#Murderbot would NOT FUCKING PARTNER

[snowstories]

listen to me. Murderbot would NOT fucking partner. that includes queerplatonically. It's an emotional wreck of a person that's just barely learning to accept it IS a person, who is still trying to figure out what it wants from its life. It's also an extreme introvert, socially awkward and more importantly generally uninterested in social interaction even with people it genuinely likes. It is also extremely romance-repulsed and had an entire scene protesting the use of the word 'relationship' in reference to itself bc it reminds it too much of romance. Granted it is also generally immature when it comes to any type of social relationship and didn't want the term 'friendship' used either, but, crucially, being immature about social relationships means you're not ready for a committed relationship. It is not in the right place to start a committed relationship, it is not interested in starting a committed relationship bc it would require a degree of commitment and social interaction it would not want to have, and it would probably instantly die if it heard the phrase 'committed relationship' be applied to it. And, CRUCIALLY, not wanting a committed relationship is not a character flaw it needs to develop away from. do you hear me? It would NOT fucking partner.

[kneesntoess]

tagged by @evanescentjasmine for a Snippet Saturday Monday because I will definitely forget about it if I wait until the weekend

tagging @flyingwide & anyone else who wants to join in!

snippet 1: a court of fey and flower's arranged marriage AU

snippet 2: murderbot & mensah non-sexual d/s

snippet 3: sidlink reverse!knot smut (explicit, nsfw, xenobiology)

snippets under the cut for length!

snippet 1: arranged marriage AU

the premise: hob and sylmenar go through with the arranged marriage and eventually build a genuine connection and relationship, in which they recnogise and enable what the other needs for happiness while maintaining their status. I would like to try and mimic the format of the show in this fic - an action phase, a rumours and actions phase, and an epistolary phase.

this snippet comes from the beginning of the fic, for Hob and Sylmenar's first courting, chaperoned by Lady Chirp

Somewhere at the front of the palace, one of Tatiana’s many ladies was no doubt greeting her fiancé, the indominable Major Hob. The veneer of respectability was almost laughable – their fates had been sealed without either of their leave, freedoms bartered away for little more than favour. What difference would it make, if there was impropriety between them now? They were as good as wed, and what either of them had wanted or chosen had never mattered. Sylmenar could fuck him on the floor with her skirts around her waist in front of her ladies and the court and she would still be married in three weeks’ time.  “Nervous?” asked the archfey seated opposite her, with a sympathetic smile Sylmenar did not trust an inch. Lady Chirp Featherfowl of Cluckingham, respendent in emerald green, took a careful sip of her tea. She had presented herself as a neutral party at the last garden party Queen Tatiana had hosted, who had spent several hours complaining unsubtly about the barbarian manners of the Goblin Court, who were conversely concerned about undue influence from the Seelie contingent. A genteel pissing match, is what it was, and Chirp had positioned herself as referee and volunteered herself as babysitter. Why, Sylmenar did not yet know. “A little.” Sylmenar took a sip of her own tea, oversteeped and bitter with it. “As is to be expected,” the Lady Chirp replied, and tossed her hair; it fanned out behind her, a flash of magpie iridescence in the sun. “Have you met, previously?” “Once,” Sylmenar allowed, suppressing the urge to glance at the hourglass on the mantlepiece. It was pointless; the flow of time had never been as receptive to her as it was to other fey. Hob would arrive when he arrived. “At the previous Bloom. He was … distracted.” “Quite.”

snippet 2: mensah & murderbot non-sexual ds

the premise: mensah and her marital partners have previously enjoyed exploring kink in their relationship, and mensah appreciates the way subbing can help her destress from the pressures of her job. she is finally in a place where she feels able to engage in this play again, but feels she needs to warn murderbot given its habit of surveilance and concern for her wellbeing. murderbot is... intrigued. I intend to have them explore this dynamic together, in a way that is honours both of their boundaries

this snippet comes, again, from near the beginning of the fic, where Mensah initially broaches the topic with Murderbot

I had been sitting in Mensah's home office for forty seven minutes and sixteen seconds, and she had done the inhale-hold-exhale-explosively thing humans did when they wanted to say something but didn't know how twelve times so far. I checked my newsfeed alerts automatically, in case something awful had happened and Mensah didn't know how to tell me, like Sanctuary Moon getting cancelled. I was in the middle of running a manual check of all recent newsbursts when Mensah opened her mouth for the thirteenth time. This time, she managed to get some words out. "SecUnit." I paused my search, and muted the media I had running in the background. Her face was screwed up and she was biting at the corner of her mouth the way she did when she was worried about something but wasn't trying to hide it. (She never tried to hide it from me, when it was just the two of us together like this). "I need to talk to you about a … personal matter." I think I managed not to wince. She wasn't looking at me, which I appreciated, and it was close to ninety percent of the reason I hadn't just left. I wasn't looking at her, either, except through one little drone stations on the ceiling above us.

She took a deep breath, one of those steeling-themselves-for-something-unpleasant ones humans did sometimes and which I had seen Mensah do before going into important meetings with people she didn't like very much about topcis she found upsetting. I didn't like that she was doing it with me, even though what she had said was unpleasant and I didn't want to be talking about my feelings with her at all. "My therapist," she went on, and I knew her well enough that I didn't have to look at her to know what face she was pulling, the one she always made when she spoke about it with me, "thought I should speak to you about it." "Why?" I was glad I didn't need to modulate the horror in my tone, because Mensah would know it was there, although I could have done without the whine. She huffed a laugh. "Well, it is security related." She paused, and her shoulders hunched. "Well. Not really. More … "I have experienced a number of traumatic events and therefore may be seeking a heightened sense of security", kind of security." I nodded. Mensah's physical safety, and her sense of security, had been a part of my function here since I had returned after GrayCris. However much both of us changed, I always wanted Mensah to feel safe when I was around

(Ugh.) "That's still security," I said, as deadpan as I could make it. She smiled up at my drones, and I definitely didn't smile back. "So why was it a therapist conversation?"

snippet 3 - sidlink reverse knot (extremely explicit)

the premise: inspired by various real-life fish reproductive systems and by the wonderful horny creativity of the fandom, I began thinking of the concept of a "reverse knot", where the bottoming partners reproductive parts have tentacles or other appendages that hold the penetrating partners penis in place. this is the oldest WIP i have that i still consider active

this snippet comes from midpoint, after Sidon has explained his anatomy and he and Link have agreed to try something new

“Link.” “I’m here,” Link murmurs, and squeezes Sidon’s hand back, hard. He was kneeling between Sidon’s spread knees, his head bent forward to press reverent kisses against Sidon’s skin, dragging his mouth down and then back up, letting the skin catch on the fine, sandpaper scales. Link’s right hand was tangled with Sidon’s right on his hip, and Link’s left was cupped gently against Sidon’s slit, already parted and starting to glisten wetly in the light. When they’ve done this before, the tip of Sidon’s cock had appeared while they’d still been kissing, and he’d simply taken it in his hand or mouth and stroked it as he would his own until it had emerged fully, proud and flushed from Sidon’s body. But that wasn’t the plan for tonight. It had started the same; long, languid kisses, Sidon leaning down to meet him and Link sat across Sidon’s lap, knees either side of his thighs the better to arch into the kisses. But it hadn’t been long before Sidon had begun to whimper, hips rolling restlessly, and Link had eased him gently back against the bed and settled into his current position.

“Ready?” Link asked, eyes bright, and waited for Sidon’s nod before lowering his head more, where the fine scales turned to soft, unmarked skin. Curious, Link lapped gently against the slit and felt it open more under his tongue, enough to slip just inside. Under him, Sidon’s hips jerked and his grip on Link’s hand tightened enough to feel the faintest pin pricks of claws against the back of his hand. Sidon’s chest heaved, pulling a stangled whine from his throat. A wave of musk and wetness rolled across Link’s tongue, making him shiver and press his thighs together. “Link,” Sidon said, again, “Please -” Unable to bare the thought of lifting his mouth away to answer, Link raked his nails lightly down Sidon’s other thigh and licked again, first a long, wet stripe up the length of Sidon’s slit. The action makes Sidon pant and spread his knees wider, prop his heels against the bed for better leverage. Sidon’s slit widens further, wider than it had ever been when they’ve had sex before, and Link feels a small thrill of triumph that he’s doing this right, success settling warm and heavy across the back of his neck and fizzling down his spine.

So bolstered, Link turned his attention to the slit itself, pink and open. He lapped at the opening, groaning at the wetness that coated his tongue; intent on getting more of it, of filling his every sense with it, Link licked his way inside, into the warm wetness of Sidon’s body. He’d never done this before, and it was intoxicating - not just the sensation of it, of Sidon’s body clinging to his tongue, but the sounds he made; the intimacy and trust of it; this new thing he got to learn and experience. Link concentrated, worked his tongue deeper inside Sidon, thrusting shallowly in and out. Sidon’s slick was already coating his mouth and chin, he could feel it, the sticky wetness of it; knew that if Sidon looked down at him now, the lower half of his face would be shiny with it. And Sidon’s slit was still widening. There was only so much Link could do with his mouth; Sidon’s hips under his were beginning to twitch and squirm, half finished pleas falling out of his mouth.

[zenerrocksmc]

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.

[grison-in-space]

murderbot, alanna, gideon (fuck marry kill new version)

New version:

fuck, marry, kill but instead it’s

get them randomly assigned as your lab partner for a whole semester, get trapped with them on a broken elevator for ten hours, and they’re your employee trainer for your new job at McDonalds

AHA. Well. Gideon as my employee trainer would be extremely entertaining as long as I could avoid any TOO risky OSHA violations. My job is paying me minimum wage, so it ain't like they care how shitty I do my job as long as I'm physically present, so: why not? (This only applies to jobs that Gideon thinks are dumb; one of the things I really love about her relationship with Aiglamene is that I think Gideon herself would be an equally stunted and exacting instructor if she was handed a random surviving toddler and told to raise it up, and that's interesting in fiction but definitely not something I need to live through myself.)

I think Murderbot would be a very restful person to spend ten hours with. It's very clear about boundaries and will not expect me to carry the conversation in the elevator. If I have feed access or my ipad with all my books, I'm going to want to curl up and read a book. And even if I don't, maybe I just want to curl up in a corner and play something stupid with little pieces of lint from my pants. Murderbot is polite enough while being abysmally socially incompetent that I can probably relax enough to be socially weird myself for a minute.

Alanna would not be a super useful lab partner in terms of educated skill, because she has basically no context for the set of technological and philosophical approaches for understanding the world we lump under "science". That's okay, I can do any intellectual stuff and figure out our answers. She'd be pretty good at following instructions and I think lab class would be a neat way to talk about the differences that can be observed between natural worlds with and without magic.

[emeritiii]

Odds??

1: Do you sleep with your closet doors open or closed?

They just sort of stay in whatever orientation they're in. I don't think either of us ever consciously opens or closes them before bed

9: Do you always smile for pictures?

Honestly, I really prefer not to, but I try to if it's anything other than a casual selfie

15: Do you chew your pens and pencils?

I don't actively chew them, but I do put them in my mouth without thinking

21: What's your least favorite movie?

I don't think I have one? I've never had the conscious thought that something was the worst movie I've ever seen

25: What is your favorite food?

I love food so much that I don't have one outstanding favorite, but if I had to choose at gunpoint, stuffed sopapillas

27: Last person you kissed/kissed you?

My greelfeend

33: Ever ran out of gas?

In the car? Not yet, and I very much hope to keep it that way

35: Best thing to eat for breakfast?

M e a t

39: What is your Chinese astrological sign?

I'm a fucken.. rabitt. The little guy in the Fruits Basket

45: Ever watch soap operas?

As much as I love to consume media Murderbot style, soap operas aren't usually my jam

49: Do you dance in the car?

Only when I'm driving alone, so I have to hit em with the old bob and wiggle and not much else

51: Last time you got a portrait taken by a photographer?

My senior portrait, I think? Or possibly the picture that was taken at my high school graduation—I don't remember if there was one, but I think there was.

55: Favorite type of fruit pie?

Peach!

57: Do you believe in ghosts?

I want to, but not really

63: First concert?

The legendary Pentatonix concert that was also the only concert I have been to

65: Nike or Adidas?

No preference, but my current pair of shoes are Nikes. So are my next three pairs of shoes because of the time the warehouse messed up and sent me five identical pairs of shoes.

69: Ever take dance lessons?

Not formally! My dad taught me to dance one-on-one though

75: Own a record player?

My partner owns a record player, which means it's Mine Now

77: Ever been in love?

Not to be dramatic but oh my god holy sweet fuck yes

81: Tea or coffee?

Coffee usually. I love espresso too much

85: Are you patient?

Not particularly. In fact, no, not even the tiniest bit am I patient (this brought to you by me checking the order status of a package that I know hasn't shipped yet because I would have gotten an email notification and also I've already checked twice today)

87: Ever won a contest?

Maaaaybe? I can't think of any off the top of my head. OH WAIT I won some spelling bees as a kid if that counts

91: Best room for a fireplace?

Basement, no ventilation. Sims fireplace.

93: If married, how long have you been married?

Not married yet!

95: Do you cry and throw a fit until you get your own way?

God I hope not. I make a very conscious effort not to do that.

99: Do you miss anyone right now?

Yeahhh I miss my frens. My buds. My pals, even.

[rjalker]

"Quarentine", a Murderbot Diaries fic.

There's no spoilers, because, like all my other Murderbot fics, all of this, every single speck of it, is made the fuck up. Because there's not actually anything about the plot of The Murderbot Diaries I'd want to change, so all my fics will instead just be adding more stories to the universe.

14,011 words.

summary from FF.net which you can also read it on if you really want.

Murderbot, other robots, and some augmented humans on Preservation are forced to quarentine after a new computer virus is released in an attempted attack on the Company, which unfortunately does more harm to people with Company augments than the coropration itself. Unfortunately, Preservation isn't the utopia it's cracked up to be, and Murderbot can't trust the medics to help.

Fanfiction.net link: "https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14201142/1/Quarentine"

Pillowfort link: "https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/3200886"

Archived read-more for this post: "https://web.archive.org/web/20230220220455/https://rjalker.tumblr.com/post/709813260171591680/quarentine-a-murderbot-diaries-fic"

I only recommend reading it on fanfiction.net if you want to leave an anonymous review.

Several words have been replaced or had their spellings changed to be more friendly to screenreaders and other text-to-speech programs.

Murderbot sat on one of the fancy carved desks in the remotest section of the office building that had been cordoned off for the quarantine.

All the humans except for the augmented humans who were also in quarantine were outside the building entirely, with many sealed pressure doors between the quarantine zone and the outer doors, so there was less chance of any disastrous escapes.

Lots of security measures had been put into place to prevent Murderbot especially from escaping, since it would be able to get past measures that would work for humans (since, for example, it could jump over barriers that would stop all but the most creative humans), but, unfortunately, it didn't know how well those measures would actually be able to hold up if its infection reached the point where the virus sent it into a frenzy.

Murderbot had chosen one of the rooms away from the majority of the other people in quarantine, but they were all working with the buddy system, and it wasn't exempt just because it was a SecurityUnit (despite its ample protests), so Jayla was there too, as its officially registered quarantine buddy. (The buddies had to be officially registered, otherwise the humans would just wander off on their own and pass out somewhere with no one to help. All buddy groups had been given naturally forming crystal bracelets that, if kept far enough away from their partner stone for too long, would start creating some sort of wave thing Murderbot didn't understand or care enough about to learn, that would alert the medics outside that someone was in danger.

The only similarities it had to a governer module was that it reacted to distance. It didn't cause pain, it wouldn't kill you, it wouldn't do anything to make you uncomfortable. But Murderbot still felt viscerally uncomfortable at even the idea of it, and the stress of having to wear it was taking its toll on its already stressed systems.

The fact that Jayla was nice, and the bracelet would protect Jayla too wasn't actually any consolation at all. The whole point of its governer module had been to protect humans. Besides, Murderbot wasn't going to be irresponsible enough to wander off by itself or let Jayla do so.

The fact that it was being forced to wear the bracelet was seriously making it regret the decision to visit Preservation again. It was half convinced the whole idea had been set up just to torment it with memories of having a governer module. The bigoted humans in charge of the government here hadn't magically become any more welcoming to constructs since the last time it'd been here.)

Murderbot had picked Jayla to be its enforced because Jayla was one of the least annoying humans it had met since coming to Preservation. Out of all current possibilities for enforced buddies, Jayla was the least horrible choice. Not that that was saying much considering the rest of the infected humans were either strangers or confirmed to be obnoxious, but still. It was a compliment.

For one thing, Jayla was also autistic, A-gender and aro-ace, so that made Jayla the first person Murderbot had ever shared those things with in any way, let alone sharing multiple things at once.

Jayla also corrected anyone who misgendered Murderbot if it didn't beat Jayla to it, even when it wasn't in the room to be insulted. (It knew about the instances where Jayla had corrected someone without Murderbot actually being there thanks to the network of cameras and drones it had set up all over the first Preservation chapter of the Construct, Bot, and Augmented Alliance headquarters when it was built. (There were also other, smaller chapters scattered around Preservation, each one designated by a number indicating when it had been founded, but this one was the biggest one)

The fact that people on Preservation misgendered it at all was a testament to how shitty a lot of the people here were despite their advertisements about how Progressive and Awesome they were, considering it listed its pronouns in its (also enforced and mandatory, but only for Murderbot itself this time, not the entire population, because fuck Preservation's shitty fucking bigoted government. They claimed Preservation was a place where bots could be free, but still kept them enslaved and owned by humans. They claimed they didn't discriminate against anyone, then forced Murderbot to tell everyone who looked at its feed bio that it was a SecurityUnit and they'd better fucking watch out in case it went on a random killing spree for no fucking reason.

Begin sarcasm: oh, but hey, at least it was better than being forcibly isolated on an uninhabited part of the planet surrounded by water so it couldn't escape or leave or hurt anyone, right? /End sarcasm.)

Anyways there was no fucking excuse for people to misgender it, because it listed its pronouns in its fucking government-enforced feed bio, and it also verbally told people what its pronouns were when it met strangers it intended to speak to for more than two seconds, in case they didn't have access to the feed. Not to mention that, thanks so much to Preservation's robot hating government, everyone on Preservation knew who it was and what it looked like. They knew what its fucking pronouns were.

But shitty bigoted humans were gonna keep being shitty bigoted humans as long as they thought they could get away with it, so even though literally everyone, including new arrivals thanks to the fucking public service announcements Preservation ran in the ports. So despite the fact that literally everyone knew for a fact that its pronouns were it-its, many of the humans still chose to misgender it, and even after they were corrected, most of the time they just doubled down and continued to misgender it, claiming they knew better than it what was good for it, or that it wasn't a real person, so they didn't need to respect its pronouns, and any number of other bullshit “justifications”.

Any bigoted fucking argument you can think of, and the humans of Preservation levied it against Murderbot to try and justify not using its correct pronouns.

Here were just a few examples of the bullshit Murderbot had to put up with:

-Only humans could be misgendered, so there was nothing wrong with humans assigning it whatever pronouns and gender they thought fit it best.

-If it was really a real, thinking person, then it should use pronouns other than it-its. it-its was for objects, not people, and using it-its pronouns was just giving people an excuse to hatecrime it. If it really was a person, then it had to change its pronouns if it wanted to be treated with respect.

-Using it-its pronouns was dehumanizing, why was it dehumanizing itself? It should use she/her or he/him or they/them! Learn to stop hating itself! Wait, what? It wasn't human and so dehumanization meant nothing? Its pronouns had been chosen specifically to declare that it wasn't human?

No, no, it was clearly a person, so that meant it was human, so that meant it couldn't use it-its pronouns! It would pick new pronouns once it stopped hating itself so much!! It was just as human as they were, it had to stop denying that if it wanted to be happy/treated as an equal! Bots didn't deserve equal rights because they weren't human.

If Murderbot wanted equal rights, it had to start identifying as human, and had to stop using it-its pronouns. Because the only people who deserved rights were those who were indistinguishable from those who already had rights.

If it wanted to be treated like a person, it had to assimilate and leave behind everything that made it different.

-it-its pronouns just made them too uncomfortable, so they refused to use them for Murderbot. Despite the fact that they had no problem calling anything else “it”, including other robots.

And so much more. You wouldn't believe half the shit these people say to defend their blatant bigotry and refusal to respect people's pronouns. It's like they think not being from the Corporation Rim automatically makes them a good person, so they don't have to actually do anything to be a good person.

It's fucking absurd and infuriating, and one of the reasons Murderbot only very rarely visited Preservation space. It got enough shit in the places that openly despised its existence, putting up with the same bullshit, only from people who pretended to care, was in many ways even worse. At least when the Corporation Rim was treating it like a vicious animal that had to be kept locked up for everyone's safety, they weren't being patronizing and expecting it to grovel in endless gratitude for saying they cared about the rights of robots while continuing to oppress them.

Actually, yeah, now that it thought about it, it was definitely worse. No one in the Corporation Rim had ever objectified and misgendered it and then demanded it thank them and be their “friend” (read: pet robot) so they could show off how progressive and amazing they were for tolerating its existence.

Anyfuckingways, to get back to the actual story of what had happened to put them all in quarantine in the first place, Murderbot had been infected by this stupid fucking virus because it was a construct, and hadn't been able to shut down its systems in time. Jayla had been infected because Jayla was disabled, and needed cybernetic augments to stop from being in constant pain.

Unfortunately, Jayla's augments had been one of the models that, it turns out, this virus had been created to target.

Apparently, someone out there had a grudge against the Company, but rather than take that out on the Company, they'd decided to make their grudge the problem of everyone who'd ever gotten augments from the Company. Which included Murderbot, whose whole body had been built by the Company, organic and mechanic parts alike.

(Begin sarcasm: Because, you know, nothing said, 'I'm a good person' like punishing other victims of Corporate greed instead of doing anything to actually hurt those in charge of the corporation you hated in the first place. End sarcasm.)

So now here Jayla and Murderbot both were, stuck in quarantine, at the start of day 8 by Preservation standard time.

Jayla had had to turn off Jayla's augments in order to stop them from causing more infections and to stop them from taking over Jayla's organic systems, which the virus just sent haywire because it didn't know what to do with them.

So now Jayla's ability to walk and move in certain ways was severely reduced, because now Jayla did not have Jayla's augments to compensate for, correct, and provide pain relief for Jayla's joint hypermobility and other chronic health problems.

A stockpile of pain medications and other first aid items had been supplied, and were pretty efficient, but taking medicine every few hours was never going to be as efficient and helpful as actually having working augments.

As for Murderbot, it had been forced to shut down and compartmentalize more than half of its functions until it had only the smallest usable space left.

This meant it couldn't watch its media unless it watched a physical copy (Which didn't exist for most of its favorite shows, because they didn't exist outside the Corporation Rim, and it'd never thought to fucking make physical copies before because it'd though the only way it would lose access to its digital storage was if it was literally dead) on the viewing screen, but it didn't even want to do that with the movies that were available in physical form, because it had to control the media with a slow as shit remote, and it couldn't pause and rewind and freeze frame whenever it wanted to like it always had been able to do when it was functioning properly.

Not to mention it couldn't even see half the things that were happening, to watch in the first place, and with so many of its functions shut down, it couldn't even remember the scenes to even place the dialogue to.

On top of that, it couldn't control any drones, it couldn't look through any cameras or microphones or chemical sensors, it couldn't use the feed, it couldn't hack anything, and it barely had the energy or space to think.

But that was the preferable alternative to going haywire and assaulting every computer system, bot, construct, or augmented human it could find before dropping dead from system overload.

For augmented humans, the virus (which some asshole abled humans wanted to call the CBAH virus just because they couldn't stop purposefully being bigots for five fucking seconds) caused tremors at first, and, if the infected augment wasn't removed or shut down in time, it would progress to seizures and full cardiac arrest in the worst case scenario.

For robots, stage one was the virus spreading to as many internal systems as it could. Stage two was sending the infected robot into an uncontrollable frenzy, with the only goal being to access (which meant, in most cases, physically assault) as many other robot systems as possible. Then you'd collapse and probably die from your systems being overloaded from being used in ways they weren't meant to be used.

Murderbot had actually been infected by Jayla, when it had caught Jayla as Jayla started to fall from the sudden violent tremors in Jayla's legs, before anyone had known anything about a contagious virus loose on the station.

It didn't blame Jayla. Jayla hadn't had any way of knowing Jayla was infected, or that Jayla could transmit it to Murderbot.

No, Murderbot didn't blame Jayla.

It blamed itself. And it was really fucking annoying.

It didn't have the processing ability to watch its favorite shows or read any of its favorite books, but apparently, that just gave its anxiety and depression more room to play in the remaining space. It kept imagining all the things it should have done to avoid this whole situation, starting with relatively reasonable, but becoming more absurd and unfair the longer it thought about it.

Murderbot knew it wasn't its fault it had been infected, but its stupid brain just continued to insist otherwise, no matter how much logic it threw at it.

Many of its favorite characters had gone through situations like this where they blamed themselves for things out of their control, so Murderbot knew how this worked in theory. It knew it shouldn't be blaming itself. It knew it was blaming itself so that it could feel like it had control over an uncontrollable situation. It knew it just needed to accept the fact that no one, not even it, could have seen this disaster coming, and that it shouldn't blame itself, but whoever has caused all of this in the first place.

Yes.

It shouldn't blame itself. There was no point, and it was only going to upset itself further.

…

See, it knew these facts, and it knew how this process was supposed to work in theory, but none of the facts changed the other fact that its brain absolutely refused to accept these facts and logic.

Murderbot didn't currently have access to its risk assessment or any actually helpful programs, but it was pretty certain even the broken version of its risk assessment would tell it there was nothing it could have done to predict or prevent this current disaster.

But knowing the facts didn't stop its feelings from making themselves known, dragging it down with guilt and self-reproach and all sort of obnoxious things.

And it couldn't even watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon to help itself feel better.

So this was the start of day 8 of one of the worst times of Murderbot's life since the survey where it had met Mensah and the rest of the PreservationAux team. Every other time something absurdly horrible had happened, it had at least had access to all its systems and wasn't practically helpless. It couldn't even do anything to help kill the virus. It had to rely on the shitty fucking humans who ran Preservation space.

It couldn't watch TV, not the way it wanted to. And though old fashioned paper books had been supplied, it couldn't read those either. The text was small, way too fucking small for its eyes to process in their currents states, and it couldn't use any systems besides the bare minimums required for its eyes to ““function”” to make it any clearer. Even if it held the book up straight in front of its eyes, all it saw was a blurry mess of light brown and smudges of grey.

And writing? Out of the fucking question. It couldn't use any computer or its own systems, and it didn't know how to handwrite. It had never had to, especially because the writing tools used on Preservation were different from the ones popularly used in the Corporation Rim, so it couldn't even draw on any fuzzy memories of shows or movies to try and figure it out.

And there was no fucking way it was asking anyone to teach it how to write, not even Jayla, as much as it like Jayla. And even if it knew how, it wouldn't be able to see what it wrote to fix any mistakes, and it'd probably kill its wrist just trying, too.

Watching media was out. Reading was out. Writing was out. The only thing that was left was listening to audio-based media, but it was so used to multitasking, that even when it put on one of its favorite audiodramas produced on Preservation, it found it couldn't even keep its attention on what was happening for more than a few seconds at a time, and had to keep rewinding to hear what had just been said. It just couldn't focus if it wasn't also doing something else. It was maddening.

Jayla had offered to read to it the day before, but that venture came to an end before the first chapter of The Storied History of the Ivory Moon Court was even done, because the small size of the text was giving Jayla a headache, too.

The pages were made of plain, plant-based paper and ink, with no backlit screen or feed interface to make the text easier to read.

The humans outside were going to print out more copies of The Storied History of the Ivory Moon Court with larger text, but that was going to take a couple of days, and Murderbot didn't want to think about being in quarantine for that much longer in the first place.

There were some books with larger text, but Murderbot had no interest in learning about plants, so it had left Jayla to Jayla's own devices - - reading up on how to identify the Preservation pawpaw tree, which grew on the largest continent on the planet around many of the major cities. (The exact opposite side of the planet, actually, from where Preservation's government had wanted to confine Murderbot when it first arrived in the midst of a medical crisis)

(Jayla explained that the Preservation pawpaw tree wasn't actually a “tree” like the trees had been on ancient Earth, it was just called that because it grew a hard stem and got really tall. A lot of species on Preservation were called trees for the same reason, even though most of them were far removed from anything you'd see in historical documentaries about Earth.)

Those events had been the day before, and the long, painfully boring night had been passed with Murderbot simply trying to avoid going mad with the inactivity. Jayla had tried staying up to keep it company the first few days, but Murderbot had put its foot down (metaphorically, not literally) and insisted Jayla needed to get the required amount of sleep. Jayla had protested, but had eventually fallen asleep anyways, unable to push Jayla's already stressed body even further, despite Jayla's best attempts otherwise.

The only good thing was that last night, Murderbot had finally figured out how to safely put itself in a pesudo-low power setting without actually having access to its power regulators. Instead of having to spend over eight hours sitting in silence in the dark, it'd managed to cut that down to half, spending the other half of the time only semi conscious and mostly lost in a maze of random images and memories and weird half-formed thoughts.

If Murderbot didn't know any better, it would have thought it'd managed to sleep, but it was pretty sure that was impossible. But it also didn't want to ask a human what sleeping was like. Humans did not need to know that it could possibly maybe sleep. It just knew they'd try to take advantage of that in some way. It trusted Jayla not to do anything, but it didn't trust everyone Jayla trusted, let alone trust who those people trusted. (And so on and so forth.)

(It was actually a miracle that no one outside the PreservationAux team seemed to know Murderbot's name, considering however-many humans had all learned it, including Gurathin (Who was still an asshole). If Dr. Mensah's family's children were to be believed, they didn't know its name either. Which was why Tara, one of the cousins, kept trying to guess it by spouting off every name ve'd learned since last seeing it.)

This morning, Murderbot was sitting on a desk, leaning back against the wall, watching carefully as Jayla demonstrated the proper technique to spinning yarn.

Yesterday, Jayla had worn a mostly yellow and white outfit, and today Jayla was wearing a long dress with a base the same light purple as Jayla's hijab, but with extra chevron-shaped stripes in red, orange, and brown. The brown stripes had been color-picked from Jayla's skin, so they were very dark brown, and warm in saturation.

Murderbot was still weirded out by the fact that, for the most part, people on Preservation changed their clothes every single day. Back in the Corporation Rim, the only people who could afford to do that were high-ranking company executives. The closest normal people got to that kind of luxury was wearing reversible clothes that had different colors or patterns on the inside than the outside, so each morning the humans would flip them around to at least pretend they could afford more than a single set of clothes.

Jayla was sitting with Jayla's legs hanging off the side of the desk, turned sideways to Murderbot, who was sitting with its knees folded under it so it could lean forward to watch.

Murderbot was wearing the same clothes it'd worn since the quarantine had started. It just didn't have the energy or enough fucks left to give about picking out whole new outfits for the humans outside to send in for it every single day, for no purpose but to seem more “presentable” to the humans. The inside of the building was climate controlled, so it wasn't like Murderbot needed to sweat to control its core temperature, and even if it had needed to, constructs didn't have the same pheromones humans did, so it wouldn't exactly smell the way humans did.

(There were probably a few things more useless than a murderbot who got stinky and gross when it got hot, but Murderbot couldn't currently think of any)

Murderbot's quarantine outfit consisted of a matching sky blue and black-striped headscarf and facemask, a black and dark blue sweatshirt, a long black skirt, black cargo pants with lots of pockets, its newest pair of Sanctuary Moon themed boots, and its reflective metal blue eyeguard.

The mask didn't actually do anything to prevent the spread of this still-unnamed virus, it was just to make sure no one could see Murderbot's face unless it let them, and the same with its eyeguard, which unfortunately hadn't been designed to help its eyesight.

Still, even with the mask and eyeguard, it didn't exactly enjoy having to put its face so close to Jayla, but unlike some people, it did actually trust Jayla not to be a creep or anything. And with its vision so blurry right now, there was no other way for it to watch what Jayla was doing with Jayla's hands.

For this demonstration, Jayla would be spinning fur collected from a species of small, omnivorous, ground-dwelling animal that was selectively bred (But not actually domesticated yet, apparently, because apparently those weren't the same thing) by the people of Preservation to have different coat colors and different coat lengths.

These animals (Or “animals”, apparently?) were called nunami, and the only reason they were allowed on Preservation's surface was because they were actually native to the planet.

Preservation had a very strict policy about not allowing non-native species onto planets unless they were already dead, and usually dead and already cooked, to kill any surviving bacteria or parasites. And there were serious limitations even after that on what could be imported, since some species that were eaten could still reproduce after you cooked them.

Some of them were banned because they got even better at reproducing after they were cooked. (No, Murderbot didn't understand how that worked, either)

That was why nunam fur and dagro (the final product of nunam fur after it was spun or woven or whatever) was so popular on Preservation over other fibers they imported. These people especially hated synthetic fibers, even though they were more uniform and easier to work with.

Unlike synthetic fibers that could just come out of a recycler all ready for use, spinning nunam fur into dagro required that it be cleaned multiple times, then dried, then brushed so all the fibers were facing the same direction, before you could even think of spinning it. And this was just to turn it into yarn, after it was yarn you had to make it into things you could actually wear, like clothes. And that took a long time.

Fortunately, Jayla and Murderbot didn't have to worry about processing the fur before they could turn it into yarn, because the people who were sending the stuff in to them had already taken care of all of that beforehand. Mostly because they hadn't been aware that the material would be partly going to Murderbot. One (1) of the humans outside was actually decent, so made sure that all the requests (barring those for personal items) were kept anonymous so no one could decide oh so conveniently that actually, none of this thing that would help Murderbot in particular could be found. Begin sarcasm: How specific and inconvenient. End sarcasm.

Jayla had Jayla's own drop spindle, which someone had retrieved from Jayla's house when Jayla had asked for it. The drop spindle was how the processed nunam fur was turned into into dagro yarn.

The drop spindle was made out of natural carved wood, (“wood”, in quotation marks) and Jayla explained when showing Murderbot the spindle, that, like with the “trees” of Preservation, it wasn't really anything they would have called wood back on Earth, but it was called that on Preservation for sake of ease, because it came from a quote-unquote, “tree”. This quote-unquote “wood” had apparently been made from the wood of the Preservation pawpaw tree, which Jayla was really excited to learn more about.

(Apparently, the fruit from the trees tasted really good, not that Murderbot would know, not having any ability to eat. The fruit was popular, but very hard to transport because it was so fragile. You'd have to take a shuttle to the part of the planet where the trees grew while the fruit was in season if you even wanted a chance to try it.)

Despite the fact that Murderbot couldn't see spinning yarn would be a useful skill for it to have, there was nothing to watch and nothing to read, and no one on Preservation had physical copies of any of its favorite songs, so Murderbot figured that learning how to spin yarn would at least be a productive use of its time.

(Yeah, Murderbot really couldn't see how this skill would be actually useful, but Jayla really enjoyed teaching and talking about it, and Murderbot liked Jayla. Plus, it beat being bored to death.)

Jayla held the spindle up for Murderbot to examine, and offered to let it hold it, but Murderbot declined. The spindle was probably covered in human oils and stuff from being handled so often, and Murderbot didn't feel like dealing with that on its hands right now. It would probably spontaneously combust if it had to add another level of discomfort to this situation.

Jayla didn't get offended by it turning down the offer of holding the spindle, thankfully. It was surprised that it wasn't surprised by this. Jayla really was nice.

Instead, Jayla showed the spindle off, turning it at different angles so Murderbot could see the intricate, colorful orange, yellow, white, and blue decorative carvings and paint all over it, protected from wear by a thick layer of clear resin that gave it a shiny finish.

Despite the complexity of the designs, the main part of the spindle was a simple enough rod, straight up and down, about the length of Jayla's forearm. There was a circular wheel of more “wood” near the top, with notches carved into the sides.

The disk, Jayla explained, was to help the spindle spin longer, and add balance so it wouldn't tilt every which way while it was spinning.

The purpose of spinning in the first place, then, was used to create tension and pull and twist the fibers out of the roving and form a continuous string. After it was spun into string, the twist would be set so it wouldn't just unravel as soon as the tension was released. But Jayla would explain that part once they actually got that far.

All of this Jayla explained cheerfully, and Murderbot listened along intently, surprised it was able to understand most of what Jayla was saying. Murderbot had seen more than a few characters spinning yarn in the shows it'd watched, and a few mentioned it off-handedly in books, but it had never understood why it worked. Now it did.

“Alrightyo,” Jayla finally said once that explanation was done, and it was time for the proper demonstration, “So now that we've got the roving ready - - that's the wool, remember? - - we place a little bit of it on the notch at the top here so it catches, then once that's ready, we spin it.”

Jayla demonstrated attaching the fur - - dyed bright red - - to the hook at the top of the disk, and also demonstrated pushing the disk of the spindle against one thigh like a wheel to get the whole thing spinning, and Murderbot watched carefully.

It had to watch carefully, or it'd miss everything. It couldn't rewind or pause it optical views right now like it normally could. It wasn't even recording anything. It was relying entirely on the organic parts of its brain. Whether or not it would even be able to remember anything happening right now once this was over was anyone's guess.

If it got distracted and missed part of the instructions, there would be no do-over unless Jayla was nice enough to show it again. If Murderbot felt like admitting it had missed it. Which it probably wouldn't.

Fortunately, Jayla was nice, and demonstrated the technique multiple times without making a big deal of it or even asking, before picking up a wooden case, and offering it to Murderbot, with a happy, “Here you go! I got this one for you so you can have your own to practice with.”

The box at least was new, and very shiny, with a crescent moon engraved on the top. Murderbot reached out and took it, careful not to lets its fingers touch Jayla's. Fortunately, Jayla was aware of its touch aversion, and kept Jayla's hand holding the far end of the box, not trying to touch.

Inside the case, to Murderbot's immense surprise (and upon further consideration, the fact that it was surprised really showed how debilitated it was at the moment if it hadn't been able to see this coming, with the way humans of Preservation had such a propensity for gift giving) was another spindle.

This one was just as colorful as the first one, but in a set of very familiar colors: black, navy, sky blue, pale green, and yellow. The colors of the A-gender, aro-ace, and it-its pride flag.

Murderbot didn't know what to say. Its throat felt tight, so it wasn't even sure it would have been able to speak if it knew what to say.

This was the part where it was supposed to say, “thank you”, but it couldn't bring itself to actually say those words.

So Murderbot just accepted the gift silently, carefully taking the spindle out of the case to look at it. The design was similar to the one on Jayla's, but different too, not following the exact same pattern.

“They're all individually hand-made and hand-painted.” Jayla said, as though sensing Murderbot's thoughts.

So they were made by humans, rather than being printed out. Which meant each one would be different, because humans couldn't make things exactly the same every time. People on Preservation thought this was charming.

(And, okay, maybe Murderbot was starting to see where people on Preservation were coming from. It was a little bit charming.)

So, now armed with its very own spindle, it was then Murderbot's turn to pick up a section of the prepared fur - - roving - - and attach it to the hook.

It accomplished this part with minimum failures.

It also managed to get it spinning on the first try.

And to Murderbot's shock, it continued to not fail when it started “drafting” the clumped, brushed fur, stretching out small sections at a time so they'd spin thinner threads instead of being a big thick clump.

Jayla helped by repeating the instructions over again as Murderbot followed them, without prompting. It was very helpful.

Murderbot was just about to start a second, much more confidant spin, when several humans noisily began to approach the door leading to their room, their footsteps stomping and loud on the stairs at the end of the hall announcing their arrival, and growing only louder as they got closer, and finally pushed their way through the doorway on the far side of the room.

Jayla looked over in alarm, and so did Murderbot, because it had no other way of seeing who it was without its drones or any cameras accessible.

Unfortunately, without its visual enhancers, not only could Murderbot not pause or rewind anything, it also couldn't see that far away. Everything beyond the reach of its elbow was blurry.

This was one of the reasons Murderbot had chosen to stay as far away from everyone else during quarantine as it could.

Not being able to see what non-trusted humans were doing when they were more than three feet away (and that was really pushing it, at that point it still couldn't see any helpful details) did nothing but ratchet up its already excruciating levels of anxiety and paranoia, especially because it couldn't hear what they were all saying, either, if they were far enough away.

It couldn't tune, pause, or rewind its auditory sensors without activating more processing space, which would give the virus an opportunity to take control, and Murderbot didn't know if it would be able to regain control if that happened.

So it wasn't until Jayla growled, “Levi, can you please just fuck off? We came here to avoid people like you. Leave us alone.” that Murderbot had any hint about who these new humans were, besides the obvious fact that they were trouble.

(It was a possibility that they were stomping because they were excited in a happy way, but during quarentine? Purposefully seeking out Murderbot and Jayla? Not likely. Jayla didn't have any friends among the other humans in quarentine, and Murderbot didn't have any human friends besides Jayla that were on the station, let alone in quarentine.)

Murderbot did its best to stare in the direction of the Hostile Humans, but still couldn't make out anything but vague smudges of color against the orange walls, even when the Hostile Humans had walked (now that they were in the room, they were moving much more slowly and quietly, almost like they were trying to show off or stalking Murderbot and Jayla like predatory animals) more than halfway across the room.

Every cell in Murderbot's body was itching to leap to its feet and get in between the Hostile Humans and Jayla, but along with everything else right now, it literally could not afford to expend the amount of energy that would be required to jump to its feet and start beating the shit out of four(? Five? It honestly couldn't tell) asshole humans. It didn't even think it could manage to unbend its legs in any kind of quick way now that it'd been sitting like this for a while.

With its mechanical parts running on their absolute minimum requirements, with any non-necessities powered down completely, there wasn't enough energy left to produce any of the raw materials it needed to keep its organic parts functioning. It was only safe to run the needed processes for half an hour each day, which gave its organic parts just enough to keep going until the next day.

This was as far from the ideal as it was possible to get, and Murderbot wouldn't be able to keep it up for long. Its organic parts were quite literally being starved of nutrients. Every day this went on, the harder it became to restart the power generation process. Sometimes it wondered if this was really better than letting the virus overtake its systems.

Normally, with all its systems functioning properly, there was an almost perfect equilibrium between the energy its organic parts gave and took, and the energy its mechanical parts gave and took. This equilibrium was only thrown off by stress, or injury.

Not now. Now, its organic parts had to pull the whole load by themselves, and they were struggling under the weight. Murderbot hadn't been designed for its organic parts to work all by themselves.

Of the slowly approaching Hostile Humans, Murderbot could only assume it was “Levi” that gave the short, unfriendly laugh that followed Jayla's demand. Murderbot couldn't even see clearly enough to see if any of the vague brown and tan blurs had mouths to open and speak with. It had to assume they did, because that was the only thing that made sense.

One of the hostile humans spoke then, saying in what Murderbot recognized as a condescending tone, “What, is that how they teach you kids how to have conversations these days? It's not very polite of you to swear at me when I haven't done anything to deserve that.”

Murderbot more than got the feeling this jackass human had done more than enough to deserve a single “fuck” being thrown around, but Jayla had never said anything to it about these specific humans, so it had no idea what this specific problem was about.

(Jayla had told it lots of stories of encounters with other humans, though. Too many for Murderbot to count right now. Most of them were infuriating.)

“Shut the fuck up.” Jayla snapped back, sounding even madder than before.

Murderbot could guess what these assholes wanted.

When the members of the PreservationAux team had talked about how awesome Preservation was, and how it was such a perfect utopia, how Murderbot would definitely love it there and be welcomed there and not be treated like an object and yada yada yada, they'd all conveniently neglected to mention the fact that not only were humans on Preservation assholes towards bots and constructs, they were even assholes to other humans, especially humans who weren't one of the binary genders that most of the planet accepted as being natural and real, (“male” and “female”, treated as universal constants that applied to everyone, “backed up” by “Ancient Earth Traditions” as though nonbinary humans hadn't also come from Earth) and augmented humans.

Sure, the PreservationAux team - - with the notable exception of Gurathin the asshole - - were normal about Murderbot's gender and pronouns. But they were only...

...

...okay, you know what, Murderbot didn't actually have the processing space available right at that moment to count them.

The PreservationAux team was one small group of humans. They did not represent the larger whole of Preservation humans. Especially because all of them were either one or the other of the binary genders accepted on Preservation. None of them had even been born as a different gender and then changed to one of the accepted ones. Not even Gurathin, who hadn't even been born on Preservation. He'd spent most of his life living in the Corporation Rim. They had the genders male and female there, too. Just like some people on Preservation were also tercera or indeterminate.

Turns out, prejudice against nonbinary people made it really hard to get accepted into the kind of positions in the government where you'd get to go out on survey teams. If a nonbinary person wanted a position in the government, or anything else important like that, they'd have to fight tooth and claw the whole way, and it would take three times longer than it would for someone with an “acceptable” gender that was strictly either male, or female, with no variations allowed. It wasn't even acceptable to be both! You had to pick one or the other, and those were the only options!

And wouldn't you fucking know it, it also turned out that having the privilege of being one of the accepted binary genders also made you tend to not notice when nonbinary people were facing oppression you didn't ever have to think about, which was why everyone on the PreservationAux team (Except for Ratthi, who had a lot of nonbinary friends and relationship partners and acquaintances besides just Murderbot) had been shocked to learn that it wasn't just the fact that Murderbot was a robot and a construct and a SecurityUnit that made humans on Preservation hate it, they also hated it because it wasn't one of the binary genders, and didn't use he-him or she-her pronouns.

And unfortunately, this bullshit wasn't isolated to government jobs.

For people who weren't one of the two accepted genders, most of the people on Preservation treated you like shit, especially if you used weird pronouns. The only acceptable pronouns, according to these people, were he-him and she-her. Anything else was punishable by society at large.

Jayla, as an A-gender person who used nameself pronouns, was sitting squarely on the shitlist of all the gender-bigots in this stupid planetary system.

Next time humans told Murderbot a planet was awesome and safe and welcoming, and totally awesome and a utopia in real life, it was going to...

...

...Well, okay, it couldn't really think of a good enough response at the moment. It would plan one out later when it had enough room to think properly.

At that moment, one of the hostile humans started talking again, and Murderbot had to actually pay attention to understand what was being said:

“I just wanted to see if you'd be willing to reinitiate the conversation we left off the other day. I was so interested in hearing what you had to say in response to my observations, but rather than responding with a calm, logical, rational argument, you instead chose to be endlessly hostile and aggressive for no reason, making assumptions about me that have no basis in reality.

“When have I ever said I hated nonbinary people? I've never said that, and I don't hate nonbinary people. I just think, as I explained before, that your insistence upon not using any pronouns is done out of sheer, misguided selfishness, and I wish you'd think about how difficult you're making things for everyone around you. If you simply apply logic, and analyze how this language works, you'll find that using your name as your pronouns is simply a waste of everyone's time and effort, not to mention an insult to yourself. I mean, really, do you want to sound like an infant child?”

It could not be stressed enough that there was a long list of things Murderbot would have gladly traded for the ability to leap to its feet and start intimidating bigoted humans right at that moment.

But unfortunately the universe didn't work on favors, so all it could do was sit there, still unable to even see any of the humans who were being bigots. They'd walked closer still, but they were still maybe six feet away, and that was too far for Murderbot to see anything but the colors of their clothes, and brown and tan blurs where their faces were.

If it assumed none of them were standing behind the others, and that they hadn't left anyone standing outside the room to stand guard, then it looked like there were five of them.

(Maybe.)

(Hopefully there were only five of them.)

(Hopefully these bigoted humans were confidant enough in their abilities that they hadn't left anyone to be a lookout.)

(Hopefully their confidence didn't reflect reality)

One of the blurry shapes suddenly broke away from the group and started moving even closer to where the Jayla and Murderbot were sitting on the desk.

Jayla said something at that point, voice even louder and angrier, but Murderbot completely missed it. It was too busy panicking and trying to frantically restart its power generation systems to give it enough energy to fight back.

But it couldn't start the process fast enough, (and even if it had been able to start the process immediately, the process itself still took time to work) and the hostile human had reached the desk before Murderbot even knew what was happening.

What actually happened next, Murderbot couldn't remember, because expending the energy to try and get more energy so quickly, and without the proper warmup ahead of time, sent its systems crashing, and crashing hard.

Its vision cut out with the finality of death, as did all physical sensation, both from its organic skin, and the weight of its now inert mechanical parts. The only thing it could feel was a horrible sensation of vertigo, like everything had disappeared and all that was left was its mind falling rapidly into an endless void.

It tried in a panic to move, to catch itself, but nothing happened, except the sensation of falling got worse.

Eventually, it lost even that much awareness, and everything just stopped.

It regained consciousness in a few scattered instances over the next indistinguishable interval of time, learning nothing except that it was still, somehow, alive, and in no better condition than before.

Each time it began to regain some sort of awareness, it faded away again after what felt like only a few moments of sensation - - muffled sounds, the horrible feeling of undampened pain, and, once, a bright light, shining purple through its closed eyes.

When it finally regained full, proper consciousness, everything returned with a sudden snap of almost-clarity. The pain in its wrist, the ache on its shoulder, and an all-encompassing feeling of pure and utter exhaustion.

Its eyes opened as soon as it was convinced it really was properly awake this time, and it sat upright to whip its head around to stare at the room it found itself in.

It was still clearly part of the office building the quarantine was confined to, but it was a room Murderbot hadn't physically been in yet. It had sent drones while it was mapping the place originally, but that had been what now felt like forever ago, and it had never seen it with its own eyes.

Which wasn't saying much, considering all its mechanical parts were still either shut down or operating at their lowest possible levels.

Sitting up so quickly had taken a lot more energy than it'd thought it would, and now Murderbot had to struggle just to stay upright. With its mechanical parts no longer supporting themselves, it felt like it had dead weights strapped all over its body and running straight through its insides.

Technically, it literally did.

What little it could see of the room was mostly the pastel orange of the walls, the brown of the polished floor, and random smudges of blue or white of what it could only assume was a collection of chairs and tables on the other side of the small room. Something blue was also hanging down from the ceiling. Bright squares of light shone downward from the cells arranged around the tops of the walls.

Beyond the probably tables and chairs was a huge window that took up most of the wall, now showing, to Murderbot's eyes strained, nothing but blackness, no stars or ships in sight.

Murderbot looked down at itself, and discovered via cautious probing with a shaking, heavy hand, that it was lying on a thick cushion of orange bedding, with a thin matching blanket that had been pulled up over its shoulders, now piled about its waist from when it had sat up and knocked it away.

It was still wearing its clothes. All articles were accounted for, but its eyeguard was gone, and its scarf, which from what its questing fingers could tell was in a dissaray. It hadn't yet mastered the techniques to pinning it as securely as Jayla could. (Or maybe, someone had messed it up on purpose, just to fuck with it.)

For a few fraught seconds, it panicked even in spite of the greater danger of the situation. About the idea that someone had purposefully messed with its scarf, the fact that it had obviously had to be carried here by humans since none of the bots were the find that could carry things, and the fact that its eyeguard was gone. It absolutely would not be able to handle being forced to make eye contact right now. If it had to put up with that along with everything else, it would just shutdown forever.

Fortunately, it only took those few seconds of twisting its head and unsuccessfully straining its eyes around the room to find the eyeguard, lying on the floor folded up next to the cushion where its head had been, the metallic blue standing out against the dark floor.

It tried to grab the legs of the eyeguard, but ended up missing and wrapping its fingers around the single, wide lens instead. Fortunately, the eyeguard was sturdy and resisted marks of all kinds, so no harm was done, except to further illustrate how much Murderbot was struggling without all of its functions working as intended.

Unfortunately for Murderbot, the eyeguard had not been created to enhance its vision, because it had never predicted anything like this situation coming. It had never imagined it would need help with its eyes at all. It had spent all of its life being able to filter and scan and see with perfect clarity even while the humans around it were helpless in the dark or the fog. And now, in a brightly lit room, it couldn't even see its own hand when it lowered it away from the eyeguard. It was nothing but a blur of dark brown with a cuff of black. It barely even looked like a hand.

And it hurt. Its wrist still continued to ache, and its pain dampeners were still nonfunctioning. It had forgotten how high it had had to keep its pain dampeners since it had damaged its wrist, just to keep the pain tolerable. No one had been able to fix it - - not ART, not Theta, not the medics of any of the Preservation clinics it had been dragged to on various occasions, not even when those miners had stolen a broken-on-the-edge-of-trash cubicle from the Company.

What Murderbot had done to its wrist was not something that could be fixed like back to before it had happened. It was such a unique and downright fucking weird injury that shouldn't have been possible to sustain in the first place, and SecurityUnits hadn't been built to last this long anyways. They were supposed to be thrown out as soon as they started slowing down or showing glitches. Most didn't even get to that point before they were killed protecting clients or by clients. The damage Murderbot had done to it wrist could not be repaired.

It just wasn't possible, not unless it wanted to get an entirely new forearm and hand, which by itself would be next to impossible for its systems to work with, and would come with its own host of brand new problems. Like the lack of a gun port, for one thing, and the probably-inferior materials would probably degrade faster than the rest of its body, so it'd have to keep replacing it and it would become this whole big ordeal.

Murderbot just had to live with the pain in its wrist, like it had been for the last few years. The only difference now was that now, it was actually feeling the pain as pain, not just constant reliability drop reports. Because even with its pain dampeners turned on, the pain was still there, still causing stress to its systems and taking up space and energy.

And unlike humans, Murderbot couldn't take pain medication for it.

Humans were able to use pain medicine because their organic systems were able to dissolve and process the medicine in a way that would let it take effect. Murderbot didn't even have a stomach, let alone any real counterparts to a human, or even augmented human's pain-sensing systems, so most pain medications didn't work on it.

Some topical numbing ones could work, but only did their job properly if the actual injury that was causing the pain was on the surface of Murderbot's skin, which wasn't the case for the problem with its wrist. Its skin had healed back over fine, that's what it was designed to do in case of injury. It was the internal structures that were permanently damaged.

No one had ever intended a construct of any kind to be damaged in the way that Murderbot had damaged its wrist. And in the event that someone who was still enslaved was damaged in such a way, they'd just be fucking destroyed once anyone with the corporation that owned them noticed. No one had any use for disabled SecurityUnits.

Murderbot lowered its shaking hand back to the ground, and watched, through the eyeguard, as its hand went from a dark brown, vaguely hand-shaped blur, to a vague, dark brown blur without any concrete shape.

It had never thought it'd need the eyeguard for anything more than hiding its eyes from other people. Now it wished it had planned ahead. But there was no way it could have seen any of this coming.

The metallic coating on its eyeguard worked as a one-way mirror, reflecting back to other people their own faces, rather than Murderbot's eyes, so it didn't have any pressure to make eye contact, and people couldn't tell if it was looking at them or not. The mask it wore over its mouth and nose was, similarly, to stop humans from reading its facial expressions. The scarf was because it liked how it looked, and to further hide its features from prying eyes.

Jayla had been the one who had finally convinced Murderbot it could wear a headscarf if it wanted to. Some humans (Like Jayla) wore them for religious purposes, but being religious wasn't a requirement for wearing one, there were lots of cultures that included headscarfs.

Mostly, it had taken Murderbot so long to start wearing one because it hadn't been able to shake the worry that it would attract too much attention to itself and be caught by the Company again. Even when it was in Preservation space, it still could never fully shake the fear that the Company was going to come hunting for it.

The facemask on the other hand, had been a much easier practice to step into, because they were already common fashion for humans, when they were sick, or trying to avoid being sick, trying to avoid allergies, or just wanted to hide their mouths and nose.

Murderbot actually had several masks of different styles that it changed out whenever it felt like it. Some of them were The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon themed, others were various pride and defiance flags. One had been made for it by Jayla, and another one was from Ratthi.

It put the eyeguard back on, and felt a small fraction of relief knowing that at least now its eyes were hidden again. Lifting its hand to its face to do so left its arm feeling like it weighed a ton, and it had to drop it back to its side before it could try to fix its scarf. The best it could manage was pulling the hood of its sweatshirt up, and pulling on the strings to tighten it.

Probably, it should be lying back down now, before it fell over, but it wasn't willing to admit that much defeat yet, even though every moment it remained upright, Murderbot could almost literally feel the energy draining out of it.

As a compromise, Murderbot furiously pushed itself further back on the cushion until it could lean its back against the wall. It shut its eyes, hoping that not having to analyze any visual input would help mitigate the energy drain.

After a few moments of sitting there with its eyes closed, it still couldn't tell if it was actually helping or not.

Probably not.

And anyways, the real question it should be asking was:

What, besides the obvious, had happened?

Obviously it had had an involuntary shutdown due to trying to expend energy it literally didn't have. But where was Jayla? What had happened with the hostile humans?

It wanted to get up and go find out, but even just the thought of moving was exhausting. Despite its best efforts, it found itself slipping slightly down the wall, unable to keep itself upright even with that support.

With the very last of its stubborn strength, it managed to thump itself off the wall and back onto the cushion it'd been lying on before. But it had no strength left to grab the blanket and cover itself again, so all it could do was lie there, eyes still closed, and wait for the remainder of its battery to tick down once more.

At some point, Jayla entered the room, breathing heavily as though Jayla had jogged the whole way there. Murderbot had no awareness of Jayla's entrance, just that Jayla was suddenly there, standing over it and peering down worriedly, breathing loud in the quiet room. The only reason it knew it was Jayla at all was because of the light purple hijab.

Jayla gasped audibly when Jayla saw that Murderbot was conscious, and it could just barely make out Jayla's movements as Jayla wrapped Jayla's arms around Jayla's chest in obvious concern.

“SecurityUnit, can you hear me?” Jayla asked, not making any move to get closer or touch Murderbot despite the clear concern. (This, it thought groggily, was one of the reasons it trusted and liked Jayla.)

Murderbot managed to nod, unable to figure out any way of clearly saying “yes” with its eyes. Then it remembered it was wearing the eyeguard, so that wouldn't have worked anyways. (Sometimes characters in fiction were able to communicate with just their eyes, but Murderbot was pretty sure that wasn't actually possible)

Jayla sighed audibly with relief, and said, “Okay. I'll try to keep this simple - -” Jayla took a steadying breath, then continued, voice only still slightly breathless, “The good news is, they figured out how to kill the virus for all of us - - augmented humans, and robots, and the computer systems. The bad news is, the healthware has to be installed physically, it can't just be transmitted through the feed. They have to get your consent to apply it to you. For you, It'll require surgery, going in through the back of the neck, then they have to attach the transmitter to, to - -” Jayla's words stumbled to a halt, then Jayla continued, sounding aggravated, “Shit. I can't remember what they said it was called. They have to attach it to something in your skull, but I can't remember what it's called.”

Murderbot could just barely make out Jayla turning Jayla's head to look over Jayla's shoulder as Jayla continued, “One of the technicians is supposed to be coming to explain it better, but they kept stopping to help everyone else. I explained that you were having trouble staying conscious, that they needed to send someone to help you first, but they kept brushing me off!”

Jayla's voice had gotten steadily more angry the longer Jayla spoke, until Jayla's voice was a snarl.

Murderbot's vision was starting to darken again, and it wasn't sure what it missed, but the next thing it, knew, Jayla's voice was roaring, loud enough to momentarily shock it back into awareness, “Hey! There's a person dying in here! We need help! Medic!”

“Coming! I'm coming!” a fainter voice called back, high-pitched and frantic.

Murderbot wasn't aware of losing consciousness again, but the next time it was aware of reality, things had changed again.

It was no longer lying down, it was being carried by a bot, supported under the legs and behind its back, neck, and head by soft, conforming paddles. When it managed to open its eyes, it found itself staring into the blue glow of a giant medical scanner, with a smaller grey nutrient radiator in the center, the indicator lights glowing visibly green, lighting up the precice logo engraved on the side.

It was such a familiar sight that, for a few moments, Murderbot forgot to be shocked. Then it realized what it was looking at, and where it was, and the confusion and alarm sent adrenaline pouring through its veins, which probably wouldn't help its long-term recovery, but it sure made it easier to think, with all due shock:

Where the fucking hell did Preservation get one of these?

This was fucking Company technology, proprietary technology, one of their most closely guarded secrets, just below the secret of how they built their constructs in the first place.

Murderbot couldn't even currently calculate how long it had been since it'd been under the light of one of these nutrient generators, but it had been too long. Way too fucking long. The soft white glow was almost invisible within the blue light from the medical scanner, but Murderbot could feel it working. It was like it could literally feel its organic cells revitalizing as the nutrients they'd been starved of was finally provided. Like little sparks of life on and under its skin, but in a pleasant way.

Already, it felt more aware than it had for the past several days. It hadn't realized how much of a toll had been taken on it until the weight was being lifted.

But there was a downside - - the nutrient generator was always used when it was time for Murderbot to go into standby mode. It didn't want to do that now, but the ingrained force of habit, from before it could even remember, still had a hold of it, and against its will, it found its eyes getting heavier and heavier despite its attempts to stay awake.

Didn't it need to talk to a medical technician? They needed to get its consent to save its fucking life or something? It had to stay awake or they'd let it fucking die - -

It was then that a dark blue blur suddenly appeared in front of Murderbot's face, and Murderbot flinched backward before it realized the shape was just a communications limb being extended from the bot carrying it. A display surface unfolded from the end, and text appeared on it, large enough that Murderbot could actually read it even though the bot was holding it an arm's length away from its face.

The message read:

- SecurityUnit, we are with the CBAA, and we've taken over your care from the abled humans, you're safe now. We'll keep supplying you with nutrients until your cognitive functions improve enough that you can understand the procedure we need to perform to kill the virus, so that you can consent. -

Murderbot opened its mouth, and was surprised when it was able to speak. “Just do it now, I don't care what it takes.” Its voice bounced back to it as a weird echo from the dome of the scanner.

The first message on the display winked out, then was replaced with a new one:

– Sorry, but you will have to wait until you can actually understand the procedure before you can agree to it. My scan indicates that your cognitive functions are improved from what they were, but they're still below the minimum-requirement threshold specified in your medical contract. This procedure will require access to critical areas of your construction, which we cannot access without your consent, which can only be accepted if your cognitive functions are within the range you specified in your medical contract, and you have no proxies approved who can give consent on your behalf.

- You are no longer in life threatening danger now that we have the nutrient generator, and your condition will not worsen, so you'll have to wait until your cognitive functions are past the threshold before you can agree to the surgery. I promise you, SecurityUnit, you're going to be fine. It is safe for you to shut down, no harm will come to you. If any asshole human tries to interrupt your treatment, they'll get to learn what a stun rod feels like. -

Murderbot was too tired to fight back its looming shutdown properly, but it still felt the need to ask, even as its eyes fell shut of their own accord, “But where the fuck did you get a Company nutrient generator?”

But it eyes were closed now, so if the bot had a response, Murderbot didn't see it, and then it was too busy being unconscious to try again.

Ten days later, and Murderbot was almost back to its normal level of functionality, if you ignored the part where it had to use a wheelchair (literally, a chair that had wheels on it, that could be propelled by the hands pushing the wheels. The Corporation Rim had nothing like it. All the mobility aids produced there were high-tech and overloaded with unnecessary features and prohibitively expensive for all but the top corporate goons to afford)

The wheelchair was to help ease the strain on its body from 90% its mechanical parts being inert for over eight days, doing nothing but weighing down its organic muscles, which were nowhere near as strong as its mechanical counterparts.

The bad news was that there were a lot of parts of Preservation that weren't wheelchair accessible. The good news was that Murderbot didn't want to go to those areas, anyway. It had been five days since it'd been released ~under its own cognizance~, which was just a running joke with the other robots now, and it had spent the entirety of the last five days holed up in its house.

And, well, okay, backtracking a bit, maybe the phrase “normal level of functunality” was misleading. Murderbot was not back to factory default, it was back to the level of functionality it'd gotten used to since leaving the Corporation Rim.

At this point it was pretty sure it'd never get back to factory standard, even with the multiple cubicles several bots and transports from the CBAA (which was an anagram that was short for Construct, Bot, and Augmented Alliance) had stolen from the Company.

The nutrient generators and proprietary healing systems were able to fix the minor problems it'd been dealing with ever since it left the Corporation Rim that had been building up over time, but its wrist, for one thing, still hurt all the time, and now that the rest of the smaller aches and pains were gone and no longer distracting, it'd realized that something was also seriously fucked up inside its left knee in particular. Every time it moved it, Murderbot was now viscerally aware of the pain and the sensation of grating that was not supposed to happen. It was just that that pain had been buried under all the other sources of pain that had accumulated since the last time it had been in a cubicle. Which was why Murderbot was actually listening to the medical bots and using the wheelchair.

When had its knee been damaged? It could probably scan through its memory files from the past few years to pin down the exact incident, but it didn't really feel like doing that. It would rather just enjoy the fact that, despite its new awareness of the injury to its knee, it was still in less pain than it had been before, because most of the other bits and pieces of pain and discomfort it had learned to live with were now properly healed.

It was also enjoying (in an enfuriated sort of way) the fact that almost a whole team of medical technicians had been stripped of their titles and fired. And that was only “almost” a whole team and not the whole team, because one of them hadn't been fired.

That was Zeynep, the youngest medical technician, and the one who's voice Murderbot had vaguely heard calling out before it'd passed out again.

Zeynep, whose pronouns were they/them, (Murderbot hadn't actually met them yet, and they didn't list it on their feed bio, so Murderbot didn't know what their gender was) was the only one of the human medical technicians who'd been tasked with distributing the cure for the virus that had actually tried to help Murderbot, even though their coworkers and even superiors had tried to force them not to. The rest of them?

Had been hoping Murderbot would go into a coma before they could get to it if they purposefully wasted time helping the humans who weren't in critical condition first, therefore meaning they wouldn't have consent to cure Murderbot, therefore it would simply starve to death, and they'd be able to go back to living their lives, free from “the terror” of having a SecurityUnit living on the same planet as them.

(For the record, this group of humans didn't even live on the same continent as Murderbot. They were from the whole other side of the planet. (Not that Murderbot had been doing anything to terrorize anyone on Preservation anyways, but even if it had been, these humans in particular had literally nothing to be worried about.))

Yeah, Preservation's government could overlook a lot of things when it came to bigotry, but for such blatant medical negligence to exist on this kind of level, and so well organized and pre-planned, they had to crack down on it publicly, otherwise they'd lose any semblance they had of looking like they caring about people's rights. (Not that most of the people in the government even thought Murderbot should be considered a person, but still).

The scandal got even worse once Zeynep had analyzed the tools they'd been given, and realized that they'd been tampered with so the cure couldn't even be administered by them in the first place. Even if Zeynep had gotten to Murderbot while it was still conscious and able to give consent - - (But not real consent, because its brain had been too scrambled from starvation to actually understand what was going on, but this was besides the point) - - they wouldn't have actually been able to help. They would have cut open Murderbot's fucking skull to install the healthware only for it to do literally nothing except make everything worse from the stress of the (extremely invasive) surgery.

This was Preservation, so the bigoted humans weren't going to be like, executed or locked away in a prison cell or anything. They hadn't even been brought in by Station Security for their interviews. They'd just admitted their plan out loud on a live feed recording because they were proud of what they'd tried to do, and even more than that, they were pissed off that the CBAA had wrecked their plan by rescuing Murderbot.

As punishment, the bigoted humans had all lost their medical licenses, which, as far as Murderbot could tell, didn't really do anything besides mean they couldn't work for the government anymore.

This didn't actually stop them from being doctors or anything, though, it just meant they couldn't tell people they'd been certified by Preservation's government.

They were also supposed to be paying Murderbot and Jayla and Zeynep out of their wages in recompense for the harm they'd caused, but so far Murderbot hadn't received any hard currency, just some imaginary “Preservation Standard Monetary Credit”, available only through the feed, and accepted anywhere in Preservation space...which meant it was completely, 100% useless anywhere outside of Preservation space.

All Murderbot's contracts, including its social contracts, required that all payment be made in the form of hard currency only, no credit allowed, and it was the job of whoever was paying it, or their authority, to make sure the money was exchanged properly before it got to Murderbot. In this case, the government of Preservation was responsible for exchanging the credit for currency, which they'd failed to do.

Pin-Lee was off somewhere raging what was probably a terrifying (for the government) war against whatever council of humans was in charge of directing recompense payments.

Anyways, the CBAA had accomplished the “rescue SecurityUnit” mission by blasting a giant hole in one of the walls of the office building, since they couldn't get through any of the official entrances without hurting or killing any of the bigoted humans, which they had wanted to avoid doing unless Murderbot got almost to the point of no return.

(Murderbot was actually kind of disappointed it hadn't gotten to the point of no return, if only so the bigoted humans could have been killed to stop them from being bigots to anyone else.)

(Apparently, it had to do everything around here by itself.)

(That's a joke.)

(Definitely.)

((Stop laughing, Dr. Bharadwaj!))

Also, the CBAA had blown a hole in the wall instead of blowing up the shitty humans because they wanted to make a statement. (A statement less violent than killing bigots) A giant hole in the fifth-floor wall off the office building that literally none of the robots would help to repair, and were actively preventing human repair teams from fixing, was a pretty big statement. (but still not as big of a statement as killing the bigots).

(Yes, Murderbot really wanted to fucking kill the bigoted humans.)

The blockade/protest had been ongoing since Murderbot had been rescued and temporarily revived with the nutrient generator, and then had been placed in one of the stolen cubicles to complete the healing process.

And yes, you read that right. A stolen cubicle. One that actually worked, instead of just being broken trash that not even the Company could justify holding onto any longer. A bunch of robots had stolen functional cubicles from the Company.

Apparently, while Murderbot and the other people infected had been in quarantine, the CBAA had been plotting a scheme to raid the Company for cubicles after they'd heard about how quickly Murderbot's health was deteriorating.

So 36 bots and 12 transports had all volunteered to make a raid on the Company.

And then they'd done exactly that.

By launching the surprise attack on a remote mining outpost known to be outfitted with multiple SecurityUnits, and lots of human contract laborers.

Also known as: enslaved constructs, and enslaved humans.

So the first thing the transports and bots had done once they'd gotten close enough had been to deployed the copy of the code Murderbot had created to destroy governor modules, along with the secondary code that would give the now-freed construct more information about how their GM had been hacked, how they could double, triple, and quadruple check that it had been completely hacked, and some tips about what to do now that they wouldn't get zapped or fried if they disobeyed an order or moved too far away from the human who'd rented them.

The rest of the raid had apparently gone off without a hitch. Once the SecurityUnits were no longer forced to obey orders from the Company...the SecurityUnits and the humans just...Stopped.

Apparently, being stranded alone in the middle of an asteroid field for several generations made you form really strong bonds with the people around you.

Just by sheer path of least resistance, back at the beginning of their history, all of the humans and the SecurityUnits, no matter what their official designation was by the Company, had worked together as as close to equals as they could get, to make all their lives as least like a living hell as possible.

They only got food, clothing, and fresh air when they met their export quotas. And the easiest way to ensure they all got what they needed to survive was to work together, everyone doing everything they could, rather than just the jobs they'd originally been assigned.

The “bosses” stopped being the bosses, and started getting their hands dirty with the menial, hard labor just like everyone else. And when it came time to turn in their bimonthly (Company standard time) performance reports, they gave everyone else glowing reviews.

No one had checked up on them for over ten standard Company years, equal to almost 300 Preservation standard years. They'd all lived there so long that the people who were finally given the chance to escape were the great (times13) grandkids of the original slaves. None of the original humans were still alive, but the SecurityUnits, and the one ComfortUnit, were.

Through the 16 generations that had passed, as the humans succumbed to old age or the rare accident, the constructs had remained, teaching and guiding the new generations, who, by the time the original slave's grandchildren grew up, had become so distant from the original slaves in the eyes of the governor modules that they no longer had the authority to command any of the constructs in a punishable way. The only GM-enforced laws were in regards to maintaining law and order around the facility - - an obligation that took no effort to follow, because none of the humans were interested in starting a conflict big enough to count as a problem as far as the outdated governor modules were concerned.

The CBAA bots had gone to the facility with the intention of freeing slaves and stealing cubicles. They'd expected the slaves to have to put up at least an obligatory fight, in order to forestall punishment by the Company, but no such fight came.

They ended up rescuing all of the humans, all the constructs, and even the computer systems, without a single casualty, and the biggest “incident” was some of the older humans having panic attacks about all the new people and places that made their world suddenly a million times larger.

But they'd all left willingly. They'd had to struggle every day just to get their meager rations of food and oxygen, and the promise of never having to fear hunger again had won them all over the moment a dialogue was opened.

Once it was feeling as close to 100% as Murderbot could get these days, minus the wheelchair, which it found itself appreciating a lot more than it thought it would, four days after it was released from the clinic, it invited Jayla (Who had let it know that anytime it wanted to hang out, just to let Jayla know, Jayla was almost never busy) to its house to finally continue their yarn-spinning lesson in peace.

(Only people Murderbot liked were allowed in its house, and only if it was in the mood for visitors. Having doors you could lock and windows you could opaque to keep humans out and stop them from bothering you was never going to get old.)

No one would be interrupting them this time with all the doors locked and drones circling the perimeter, so this time Murderbot actually got to try drafting and spinning the yarn for itself, all on the drop spindle Jayla had given it, which had miraculously survived the catastrophe of Murderbot overexerting itself and almost dying again. The end product of dagro was more bumpy and uneven than Jayla's, but it was only its first attempt, and it was proud of what it had created.

Jayla told it that the constructs from the mining facility had been asking about it, and were really excited to meet it. It'd been centuries since they'd had any new constructs to talk to, and they wanted to thank it personally for supplying the code that permanently disabled what was left of their governor modules. Without Murderbot's help, they wouldn't have been able to leave the facility with the rest of the rescue party, even if any of their baby humans had ordered them to.

This was the first time Murderbot had actually gotten confirmation that its GM-killing code worked, and it had had to spend several hours straight in standby mode to process that information when it had first gotten the news. It almost hadn't been able to believe it.

But it was true. It had helped to free these constructs, and now they wanted to thank it.

They were excited to meet it.

Murderbot was proud of itself for the code working, but it was also scared shitless. How was it supposed to act around other constructs who were free? Who'd already mostly been free for longer than it had even been alive?

They'd already been formerly welcomed into the CBAA, all of them, construct and human alike.

All the humans who'd been born on the facility had had to be heavily augmented - - (or spiced, in their terminology) to allow them to perform the maintenance required for the facility to function, especially as the facility aged and got harder to maintain.

The humans, Murderbot saw when Jayla linked it to a news article, were actually so heavily augmented/spiced that they looked more like constructs than humans. Unaugmented humans probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Or if they could, they wouldn't care, as long as pretending not to know would give them the 'excuse' of oppressing people.

That was going to cause them a lot of problems, which made Murderbot murderously enraged all over again.

But Jayla was fun to hang out with, especially when Ratthi asked if he could come over to watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon again. By the time they got to the intermission in the first episode-pilot-movie, the mind-numbing rage had cooled to merely blood-boiling rage.

If these constructs and their human kids wanted to meet it, maybe it could handle meeting them.

After it had finished at least the first season of Sanctuary Moon again.

(Who knew? Maybe they'd even want to go on a bigoted-human-murdering spree with Murderbot.)

(That was another joke.)

(Totally.)

[elexuscal]

A popular human bonding activity is sharing photographs and other recordings of social events. I could understand that in the context of relaying vital updates of things which occurred at these events (for a very, very loose definition of 'vital') except humans did it even for other people who had been there at the time, and even allowing for the extreme fallibility of human memory, should be perfectly aware of who wore what and won which game or climbed what cliff or whatever.

That was what this social situation mainly seemed to be centering around, besides eating a drinking. My humans were there, gathered with a number of their friends, family, and romantic partners, and a knot had gathered around a display surface where Arada and the others were showing off a slide-show at a recent Survey Youth Training Day they had supervised.

This picture was a more candid shot. Arada and Amena were crouched on the ground, showing a younger attendant how to filter through dirt or something. There was another person standing right next to them, who caught my eye because: a) Despite having given lengthy anecdotes for everyone else in these pictures, this person had been omitted time-and-time again.

b) I didn't like the way they were standing so close to my humans and glaring.

"Who the fuck is that?" I said, and everyone laughed.

Seriously. Everyone.

I crossed my arms. "Fine then," I grumbled. They didn't have to answer me if they didn't have to.

Gurathin snorted. "Seriously?"

"What," I said, because everyone was still either chuckling, or shooting confused glances at me/my drones.

That was weird. I had already started running a feed search for the person in the images to cross-reference with Preservation's (public) image data-base and--

Oh.

I figured it out before any of the humans could answer me and Murderbot, this is why you should just shut up and do your own research before asking humans anything.

"SecUnit," Arada said, "that's you."

Yep. It was me.

Ratthi, sounding like he was trying really hard not to sound amuse and not really succeeding said, "Don't you know what you look like?"

"Of course I know what I look like," I said. "It's just not information I bother accessing all the time." Why the fuck would I?

One of Ratthi's current romantic partners tilted zer head. "But... don't you have all those drones watching all the time?"

I actually didn't mind this particular partner too much (ze had been very accepting of the drones, which was more than some people could say) so I actually bothered to answer. "They're for watching other people, not me."

Which was only half an answer, and judging by the puzzled looks, most people knew that, even though they didn't press. The full truth was... I didn't really like looking at myself. So unless it was absolutely necessary (e.g. ensuring I didn't blow my cover in hostile territory), I generally filtered out that information. And I generally deleted my memories of it after the fact, in order to save space.

Which was the same answer I gave when Arada asked, "But SecUnit, don't you remember being at this event?"

Everyone boggled at my casual deletion of the day, as if humans didn't constantly forget all sorts of information with way less deliberation than I did. "But what if something important had happened?" asked Pin-Lee.

"Nothing did," I said. And to prove it, I began reciting the report I'd written of the event for my own records (text takes up way less space than any visual media): "8:00am, set-up completes with no incident besides stubbed toe. 8:15am, Arada practices opening speech. 8:45am, Gurathin spills coffee on himself--"

"I think we get the point," Gurathin said. And with that, everyone finally moved on, as intended.

I did, privately, take an extra moment to review the photos everyone had been sharing, now that I knew I was in them. I only inteded to quickly glance, because, as I said, I didn't really get the point of looking at myself more than necessary, but--

--but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

I mean, I still didn't think it was fun, exactly. I didn't understand how some humans could spend hours taking pictures of themselves in mirrors and things.

But normally when I looked at myself, it was stressful. It was something I did because I was in a dangerous environment, and I needed to make sure I looked like a perfectly normal SecUnit or a perfectly normal human, and usually there was a risk of being shot and/or killed if I failed. And anyway, my face was weird, alright? SecUnit neutral looked weird, and so did every other expression, whether I was scowling or (ugh) smiling.

Or I thought it looked weird. It always had in the past.

It didn't look quite as weird anymore.

I don't know how to explain it, okay? I was looking at these recordings of myself and I looked. Fine.

I was wearing the really nice leather jacket I'd been gifted by Volescu and the others at a previous holiday exchange. It looked nice against my blue shirt. I'd let my hair grow out a bit, and I liked the way it hung over my eyes. My skin was darker than I remembered it being, probably because of exposure to solar radiation. And while I was still scowling in some images, in others I looked.

Fine. I looked fine.

... Maybe it was time to revisit the filter I was running. Just for the sake of optimizing my ongoing processes.

i see potential for a murderbot that doesn't know what it looks like because it's decided it's safe to delete that information and it automatically applies a filter to any recordings of itself that it processes, and then some day ratthi shows it a picture of of some of its friends doing something, and mb is in the picture, and it points to itself and says "who the fuck is that?" great comedy potential

[unconnectedthoughts]

So, obviously I absolutely loved Fugitive Telemetry. But I wish I had known before I started reading that it chronologically takes place BEFORE Network Effect.

Mostly because I reread the Murderbot Diaries in anticipation of its release and I would have preferred to read them in chronological order.

Also mostly because I was EXPECTING the awkward 'getting to know my partners family and oh fuck if they don't like me is ART gonna delete me/shove me out into the vacuum of space?'

[sendme-2hell]

Ranking the Hugo 2021 Nominations for Best Novel by How Gay They Are

I did this with the 2020 nominations because they were overwhelmingly sapphic, but now that I’ve read the 2021 nominations I think these are even more queer than 2020! The ratings are based on how queer they books are not how much I liked them.

6. The Relentless Moon - Mary Robinette Lowell

Rating: 4/10

Explanation: The way this author writes feels unbearably straight (and white) to me. She definitely makes an attempt to have a diverse cast of characters but is not very good at it so it ends up feeling more like a bunch of stereotypes than actually interesting characters. There is a sapphic relationship that is briefly hinted at in this book. A woman named Wafiyyah says she wants to use her one phone call (they are on the moon) to talk to her female lab partner. The main character speculates that she is probably in a relationship with this woman. Wafiyyah is mentioned a total of 12 times in the whole 500 page book and has about five lines of dialogue. But I won’t forget Wafiyyah and her lab partner. Giving points for her and then points for being on the moon because space is gay.

5. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

Rating: 7/10

Explanation: Well, you can’t have a book about an academic cult without at least one of them being gay. This is a misleading description of what Piranesi is actually about, but idk...something about academia, people obsessed with the classics, greek aesthetics, and being gay. There is definitely homoerotic vibes going on through the whole book as well as mentions that that one character is, “picking up men,” and was “gay before it was legal,” and uh...maybe doing some other things. It’s unclear to me. 

*Okay to be honest the next three books on this list are all pretty equally queer. They all have multiple queer characters and are pretty diverse in other ways too. So I ranked them arbitrarily.

4. Network Effect - Martha Wells 

Rating: 8/10

Explanation: The thing that is great about the Murderbot books is that queerness is very normalized. There are multiple queer relationships that are just mentioned in passing, and if I remember correctly (all the murderbot books are one big book in my mind), there is a wlw couple that features prominently. There are also a few nonbinary characters including the main character. Polyamorous relationships as well. I would like to live in Preservation, please. 

3. The City We Became - N.K. Jemisin 

Rating: 8/10

Explanation: You know what I was saying about how Mary Robinette Lowell clearly tried to make The Relentless Moon diverse and didn't do it satisfactorily. Well, N.K. Jemisin said “hold my beer.” When writing characters meant to embody the boroughs of New York, she made sure that the people would all be different ethnicities, genders, and sexual identities. Since, ya know, New York is pretty diverse. She did an incredible job of writing maybe the most diverse book I have ever read (what does that say about me? What does that say about the publishing industry?). There are lots of queer characters in these books including gay, bi, lesbian, and trans characters. Although their identities are not central to the plot so far, I think that a mlm relationship will become very important in the later books in this series. Okay it’s not really fair to say they aren’t central to the plot since I’m sure they are part of her central metaphor or something. 

2. Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

Rating: 8/10

Explanation: Like the two last books, Black Sun is diverse in many ways. Queerness is not quite normalized in the pre-columbian americas inspired fantasy world of Black Sun, since Xalia, the bisexual sea captain was sent to jail for sleeping with a woman. That being said, it seems that some cultures are cooler with it than others in this world, and non-binary and trans people are accepted. Queer relationships and identities are sprinkled throughout the book. Also this book is just great! I highly recommend it. Might be my favorite on this list were it not for my Locked Tomb brainrot. 

1. Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir 

Rating: 10/10

Explanation: Harrow the Ninth has many notable queer characters such as: the main character, the main character’s evil roommate, the main character’s dead ex-frenemy, a sword, a woman possessing another character (a few of these actually), God, and more! This is just a very queer book. It gave us classic lines such as, “gall on gal,” and “Ianthe had walked away from you, all split lips and gay loneliness” which was weirdly relatable. Plus I’m gonna say 1.5 gay sex scenes (argue with me about this). 

Other Notes (Continue reading for some random thoughts on these books, my actual ranking of them in terms of how much I like them, and a comparison of Griddlehark to Mahit/Three Seagrass): 

*I would say this is a better list than the 2020 nominations where there were a few books I straight up hated. I liked all of these books, even Relentless Moon.

*I would rank the books in terms of how much I liked them: Harrow the Ninth > Network Effect > Black Sun > Piranesi > The City We Became > The Relentless Moon 

*I think it’s funny that “Black Sun” and “The Relentless Moon” were both nominated. Sun vs moon. Don’t make them fight, they are dating! 

*The City We Became was great but the ending was umm...very abrupt...N.K. Jemisin wrote the Broken Earth Trilogy so she can do whatever she wants, but yeah I have to complain about the rushed ending. Black Sun also had an abrupt ending. I guess they are setting up for the sequels. Vs Relentless Moon, Network Effect, and HTN which are just building off of the other books in the series so they don’t have to do as much set up. Oh wait, Tamsyn Muir didn’t do that much worldbuilding in GTN and therefore made me sit through pages about the difference between thanergy and thalergy that made me feel like I was in 11th grade biology class trying to take notes.

*The television show, For All Mankind has a similar premise to The Relentless Moon but actually has a few queer characters including a woman I am in love with. Seriously, more people should watch that show! 

*HTN and Piranesi are both books where you have no idea what the fuck is going on in them for ½ of the book and even when you finish you are left with a lot of questions + they both have unreliable narrators

***spoilers for A Desolation Called Peace and Harrow the Ninth (and amce + gtn): 

When I ranked the 2020 Hugo nominations I ranked A Memory Called Empire above Gideon the Ninth because Mahit and Three Seagrass kissed and I was salty that Gideon and Harrow didn’t (ok they kindaa did. sue me). Anyway, in Desolation Called Peace Mahit and Three Seagrass actually had sex, so in that they are still beating griddlehark. Though to be fair, they never shared a body sooooo... Griddlehark is winning there. Thankfully I didn’t have to compare Teixcalaan and tlt in this list because I don’t know which I would choose this time.

[theres-no-protocol-for-this]

Inevitable

Years in the future, Dr. Mensah has grown old and tired. SecUnits aren't meant to survive this long, but of course, this SecUnit has persevered and grown in the intervening years. And like all people, it comes time to say goodbye.

Trigger warnings: mentions of death, grief, and ownership of people.

ART offered me video clips of the funeral, which I frankly didn’t need.

Mensah and I had met a few days prior. She’d been at home on the family farm, seated in her favorite armchair, and the silence told its own story. As if the whole place was holding its breath.

“Come, sit down,” she offered, patting the chair next to her.

I did as I was asked. What else could I do? My drones stayed behind in the entryway, settling into a kind of perimeter (a habit that had served me well over the cycles). For what came next, I needed my own eyes.

“How have you been?” the elderly woman asked, her gaze focused somewhere on the wall past my right shoulder.

ART and I had just come back from a rescue mission in the Corporation Rim. We were mostly all right; nothing the MedSystem hadn’t been able to fix. I had a feeling she wasn’t asking me about the trip.

“Fine.” I looked at her.

Mensah’s smile was weary, and there were more wrinkles around her dark eyes. I could compare images, but it wasn’t necessary. I knew that this was… an end.

I could feel ART hovering in the feed, suddenly rendered silent. Probably running calculations because it knew inevitability just as well as I did. Probably even better.

“Liar,” Mensah said.

I nodded. “Yeah, OK.”

“Amena will be here in a couple of minutes, and we can get this over with,” she told me.

This was the transfer of guardianship from Dr. Mensah to her oldest child. It was… a formality at best. No one on Preservation thought I — or any of the other constructs that lived on the planet — needed or wanted guardians. But, the others had come later, after the rules had changed. I was the last construct with a guardian.

Would always be the last one.

I didn’t have anything to say and felt no urge to fill the silence with words. Around Mensah, I didn’t need to pretend to be human; being myself was usually enough.

“Once I’m gone, you can petition the council,” she added, and her voice trailed off.

I shrugged. What did it matter at this point?

“You’ll be alright, SecUnit.”

“Murderbot.”

She smiled at me and for a moment, she looked much as she had so many cycles ago, ageless and unstoppable. “I thought you might never admit to your name.” And then, the weariness returned. “I always wanted to see you happy. From the moment I saw you in that forsaken cubicle.”

The silence that followed was broken by laughter and a child’s voice. “Grandma!”

Sasha was all of four, and Amena’s youngest daughter. The bravest of her siblings, she took many things in stride. Right then, she launched herself at her grandmother, short curly hair bouncing with every step.

Amena followed her inside a moment later. Grown now, she looked a lot like her mother, strong and kind and unbreakable. Even though I knew better. She’d become a solicitor, and had largely taken over Pin-Lee’s job in the last few years. ART and I sent newly-freed constructs to speak with her when the time came.

“Second Mom,” Amena said softly in greeting. “SecUnit.”

I could see that she’d been crying, but she was hiding it now behind a mask of stoic acceptance. I could sympathize. SecUnits can’t cry, but I had some inkling of what she was feeling.

They talked for a moment longer, mother and daughter, while the little girl nestled in her grandmother’s lap, largely unaware of why we were here.

And then, Amena pulled out a display surface. Her hands shook. Her gaze turned to me and lingered. “Are you ready?”

Was I? No, but sometimes… we take what’s given. ART played the opening theme of Sanctuary Moon in my feed — the show had ended decades ago, but somehow the melody still helped. It had lasted longer than Worldhoppers, something I reminded ART about when it got too mean about the media we watched.

“Yeah,” I said.

Dr. Mensah nodded and took the surface from her daughter. “I know you and your partners will be good to SecUnit, but… I guess I’ll worry until the bitter end.”

“Don’t say that, Mom.”

“Grandma?” Sasha asked, confused.

I reached out and offered my arms to the questioning child. She crawled off Mensah’s lap and curled up on mine, a monkey clinging to my neck. I upped my body heat for added comfort. Sasha was one of the few people with the privilege to touch me, fuck if I knew why. Maybe because she’d once announced that she wanted to be strong and brave like SecUnit. Maybe not.

“Mom’s sad.” Sasha looked frightened, and for a moment, the family resemblance was unmistakable.

“Mom and Grandma have to do something very difficult because…” Amena began and cut herself off, clearly unwilling to explain the Rim to her child.

“Because the place where I was made is not fair,” I finished. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s give your parent some privacy.”

This was written based on a conversation in the Murderbot Discord server and the nature of inescapable death.

[brawltogethernow]

for the askbox: Gil (from GG), murderbot, and Wei Wuxian

fuck marry kill but it’s get them randomly assigned as your lab partner for a whole semester, get trapped with them on a broken elevator for ten hours, and have them as your employee trainer for your new job at McDonald's (you cannot escape the elevator)

Murderbot for my lab partner - it's the only one who doesn't have a strong chance of either inventing something hazardous instead of doing the assignment or ditching me. Murderbot will just do the work well and won't mind me as long as I'm polite and don't try to touch it. It's also the one on this list I think I have the strongest chance of actually vibing with while collaborating over an extended period? Wei Wuxian is a deeply annoying gremlin man. Gil thinks almost everybody is an idiot and is being polite about it, which is very fun in fiction. Not in person. Like I would want to get along with Gil but is it realistic.

Wei Ying for the elevator. Gil will try to escape, and the rules of the meme say he would fail, and even if wwx also does that and also uses mad science Gil is still the more hazardous problem-solver to be standing next to. And if, if Gil calls it and chills out after a bit, he's just as likely to sulk as flex his mediocre conversational skills. Wei Wuxian might not even bother before trying to make his own entertainment. He could also opt to whine the whole time, but there's a chance of that being more funny than annoying.

Gil for job training because I think it would be an entertaining test of wills, and also neither Gil nor wwx has a reason to be here but Gil better understands being normal about service work(ers) despite a comparably deranged upbringing. Wei Wuxian is an objectively better teacher, but I don't want to put up with his teaching style (constructively throwing you to the wolves) for skills I don't actually care about gaining, like being good at being a McDonald's employee. Like I would pick him to teach me swordfighting or bringing back the dead. Gil just says information he thinks you need to have to put together what you need to do very fast, which is also how I teach people things and works for me. Murderbot would also be competent, but its palpable discomfort would get to me and we'd be trapped in a discomfort loop, and I'd be nervous about asking it questions/for help, which it would interpret as me being afraid of it killing me and not me being afraid of bothering it. Bad. Also I literally just don't want to make it hypothetically deal with McDonald's.

[hoarder-of-stories-27]

So all I know about Homestuck I've osmosed from being on the internet, whereas you've actually read the thing, so I would love to get an expert opinion: I've been thinking Murderbot and Mensah are moirails. Do I have my pale shipping goggles on sideways? I would love to hear any thoughts you have to share about a Murderbot and ART moirailegence!

!!!!!!!!! *excited happy flapping* I would love to infodump about connections between the two things I’m currently special-interest-ing on, thank you.  (This got really long, whoops.  The short answer is “yes, I think both Mensah and ART are Murderbot’s moirails.”)

Okay, so, moirallegiance in Homestuck is a kind of relationship meant for people in a really violent society.  One partner is supposed to pacify the other.  From the comic:

A reasonable human translation would be the concept of a soul mate, but in a more platonic sense, and with a more specific social purpose.

Trolls are a very angry and violent race. Some are more hot-tempered and dangerous than others, to the extent that if left to their own devices, they would present a serious threat to society, or even to themselves. Such trolls will have an instinctive pale attraction to a more even-tempered troll, who may become their MOIRAIL. The moirail is obliged to pacify the other, to function as the better half. The two partners in a strong pale relationship will serve to balance and complement each other's emotional profiles, and thus allow their other relationships to be more successful.

The more dangerous partner also tends to protect the pacifying one.

A lot of people in the Homestuck fandom use a looser definition of moirallegiance, where it’s less lopsided and there doesn’t have to be a one-dangerous-person-and-one-calming-one dynamic.  Basically just queerplatonic partners.  I think both Murderbot/Mensah and Murderbot/ART fit into the official definition, though!  From Network Effect:

I could say it was an accident, I’d meant to take him prisoner and he had tried to get away and— 

Dr. Mensah would never believe that. My accidents were spectacular and usually involved me losing a big chunk of my organic tissue or something; she knew I could stop a human without hurting them, without even leaving a bruise, that was my stupid job. 

She would never trust me again. She would never stand close enough to touch (but without touching, because touching is gross) and just trust me. Or maybe she would, but it wouldn’t be the same. 

Fuck, fuck everything, fuck this, fuck me especially. 

I opened a secure comm contact to Mensah and Senior Officer Indah and said, “I’ve caught a GrayCris agent in the Port temp housing block.”

Dr. Mensah wasn’t even there and that guy wouldn’t be alive without her.  And from Exit Strategy:

I could take over the ship’s SecSystem before this human with the temptingly large familiar projectile weapon could blink. I could get that weapon before that human could blink. I wanted to do it, and it bled through into the feed.

Mensah turned, gripped the collar of my jacket with both hands, and said, “No.”

(...)

I sent, You have no idea what I am.

She tilted her head and looked more mad. I know exactly what you are. You’re afraid, you’re hurt, and you need to calm the fuck down so we can get through this situation alive.

I said, I am calm. You need to be calm, to take over a gunship.

Mensah’s eyes narrowed. Security consultants don’t get their clients into unnecessary pitched battles for control of their rescue ship. She added, Because that would be stupid.

She wasn’t afraid of me. And it hit me that I didn’t want that to change. She had just been through a traumatic experience, and I was making it worse. Something was overwhelming me, and it wasn’t the familiar wave of not-caring.

Fine, I sent. I sounded sulky, because I was sulky.

I hate emotions.

“Good,” she said aloud.

That’s... heavily reminiscent of the Karkat and Gamzee scene (arguably the most important portrayal of moirallegience in Homestuck).  And obviously Murderbot protects her.  Yeah, they’re moirails.  :D

Murderbot and ART don’t fit quite as easily into the comic’s definition of moirallegiance.  I thought at first that ART would be the dangerous one.  I mean, it is dangerous.  (They both are.)  But Murderbot’s usually the one who needs to be calmed down and kept from going through with its bad ideas.  There’s this (from Network Effect):

I was desperate. I sent privately, ART, tell them I need to go alone. Back me up. 

ART said aloud, I concur, it will be safer if SecUnit is accompanied by two certified survey specialists. 

Why am I even surprised. I sent privately again, ART, you asshole. 

ART replied, only to me, It is safer. I’ve lost my crew, I won’t lose you. 

Amena said, not helpfully, “Your face just got really weird. Are you all right?” 

No, it was confusing. I was confused.

And while Murderbot 2.0 did end up happening, ART was against it until it was absolutely necessary.

I do think Murderbot and ART could be considered moirails!  Especially if you use the looser definition that’s basically QPPs.  Still, I like “mutual administrative assistants” better than anything else for their relationship.  :D

I hope that answered your question!  Sorry about how long it got.  (Wow, I wish I could use this energy for things that aren’t my special interests.)

[phcking-detective]

8. Baby’s First Crime Scene

Fic Title: First Blood

Rating: E

Length: 7/33 chapters, ~128k

Tags: Slow Burn, Idiots to Lovers, Trans Character (gavin), Autistic / Asexual / Non-binary Character (nines), BDSM, learning to use good etiquette and safe words, Dom Nines / Sub Gavin, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Chapter Tags: more Tina Chen, Nines works his first crime scene without Gavin, Nines goes nonverbal during a confrontation, Nines and Tina discuss how the victim was shot (medical and detailed, but not overly graphic)

Link on AO3

***

Nines returns to the crime scene to find Officer Klein under the delusion that he is now in charge. His partner seems to better understand his place on the food chain at least, slumped against the wall of the hallway while enjoying his coffee and donut.  

Officer Rogers, age fifty-nine, active member of an online boston terrier fan club. A nearly negligible threat who barely even glances up as Nines enters the victim's apartment.

He stands quietly behind Officer Klein with his audio processor set to strip out the human's voice so he can focus on prioritizing the crime scene. [retrieve Gavin's jacket] receives an unnecessarily high priority. Nines attributes the discrepancy to the jacket containing his partner's cellphone, a device he frequently hacks for his own communicating convenience.

The laptop sitting on the victim's desk takes highest priority, followed by examining all surfaces for trace amounts of blood tracked away by the perp—before the human officer and two android units inside bumble their way through all the evidence.

Nines slips around Officer Klein's side when he turns to lecture the PC200 and calculates the optimal position for reaching Detective Reed's jacket without stepping in any of the blood.

Officer Klein stomps directly through it.

The human's lips move, so it is likely making sound, but Nines cuts that off when he grabs it by the throat and removes it from the crime scene. Flailing and kicking prove ineffectual. Still, to prevent the human transferring blood from the bottom of its shoes to Nines' dress pants, he tosses it down the hall.

The other human officer moves to place its hands on him, but then quickly rethinks that idea when Nines makes eye contact.

You just assaulted an officer. The human's lips move. Klein—hey! Stay over there, Klein.

The PM700 moves closer slowly in his peripheral vision. It holds Detective Reed's jacket, lips clear in Nines' peripheral vision.

Is this what you wanted?

Nines reaches out and takes the jacket without breaking eye contact with Officer Rogers.

You can't just lay hands like that on—for fuck's sake, Klein, you don't want to bother the Captain about this, trust me.

Nines locates the cellphone and pulls it out for the human to see. He gets a gun pointed at him for his effort in communication. Not that it would be effective in any manner, but still. The bullet ricocheting off his chassis could damage the two other police units or worse, contaminate the crime scene.

Are "—you all right?" The PM700 asks.

Nines broadcasts his reply from the cellphone. "Yes. Officer Rogers."

"Uhhh." The human looks at the phone, then stares up at him before intelligently asking, "Yeah?"

He has Rogers' attention now, but using the cellphone's text-to-speech function is tedious. Text alone would be much faster. Nines shows the phone screen to the PM700 without relinquishing it to her.

"I require the crime scene to actually remain secure," she reads aloud. "If Officer Klein tram—um, tramples through the evidence—"

Officer Klein beings yelling again.

"Then I will remove him. Again."

Officer Rogers attempts to calm the yelling. The PM700 glances between the two as her stress levels rise. The PC200 stands half behind the doorway of the apartment and flinches every time the human's noise rises above seventy-five decibels.

Nines considers removing them all from the building.

The yelling temporarily stops at least, at Detective Chen's arrival. Nines had not picked up on any additional transmissions for assistance, either from the other androids or over the DPD radio.

"I got here as fast as I could." Detective Chen ignores the other humans to address Nines. "Gavin texted me from this random number about blood and being in a hospital and—"

Nines reads through her recent chat history with Gavin, who apparently though it would be a good and coherent idea to text his friend and follow police detective:

123 &131

blood @ hosiptal

Given that Detective Chen has every right to believe Gavin has been shot, Nines decides clarifying the situation takes a high enough precedence to broadcast his actual voice through the cellphone.

"Detective Reed and I responded to a code one-forty. We found the victim still alive. He is currently donating blood at the Henry Ford medical center."

"Oh Jesus." Detective Chen bends over with her hands on her knees. "That asshole! I'll show him a fucking code one-forty. Goddammit."

Everyone stays blessedly silent while she gets her breath back. Almost everyone.

"He threw me!" Officer Klein suddenly feels the need to complain.

"What?" Detective Chen straightens back up and surveys the hallway. "Nines, report."

"Angelica Juarez, age twenty-seven, subject of the codes one-twenty-three and one-thirty-one. I have secured the crime sce—"

Officer Klein interrupts. "The fucking murderbot over here picked me up by the throat!"

"Nines." Detective Chen looks at him and lets out a sigh. "Why did you use your big boy hands on Peter?"

Officer Klein splutters and opens his mouth to say something else, but a sharp finger stab in his direction by Chen cuts him off.

"If you boys are going to act like first graders, I'm going to treat you like first graders," she says. "Nines. Report."

Nines continues to broadcast through the cellphone. He has no way to estimate if Detective Chen has done so for his benefit, but responding to an order to report is much easier than simply vocalizing. If the other humans leave, he may even be able to skirt his lack of a social module enough to hold actual conversation from his own voicebox.

"Officer Klein walked through trace amounts of blood that could have yielded a footprint from the perpetrator."

"Bullshit, no I didn't!"

Detective Chen lets out another loud sigh and pulls out a package of plastic booties from her utility belt. The other two android units already wear their own, unlike Officer Klein. Nines moves to follow Detective Chen inside the apartment after she finishes equipping hers, but she stops him with a hand in front of his chest. No physical contact though. Nines rates his estimation of her a little higher.

"Booties," she says.

"Unnecessary. I can perfectly predict where I—"

"Booties in the crime scene, that's the rule," Detective Chen insists.

The two human males snicker. Nines would protest an unnecessary and illogical rule further, but there's no need to subject any of them to more immaturity. However, even after deciding to comply, he recognizes that her pairs meant to fit over a woman's size 6.5 will not fit over his shoes.

"Here," the PM700 says. "These should fit you."

The official DPD database lists a PM700 and PC200 working together as partners. That is accurate. Yet the two have swapped appearances and seem to have altered their files accordingly as well.

While the PM700 has modded her physical model to have the appropriate facial and secondary sexual characteristics of her new series [gender?], she cannot change the size of her feet. Since that affects neither himself nor his partner, Nines designates that information as [irrelevant].

"They're … my partner's," she lies.

The PC200 who still hasn't dared to venture out of the doorway doesn't make eye contact. His feet clearly aren't large enough to fit either that statement or these booties.

Nines accepts the booties and practices giving [a nod]. Gavin does that when he doesn't want to actually say thank you, and speaking directly to the PC200 might raise his stress levels even higher.

Except now Nines has to actually put on the booties. Bending over or sitting on the floor would be undignified. From the [smirk] on Officer Klein's face, the human knows it as well.

Nines maintains direct eye contact with him as he lifts his foot and crosses his ankle over his knee, as he has observed some males prefer to sit. He remains standing however, for the first bootie and then the second.

"You." Detective Chen points to the PC200 in the meantime. "Sync up with the other androids who have human partners. I want officers canvasing the neighborhood in case the killer is hiding out somewhere or anyone saw something."

"Yes, ma'am."

Chen motions for Nines to follow her into the crime scene now that he is properly outfitted. Officer Klein is left outside as the PM700 tells him that was their last pair.

Nines reaches for Chen when she approaches the edge of the blood splatter too fine for her human eyes to see. He also does not initiate physical contact, only steps quickly to her side and holds his hand in front of her.

"The perpetrator attempted to shoot the victim in the back, but only hit her arm," he says with his own voice now that they are relatively alone.

"Might've dropped down when she heard the shots or tried to hide beneath her desk," Detective Chen mused out loud.

She surveys the desk, then crouches herself without letting her knees touch the floor. She should be able to see the bullet embedded in the wall beneath the desk from her current angle.

"That from the second shot or the third?" she asks.

"Second. Clean through and through the victim's shoulder." Nines stands at military attention with his hands clasped behind his back as he delivers his report. "The shooter then stepped forward, grabbed her shoulder, and shoved her onto the floor."

"Face up or face down?"

"Face up, on her back. Third and final shot directly to her chest. No exit wound."

Detective Chen stands back up. "So he's not a good shot. Aimed for center mass three times and could only hit her point blank."

"We should not assume gender at this stage, but correct," Nines says.

Chen looks back around the crime scene without moving from her spot. "Bullet from the first shot?"

"Entered the potted plant on the desk there." Nines points out the location. "Likely still within the soil. I will leave recovering the bullets to ballistics."

"All right, so where's this blood splatter Klein stepped in?" Detective Chen asks next.

"On the floor diagonal to the bottom left corner of the desk."  

Nines steps carefully around the congealing pool. Chen follows exactly in his footsteps until they're close enough for him to physically point at the evidence.

"If you cannot see the spray left on the floor, even human eyes should be able to note where the blood hit the corner of the desk. Being closer to—"

"Yeah, yeah. I can see that," Chen mutters, crouching back down again and staring hard at the floor. "This would be from the first shot, through her arm?"

"Correct."

"I can see the blood splatter underneath the desk over there."

"Second shot, through her shoulder. As it is located underneath the desk, it contains no foot or finger prints," Nines informs her. "As such, it will be of interest to ballistics only, for the purpose of establishing—"

"I know how ballistics does their work," Detective Chen interrupts. "Do you overexplain to Gavin too or is it just women?"

"Overexplain."

Nines replays the parked car conversation he had with Detective Reed. The human had yelled and hit the steering wheel in an attempt to communicate that Nines should not inform him of "basic shit" about crime scenes. Yet failing to inform the detective that the maid had cleaned all the floors at the previous crime scene had been an oversight of important evidence.

"I provide Detective Reed with the same amount of information," Nines says. "He has requested I text it to his cellphone so that he may privately sort what is relevant. You have requested I never interface with your phone again. Therefore, you are receiving my reports verbally."

Detective Chen stares at him a moment longer. "So Gavin wasn't just being mean or joking when he said you don't have a social module."

"I do not see how that is relevant now," Nines says. "We are working, not socializing."

"Oookay. Hey, Klein!"

Officer Klein enters the room, stopping short of approaching them when Detective Chen holds up her hand.

"Did you step here?" She points to the fine blood spray on the floor where Officer Klein stepped.

"I mean." The human shrugs and hooks his thumbs into his utility belt. "Yeah, I might've, I guess. But there's nothing—"

"There's blood here."

"Aw, c'mon! Reed walked through all—"

Nines interrupts him this time. "Detective Reed provided emergency medical assistance and is currently at the Henry Ford Medical Center to donate blood to the victim. If she survives, it will be due entirely to his actions."

Detective Chen draws in a breath, and Nines is aware that is typically a signal that a human will begin speaking soon, but he has already preconstructed what he intends to say and he will be saying it regardless.

"Your actions were nothing except negligent, and to imply that the two share any correlation is—"

"RK!" Detective Chen snaps. "Only person here who gets to chew out the rookies is me." She turns back to Officer Klein. "So fucking speaking of which—this is why you always wear booties and pay. Attention. You can practice the latter outside, in case the ME didn't get the message there's no body. And keep the media out. Go!"

Officer Klein stomps away upon being dismissed. Detective Chen rubs her temples, then smooths her hand over her hair and tightens her ponytail.

"All right. What do we have left?" she asks. "Like, tell me you can do something about that laptop."

"Correct," Nines replies. "I can provide an initial examination to determine what parts are damaged, if it can still run, and the most likely explanation for how it was fried."

"OK, great. Where are those other two bots—uh, shit. Androids?"

The PM700 and PC200 appear at the doorway. The PM700 waves. Nines does not wave back. This is not a social function and they have already been introduced.

"Are we allowed in?"

"Yeah, yeah, get in here," Detective Chen says. "RK, do you need any help … doing your thing?"

"I do not require assistance."

"Great, sure. What do I call you?" Detective Chen asks the PM700.

"Um."

The PM700's LED swirls yellow. She sends a message through the open network available to all androids. Nines monitors this network, but it is far too much of a security threat to join. Any android—or even a particularly adept human hacker—could send anything embedded in a message through that system.

"My name is Lisa," she finally says after Nines ignores several messages that were presumably intended for him. "And this is John."

"Hello, ma'am," PC200 [John] says.

Nines decides this conversation is no longer relevant. He makes his way over to the other side of the desk without disturbing any of the evidence and examines the laptop while Detective Chen chats with the other two androids before assigning them to interview the leasing manager and knock on doors to find any possible witnesses. Definitely not relevant to his own skill set.

The laptop is nearly obsolete even if it were running. The serial number on the back identifies it as a MSI GS97 Razor 0-87 that only has a tenth generation i9-1050H core processor at least ten years out of date. Parts of the plastic casing have melted from what Nines estimates at first preconstruction was a surge of electricity.

The power cord nestled beneath the desk still features a business card sized hunk of a power block, which has also been blown out. The outlet it connects too appears fine. Nines unplugs the cord, retracts the synthskin on one hand, and extends a single metal nail. 120v at 60Hz flows through his circuits, as is standard for an American outlet.

"Please tell me sticking your finger in the socket has something to do with the case," Detective Chen says after finally dismissing [Lisa] and [John].

"The laptop was most likely fried by an electrical surge." Nines stands back up for his report. "Ninety-six point eight percent chance. I have now established that the outlet has not recently experienced a surge, protected by the power block in the laptop's charging cord that absorbed the excess electricity."

"So something hit the laptop, jumped through the power cord, but then fizzled out before damaging the outlet," Detective Chen summarizes. "Gavin said you were looking at an android perp. Could one of you do that?"

"I could," Nines says. "Technically, any model sufficiently modified could as well, but such modifications are unlikely to be compatible with models created before twenty-thirty."

Chen makes a sucking noise with her mouth. This is an indication of thought in humans. Nines saves a recording of the action and reconstructs a facial model as well.

"What about unmodified?"

"Units created between twenty-thirty and twenty-thirty-five could possibly produce enough electricity to fry an older laptop, depending on the model. Any units from thirty-five to the current year could, regardless of model. Commercial models have internal protections in place specifically to prevent this however."

Chen leans over the laptop but keeps her human hands with their human fingerprints to herself. "So does that rule them out or not?"

"A deviant could theoretically bypass its own protective measures. May I continue my investigation, detective?" Nines asks.

"Yeah. Let me know if you get that thing running. I'm going to do another walk-through."

Nines acknowledges the statement with a nod, then returns his attention to the laptop. His attempts to connect with it wirelessly have been unsuccessful, so he tries a traditional interface next. No response.

The only fingerprints on the laptop belong to the victim, Angelica Juarez, age twenty-seven, arrested twice during public protests in 2036 and 2038. An android perpetrator would not leave prints, and neither would Nines, but he still equips his recently-purchased black leather gloves before handling the evidence, as per Detective Chen's preference.

Removing the plastic covering on the laptop's bottom reveals much of the circuitry inside has been fried, as suspected. While unlikely to be the only problem due to the extent of the damage, it is technically within the realm of possibility that the laptop cannot boot up because the information in the CMOS has been scrambled.

Nines picks out the motherboard battery with his extended nail, inspects it for damage, and replaces it after exactly three seconds.

The laptop does not interface with him.

Solely so that Detective Reed and possibly Detective Chen do not mock him for missing the most obvious solution, Nines manually presses the power button like an absolute barbarian.

The laptop still does not boot up.

Nines downloads a live version of Linux and attempts to connect to the laptop again so he can burn the OS to his own system and boot it up within his quarantined space, but the laptop is too dead for him to even force the Linux into it.

An actual, physical flashdrive may be necessary. Or even worse—a SATA-USB cord to connect him to the laptop like an overgrown iphone.

Gavin is going to mock him for weeks.

***

***

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 / 31 / 32 / 33

I also have a Patreon for this fic, if you want to support me! $1 gets you access to chapters a week early, $2 gets bonus content and deleted scenes, and $3 gets short chapters from two AUs I’m writing: an A/B/O heatfic and reverse!AU

this week’s bonus content is some more backstory on how Nines gets an apartment before the start of this fic, plus another chapter from the A/B/O AU where Omega!Gavin is in heat and Alpha!Nines offers to help (fuck him)

the money I make from patreon goes toward paying for therapy and hopefully HRT, since I have my first appointment to start taking T this October!

[acrophobicjack]

"jeeeeez, honey. you look even more bitter than you did when you were on the casino!" zane pouts, wrapping his arms around tim's waist from behind and crouching down to place his chin on the other's shoulder, kissing the side of his neck first. the fire is warm and he's not really focused on hammerlock or claptrap talking by him, just on timothy and his grouchy face. "come on. let's go look at our room. maybe you'll feel better then."

“No offense, babe–but when you mentioned going to a wedding…this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.” The doppelganger’s voice is low enough, trying not to allow the grooms to be to hear his complaints considering the venue. Body leans back slightly into the warmth of Zane and he offers a soft sigh at the kiss that finds itself planted on his neck. 

Timothy had all but leapt at the chance of getting to tag along as a plus one to a wedding. An opportunity to get out and about, dip his toes into the world that existed outside the Handsome Jackpot; a chance to hang off of the Operative’s arm like a piece of candy–and stake his claim on the Vault Hunter after the years (and Jack’s backhanded scheming) had kept them separated. 

He didn’t particularly know Alistair or Wainwright–but he’d assumed that being related to Aurelia, that Hammerlock would…share that passion for the extravagant. A cushy rich venue; some swanky gift bags etcetera. No one had mentioned the carcass of a fucking vault monster that loomed over the place. Or you know–the genuinely cursed creepy vibe that the whole place seemed to produce. He blamed the wedding planner--Gaige and her stupid frickin’ murderbot that hadn’t really seemed too keen on the masked doppelganger’s companionship up the Mountain. 

Mismatched eyes darted uneasily around the Lodge before settling back on his partner, a small nod given at the idea, already pushing himself to his feet to escape the awkward small talk.

“Yeaaaah. Yeah. But if I see a frickin’ tentacle in there I’m leaving.” 

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue. 

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics. 

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it! 

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that. 

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be. 

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury. 

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash. 

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’. 

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises. 

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right? 

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it. 

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’. 

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

[cassandraooc]

@dirkweek day 6: Splinter I was originally hoping to do a set of all of them, but decided to just do Dirk because of time constraints. (And poor time management, if I’m honest. I got a little distracted.) You might notice that Bro’s feeding Dave himself, instead of using Cal. Mostly picturing this as a what could have been if Alpha Dirk hadn’t been raised by a psycopathic possessed puppet. Though I also think some of what happened with Dave and his Bro was just Dirk being Dirk. I mean, his idea of a great gift to express his affection for the love of his life is to build a murderbot sparring partner that protects him but also beats the crap out of him. I’m pretty sure that the training he gave Dave wasn’t just preparation for the game, but a twisted, messed up way of expressing affection. (Especially if normal physical affection might have become associated with something wrong or sexualized from Cal’s influence, which would also explain why Dave would interpret this as Dirk loving the puppets more than he ever loved Dave.) Dirk expressed that he considered himself wholly unsuited to raising a child, and I imagine there’s been a thousand terrible things running through his head on how he must have fucked things up for Dave after their conversation. But no matter how much Cal might have messed with him, it’s part of his nature that Dirk is always going to be Dirk, because of his aspect, even when he’s Trickster Mode. So for that reason, I’m certain that screwed up though it all was, Bro really did try his best to be a good guardian to Dave. Buuut, that’s just my opinion, feel free to disagree. Hopefully you can still appreciate the fluff of a non-corrupted Dirk feeding baby Dave. :3