A timelapse of a commission i did recently, posted with permission from the person that commissioned it, cause the process on this one was a bit of a journey and i think that makes it fun to share.
I am going over Murderbot's and ART's first interactions again and it's driving me crazy, so I really need to yell into the void about it.
Alright, so we have ART:
ART, a highly advanced deep space research vessel, who is very attached to its crew and seems to generally do what it's supposed to, especially when not doing so could endanger its mission - but ends up accepting a suspicious looking SecUnit that is lying about being a bot aboard itself. ART is evidently aware that it is directly breaking the rules in doing so. (Aside: How often does ART break the rules?) Why? All for that tempting media package that the SecUnit has to offer?
No.
It was sent off to do some work all alone and got bored and lonely. (I think there are different ways to intepret this, but looking at our super social raised-by-humans loving-its-crew never-shutting-up research vessel, I choose to think that is exactly what it was!)
Anyway, what does ART do now that it has this lying, potentially dangerous rogue SecUnit aboard? It
lets it know that it saw right through its lies and knows exactly what it is
intimidates and threatens it by showing off its own ridiculously extensive superiority (just to be on the safe side ofc)
gets bored after the SecUnit gets too scared to do anything interesting
asks the SecUnit to "stop sulking"
learns that the SecUnit has been through A Lot and seemingly understands how it made it feel and apologizes
gets bored again and starts lurking and harasses convinces the SecUnit to watch media about ships and their crews with it
[gets way too invested and agitated by the media, probably going through its first media-induced emotional crises (but gets through them with the support of the very patient SecUnit)]
tries to have a conversation with the SecUnit to get to know it better
gets offended that the SecUnit is not answering truthfully and won't share sensitive and very private information about itself
lets the SecUnit know it can see through its lies, calling it "inherently inferior" to itself and causing the SecUnit to sulkily shut down for four hours (lol)
immediately calls the SecUnit "unnecessarily childish" upon its awakening four hours later (referring to its own extensive experience with children to really get the point across)
And apparently all of this seemed to be a perfectly pleasant and normal interaction to ART, because:
That's how you make friends, isn't it?!
God, I love ART so so so much and this is SO funny to me! To be fair, I don't think anyone ever really prepared it for an interaction like this. (Probably because its crew did not expect it to pick up a stray rogue SecUnit and try to befriend it).