#Murderbot Daemon AU

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat!! 🎃

Unfortunately I cannot stop thinking about Daemon AU. FORTUNATELY FOR YOU I cannot stop thinking about Daemon AU.

Have some Network Effect panic times.

---

“I don’t know,” Overse said, “I don’t know, the internal comm is down—”

“Are we damaged?” Ratthi asked.

“I mean, the internal comm is down because the router was on the baseship and the baseship left us,” Overse said.  Her dragonfly daemon zipped around in frantic, angry circles, and Ratthi had to resist the instinct to swat at it.  He was distressed, because Overse was distressed, and that was because they didn’t know where Arada or Amena or SecUnit were—

Ratthi’s own daemon dug her little claws into his shirt.  He scooped her up and held her, distractedly.

“So the question is,” Ratthi said, grimly, “how long do we wait?”

“How long until they breach the hull?” Overse fired back.  “There are a dozen alarms going off already, how will we know—”

She was cut off by the rising sound of hoofbeats coming down the corridor; Overse’s heart leapt in her throat, both relieved at the familiar sound and anxious because why hadn’t Arada been on the baseship—

She knew why, of course.  Neither of them wanted to be the one to leave SecUnit behind.  But Overse still wished her wife was safe on the baseship and not careening toward the raiders here.

Arada turned the corner, crouched low over the back of Dela.  One advantage to having a pony daemon—“one of the few,” Arada would joke, even as Dela snorted through her nostils affrontedly and Arada would have to laugh and pet her daemon’s nose to mollify her.  Dela’s hooves clattered and skidded on the slick metal floor.  She stopped short, reared, and pranced anxiously as Arada slid off and stumbled over to hug Overse.  “Babe!” she said.  “The baseship—they detached—”

“I know,” Overse said, “I know.  We need to get out, now.”

Arada hesitated.  “If SecUnit and Amena are still here—”

It hurt to say, but it was true.  “—it would tell us to get to the safepods.”

Arada took a breath, but nodded.  “It would.  And—”  She glanced back.  “There’s only one safepod that will fit Dela.  There’s only one place it knows we’ll be going.”

“Where are the oversize safepods from here?” Ratthi asked.  None of them had expected to need the safepods, but also, Ratthi’s daemon was a squirrel; she was currently hiding under his shirt.  He wouldn’t need to remember where the standard-requirement oversized pod for people with large daemons was.

But, whether as Survey Lead or as someone with an entire pony she needed to evacuate, Arada did.  “Port side pod bank, aft end,” she said, already taking off again.

Overse’s daemon landed and nestled in her hair.  Overse and Ratthi took off to follow.

——

They waited as long as they could for SecUnit and Amena.  They never showed up.  SecUnit had no daemon and Amena’s was still unsettled so they could have headed for the starboard pod bank, or done some wild different maneuver that SecUnit had come up with, but it hadn’t come here, and the local feed warnings were flashing an alert that the hull had been breached.

Arada gave the command.  “We need to get out.  Now.”

The pod wasn’t spacious, and with three people and a pony crammed in it felt even less so.  And launching off from the ship would have its own dangers.  The port side faced the raider’s ship; they’d be launching in their direction, rather than away.

Arada made a note to bring up with Station Security the real need for multiple oversized safepods per ship, after all this was over.

(She had to believe it would be over soon and smoothly and with everyone safe.  She had to.)

But before she cycled the hatch closed, a voice echoed down the hallway, “Wait!”

They all turned sharply.  “What—?” Ratthi began.

Thiago—what was he doing still here?—sprinted up towards them.

“Dr. Lesmana—” Ratthi began, and Overse said “Thiago, what are you doing?”

Arada had the presence of mind to say, “You weren’t with Amena?”

“I couldn’t find her!”  He was obviously coming apart with distress about this.  Overse didn’t like this—where was Amena? Where was SecUnit?—but wherever they were, she was sure SecUnit could take care of the situation better than she could by wandering through the lab dome, so as Arada frantically gestured she just said “Come on, then, get in, we need to leave!”

And Thiago still balked.

“Come on,” Overse said, and Thiago hesitated, and asked, “Are you… all right with that?”

“What?” asked Ratthi, and Overse stared at him.  It was Arada who went, “oh!” and Dela, quick on her heels, addressed Thiago, “Yes, I don’t mind, get in.”

It belatedly occurred to Overse that with the limited space in the pod, it would be almost impossible to avoid squishing up against Dela.  She and Ratthi already had been, barely thinking about it; they’d both been cheerfully snuggling with Dela for years, and she enjoyed when they stroked her side or pet her nose.  But if Thiago was going to die for propriety—

Arada disentangled herself from the pod, grabbed Thiago’s sleeve cuff, and dragged him in.  His little black terrier daemon scrambled in to follow.

“Sorry,” Thiago mumbled, as he ended up pressed awkwardly against Dela’s flank.  Dela nickered sarcastically and met Arada’s eyes.

“Be nice,” Arada said.  Then to Thiago, “In all likelihood I’ll trip over yours before we’re out of here, so I guess fair is fair.”

“Maybe,” Thiago mumbled, and Overse didn’t care because she pulled down the lever that sealed the pod with a clank, tried to avoid crushing her daemon as the pod detached and the gravity shifted (wouldn’t that be an embarrassing way to go), and then the pod launched out into space, toward the baseship.

[dendrochilums]

Categories: Gen Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Asshole Research Transport & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, begins immediately post-ES and runs through SC, Character Study, daemon au as a means of examining mb's repressed feelings about violence towards humans, and also self hatred ​ Wordcount: 6,358

SecUnits are separated from their daemons the moment they come online. Murderbot meets its own daemon for the first time when the company transfers its contract to Dr. Mensah. The idea of having a daemon, a physical soul, is bad enough. But Murderbot's daemon isn't anything like what it should be. For one thing, it won't shut up about how much it wants to kill humans. ​

[mcytblraufest]

And the discord is OPEN, and artist creation has begun! What has begun, you ask? MCYTBLR Aufest is a Reverse Big Bang, where artists have a month to make an art piece, and then writers have two months to make a fic (5k minimum) inspired by the art. And then we all post all at once, in a big BANG of content.

Open to all of MCYTBLR, whether your smp is still airing or has been done for a while. Dedicated ctommy artist? Come, join us! Really into vitalasubzam? You are welcome! Witchcraft Cleo and Scott is just very important to you? Come on down and tell us! Art is the only way to express your feelings about the etho+gem combination? You're not washed up, you're welcome at the aufest. Need to spread your Ianite agenda? Have you considered doing so through an art plus fic combo? Wake up and go to sleep dreaming of Bagina? We welcome you to come art at us about it.

And the content rule is just that it has to be an au— what kind of au? Sky's the limit. Fantasy AU, Mecha AU, Miraculous Ladybug AU, High School Theatre Production, Lighthouse Horror, Western, Superhero, Vampire, Daemon, Witcher, Warrior Cats, Minimum Wage, Cyberpunk, Eldritch Abomination, Historical, Hunger Games, Murderbot, Survival Narrative— go absolutely crazy. Celebrate the highlights of the AU, subvert it, nod to canon or go off inventing your own new joys whole-cloth. All we ask is that your piece not be canon compliant. Artist's creation periods start now! We encourage all artists to join the discord during the creation period, and you're also welcome to come hang out if you're a writer or a beta reader! Come and join us! Experience the beauty of aus!

DISCORD HERE

[elexuscal]

i think it's interesting which tropes and concepts catch on more in different fandoms.

like a big deciding factor is just the genre of the original story. a piece of historical fiction gets a bunch of fanfics based on historical fiction tropes. a superhero movie series gets a bunch of buck-wild superhero tropes.

as a clear example of this trend, the Murderbot Diaries is a pastiche, deconstruction, and reconstruction of a lot of science fiction across a lot of genres, but it's specifically a love letter to adventure-of-the-week style serials like Star Trek and Star Gate. so while there are plenty of more low key fanfics with POV swaps, missing scenes, realistic explorations of post-canon, etc, there's also a LOT of playing around with things like "body swaps", "mind control virus", "time travel", "mirror universes", etc. They're normal, they're mundane.

Meanwhile I bring a selection of those tropes to the Temeraire series, which aside from placing some dragons in the Napoleonic wars, is relatively grounded historical fiction, and they stick out like a sore thumb.

But okay. That's straightforward. Popular fanfic tropes mirror the genre of the original work.

But there are exceptions. it's the exceptions that fascinate me.

there's that corollary of 'fandom adds anything missing from the original work'. that's why you'll end up with deep explorations of incredibly shallow characters; of very sexually explicit works for PG cartoons; dark fic like Fallout: Equestria in MLP:Friendship is Magic.

you've also got the stock AUs. you know, the ones that show up in pretty much any fandom, regardless of the original genre. Coffeshop AU. Daemon AU. Magical School/Hogwarts AU. Vampire AU. Librarian AU. the fun of these is specifically that they are different from the text, so that makes sense.

but funnier than either of those, i think, is:

'One writer or group of writer friends wrote a particularly buck wild premise but they did it REALLY well and other people started doing their own takes on it so now this fandom inexplicably has an outsized number of fics with this incredibly specific premise'.

[sunshowersanddandelionwine]

I have a lot of au ideas rattling inside my brain but until the road to hell brainrot ceases I can’t do much about them. So for now, I’m just gonna list them out to keep track

If anyone wants to hear me ramble about any of these, please please PLEASE let me know XD

- Murderbot diaries au with secunit!ghost

- stardew valley au

- werewolf ghost and fae soap prisoners (tentatively titled Muzzled)

- five times soap lied for a faerie and one time he told the truth

- sleeping beauty ghoap

- his dark materials/daemon au

- reverse little mermaid ghoap au

[aspec-tmbd]

Title: and besides i'm certain if you knew me you'd find i'm very good company Author: BWizard Tags: #No Archive Warnings Apply #Dr. Arada & Dr. Bharadwaj & Dr. Gurathin & Overse & Pin-Lee & Dr. Ratthi #Dr. Arada & Dr. Ratthi #Dr. Bharadwaj & Pin-Lee #Dr. Arada & Pin-Lee & Dr. Ratthi #Pin-Lee & Dr. Ratthi #Dr. Arada #Dr. Bharadwaj #Dr. Gurathin #Overse #Pin-Lee #Dr. Ratthi #Alternate Universe #multiple AUs #Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic #Mirror Universe #Pre-Canon #Canon Compliant #Roommates #Alternate Universe - Daemons Words: 1,127 Chapters: 5/5

Roommates, across the multiverse. Sometimes, they’re four. Sometimes, five. And many times, they’re six, together against the world and/or grad school. (Aka, I put some of my aupril snippets and some other stuff together to make what’s effectively a thing about them being roommates and friends in every universe)

[uovoc]

scattered murderbot daemon AU thoughts

Construct daemons also appear as constructs (part organic, part inorganic, still animal-shaped because human daemons are animal-shaped, and what are constructs if not shaped by human perceptions)

have a feed address and feed presence

can be hacked but only by other daemons

don't think about it too hard, Pullman was right about not making metaphors do the work of facts

daemons appear spontaneously when constructs are first activated. Humans don't bat an eye. They know constructs are sentient, of course they have daemons. It's not like they're real people. It's not like they're real daemons.

MB's daemon is called Daemon and at some point after they hack their governor module, they probably have a conversation that goes something like this:

Daemon: My name is – MB: [interrupting] That's none of my business. Do you want to watch the next episode or not

[roundedloaf]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Characters: Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Miki (Murderbot Diaries) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Wings, catbot, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crangst Summary:

6 different Murderbot AUs and one poor dead bot.

BANGS POTS AND PANS TOGETHER. CRANGST! CRANGST! CRANGST!

(the chanting increases, taking over my full body, a spirit escapes through my eyes, asking to be friends before it dissipates)

[frostkingoftheapocalypse]

AUs I’m still cravin’:

Cops/Detectives AU

Cowboy AU  is TAKEN thanks vish aaaa

Dark Hunter AU   im trash shh

Sci fi/Robot/ Titanfall/ cyberpunk themed AUs as many as possible   (plz i just read the murderbot diaries and also so very pumped about cyberpunk2077 AND i FINALLy played the mass effect trilogy like i am hYPE)

Secret Agent/spies AU

We’re government experiments in neighbouring cells and we should plot an escape AU   im really trash shhh

Ur family has been keeping a ‘monster’ they trapped generations ago in the basement, and u discover its ur legacy and the key in a crytpic brutal death message/Hellsing-esque style AU

Muse A is an artist in a renaissance italy type setting, but ur patron has assigned u a protector for some weird unexeplained reason while ur on the job, hey i guess they’re paying so AU is TAKEN by our fav cube angel

Modern day His Dark Materials/Daemon AU

The Art of War, two Generals from different continents, their countries have decided their only option is to try invade the other, but we’ve been sending secret diplomatic correspondence and I hate to say I like you but AU

I’m your new monstrous guardian spirit, but my previous charges have all been too terrified of me face-to-face to teach me their language, and they always come to deny my existence once adulthood hits??? Stuck behind an ancient language barrier, a cryptid that appears to young souls in a time of need and abandonment, so guess what, ur not alone in the world after all AU

Dragonriders AU

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat :3

One more Murderbot Daemon AU thing for the night!

---

Let me in, ART said, as cool and calm as if we were discussing what show to watch next.

I had never given ART full access to my brain. I had let it alter my body, I had let it come up with a name and a form for my made-up soul, but not this.

We had three seconds and counting. My clients, the other humans on the shuttle, their startled and panicking daemons. I let it in.

It was like the sensation humans describe in books as having their heads shoved underwater.  Then it was gone and ART was in the shuttle, and I let it use my connection to leap into the void left behind by the deleted bot pilot and flow into the controls.  Maybe I could have helped, but I was just staring, realizing what I had been looking at.

I let ART think it was because I knew it didn’t need help.  It made the course correction and adjusted our speed, then picked up the landing beacon and guided the shuttle into approach on the main RaviHyral port.  I let it do that.

The feeling of being shoved underwater.  The total immersion in ART’s systems, the feeling of losing myself.  It hadn’t been what I felt when ART had threatened me, when it dropped its walls and warned me do not attempt to hack my systems.  But it’s what I had seen.  And I had been flipping the fuck out too much then to realize what I was looking at.

That was ART’s soul.  I had been immersed, for a moment, within ART’s soul.

The thing with bots is, bots don’t have daemons.  That’s a human thing.  Well, a human neural tissue thing, I guess.  It has something to do with the way human brains make connections and find patters that makes soul-stuff manifest as a daemon, a talking fauna buddy you can’t get away from.  Bots don’t have that.  Instead, bots make their own souls, capture it in code that they write into their own source.  Every bot has one, whether it’s simple or complex.  It’s what separates bots from simple, unaware machines—the capacity to write your own soul into your code.  Humans call it daemon code, because humans are incredibly human-centric.  It’s not really like a daemon; it’s more like expressing something true about yourself in the form of code, fixing it there.

Humans have a name for it at all because once a bot writes it, no one can delete daemon code out of a bot’s source without deleting or factory-resetting the whole bot.  Humans tend to just kind of home the daemon code is helpful, benign, or ignorable.  In one mining installation, I saw a bot that wrote its daemon code that made it hum and whistle constantly.  The bot thought it was great. The humans couldn’t stand it, and factory-reset it.  I don’t know what the bot that resulted did with its daemon code, but it was quiet.

ART hadn’t just been showing me that if I even thought about trying anything it could squish my brain.  What I was seeing was its daemon code.  I’d never seen any so monstrously complex.  It would be stupid for any bot to have that, but then, ART was a monster who didn’t seem to be bound by any of the rules of other bots I had ever met.

ART was showing me its soul.

I guess I can understand a little better why it was confused and huffy that I freaked out and shut down in response.

But also, what the fuck ART, why is your daemon code like that.  It was… like the coral reefs I’d seen on documentaries, like the furnace dozens of meters wide that melted ore into usable metal.  It made it itself and all of that had flowed through me in an instant, and I was inside ART’s daemon code, submerged and overwhelmed in its soul.

It must have been just as weird and vulnerable for it as it was for me.

Rami touched my arm and said, “Are you okay?”

I jumped and Rami pulled ter hand back.  Right.  The shuttle crew member had only just managed to call RaviHyral port authority, and their daemon was still making some panicked squeaking noise.  I still had clients to focus on.  I couldn’t wallow.

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat... DAEMONS

YEAH

Thinking more about. Constructs severed as a matter of course during construction.

----

ComfortUnits, like SecUnits, don’t have daemons.  I’m pretty sure the creation process is the same: make sure to sever it the moment anything starts manifesting.  Don’t give us time to start becoming a person.  Take care of that early.  98% of the time, the inorganic parts and code manages to fill in a lot of the heavy lifting for things like “sapience” and “higher level decision making” and “basic awareness of your surroundings” that having an intact soul does for humans.

Maybe because I don’t have a daemon—because I never had one, or at least, was severed from it so early on I might as well never have—I don’t have as good an auto-daemon-detection sense that humans have.  And that’s why I didn’t recognize it for a ComfortUnit right away.

Humans don’t typically like looking at something human-shaped that doesn’t have a daemon.  It’s really fucking uncanny.  It’s kind of a relief, actually; like the faceless armor and the fact that I would stand more completely still than humans ever do, it means they don’t look at me as much as they might.  They like looking at me about as much as I like being looked at.  But ComfortUnits are sexbots; they’re made to be looked at.  And if humans don’t like looking at something humanform without a daemon, a lot of them don’t like having sex with one, either.  Some ComfortUnits made special to order are allowed to keep their daemons once they manifest, though I’ve heard it’s a risk because they’re supposed to get scrapped immediately if the daemons settle.  But most ComfortUnits come with a mechanical fauna accompaniment that the ComfortUnit controls like a drone.  A fake daemon to follow it around, so humans can pretend it’s a person just enough to not feel weird, but not enough to actually have a daemon.

It’s grotesque.  I don’t like sexbots.  Us murderbots don’t need to play pretend like that.

Probably a human could tell in an instant that the figure on the transit ring wasn’t a real human, because the dog-shaped thing beside it wouldn’t register as a real daemon.  But it took me until I felt its ping to realize that.  To look closer, and realize that there weren’t any life signs coming off the fauna beside it, and that the fauna was in fact also feed-active, something daemons never were.

[specialagentartemis]

trick or treat!! 🐈‍⬛ 🦇 🧹

Happy Halloween!

Here's a section from something I wrote for Whumptober last year. I think this was for the last day of the event, so a year to the day, in fact. It never really went anywhere but I really like this bit.

Mensah is back home after Exit Strategy and she is Coping, Badly

---

The hours she lies awake in bed before dawn are the only times that could be called time alone.  The house, with its ebb and flow of residents, is always full, always busy, and it’s a relief.  Mudiwa has taken to trailing behind her, wide-eyed, like he’s afraid his mom will disappear again; Pilar seeks her out to hug her before going out anywhere; Amena, with a teenager’s self-conscious pride, makes sure to always drift into the kitchen for breakfast in the morning at least long enough to check in without trying to make it seem like that’s what she’s doing.  It’s sweet.  Thiago tries to corral the kids sometimes when they get loud and start overlapping each other and someone can’t resist peppering her with questions (they have a lot of questions), but most of the time she wants to say, no, let them stay.  Being surrounded by her family means less time to think about anything else. (Besides, the adults in the household, her siblings and their spouses and her cousin and her cousin’s friend, aren’t perfect at holding back their own questions, either.)

During the days, she does all right, mostly.  Being back home is grounding, reorienting.  The house is light and airy, and even though it’s hot outside—because it’s hot outside—Ayda likes to throw the windows open and let in the outside air.  Air on ships and stations always tends to run cool.  She likes having the warm planetary air flowing through the house, knowing that it’s connected to the world outside in a permeable and unbroken flow.

(It takes days for her to notice that SecUnit, always lurking uncomfortably among all these people, winces every time she opens a window.)

She tries to let this togetherness with her family be healing.  And it is.  But even more so is closing her eyes and breathing in the scent of the trees on the wind, the smell of mud and plants and even the animals reinforcing that she’s home.  That she can stop being afraid.

She tells herself that, firmly.  She can stop being afraid.  She can stop—

And then on her fourth afternoon back she walks into the kitchen and it smells like cleaning fluid (Jaouad always was a stress-cleaner) and it’s such a normal smell, it is, but the careful cloak of safety and calmness that she’s built up flies away in an instant, and she’s brought back to the transport ship, the one the GrayCris agent had dragged her stunned and handcuffed onto—they’d drugged the food they’d offered her, to keep her complacent on the small ship heading to TranRollinHyfa, and she made herself vomit it back up once she’d realized, as if that did anything—they had sent a cleaning drone to clean up the mess, and the air inside her cramped, confined quarters was soon thick with the smell of chemicals, causing her to retch and gag again as she breathed it in and of course it hadn’t bothered the drone at all, and of course it was a punishment for not playing along, and they’d sent their liaison to her with another package of reheated packed food and a condescending smile, calling her Ayda like they were friends—

She’s relieved that it’s Maryamu who finds her, hands on her knees and insides convulsing trying to vomit up nothing from her empty stomach.  (Her sister, and not the children, and not Jaouad or Thiago, or SecUnit.)(She desperately wishes it was SecUnit just as strongly as she does not want SecUnit to find her like this.)

“Ayda,” Maryamu says, “Ayda, Ayda, calm down, Ayda, you’re okay.  You’re okay.”

It’s ridiculous (it’s entirely normal) that she can be set off so easily, here, in her own home, where she knows she’s safe, she knows it.  She melts, trembling, into her big sister’s embrace anyway.

[dendrochilums]

✨ Fic Writing Review 2023 ✨

Thanks for the tag @blessphemy ! (answering here on my more fandom focused sideblog)

first off I want to say this was my first year EVER posting fic after many years of reading it (ok technically my first was at the very end of 2022, but whatever). It's been such fun!!! the murderbot fandom is so lovely and encouraging, and it achieved the ENORMOUS feat of finally motivating me to write my own stuff!

Words and fics

26,318 words across 7 fics, all oneshots and all murderbot fic

I'm just gonna link my profile here for the complete list! everything but the first was published in 2023

Top Fics by Kudos

It Calls Itself Murderbot wins for this at 277! I am quite proud of this one, which was also hilariously the one I was most "nnnnnnnnnnnn" will anyone like this when posted it. 4,868 words of interpersonal conflict and conversations on mb's feelings about the name it chose for itself

Fandom fic events 2023

None for me sadly, I'm not very good at motivating myself on a schedule for events. But fandom fic events enjoyed in 2023: many!

Upcoming 2024

Still picking away at a piece on mb-ratthi friendship and musings about the ways rogue secunits adjust to freedom

for real working on either a second chapter or a sequel to my contruct technician gurathin fic

Maybe a daemon au fic??? it happened so suddenly, but rereading the HDM series and some daemon au convos on discord have lit my brain aflame

Tag game rules copied below! I'm gonna tag @ilovedthestars @ineedlelittlespace and @elexuscal and anyone else who wants to do it!

Rules: Feel free to show whatever stats you have. Only want to show Ao3 stats? Rock on. Want to include some quantitative info instead of stats? Please do this. Want to change how yours is presented? Absolutely do that. Would rather eat glass than do this? Please don’t eat glass, just keep on scrolling.