#now it climbed up at least to thirty because its frankly fascinating and i want to spend more time examining how its brain works

[aleki-lives-here]

I'm still reading through Network Effect and Murderbot acts like such an angry (and very traumatized, actually) teenager. I love it.

But also it makes me wonder how the idea of age could be applied to it and other constructs? Like obviously there's no age in human sense (no making children, so no growing up stage, and I assume no old age... I wonder if a secunit could grow old if it didnt got killed), but age isn't just about physical changes in the body, it's also just lived experience that allows you to accumulate more data and skills and ways to solve problems and understanding of yourself and the world. Like, these are not synonymous with age as a number, but they are intrinsically linked to how people see different ages, and I say all of them definitely apply to constructs, namely Murderbot, and I think it's fascinating.

Because it doesn't have many general experiences, does it? I wonder how long it worked for before Ganaka Pit. I wonder what the very first moments of consciousness are like for a construct. I wonder what Murderbot was like before it hacked its governor module. And directly after? I wonder what revelations it had about its situation when watching its serials for the first time, and what it already was aware of beforehand. I wonder how much it understood itself and its emotions before it got the relative safety of media to explore the fact that it did feel things.

It, imo, can be incredible immature (see: angry traumatized teenager), but it also must have spent a while figuring itself out. It's more aware of its emotions and reactions than some people I know and can actually articulate (at least to itself) what it's feeling quite often (gods know it's more than I was capable of half a decade ago), but then other things seem to be virtually impossible for it to admit, and it's just so fascinating to watch.

I absolutely love the constant near breakdown it's experiencing this book. Just seeing it work through the emotions and act irrational, it's so fun.