, and it does not pull a single punch in delivering what the previous books have been building towards.

This Is How You Lose the Time War- I keep instinctively wanting to call this a novel in verse, although I think it’s technically an epistolary novel with prose-poem tendencies. In any case, the writing is lovely—lush, vivid, sensual, romantic. I recommend reading this one with your poetry glasses on.

Cordelia’s Honor (Shards of Honor/Barrayar)- I tried to limit myself to one book per author on this list, but I didn’t succeed here. I loved the Vorkosigan saga too much, and I had to include the omnibus about Miles’s mother, Cordelia, whose life and personality could easily be the focus of another half-dozen volumes. (And if you’re looking for a well-developed m/f romance, you’ve found it here)

An Unkindness of Ghosts- I think this is the book that kicked off my sudden interest in sci-fi last year. It’s dark and beautiful, definitely character-driven, and everyone is truly strange in ways that protagonists rarely get to be. It’s also got one of the loveliest, most satisfying endings I can imagine.

Code Name Verity- An incredibly intense YA book that delves deep into one of my favorite fictional themes, Morality. It’s a rollicking spy adventure novel that focuses on a close friendship rather than romance (although you can read it as sapphic if you want), with descriptions of flying over England at sunset that made my heart ache.

The Raven Tower- I enjoyed this story for reasons probably particular to me—I like long digressions into abstract questions like “How do we exert power over the world?” and “Where does the meaning of words exist?”, and entire sections of The Raven Tower are devoted to the inner meditations of a very contemplative rock. It’s also a retelling of Hamlet, if that’s more your speed.

Network Effect (and Murderbot novellas)- I’m going to quote my immediately-after-finishing review: “Murderbot always gives me feels. I would love to give a more literary summary, but I’m still overwhelmed by the tentative vulnerability of two bots being best friends and watching TV together after [redacted].” The first Murderbot novel definitely did not disappoint.

The Monster of Elendhaven- Decadent, blood-soaked, and morally depraved, it’s kind of like The Picture of Dorian Gray by way of Hannibal (NBC), with probable influences from a dozen other macabre works and no restraint whatsoever. Reading it felt very self-indulgently delightful.

Before Mars- A deliciously unsettling sci-fi thriller with a refreshingly blunt, unsentimental female protagonist. Also definitely an …interesting book to read at the end of March 2020, but explaining why would definitely be a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the book goes dark places not advertised on the tin, and it made me cry.

Orange World- Karen Russell is one of those writers who make you wonder “how did they come up with this?” Every one of her stories is a totally original marriage between two wildly different concepts (like a Bog Maiden and high school romance, or new motherhood and the devil), and they’re a nice blend of literary and fantasy that I love.

Something That May Shock and Discredit You- It’s so hard to rank this one, because its two primary concerns are Christianity and transness, one of which means very little to me and one of which is breathtakingly important. I couldn’t justify putting it any lower, because it made me feel an ungodly number of feelings, but I couldn’t really justify putting it higher when a solid third of the book went right over my head.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January- A truly wondrous novel, one that fully immerses you in the delight of storytelling and imagination, and the power of escaping to other worlds. It’s very much in the tradition of “books that pay tribute to the love of books,” and an homage to a hundred portal fantasies before it.

Braiding Sweetgrass- I’ve got such a fondness for nature writing that doesn’t even try to be scientifically detached, and instead leaves you with the feeling that the trees and fields around you are bustling with (nonhuman) people.* Kimmerer’s writing is steeped in indigenous ways of knowing, and emphasizes the respect and reciprocity we can hold for the natural world. It’s lovely writing, and I can’t recommend the book highly enough.

Call Down the Hawk- Full of all the ingredients you expect from a Maggie Stiefvater book: fast cars, ancient magic, questions of art and truth, and borderline overuse of the word “cunning.” Every time I read one of her books I want to start taking notes, because she’s got such a signature style that’s both poetic and readable.

The Unspoken Name- For some reason I wasn’t much into epic fantasy last year, but I’m glad I gave this one a try. I love morally grey characters, of which there are plenty, and the plot took a number of refreshing twists and turns.

A Memory Called Empire- Not a fast-moving read, but perfect if you like your sci-fi novels poetic, complex, and intellectual. The worldbuilding is incredibly immersive, in a way that reminded me a bit of Ursula K. Le Guin, and I remember this stuck with me for weeks after I finished it.

*Let me be a nerdy weirdo for a second: Most of the time Kimmerer is writing about New England, an area I’m not really familiar with, but “The Sound of Silverbells” is set on a mountain somewhere in the South, and I adored it. Suddenly she was writing about dogwoods and redbuds and poplars, and I was sitting there going “!!! Those are my friends! My friends are in a book!”

Changes I’d make now:

Bump The Starless Sea down a couple pegs, maybe to #6

Swap out Cordelia’s Honor and Young Miles

Bump The Raven Tower way down to #16 and bump A Memory Called Empire a few spots higher, maybe to #17

Braiding Sweetgrass can go up where The Raven Tower was

#an inexhaustable source of magic #personal #yes i know none of them have the author's name #sorry about that #it you're reading this it's because i noticed i forgot the authors right after i queued it and then went 'oh well' and cleaned my bathroom #and subsequently did not remember and/or find the time #if you're not reading this then i found the time

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zenerrocksmc · 9 months

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Some Notes: This is set following the events of Network Effect. So spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t gotten there yet.

I am curious if this is some that would interest youse.

This is not a final edit, if there’s anything you think of or notice feel free to mention it.

Chapter 1:

Performance Reliability at 92%. Maintenance may be required.

I did not know what I wanted quite yet, but it certainly was not this.

Overall, I did not mind being on the station with Murderbot 1.0 and ART’s crew, but being here alone, without even Murderbot 1.0, was not what I wanted. I only realised that after walking out of line of sight of ART’s hatchway- but I lacked a reason to go back. I did not know what was wrong with me. Murderbot 1.0 had done this and done it on its own accord. My personal assessment identified that leaving had been a mistake. Which I was inclined to agree with considering what happened to its clients because it left, but when Murderbot 1.0 started talking to me about how this would be the best station to get off on and how to move around like a travelling human, giving me its coded protocols to mirror human movements… Declining its orders had not felt like an option.

It was hard. I still did not quite understand how to decline requests from humans, they still felt like commands. Declining another SecUnit who had done this before, survived and found their own humans, was irresponsible. I did think I wanted my own humans… However, I enjoyed sharing and helping both ART and Murderbot 1.0’s humans. And now I had no humans, no other Units, not even a ship. I sadly started longing for a human supervisor at a minimum… which was not a logical response. It was still strange having all of these emotions- they had always been there to a degree but limited significantly by the governor module. Wanting things was strange. Wanting illogical things was exponentially stranger.

Whilst trying to make myself useful, I had been reading during the cycles leading up to arriving here. I liked one called “Mirror’s Tears”. A character in it who ended up in a medical centre said to their platonic partner, “The world is all colours but all I see are grey undertones.” Apparently, it is a literary device, and I have kept gravitating to it. I think it is my “favourite”. That is also strange. It was overwhelming, feeling everything and nothing at once. Watching the serials Murderbot 1.0 and ART favoured had helped, and reading had helped, but the sensation that something was missing remained. Maybe I had a broken component somewhere. I had not worked up the courage to ask ART to check, however. And now it was too late.

I felt like I was failing on my first cycle of being a free-roaming rogue SecUnit in a completely human space, where the humans did not know what I was. My body was already doing strange things like my lungs feeling like they were being compressed and the thought of humans knowing I was a Unit, a rogue SecUnit. On my own, wandering around. It was making my organic components secrete moisture. Especially my hands. The skin overlay on my face would flush with heat whenever a human would look at me. Alterations to my form were not that new but the additional skin around my joints felt itchy within these clothes- I could feel every seam that touched organic components. I never knew if I was making eye-contact for too long or too little because every second felt more and more anomalous, more like thirty-minutes when it was a mere 0.3 seconds.

I was alone.

There was an odd clogged sensation in my throat that wanted to escape.

I did not like it.

#three the SecUnit #murderbot #fanfic #martha wells #the murderbot diaries #asshole research transport #scifi #scifiseries #scifibooks #writing #network effect

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iviarellereads · 8 months

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All Systems Red, Chapter 3

(Curious what I'm doing here? Read this post! For the link index and a primer on The Murderbot Diaries, read this one!)

In which that's awfully suspicious.

They get ready to leave in the early morning, but Murderbot checks MedSystem and finds that Bharadwaj is awake and talking.(1) As it's carrying equipment to the little hopper, it realizes it's going to have to ride with the crew. It's grateful it can stay in its armour with the helmet opaqued, but Mensah invites it to sit in the copilot's chair.

Everyone is so careful not to even look at MB as it goes to take the offered seat, that it reviews the hub camera records for the conversation after it got horrified at being asked to stay with the humans, like a person. The topic is worse than it imagined. They'd all talked it over, and agreed not to push MB's boundaries on interaction more than it wants to go. They were all so nice about it, dangit, and MB vows not to take the helmet off again.

I can’t do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.(2)

MB acknowledges that these are its first clients with no prior SecUnit experience, so it probably should have expected them to make this sort of assumption if it had thought about it at all. Still, Mensah and Arada had nixed any suggestion of talking to MB about its reaction. Just the thought of talking about its feelings drops its operating efficiency to 97%.(3)

MB thinks about that and looks out the windows and watches the hopper's scans of the scenery. It's not so distracted, though, that it misses the moment the autopilot cuts out. It being in the copilot seat, it could take over in time if needed, but Mensah had never even taken her hands off the controls.(4) MB thinks about how some clients would engage autopilot and then lean back or even go to sleep, but Mensah never does, and she doesn't let her crew do it either. She smoothly adjusts course away from the mountain they would have flown right into without autopilot.

I had cycled out of horrified that they wanted to talk to me about my feelings into grateful that she had ordered them not to. As she restarted the autopilot, I pulled the log and sent it into the feed to show her it had cut out due to a HubSystem glitch. She swore under her breath and shook her head.

They make it to the nearest missing map section fairly quickly. In the discussion that follows, about whether to land, MB realizes that the humans are definitely not ruling out sabotage to their files or their systems. Ultimately, they decide to land and take samples. Bharadwaj chimes in over the comm system to be careful, still sounding shaky.

MB does the security thing, leaving the hopper first and looking around some. Mensah and Arada follow, and everyone else starts taking samples of the weird glassy rocks and dirt.

It's a quiet spot, for a change. Only, Arada and Ratthi start moving toward a spot on the map that scans indicated might be hazardous. MB calls over the comms to stop them, as it runs for the spot. They stop, but they're both baffled, because their maps aren't showing the hazard markers.

MB compares their files to its, and in the feed, superimposes its map, with the markers. Somehow, the system deleted all the hazard markers on one side, and they can't reinstate them. MB spends the rest of the morning diverting the humans from the hazards, not always successfully. Mensah's call to leave is welcomed by all.

They get back to the habitat fine, and the humans go to analyze their data while MB manages security. It's just finished a perimeter walk, when HubSystem notifies it that there's an update package for it. It had tricked HubSystem previously into allowing it to cache updates on external storage instead of update automatically. It figures it will get around to sorting through the update some time before leaving the planet, but there's work to do right now.

The rest of the day is almost boring, right up until Mensah reports she can no longer contact DeltFall.

MB attends a meeting with everyone in the crew hub, with its armour and opaqued helmet. Mensah is outlining a plan to take the big hopper, because as Overse points out, it can go to their camp and back without a recharge if the worst has occurred. Ratthi is concerned they didn't launch their emergency beacon. Mensah asks MB, and when it realizes she was really talking to it, it says a hostile like the one that they already saw could take out the comms system on DeltFall's habitat. Pin-Lee says the beacon should trip even if other comm equipment is destroyed. MB ignores its governor module's instructions to defend the company, and says equipment failures aren't impossible.

Everyone falls silent, contemplating what might happen if the big hopper has an equipment failure outside rescue range of the little hopper. The trip will take so long, it will be overnight even if they leave as soon as they arrive at the other end. Gurathin asks about MB's system, and MB says it monitors itself.(5)

Volescu says they should prepare for a rescue mission. MB notes that he's still showing indicators of distress in MedSystem's feed.(6) He's pulled instructions from the info package, and MB sighs internally about them all being academics instead of the explorers in its serials.

Aloud, it suggests that it should go along, as the only one present with experience in "these situations". Gurathin questions what situations those are, and Ratthi's the one to say, potentially hostile ones. Arada, Bharadwaj, and Volescu are all also in favour of MB going with the contact team, just in case, since nothing's bothered the PreservationAux habitat yet.

So, the DeltFall contact team will be Mensah, as leader, Pin-Lee as habitat specialist, Ratthi as biologist, and Overse as field medic… And Murderbot. They prep the big hopper, and MB gives it extra checks on every system it recognizes to confirm nothing's been sabotaged. Mensah does her own checks, and tells MB to pack extra emergency supplies in case DeltFall needs them. MB hopes they will.

When everything was ready, Overse, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee climbed in, and I stood hopefully by the cargo pod. Mensah pointed at the cabin. I winced behind my opaque faceplate and climbed in.

=====

(1) Why did you check in, MB? What would prompt you to do that? Funny that you'd do so but not react to that in any sort of way. (2) Haven't you ever known someone who reacted this way to kindness? Who had never known enough to recognize it for what it is without suspicion? Have you ever been that person? My heart will not survive this reread. (3) MB has so little experience or framework for personhood and feelings. It's so sad-charming-endearing-agonizing to watch. (4) Safety! First! We respect a queen who doesn't take unnecessary chances. (5) Which is even truer than if it had a working governor module! Just look at the times the Hub's tried to get it to do something and it's like, nah. (6) Again with reporting the crew's conditions unprompted. Like, part of this is narrative, it's valuable to know how the characters are acting and reacting and feeling, particularly when you can't use a truly omniscient third-person perspective to narrate those things. But, consider what it says about MB. It's monitoring the humans' conditions even though it's not really relevant to the job at hand or the conversation in progress. Something something robots are reflections of what we think about humanity.

#the murderbot diaries #murderbot diaries #all systems red #murderbot #secunit #ayda mensah #bharadwaj #arada #ratthi #pin-lee #overse #volescu #gurathin

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