#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

[murderbotwritingprompts]

Prompt 1: Murderbot Is A CombatBot

Submitted by @walks-the-ages

Edits: corrected "CombatBot" to "CombatUnit"

= = =

Submitter note:

Woot! First prompt! Let's go with my most popular MB post as an official writing prompt:

= = =

Murderbot somehow finds out it was originally a CombatUnit, stripped of its extra parts except for the advanced hacking capabilities after the disaster so The Company could keep their super expensive equipment on call at their beck and whim without letting the media and public know they haven't destroyed it.

Keeping Murderbot functioning as a lower-ranked construct also allows them to dodge certain taxes.

Murderbot decides, after listening to the entire archive of Big Finish Audios to calm down, that this is the perfect opportunity to fuck with the company. Big time. Hit them where it hurts--

Hack their tax files.

[radiantmists]

does three have to reload its arms

[birdofdawning]

In my reread of Murderbot I'm becoming fascinated with the demimonde that SecUnit and the other constructs and bots inhabit, and of which the humans seem unaware. It's the sort of under-society that any servant class - especially one with its own languages and customs - develops for casual fellowship and to quietly support each other when they can safely do so.

[kelpiemomma]

i am not happy with my art right now and i so can't draw mechs of any kind, cyborg or construct or whatever, but here is a starting idea of CombatUnit!Khan

As a CombatUnit he's a little sturdier and more dangerous than a standard SecUnit. I wanted to try (and fail) at mech so he's a little more robit here. His lower legs are all mechanical, his forearms are mostly mechanical, and his hands are partially mechanical. (thinking of changing his neck,,,,)

his sternum and abdomen are reinforced externally, while his chest is reinforced internally.

he persuaded his hacker to give him a glowing eye feature after the hacker's younger siblings told him how COOL it would be (khan likes using them to scare the shit out of people)

as a standard CombatUnit his hair was in a buzzcut. He was typically straight-faced and revealed little. After becoming Khan he smirks a lot and grew his hair out a ton (so the kids can play with it and braid it).

someone tried to take one of his lil nibling kids. khan quickly tracked them down and made them regret that decision.

[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.

[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

[thinkicalcritter]

Gurathin: I've opened the gate so it can come through.

Mensah: Great. But… where is it?

Murderbot, fighting a CombatUnit: GLORY, GLORY, WHAT A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE!

[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.

[foxprints]

Commission for @rj-abacura of his CombatUnit OC! The propaganda style poster was fun. Thank you so much RJ for the opportunity to draw this!!

Commissions are currently open -- please DM if interested. Pricing is slightly different than what's on my currently pinned post, I just haven't had a chance to make another commission sheet 😅

[rockalillygirl]

Mamma mia here we go again…

So I have more thoughts because apparently there’s no bottom to the murderbot mindhole I’ve fallen down.

(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)

I’ve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). There’s also been some interesting related discussion of MB’s distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.

And I’ve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!

Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MB’s pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.

I’m very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.

The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!

I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):

https://www.tumblr.com/onironic/736245031246135296?source=share

So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries”. I’ll link the article here:

(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)

In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think it’s reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think it’s more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.

But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.

We don’t learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and that’s it. What little else we know comes from MB’s thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).

When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, it’s as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real “murderbots” that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, it’s fucking terrifying! There’s a collective “oh shit” moment as both MB and the reader realize what it’s up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldn’t have survived the encounter if its humans hadn’t helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.

And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an “evil robot” that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what I’d call a “Terminator-esque” manner: telling MB to “Surrender” (like that’s ever worked) and responds to MB’s offer to hack its governor module with “I want to kill you” (ES, pp 99-100).

(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they “kill all the humans” because that’s how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that I’m not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe I’ve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit would’ve talked like that. I’m just suspicious.)

(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks they’re assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. I’m not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that “everything deserves autonomy” is very much at the heart of the series.)

So it’s clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. I’ll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:

https://www.tumblr.com/grammarpedant/703920247856562177?source=share

OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions aren’t rigid- MB has implied that it’s been forced to be violent towards humans before, and I’m sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a “CombatUnit” plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).

This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it could’ve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and that’s why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think it’s important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just can’t know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they don’t have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?

I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think that’s because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world that’s not always the case. But, critically, this can’t be the case for CombatUnits because they’re enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).

There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that there’s a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). It’s a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldn’t help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnit’s core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because I’m very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just don’t buy it.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. There’s a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ART’s function to its own to explain why there are things it doesn’t like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. I’m not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they don’t) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in it’s own unique way). It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of “function” when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldn’t be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?

I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways it’s been more difficult than I expected. I’ve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldn’t, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting “something” in the very near future!

Would really appreciate anyone else’s thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ It’s been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.

[sevengraces]

I love that throughout the series Murderbot is both:

- one of the most spiteful beings I’ve ever had the pleasure of being the narrator in a book I read,

- and also so immensely compassionate 24/7 towards its companions and acquaintances regardless of personal opinions

———

Like yes,

-it’s internal monologue through almost every fight is I wanna win and if I have to die to take down this fucker I will, it just doesn’t deserve to win 

-While also, addressing every single bot kind of entity with this level of respect, comradery, and attachment, regardless of so-called sentience or sapience. Even going through extra steps to protect Guarthin and free the comfortunit despite how harsh it behaves towards the both of them.

———

The only notable exceptions I can recall to this sort of inherent respect it has is with the other bot/human constructs (ie comfortunits/combatunits/occasionally other secunits), which I imagine is the self-loathing talking,,, and that is something that improves measurably throughout the series at least in regards to comfort and sec units- which does imply possible change in regard for combatunits !!!

———

Like I know, this is like the point of the book or whatever but there’s not like a lotta moments in which I go

“man murderbot, You just kind of disregarded the like personhood (for lack of a better term) of that being.”

because like, there are a lot of books, in which,, despite the overarching moral being something to the effect of

[treat people well,] or

[everyone deserves respect]

there’s almost always exceptions to that rule that are implied or stated within the text despite the inherent contradictions it makes to what the author is trying to teach you (think hp w the supposed moral being found family but the plot being utterly reliant on blood ties above all else)

It’s just ridiculously refreshing to read something and not have to watch the author backpedal on their thesis once they get to the world building,,,,,

[violetcomplains]

Things I'd like to see:

ART and Gurathin have to interact. Gurathin is good at not putting up with bullshit from things what can kill you and I think that would annoy the fuck out of ART.

Rogue CombatUnit. Would it act similarly to a SecUnit? How much of what we've seen with MB and Three is programming and how much of it is the book going "people are generally good when given a chance actually" I feel like it's more the latter.

More info about the aliens. Did anyone else assume that the contamination being able to hop from organic to machine might suggest this precursor society were cyborgs?