#combatunit

[laatmaar]

A piece I started after finishing exit strategy. Wanted to use my markers again! Also black and white version under the cut!

[homosekularnost]

nonhumans . from the nonvellas novellas

[mavisthemae]

A side thing I really, really enjoy about the Murderbot universe is its lawyers.

For one thing, Martha Wells refers to "corporate solicitors", not "attorneys" nor "counsel". In one book (can't remember which), Pin-Lee refers to her General Counsel which is the apex of in-house practice.

Pin-Lee is close to perfectly written, she is strategic, sharp as a razor, pugnacious and ever so slightly too aggressive for everyone else's comfort, of course is a workaholic and is almost always up to her eyeballs in documents and drafting.

In Fugitive Telemetry, the second that Mensah even suggests displeasure at Indah Pin-Lee has begun her legal research, is preparing to advise and is champing at the bit to draw up a legal fireball. And she is not happy when the tack changes, but of course takes instructions and backs down. (I myself have never hissed when the opportunity to really go someone evaporates, but I have certainly felt it.)

And Pin-Lee is much more than a brain on legs. She cares very strongly about and for her team: in Exit Strategy she's well aware how dangerous a situation she, Ratthi and Gurathin are in, tries (not well admittedly) to buoy the others up and is sensibly cautious when Murderbot approaches her. When Murderbot returns to Preservation Space she's the one who makes sure that not only does it know it's free to leave again if it wants but that it has the means to do so (with the hard currency and fake IDs). She swears, drinks, parties and loves watching gruesome I-told-you-so media about hostile fauna.

She's sized up Murderbot and totally runs rings around it in her own domain - one of the funniest things for me in Network Effect (besides "no hugging") was the revelation that she'd written its contract with PresAux so as to try and keep it safe from itself. To its outrage.

The court system is never explained (with no apparent government, how are Corporate Rim judges appointed and their decisions enforced? Is there any appeal system? My guess would be that it's essentially treaty-based with each participating polity enacting the necessary legislation and the corporations entering into some behemoth multipartite Deed the breach of which brings the wrath of all the counterparties raining down...but that's circular, because - I'll stop myself here on the basis that very few lawyers will be reading this!) I'll buy it though as equivalent to the tech hand-waving. It's something that doesn't get explained because Murderbot doesn't need to know or care about the details for it and the story to get the benefit.

Pin-Lee, my unexpected sci-fi hero!

[radiantmists]

does three have to reload its arms

[inkedinserendipity]

just finished re-reading all systems red and the way martha wells' narration directly tracks murderbot's thoughts is, like, diabolical in retrospect.

because on my first read-through, i'll be honest. i did not remember the presaux crew at all. pin-lee and gurathin show up in exit strategy and i, remembering nothing about those two except ":D! presaux friends!" expected them to be like "omg hey murderbot!" because i figured the presaux crew would be excited to see their secunit again. i did not remember pin-lee's temper or gurathin's skepticism. because the presaux crew kinda blurred together for me in the first book. because that's how murderbot saw them too!

all systems red has the most en media res of all en media res beginnings. not just because it starts in the middle of an action sequence, but because it also starts in the middle of an emotional sequence. the survey has been happening, for, what - a couple of weeks? - by the time asr starts. murderbot has already met the crew. they have already formed impressions of it. but, crucially, it has formed almost no opinions of them*.

it's been watching media and half-assing its job. and at this point in murderbot's journey, and therefore its internal narration that forms the text, a human is a human is a human. it is not invested in their work, so we don't hear about the start of their survey. it literally starts paying attention to them when they are in danger and when they start to realize that it is a person, because that is when murderbot has to start paying attention.

and this is why i remembered almost nothing distinct about the presaux crew. there are a lot of crew members, but murderbot spends very little time thinking about them as individuals. so the narration tends to skim over their distinct personalities, because murderbot doesn't really consider them* at all!

and then of course we come to exit strategy and network effect, and the contrast could not be more clear. now it's got opinions about everyone, and because it has a better grasp on their personalities, the narrative does too. oh yes that's arada, wibbly bulwark, the human murderbot trusts to not be overconfident and ignore its advice. that's gurathin. it doesn't like gurathin. that's pin-lee, the combatunit of lawyers, well-dressed and sharp-tongued. and of course, that's ratthi (tag: bestie!!), who stays in the car because he will get himself killed by something.

and of course, there's dr mensah. but she was always an exception.

*dr mensah is, as she always is when it comes to murderbot, an exception to this generalization. that's tag: intrepid explorer like blorbo from my shows! that you're talking about. even when murderbot mostly tried to avoid humans at all costs, even murderbot paid attention to her. from asr to now, that has been and remains perfectly true.

[art-drone]

There's a cool moment in Fugitive Telemetry where Murderbot has a realization. (Spoilers...) It likes its plan to rescue the refugees secretly because it's not a "CombatUnit plan" (it's "a 100 percent less murderery"). But more importantly it's a "SecUnit plan ... The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else." It's a plan that SecUnits were actually designed for, "despite how the company and every other corporate used us."

This is one of the few times that Murderbot actually refers to itself as a SecUnit positively. It's not SecUnits are terrifying killing machines and "fucking dangerous," it's hey I was designed to do something important. Murderbot, for a moment, forgets all the internalized stigma, the trauma and the self-loathing. It realizes that being a SecUnit is a good thing.

Of course that makes things more tragic when (more spoilers...) the plan goes to shit and Murderbot gets shot by the very people it's trying to save. Because the perception that SecUnits are terrifying killing machines is real. A real perception that Murderbot has long shared. But that it could dispel that perception - at least to itself - for a moment is heartening.

[blessphemy]

I was ruminating on fanon vs canon, and the ways in which certain ideas, through the power of plausibility or compellingness, can propagate through fandom. So here's a list of fanon of varying popularities, that have never actually been canon. Plus an honorable mention of fanon-proved-canon.

Fanon:

The entirety of All Systems Red is a letter given to Mensah - This is a popular fan interpretation of the final chapter of All Systems Red, but personally I've thought that Murderbot might have just written a shorter letter separate from the whole diary.

Gurathin is from the corporation rim - Not specified in books-canon, but this is a popular fanon. It's implied that Gurathin or his grandparents came to Preservation "later," so imagining a corporate background is a reasonable interpretation, though it's just as possible he came from another Preservation sister system or non-corporate system.

ART’s university is from a non-corporate system - If anything, the books imply that the university is from a corporate system if you take ART's credentials in Artificial Condition at face value: Murderbot met it at a corporate berth where its university supposedly was. It's possible ART could have been lying, but it wasn't lying about its official designation of "Perihelion" at the time. Also why not a corporate university doing anticorporate work?

Amena is going to the Pansystem Uni of Mihira and New Tideland - Reasonable to project this out from her reading the University catalogue at the end of Network Effect, but she hasn't officially matriculated yet.

Amena and Iris are of similar age - This never actually is mentioned in the books but is nonetheless a popular fanon. I suspect it comes from Amena and Iris being compared in size. Amena is specified to be a young-adult/juvenile human. Personally I imagined Iris as older, grad-school age, doing dangerous anticorporate work and all.

The company name AmaSoft - Murderbot never mentions the name of the company in its diaries but CompletelyDifferent coined this one and it has been used since by multiple fic writers.

Murderbot is tall - A very popular fanon that you'll see people defending to death but Murderbot has no strictly specified height, neither in numbers nor referring to itself as compared to population average. I can say short king all I want.

CombatUnit handlers - originated in the fanfic my enemy, bright star dancing and propagated to other CombatUnit fics from there by dint of being a fun idea to play with. Two related canon things: 1. the mention of a "controller" for a SecUnit in Exit Strategy and 2. Years later when System Collapse came out and it was shown that Barish-Estranza employs human-hubystem-like overseers for their SecUnits.

The Pressy is sapient - Mostly just fun fandom riffing

Exit Strategy combat unit in the shuttle is the same one as the docks - A reasonable assumption on all accounts but not strictly defined.

Aromantic Allosexual Ratthi - This one is just cool.

Fanon that was later proved canon by System Collapse:

Iris is ART’s sister - We did it gang.

[spiderace]

One of the depressingly likely things posited by the Murderbot universe is that corporations invented a form of thinking, feeling human they can legally own and just pretended they were robots.

It's clear from the stories that even most full bots are sapient creatures (and in the utopian Preservation society, are legally people). Constructs with organic parts exist because bots think in an alien way. The corporates needed a humanlike consciousness to make judgment calls involving human behavior in a dangerous situation (SecUnits, CombatUnits) and to satisfy human fantasies of sexual behavior (ComfortUnits).

Murderbot identifies as a bot, and it navigates software and network environments like a bot, but the way it thinks and feels is emotional and messy. It's so very beautifully human. I read these books over and over for it, and not just because Murderbot acts like a person with autism, depression and anxiety (ahem). In spite of all this, it makes correct judgment calls about humans and situations when the stakes are high. The Corporation Rim is about as dystopian as it gets, but Murderbot and its humans and its story are lovely and optimistic.

[iamfuckingsorry]

so i really didn't like fugitive telemetry nearly as much as the rest of the series on my first listen, in part because i spent a big chunk of it confused about what the hell i missed because i was listening to it in publishing order, and in part because mb spends a great deal of it feeling super uncomfortable about basically everything

but i'm listening to it again now and i can really see why people seem to like it.

mb's really struggling with its identity in this one oh god. it knows it's a secunit it wants to be a secunit it is not a human or a bot or anything else and it does not want to be treated as anything else but what it is. but it also. fucking hates being treated as a secunit. and it's especially bad because so many of the people on preservation are trying to be nice about it, like there's several instances of people going "oh hi--- oh wait fuck the feed id says secunit oh shit it's the secunit--- wait no calm tf down it has rights yeah i know it's scary af but you still need to treat it like a person oh god okay let's be weirdly polite and pretend you're not scared" and mb clearly hates that immediate reaction to what it is, but it seems to hate people forcing themselves to be aggressively polite around it just as much, because at least that immediate reaction is what it's used to

ah mb both wanting to be equal and being horribly freaked out by the idea of being equal because equal means human and the idea of being human is so incredibly gross will never stop being entertaining (and very very relatable)

pin lee is also just so aggressively in mb's corner, she doesn't really play /that/ big of a role in the book but she's 100% fighting for mb basically from the moment it comes back to save mensah in exit strategy, and here mb just needs to be like "ew i don't wanna do that" and pin lee feels like she would fucking. kill someone. to make sure mb doesn't need to do things it doesn't wanna do. can i also get a pin lee please.

also the bit where mb talks about people seeing it on tv or something? i can't remember if it's the documentary or if it maybe comes up in another context but there's definitely a part where mb talks about how it wouldn't mind that actually. and knowing what happens later on i'm just like. ahhhh foreshadowing!! nice!!

and it gets to do proper secunit stuff! it's so happy about it, like "yes i liked this plan better. partially because it was a better plan but also because it was a secunit plan, not a combatunit plan". like i know we all (me included) wonder if/what kind of sexual abuse mb's been through the way it reacts to maybe being percieved as a sexbot and stuff, but it also clearly doesn't want to be perceived as any other kind of construct either. it's not a comfortunit, it's not a combatunit, it's a secunit goddamnit (insert bones "im a doctor not an ---" gif here)

and the way it just. doesn't understand the preservation bots at all. jollybaby probably thinks it's being all cute and friendly including and mb just finds it. annoying. the other bots are a variety of genuinely friendly and lowkey an ass but doing the same Nice and Polite thing that some of the preservation humans do to it, and mb feels all sorts of ways about it, like if all of them are playing some kind of weird game where they roleplay as happy content bots even though they couldn't possibly be since they're not really free

and its relationship with indah, and the way it goes from "ugh i hate this human" (because said human is very much treating it like a dangerous murder weapon, very fair reaction) to "ugh i still don't like this human but i wouldn't necessarily /hate/ having to work with her again" (because said human has actually started to realize that secunit 1. fucking loves saving people is just can't help itself, 2. is actually fucking amazing at its job, and 3. maybe really does deserve to be treated like a person)... like they're not friends by the end of it but they're much, much closer to something like coworkers who don't work the same way but are generally fairly okay with each other. god it just can't fucking help making some kind of connection with humans can it

anyway i dunno where i was going with this, my memory is too shit to actually pull up any specific examples and i'm all just about vibes, but it's just like

good book actually

[specialagentartemis]

I’ve increasingly seen the take that Gurathin, being the only one of the PresAux group originally from the CR, understands SecUnits better than the others and understands corporate greed and underhandedness and violence better than his idealist space socialist leftist colleagues… which always rings odd to me, because it’s well established that Mensah and Pin-Lee understand what they’re dealing with as intelligent, savvy professionals!

Mensah is the Planetary Administrator of Preservation; she is very nearly the President of the Whole Planet. It’s hard to believe she could get there and be regarded as a good leader of a small planet with neither military nor economic power in the galaxy and remain unaware of how the Corporation Rim works and how to deal with them to keep her polity safe. The company executives presented Murderbot to Mensah directly in their pitch for why the team needed to take a SecUnit; her multiple objections to this indicate that she does, in fact, know how unethical (and likely dangerous) SecUnits are.

Pin-Lee, meanwhile, is a corporate lawyer; she’s described as CombatUnit-like, and based on the fact that she went not only with this scientific survey but also with Mensah at the end of Network Effect on this short-notice and desperate chase across the galaxy, seems to be the go-to person to deal with off-world legal issues. Murderbot notes early on that being under the Company’s surveillance seemed to affect her more than the others. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that’s because she knows what shit companies put in their contracts, and what they do.

They aren’t naïve leftists who don’t understand how the Real World works, they are well-too-aware of the abuses and surveillance and callousness of companies!

(Ratthi watches Sanctuary Moon, evidently a CR production—Preservation aren’t isolationists. The whole Preservation backstory is of a community’s escape from callous, profit-driven corporate abandonment of their grandparents’ generation to die. I would think Preservation people would be, as a society, aware and very wary of CR corporations.)

Their trust they place in Murderbot in All System Red is very likely influenced by Preservation’s cultural values of dignity, support, freedom, responsibility to each other, bot citizenship, all that good stuff—but it’s certainly not blindly, naïvely unaware of alternative possible perspectives. And that’s why it’s powerful: they’re making a conscious choice, measuring its actions and its rights as a person against the propaganda and fear, that Murderbot deserves that respect and dignity and freedom and trust as a person and not just as an arm of untrustworthy corporations.

(And like. Also the fact that “Gurathin is from the CR” is not explicitly canon, either. We don’t know where he’s from originally; the CR is a reasonable interpretation, certainly, it fits the facts, but it’s still an interpretation that fans have to make rather than actually being text. And I think in these discussions that ought to be remembered too. )

[grammarpedant]

Gurathin's "bewildered, trusting, naive socialist friends" include Madame President of the Planet and her high-powered CombatUnit-grade human rights lawyer, but go on, tell us how much wiser the man is who rifled through a slave's brain to find it couldn't be controlled, and then taunted it with his supposed control over it, than the overly emotional socialist women around him.

[jadefyre]

so I've seen a lot of different takes on what constitutes a Combat SecUnit (and I love them all!!) but

what if somebody gets a hold of Murderbot sometime post-SC and is looking at its systems and goes "wait, crap, nobody told us this was a CombatUnit" because it turns out that by altering its own configuration and upgrading its own hacking/coding/input-wrangling skills, Murderbot basically self-upgraded into one

and then of course it breaks itself out while having a little existential crisis about it

[larkspirereads]

There's something really fascinating about the responses to Murderbot using "it" pronouns and giving its gender as "indeterminate" or "not applicable". Lots of reviewers call it "he"; lots of people say Skarsgard is the wrong casting because "Murderbot passes as female and uses 'she' pronouns" which is just. Not true? I mean, I'm not completely done with System Collapse but I don't think this is going to happen in the next 50 pages?

Where is all the gendering coming from; do people even realize they're doing it?

(Don't get me wrong, I don't think Skarsgard is the right person for the role (though I can see him as Combatunit or Three), and it gives me a lot of misgivings about the direction the series will take the character. But not for this reason)

[polyhexian]

I'm going to come up with a three design I'm happy with eventually, but. CombatUnit in ship pajamas lol

[art-drone]

Though it is more likely that Murderbot learned to swear from all the media it downloaded, I think Ratthi's idea that it might have picked it up from Pin-lee is absolutely hilarious. Like it observed her swearing while she was doing her CombatUnit-like lawyer routine and thought I like that, I'll add that to my vocabulary module.

[themirokai]

She meant Pin-Lee because she said "terrifying." Being the top Preservation expert in dealing with contract law in the Corporation Rim apparently made Pin-Lee like the CombatUnit version of a lawyer.

As if I needed another reason to love Pin-Lee.