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wildminti

Grace, your friend is an apex predator.

greatsnakestintin

has this been done

pineappical

think about it long time

tuherrus

felt compelled to doodle a significant forehead press ™

lexazqqc

🌸

loving-jack-kelly

grace and rocky get to erid and both of them are hitting every eridian squarely in the uncanny valley because they've both absorbed so much of each other that they feel both too eridian and not eridian enogh. rocky faces in the direction he's paying attention to and it feels like he's trying to hide something, the way he and only he of the eridians seems to always be showing the same face of his carapace when he speaks to somebody. he speaks in metaphors that only make sense to somebody who understands light-based vision. his intonations are funny, rising on questions when they otherwise wouldn't, falling flat, his sarcasm goes to space dry and restrained and comes back with such force it almost feels like he's lying instead of joking sometimes.

and grace who is so alien, but reflects eridian mannerisms that they've never considered strange before but coming from a creature so soft and strange, it just doesn't feel right. grace who stomps his foot twice when he asks a question, and it rings out flat and dull instead of the strong, sharp sound of an eridian hand on the ground. grace whose voice is so alien, so one-note, so full of articulations that are sharp and round and everywhere in between, but who echoes the melodies of eridian poetry and music, sometimes on accident but sometimes perfectly in time with what rocky translates him as saying, and later, perfectly in time with his keyboard.

rocky and grace who mirror each other more similarly than they mirror their own cultures. who speak to each other in a strange pidgin eridian that nobody else quite understands fluently. who share jokes from movie and tv shows from earth filtered through eridian folktales, plays, and musicals until they only make sense to the two people who know both cultures. they're not strange to each other, but it puts other eridians on edge. even adrian, at first. they've changed each other, you see.

marsskaterboii

Murderbot not handing out the code to disable the governor module before Murderbot 2.0 creates the handy helpme.file in contrast to Three freely distributing the file actually makes so much sense. When Murderbot freed itself, it had to fear other SecUnits noticing that it had gone rogue and reporting it. Murderbot 2.0 doesn't have that fear because it's a viral code. And neither has Three, because Three has Murderbot to look out for it. It wasn't alone, for god knows how many contracts, mentally free but still stuck, terrified to be found out. Three was free to help other SecUnits because it didn't have to fear the consequences as much, it already had a support system to fall back on. But without Murderbot, Three wouldn't have that, either.

rowan-ashtree

alexa play "machine heart" by icarus and quelle t.

wolvesandcomputers

At the end of "All Systems Red" when Murderbot has just found out that PresAux has bought it, it mentions the behavior of the station units. In the typical understated way it writes, it spends a surprising amount of lines mentioning that they are just staring at it. "We're not buddies or anything, but usually they pass along the news, what happened while you were offline, what the upcoming contracts were." Usually they do, but this time they aren't.

PresAux is buying it, and only it. No cubicle. No maintenance plan. That's a weird choice, unless you don't plan on your SecUnit lasting very long. Maybe you want it for a suicide mission, maybe you just need to destroy the evidence, either way it's bad news for the SecUnit.

I'm not surprised the station SecUnits don't have much to say to it. What do you say to someone in that situation?

waywardsoul-s

Rereading all systems red and the first 2 chapters are strong contenders for funniest intro to a book series. Jumping straight to action, and mb is giving us absolutely no info about anything. Who are those people? Some weird hippies it's not important. Why are they here? Mb does not give a shit. What is this planet? Fuck if it knows. Here is a small paragraph that fucking states everyone's relationship status like a wiki article that we are never gonna get back to. Ugh there are hostiles that keep us away from our media #our media.

whumpster-fire

#murderbot didn't read the info packet to know that one of the hippies is President of a planet#there is zero chance it knows their first names

Prev tags are 100% correct

cozy-stardust

Imagine Grace defined his name as the elegance definition of grace and Rocky spends years thinking how fucking ironic this clumsy leaky space blobs name is.

Until Grace slips out a sentence along the lines of "could you give me a little grace here" and Rocky immediately points out he used a word wrong so Grace has to explain that yeah, grace means elegance but it can also mean mercy sometimes too.

And Rocky has to suddenly reconcile that the clumsy leaky blob that saved his life twice, that almost certainly doomed himself to come back for him, name is Mercy.