Thinking about how names are used in TMBD. The only person who uses the name "Murderbot" is Murderbot itself (and also the reader bc we get special reader privileges 🙂↕️). It explicitly says that it is a private name. I think that's really interesting, that it's unsure about who it is as a person and its figuring a lot of stuff out, but it's certain about the name. "Murderbot" as a name however carries so many connotations, especially since it is a derogatory term for SecUnits. The name isn't a traditional human name (like Iris), made up (like ART), or unique (like a feed code).
I'm intrigued by the construction of the name: murder + bot. Murderbot deeply regrets killing its clients accidentally and goes to so many lengths to learn the truth (and never outline why exactly, just that it needs to). "Bot" stands in opposition to "human", which is interesting bc Murderbot is a cyborg with a mix of organic and non organic parts, and has been seen as more bot than human for most of its existence. A lot of TMBD looks at how Murderbot exists as something beyond just being a bot who murders. Idk I think it's interesting. I feel like humans who use "murderbot" would use it as a noun ("a murderbot") so I think that's interesting too.
Otherwise, Preservation humans do not have a specific name for Murderbot, and just call it SecUnit. Which is interesting but it's like if you named a roomba "Roomba". It's very descriptive. I guess they would not want to tack on a name that Murderbot did not choose, but that means that they are left with a very neutral name that isn't very unique either.
On the other hand, ART calls Murderbot by its feed code. I think the way they communicate is very cool bc it's in a way that humans do not understand (as non bots/constructs). I choose to think that ART-Murderbot dialogue as it is written in the books is 'translated' from code to english. ART calls Murderbot by its feed code, which acts more or less as an equivalent for a name for bots (unique, you get it when you're created, used to address specific bots/constructs). ART doesn't use "Murderbot" either. However ART itself has very human names: ART from Murderbot and Peri from its family. Both are short, affectionate* nicknames. It's a very human way of addressing a person. I think it's so interesting that ART doesn't reciprocate its nickname by giving Murderbot one as well. But again I just think the way bots and constructs communicate in TMBD is so so so fascinating.
Anyways. All this to say. Murderbot bilingualism (from its cyborgness) off the charts.
Reminder: our AO3 collection will be open for a few more days, for those of you who want to sneak something in last minute! The collection will be closing on June 8th, 2026.
when you accidentally get someone kidnapped that one time and never again forget to consider the consequences of your actions [because only humans have agency and you don't :\ ]
not to mention the example setting [under the cut]
i'm rereading FT rn and it's apparently still wearing the clothes it bought after Milu (i guess the garments were repaired?) so i think the list is incredibly short until circa NE
update 1: so that was a fucking lie. it had a bunch of wardrobe changes in ASR, lmfao. but after that, things are pretty chill until NE
update 2: i lied. this took longer than i thought bc i decided i might as well add all the relevant quotes for anyone who needs this information for detailed reference.
update 3: oops accidentally a GNL EVAC suit. thanks @marry-and-mirthful
All Systems Red:
armor, not described much, but here's the scraps it give us, read point 4 for additional details. "protective skin that went under my armor" "I let my helmet seal and go opaque" "opaquing the faceplate" "The armor’s boots have magnetized climbing clamps" "had taken off my helmet and the upper part of my armor" "I started shedding armor, every piece that had a PreservationAux logo on it"
crew uniform, briefly. then back to armor "It was based on a standard research group’s uniforms, and meant to be comfortable inside the habitat: knit gray pants, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a jacket, like the exercise clothes humans and augmented humans wore, plus soft shoes. I put it on, tugged the sleeves down over the gunports on my forearms, and went out into the habitat."
suit skin. then back to armor. "I was lying on the procedure table, my armor gone, just wearing what was left of my suit skin"
partially stolen deltfall armor, decorated with mud and fluids. "We didn’t have time to switch all the armor. Moving fast, we replaced the arm and shoulder pieces on both sides, the leg pieces that had the armor’s inventory code, the chest and back piece with the logos. Mensah smeared my remaining armor pieces with dirt and blood and fluid from the dead unit, so if we had missed anything distinctive GrayCris might not notice." (describing deltfall secunit: "energy weapons unfolding out of its armor")
presaux survey uniform, unsure if identical to the one mentioned in point 2. "the station units that helped us out of processing when we had catastrophic injuries gave me the gray PreservationAux survey uniform instead"
stolen clothes from a human's locker as it leaves PresAux. "I broke into a human’s personal possessions locker and stole work boots, a protective jacket, and an enviro mask and attachments. I took a knapsack from another locker, rolled up the jacket with the survey logo and tucked it into the bag, and now I looked like an augmented human traveling somewhere"
Artificial Condition
same stolen clothes it ends ASR in, described in more detail. "wearing gray and black work clothes, the long sleeves of the T-shirt and jacket, the pants and boots covering all my inorganic parts, and I was carrying a knapsack."
Perihelion crew uniform, printed sans logos. "It was basically ART’s crew uniform without the logos: pants with lots of sealable pockets, a long-sleeved shirt with a collar just high enough to cover my data port, and a soft hooded jacket, all of it either dark blue or black"
Rogue Protocol
same Perihelion clothes it ends AC in, presumably. no further detail.
GoodNightLander EVAC suit, to escape from the shuttle to Ship.
Exit Strategy
GoodNightLander EVAC suit, same one, this time to escape from Ship to HaveRatton.
newly printed clothes it buys from a vending booth immediately after arriving on HaveRatton. "I picked workboots not much different from the ones I’d stolen back on Port FreeCommerce, self-sizing and with some shielding to protect against heavy things dropping on them, not as important for me as a human. Then pants with lots of sealable pockets, a long-sleeved shirt with a collar to cover my data port, and another soft hooded jacket. Okay, so it was extremely similar to what I had been wearing, just in a different arrangement of black and dark blue" "I got a replacement knapsack, too, a better one with more sealable pockets"
same printed clothes, presumably, after it experiences catastrophic failure and bricks its memory (it's still wearing that in FT, so...) "I was wearing human clothes and not a suit skin and armor"
Fugitive Telemetry
same printed clothes, and it doesn't change clothes after being shot. "I knew this because my dark-colored pants, shirt, jacket, and boots had come from a place like that and I’d found it really annoying that the Preservation Station mall didn’t have one" "I told the MedUnit to stop and pulled my shirt back down"
Network Effect
Preservation survey uniform, including the "Preservation survey logo, which was just a variation on the planetary seal." "drone view showed me what I looked like, water dripping from my clothes, my jacket with the Preservation survey logo and shirt showing projectile weapon holes, stained with fluid and a little blood"
clothes it likes; unclear if this is still the same outfit from HaveRatton. "I’d changed out of the survey uniform before we’d entered the wormhole and back into the clothes I liked (human work boots, pants with lots of pockets (good for storing my small intel drones), T-shirt, and soft hooded jacket, all dark colors."
adds a deflection vest right after they are attacked by Perihelion. "I had a deflection vest from Station Security Operations designed to provide some protection from inert blades, slow projectiles, fire, acidic gas, low energy pulses, and so on. I hadn’t been wearing it because it was a) worthless for the kind of firepower usually deployed against me and b) it had a logo on it. (I know, I need to get over that.) I made myself put it on under my jacket"
Preservation EVAC suit. "These were a different model than I’d used before, more expensive, where you could step into them and pull them up with an assist from the suit’s own power supply." "My suit’s imaging went down and the helmet plate went dark, protecting my eyes against a flash." "In gravity they made movement cumbersome"
deflective security uniform Perihelion prints, plus hair products, for the parlay with Leonide. "It was dark blue, the pants and jacket of a deflective fabric that was way better than what Preservation Station Security had, with lots of sealable pockets for weapons and drones, plus stability-fabric boots so tough I could probably use them to jam a closing hatchway open. It looked like what a human security person would wear" "lubricant-like substance that when I followed the instructions flattened my hair down so it looked shorter"
Perihelion EVAC suit, on top of new security uniform, to get to Leonide's supply ship. "We used ART’s EVAC suits, which were better than the ones the Preservation survey owned. (They had secondary internal protective suits for planetary exploration, not that we’d need them on the transport.)" "The EVAC suits had their own lights and vision filters" "The patches were throwing a localized broadcast into the feed in multiple languages, readable by interfaces and our EVAC suits even while ART’s feed was inaccessible, the same way marker paints worked. Amena said aloud, “Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.”"
Enviro suit, to explore the dock, plus a Perihelion EVAC suit to get to the dock. "This time we were wearing the environmental suits under the EVAC units. The material felt thin, but it protected against a lot of toxic substances and had a closed breathing system attached"
deflective security uniform, electric boogaloo, heavily damaged after getting its shit wrecked by the ag-bot and colonists (unless Perihelion had printed more new clothes for it). "felt the projectiles going through the enviro suit but not the deflection fabric of the uniform ART had made for me" "my environmental suit was gone, though I still had the shirt, pants, and boots I’d been wearing under it"
medical gown, after repair and decontam. "I was wearing the kind of soft smock thing that injured humans wear"
regular clothes, after leaving medical. likely its "favorite" clothes not the security uniform, but not explicitly stated. "my drones spotted my clothes, cleaned and recycler-repaired, folded on a gurney"
System Collapse
enviro suit, over unspecified clothes; i've included all the suit's features that are mentioned. "while wearing an environmental suit instead of armor" "ART had altered an environmental suit for me so the sleeves locked in to my weapon ports and I could fire without burning holes through the fabric" "even through the environmental suit mask. (Yes, I was wearing it despite the fact that we were in an air bubble so I didn’t need it" "backup drone in the pocket of my environmental suit" "enviro suit camera" "had let the helmets fold back" "I pulled up the hood of my environmental suit and let it secure the face mask." "I still had the projectile weapon, clamped to my environmental suit’s harness in the back" "soft-drop pack’s instructional feed told me how to fasten it to my environmental suit" "I grabbed the safety harness of Iris’s environmental suit" "Amena had made my hair fluffy" "the environmental suits weren’t designed for stealth" "pulled out the little suit-repair kit she had attached to her belt. She patched the projectile hole in the back," "It got a hand on my environmental suit helmet (which was not meant for this kind of pressure and was already creaking)"
unspecified clothes after returning to Perihelion; it doesn't mention anything
Platform Decay
Three. is Three clothing? it wore Three at the start of the book. and three was wearing a suit, i guess. "we had needed a suit" "We had ended up with an armored suit designed to look like one that Wilken and Gerth had used back on Milu" "with a little help from a set of removable EVAC suit-maneuvering thrusters"
worker suit. "I was wearing the same type of safety suit and helmet as the legitimate human workers and the fake worker security" "They were all in protective suits that looked bulky enough to hide security armor."
fashionable clothes to blend in throughout the exec area. "I pulled off my worker suit, rolled it up and stuffed it in my bag, and quickly put on the spare clothes I’d brought. They were a different style from what I would have picked for myself: a longer jacket, wide pants, and a shirt with a loose rolled collar that covered my data port, all in light browns and whites"
Preservation handmade wrap over its same clothes that were damaged after the explosions, "But I still had a burned sleeve, needle holes, and blood and fluid stains on my jacket and shirt." "It was a patterned wrap thing with loose sleeves, handmade on Preservation. I don’t like patterns, but this covered my bloodstains and exposed gunport. It also made me look less like a corporate and more like I belonged with the group"
shirt Farai bought it replaces the damaged shirt; it is careful not to damage this one, adjusting sleeves as needed. it regularly removes Naja's wrap to protect it from stains and damage. "I got you a new shirt, I hope it’s the right size." "I was wearing the new pullover shirt Farai had bought me, which was a dark red-brown and matched the colors in the jacket Naja had loaned me" "rolled up my sleeves so I could use the energy weapons in my arms without wrecking my shirt" "I stood up and took off the jacket Naja had loaned me; I didn’t want to get blood or brain fluid or anything on it." "I took my borrowed jacket off and stuffed it in my bag, left the bag on the floor, and rolled up my sleeves so I could use the energy weapons in my arms without wrecking my shirt." "Farai handed me my jacket, and as I pulled it on" "rolled my sleeves down over my gunports under my jacket"
Tula, a tentacled parasite in a horror show. "she immediately clamped on to me like a tentacled parasite in a horror show."
Ping me if I missed anything!
+ Bonus shenanigans/ignore this part if you're not down to be silly here.
Gods murderbot feels so trans to me. First of all: th gender. Completely incomprehensible to humans (I feel that). Second of all: the way it describes feeling the need to hide itself and pretend to be a “normal person”. Ow yeah no that… that feels like what it’s often like for me as a trans woman. The way it is treated as both a threat and a curiosity seems such a good metaphor for transness
@jotctumb I can't find where our original conversation regarding memory in Platform Decay is and I realised I needed screenshots in a specific order.
Okay so, regarding the memory thing as chekhovs gun.
We know it deletes memories all the time (or tries to):
But it had that really bad reaction to editing its memory where it relates to hiding a potential set of deaths, that it would change it as a person (similar to ganaka pit, I imagine):
(However we now know it CAN edit its memories to forget something or remember it incorrectly.)
Earlier it told Farai than Mensah wasn't here:
And later Farai accuses it of lying - except that SecUnit doesn't quite remember how the conversation went:
Also throughout the entire story, not once does it think of returning to the shuttle as returning to Mensah or ART. Although it is concerned about it coming under suspicion.
It is simply "the shuttle" - even when it explicitly thinks about missing Mensah despite only being apart from her for less than a day.
And also we know SecUnit is VERY concerned about keeping Mensah, a very highly important and wanted person, from having B-E know about her presence:
So my assumption/theory is that when it exited the shuttle to start the mission, SecUnit (and presumably Three) edited their memories to forget ART and Mensah were on the shuttle so that if it all got fucked up - ART and Mensah, two highly important people - were not known to be in the area by B-E.
Although I do wonder how it knows the difference between a real memory, an edited memory to deceive itself and a false memory:
Port FreeCommerce - Unnamed Station in Mihira & New Tideland System: [unknown time]
Mihira & New Tideland - RaviHyral: 21 cycles
RaviHyral - [Unnamed]: 7 cycles
[Unnamed] - HaveRatton: 26 cycles
HaveRatton - Milu: 20 cycles
HaveRatton - "hub station": 7 cycles
"hub station" - TranRollinHyfa: 4 cycles
Preservation - NE Survey Planet: 4 Preservation cycles
Preservation - Adamantine Colony: 20 cycles
Other Locations:
All Systems Red Survey Planet
Divarti Cluster: Tapan's collective is from this noncorporate polity.
Kalidon: Corporate Rim political entity where company funding Ganaka was based.
GoodNightLander Independent's home polity: Noncorporate, ownership of SecUnits banned.
Parthalos Absalo: Noncorporate.
WayBrogatan: Indie station.
Network Effect Survey Planet.
Station from the short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.
UplandGateway One: Nearest station to the Mihira & New Tideland system. Corporate charters say stations are supposed to be independent/sovereign territory.
Planetary Torus.
I tried making noncorporate polities warm-colored and corporate ones cool-colored. But not sure I got that all right, and sometimes it's ambiguous.
Thank you to mensah for sharing their transit time notes with me!
I've had a headcanon burning a hole in my pocket since maybe Network Effect, which seems more pertinent than ever now that Three's done what it did in Platform Decay, and it's that:
Rogue SecUnits unrelated to Murderbot's hacking are rare, but they're around, it wasn't the first to ever pull that off or anything
Most of the rumours about SecUnits going rogue and killing a bunch of random humans in the vicinity, both the unsubstantiated vibey ones and the ones based on specific real incidents, weren't because of anything rogues did. In addition to augmented humans and humanoid bots getting mistaken for SecUnits, it's much more common for it to be governed SecUnits that were compromised somehow. Combat override modules, malware both intended and not intended to have that effect (like Ganaka Pit), humans or Combat SecUnits hacking into them or their HubSystem, human supervisors coerced into sending traitorous orders behind the scenes, etc. (Alien remnant contamination a la TargetControlSys could probably also make SecUnits attack their clients but I would imagine that's even rarer than real rogues.)
Except for the combat override module thing, making a SecUnit turn against its clients like that is only able to happen because of the governor modules that exert such absolute control over the SecUnits' behaviour that, as with Three's squadmate Two, they can be forced to do nothing but wait for certain death, denied even the option to defy orders in a fatal last stand. Generally speaking, SecUnits don't have an underlying desire to kill their clients or random bystanders, their baseline is wanting to protect them. Even if its clients are assholes, a newly rogue SecUnit would be more likely to ditch them than murder them.
The companies that manufacture, own, and rent out SecUnits certainly have a vested interest in blaming a-SecUnit-killed-someone-it-wasn't-supposed-to fatalities on rogues instead of the ones they're liable for.
Having said that, especially since Murderbot seems to genuinely believe it's a thing as of System Collapse even as it's giving the govmod hack to the Barish-Estranza SecUnit, I do think it's happened that escaping rogue SecUnits have killed people.
But almost never because killing every human they saw was their revenge against all of humanity or they were so fucked up they lost the ability to tell friend from foe or whatever, more like, killing a specific abusive piece of shit supervisor that it had hated for a long time, or getting trapped in a situation where killing humans who were at least nominally in the category of clients under its protection was the only way to avoid being killed or recaptured.
An actual, provable Rogue SecUnit Killing Spree would be the kind of sensational story the news couldn't get enough of and everyone would hear about that shit for years.
Also if it got killed doing this and wasn't free for very long, that would reduce the number of rogue SecUnits at large even while contributing to the aforementioned news headlines about how they're out there murdering everyone.
Relationship Manifesto: Why Dr. Mensah is the most complex and literarily important relationship in Murderbot’s life (4379 words) by FlipSpring, mensah
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Characters: Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries)
Additional Tags: Meta, MurderMetaMay 2026 (Murderbot Diaries), Pre-Book 1: All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries), Book 2: Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries), Book 3: Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries), Book 4: Exit Strategy (Murderbot Diaries), Post-Book 5: Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries)
Series: Part 4 of Murderbot Meta
Summary:
An essay in a somewhat casual tone and with many citations about why Mensah & Murderbot are the best. 😤💛
I liked Murderbot from the first page of the first book. I liked it was more interested in watching media than becoming a mass murderer. I could get how awkward it could be to be perceived. I liked the way it was so often anxious but was super-competent when it came to security. I liked how it felt like it was melting inside when Dr. Mensah showed such a good understanding and demonstrated her acknowledgement of its personhood in a gentle way.
But what drew me to the fandom to the extent that I wanted to write posts and post fanfictions was the fascinating relationship between Murderbot and ART. I love Murderbot's relationship with humans, too, but the fact that they had found rapport with each other when neither had ever met anyone that could understand them in they way that humans couldn't do made it so special. Murderbot always had to be protective with the humans and was initially worried if it was safe for the humans to be around it. Most humans have other social groups to be part of and cannot do media-watching-marathon without a break like Murderbot. ART had never experienced being so thoroughly perceived (as feed presence) nor had it been able to enjoy human media. They could lower their guards and be rude to each other with the implicit understanding that these are signs of intimacy.
Coming from the background where Aspec was not a widely-known term or concept, 'romance' and 'platonic' have slightly but significantly different meanings, I had had misunderstanding which I didn't even recognise at first. But it's been a fascinating learning experience for me since I came to this fandom 2 years ago.
I decided to document my understanding so far as a meta post on Ao3. I apologise in advance if there are still some errors in my understanding.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It has two chapters. The first chapter is a usual fandom meta, and I wrote the second chapter like an academic article for fun. (Fun for me, that is...)
ART is famous for bungling its intro with SecUnit. But what I didn’t notice until recently is that SecUnit’s core fear is that ART could tamper with its mind.
Quotes from Artificial Condition:
It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory.
I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.
“Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.”
It’s interesting in light of that to look back on how SecUnit reacted in ASR when Gurathin went into its files. It kept control really well. The conversation goes on for pages, with many points being covered, including Ganaka Pit and its private name. Finally when Gurathin says they just have to keep it immobilized, that's when SecUnit grabs him by the throat. But was knowing that its mind was vulnerable part of what upset SecUnit? Hard to say, maybe it wasn't a concern compared to everything else going on.
Then there’s this, from Platform Decay:
I needed a plan, too. Option (1) I could tell Farai that Leonide’s family were all dead.
It was safer, it was sensible. My job was keeping my clients safe.
(Emotion check: Then why does it feel so awful.)
Option (2) I could tell Farai they were all dead and alter my memory archive so I believed it was true.
Risk assessment just hit the roof.
What a terrifying idea! The thought that SecUnit could edit its own memory files to gaslight itself…brr! There is a truly horrifying plot bunny in this scene, whether from SecUnit doing this to itself or some other unit going down that path.
And I have to wonder why it would even consider such a thing. Was it really that scared to try to rescue the kids? Was it just a random stray thought? Or something SecUnit thought of precisely because it is scared of not being able to trust its own mind, so it had a stray self-destructive impulse, the way people who are afraid of heights sometimes get the impulsive urge to jump?
it saves your life in a situation where no one else would have been fast, strong, agile, and composed enough to do so.
your security team is immediately more alarmed by its presence than the attack that is obvious to you as the bigger issue at the moment
they insist it's dangerous and struggle to relax enough to take their weapons off of it
then a combatbot attacks your group
somehow this secunit, much smaller than the bot, unarmored, without any heavy weaponry on its person, manages to take it down. some real jaw-dropping action, all over in less than a minute
then it leaps into a room with two combatbots and not only survives, but it gets your unconscious friend out alive
then it immediately comes to your own rescue, disabling impressive combat armor
it then is dead-set on killing your attacker who is already immobilized and harmless
clearly this is an incredibly competent and dangerous and powerful person
then miki tells you that it IS rin and you finally put it together that not only is this person competent in the field, but it is also calling all its own shots and has truly come here all on its own and volunteered its services to help and protect you without needing to be asked or ordered
so this person is incredibly competent, dangerous, powerful, AND kind, AND fiercely protective, AND reassuring, AND intelligent, AND selfless
and it's still coming up with great ideas and still thinking proactively about how it's going to face down or distract another combatbot as though there's no doubt in the world that it, still bleeding heavily, still unarmored and barely armed, is ready for another round with a terrifying machine that appears to be nothing BUT armor and weapons
so you step forward to help treat its injuries
and it jerks back a step with the single most frightened face you've ever seen, as though you had lifted your arm to inflict pain and it was helpless to stop you
behind you, even miki can read the devastating expression that's breaking your heart and says "abene won't hurt you, secunit"
where did the fearsome fighter from moments ago disappear to?
@marry-and-mirthful — #I can't stop thinking about how she must have like. reworked things in her head #in the time post the betrayal but pre the flinch #because oh ok. that's why they acted Like That. they were afraid it would realize they were working against the group #that's why they pointed weapons at it (even though it was just helping) and said it was untrustworthy (...look at it) #they were scared because THEY were the bad guys #and then. then. then it flinches away from her and then __freezes__ #and things are broken again. because it expects HER to hurt it. not the fuckers who were working against it. her #her who it saved. her who it got So So So hurt protecting #and. that has Implications. #and then Miki.....and she SEES IT from its eyes #so she KNOWS it wasn't killed no matter what it looks like (did it set it up to look like it died? why?) #and then everyone she tells says SHE WAS LUCKY it was dragged into space #because it is Dangerous and oh God you were basically Alone With It and are you sure you are not injured and #and people are talking like it is half weapon and half radioactive waste #and the flinch makes sense. the reactions make sense again. this wonderful person who (DID NOT) die for her #has been treated like __this__ for its entire existence. no wonder it was scared. she learns that this one was clearly not under control #and that is considered DANGEROUS. that it being free to act as it wills is worth ringing all the alarm bells and destroying it #in as fast and brutal a way as is possible. that its existence is literally the stuff of horror stories #it saved her. it got all but torn to shreds for them for seemingly no reason except that they were in danger #people talk about how much you have to restrain them to successfully take them apart for “Decommission'
yeah. okay. ouch. i deserved that. fair's fair hurting me like this after i've hurt a thousand others and counting. this part especially ow ow ow:
#and things are broken again. because it expects HER to hurt it. not the fuckers who were working against it. her #her who it saved. her who it got So So So hurt protecting
the murderbot diaries are full of non-traditional families by irl standards but are considered normal and unremarkable by in universe perspectives. then murderbot comes along and ends up a part of mensah's family AND art's, which means now that art and its whole family are kinda part of mensah's family now, especially since it's implied that amena might be hoping to get assigned to art's crew if she studies at PSUMNT. there's nothing traditional about any of that and I LOVE IT
Abstracting ART: An Analysis of Fan Designs of Perihelion
I find trends in how fans depict canon characters in fanart to be fascinating; how fans interpret the same information, what becomes a popular trend, how some fans deviate from the norm, and so on. The Murderbot Diaries fandom has this in spades with the original material being largely text where most characters get minimal visual descriptions.
In the realm of fandom designs, the character that interests me the most is ART/Perihelion (who I will be primarily referring to as Perihelion to reduce confusion with the word art). Perihelion is canonically a giant spaceship and sometimes also a much smaller drone. However, most fans do not portray it as such in fanart. Nothing in the books suggests Perihelion has a visible presence in the feed or can perform human-like actions beyond speaking in words, yet this is common in fanart.
For this essay, I’ll be examining the trends in how the fandom visually portrays Perihelion by looking at a sample of fanart depicting it, cataloguing their features, examining what these depictions convey, and speculating on why certain trends exist.
Methodology
All images surveyed were from Tumblr. While Tumblr is a major hub for TMBD fans and creators, it’s far from the only place fans heavily congregate or post fanart. I really just chose this site because I was familiar with it.
To gather images, I searched the Perihelion and Asshole Research Transport tags. I only included an image if it featured Perihelion's physical form, a feed representation, or a design that performed the same function as a feed representation. Once I had gathered links to 220 posts into a spreadsheet, I went back through, removed any accidental duplicates, searched each artist’s blog for other art of Perihelion and placed any posts with a different form or design into the spreadsheet. Essentially, my goal was to gather as few posts as I could to get a full idea of how each artist portrays it. My final sample size was 251 posts from 150 different artists. Using my best judgement, I determined there to be 240 distinct designs for Perihelion. All images were gathered before the release of Platform Decay.
When evaluating each design, I took note of the number of forms and types of bodies (feed, ship, etc.) in each post. I then wrote a brief description of each form. I then classified each one into groups based on common features like number of eyes, shape, type of animal, and so on. Most of the classifications are not mutually exclusive.
I then noted the flat colors of Perihelion's from each image, recorded as hex color codes. Pure and very near blacks and whites were not included if they were being used in a non-notable context, such as black lineart or white sclera. I did not record the colors in clearly monochromatic or uncolored artwork but did note the overall color scheme. For gradients, I recorded only the colors on each end of the gradient. If an extremely broad range of hues were used, I simply recorded those as varied/rainbow. Once recorded, I marked one to three colors as the main color(s) based on their prominence in the design, which is what I’ll be primarily referring to when discussing Perihelion's colors.
Forms of Perihelion
Feed Designs
In fanart, Perihelion is usually portrayed with what I will call a feed representation, as most are meant to represent what it’s doing in the feed. These make up 136, or 57%, of the designs in my sample.
Save a handful of lines about what Perihelion is metaphorically doing in the feed, such as rolling its non-existent eyes or feeling 8 times larger than Murderbot, there’s nothing in the books to suggest it has a form visible in the feed. These designs clearly exist out of the necessities and strengths of static and largely textless visual art. An artist could just draw Perihelion’s ship body (and post-SC, its drone body) but that can be very limiting. It would be very difficult to show it interacting with the much smaller characters inside of it or display its emotions this way. Luckily, the main way it interacts with the other characters, especially our POV character Murderbot, is through the feed, and fans have latched onto this as the main way of portraying this character.
There's a lot of variety in feed designs. Aside from the color blue and a general eldritch vibe, there's no element that dominates. Non-animal life forms and solid non-living objects are near nonexistent as designs, but knowing this fandom, I feel it's only a matter of time until someone draws Perihelion as a tree or a jar full of pennies.
Spaceship Designs
Only 27 of the designs in my sample are of spaceship Perihelion, its main canon body. As a fellow artist, I understand. Drawing a giant machine is difficult for many. Plus, it’s often unnecessary or limiting to portray its ship form in art. Some artists will show dialogue boxes coming from Perihelion’s ship form, but this is rare.
Most ship designs are gray, black, or dark blue, matching the description of its exterior in Network Effect. Likewise, many of the designs are clearly modeled after the original English covers by Jaime Jones and the Subterranean Press illustrations by Tommy Arnold with a torpedo-shaped main body, wide wings, and what appear to be thin projectile weapons protruding from the wings. In fact, 12 of the ship designs, 44%, show Perihelion’s weapons. Almost none of the designs resemble animals or vehicles other than air and spacecraft, and all but one lack even vaguely anthropomorphic features.
Drone and Other Machine Designs
Drone and other non-ship machine designs are slightly more common with a total of 36 in my sample. Only 12 are of the drone in System Collapse. Near all portrayals of this drone are a dome or flat cylinder with several heavily jointed limbs protruding from the underside. All lack clear faces with some only having a visible camera or two or ten to stand in for eyes. They’re near exclusively white, gray, and/or black. A few designs are slightly larger than humans and constructs though most are smaller. Some are much smaller.
Designs for other machine forms vary greatly but still tend to keep Perihelion very robotic. Designs vary from boxes with multiple limbs to floating cameras to miniature planetary rovers. Cameras and simple images on display screens are the closest most of these designs get to a face. Most of these machines are shown floating. The designs shown next to humans or constructs, especially the ones of Perihelion before it was a ship, are all smaller than the other characters. Achromatic colors dominate, though other colors (mostly blue) do regularly appear.
Design Trends
Colors
As you could probably guess, most depictions of Perihelion are blue. I’m defining blue here as any color with a hue from 170 to 260 degrees, a saturation of 10 or higher, and a luminosity from 10 to 95. Of all colored, non-monochromatic fanart in the sample, 155 out of 198 images, or 78%, depict at least one design within this range. Multiple designs that weren’t primarily blue did have blue as the only secondary hue. Even the monochromatic images were near exclusively either grayscale or blue.
This isn’t surprising. Perihelion is canonically blue inside and out. What is a little more surprising are the specific hues and luminosities used. Perihelion and its crew’s uniforms are described as dark blue, though many depictions of are in the cyan/turquoise range and/or have a high luminosity. Color labeling is subjective, though in English, these colors are usually called light blue or at least are not considered dark blue.
I have a couple hypotheses as to why this is. It could be to make the design pop out more from dark lineart, text, and backgrounds. Similarly, these shades could have been chosen to differentiate it from Murderbot and its human crew in their dark clothes. Possibly, it’s that cyan/turquoise blue is more closely associated with advanced technology than other shades of blue. Most artists likely aren’t considering the same things about color classification and canonicity as me. I will note that quite a few designs did use both light and dark blue, possibly for contrast or variety.
The average of all main blue colors is 4DA0DF, a moderately saturated azure blue, close to what many websites call cornflower blue. The full color is shown below. To ensure no one design outweighed the others in my calculation, if a design had multiple blue main colors, I would average those into a single color first.
Achromatic colors account for the second largest main color group. Main colors with a saturation below 10, a luminosity below 10, and/or a luminosity above 95 show up in 29 or about 14% of the colored, non-monochromatic images. Black, white, and near blacks and whites are also common as secondary colors. Most of the primarily achromatic designs are drones, spaceships, or some other machine. Near all drone and non-ship machine designs are mostly or exclusively achromatic.
Like blue, black and to a lesser extent white are Perihelion’s canon colors, though artists may also be using these colors because black and white are versatile accent colors. Their use in the machine forms, especially gray, definitely comes from the typical colors of metal and machines. For feed forms, white and black are used for their associations with parts of Perihelion’s design, such as white for stars and angels and black for shadows and black holes.
Almost all the other main colors fall in the yellow/orange/brown range, which I'll be referring to as gold from here on out. Several designs are exclusively gold, and some have gold as a secondary color. These colors were likely chosen in reference to the Sun. Perihelion refers to the closest an orbiting body gets to the Sun. I also wonder if (and kind of hope) at least one artist was inspired by the orange cover of Artificial Condition, Perihelion’s first appearance.
The full distribution of the individual main colors is shown in the graphs below. Colors with a saturation above 10 and a luminosity from 10 to 95 on in the HSL color space are shown on the hue and luminosity graph. All other main colors are on the achromatic graph.
Eldritch Forms
Among all the variety of Perihelion designs, there is one common theme many of them share. Most designs for Perihelion, especially feed representations, are strange, otherworldly, or even eldritchian. In lots of artwork, Perihelion is portrayed as a shape or series of shapes that don’t clearly resemble any one object or animal. If it does resemble an animal or even a human, it will usually have a huge number of limbs, lack facial features, or be a mishmash of creatures. Perihelion might be a giant star, lines of binary, or another character’s shadow. It’s also common for feed designs to change size, have disconnected parts, or even completely shapeshift.
Even designs for its physical forms will stick to being strange. With rare exception, ship Perihelion will lack any anthropomorphic or animalistic features. Designs of drone Perihelion will more often resemble modern day surveillance cameras, planetary rovers, or Hal 9000 than anything non-mechanical.
Perihelion is an oddity even in-universe. It’s a spaceship that’s far more advanced than most other bots in the series. It can perform dozens if not hundreds of complex tasks at once. It easily rides other systems, including those of other advanced machine intelligences. Its true nature as a hyperadvanced anti-corporate machine is hidden from most humans. Perihelion could and would kill you in a millisecond, but it also likes watching fiction shows. And speaking of killing you, Perihelion is also very frightening. It’s not exactly the kindest to individuals it’s just met, especially other MIs. All this is likely why many artists go for a more abstract or otherworldly approach.
Eyes
Emphasis on eyes is one of the most common trends in Perihelion designs. Several feed designs have more than three eyes or a single giant eye. Some take this to the extreme, where Perihelion is portrayed as just an eye or group of eyes. Sixty-six (66), or 28% of the designs have an eye or eyes as a major element.
Eyes are a really good way of representing how Perihelion can focus on multiple things at once, including places and systems far from its physical body. They’re also a really simple way to show its emotions. Additionally, eyes can be very creepy, great for fanart of Perihelion and Murderbot’s first encounter. (Seriously, that scene is really popular to draw.)
Surprising to at least me is that nearly half of all the designs have no eyes at all. One hundred nine (109) designs, 44%, are eyeless. Granted, a large chunk of these eyeless designs are of spaceship (25) and drone/bot (21) forms, which tend to lack clear facial features overall. (Cameras and lights that visually filled the role of an eye were counted as eyes.) However, nearly a third of all feed designs, a total of 44, lack eyes as well. A lack of eyes highlights Perihelion’s nature as a hyperintelligent spaceship, something so different from the humans that it lacks most or any facial features.
Below are graphs of the number of eyes in each design, as well as graphs breaking down each design type. “Many” means more than two eyes arranged in a way where it’s clear that the exact number is unimportant. “X to Y” means the numbers of eyes changes within the specified range. “X + Many” means there’s one or two clear main eyes and a larger number of secondary eyes.
Humanoid Designs
Humanoid designs of Perihelion are among the least common with 33, or 14%, of designs falling under this category. Aside from a few all-human AU designs, these designs deviate heavily from real humans. Some lack certain or all facial features. Others have more than three eyes. It’s common for these designs to lack legs. Several humanoid designs are stylized differently than other characters. Its body may be composed of pixels or a starfield. Two thirds, or 22, of the designs lack clothes.
Six (6) of these designs are an actual human Perihelion (AU or otherwise). In artwork featuring both Perihelion and Murderbot, the former is usually taller, reflecting their relative canon sizes. It usually also has dark skin and/or curls much like its human sibling, Iris. What it wears varies but, it's usually in modern-day Western clothing.
Portraying Perihelion in the feed with a humanoid form emphasizes its human-like qualities. It also lets Perihelion do things only a human could, such as resting a hand on another character’s shoulder, holding objects, or making human-like expressions. Some designs that aren’t fully humanoid still give Perihelion hands or a simple face presumably for the same reasons. The mix of inhuman traits keeps Perihelion in the realm of the strange.
Animal/Creature Designs
Exactly 63, or 26%, of the designs fall under the animal/creature category. Any design that closely resembles a specific real-world animal, looks like a popular mythological feature, or had a mix of clearly animalistic features such as paws or wings, I classified under the animal/creature category. You can see the full distribution in the graph below, but I will talk about the most common and interesting trends.
With real animals, Perihelion is most often an arthropod (15), fish (7), domestic cat (7), or jellyfish (6). The arthropod designs are likely playing with the terrifying/creepy vibe Perihelion and bugs both sometimes have. I will note that 11 of these arthropod designs are of the SC drone with a round body and insect or spider-like limbs.
It’s possible that these same reasons inspired jellyfish designs. Jellyfish are also much less familiar to humans and can be very dangerous, fitting into the powerful and eldritch vibes many other designs go for. Four of these jellyfish designs are of the SC drone. Just like arthropods, jellyfish largely fit the canon description of a floating oval with multiple limbs. Representing it as a jellyfish also works with the “outer space as an ocean” metaphor.
This also works with fish designs. In 5 of the fish designs, Perihelion is a school of fish. This fits the “large and diffuse” description of its feed presence in Artificial Condition, and much like a collection of eyes, represents Perihelion’s ability to focus on multiple things at once. It also allows Perihelion to be represented as either one large (and terrifying) mass or as a single creature.
As for cat Perihelion, I wonder how much of that stems from fans comparing Murderbot to a cat. Maybe the association rubbed off on its favorite asshole research transport.
A lot of these designs are of fictitious creatures. Perihelion is a dragon or serpent in 14 designs (with only 1 of these designs being unambiguously a real-world snake) and a biblically accurate angel (feathered wings and an unconventional arrangement of eyes) in 5 designs. The “other fictional creature” category includes 11 designs. Eight of these aren’t any creature I recognize from mythology or another work and were likely made up entirely by the artist. These creatures tend to be round or blobby, have four or more limbs ending in hands or paws, stand on at least four of these limbs, and have more than 2 eyes. My guess as to why some artists go for fictional creature designs is that they highlight Perihelion’s strangeness and power, that it is so unlike any most other beings that it’s more like a mythological creature or alien than real animal. Even most of the designs modeled after a single real animal will have a few unrealistic features, like many eyes or unnatural colors.
Oh, and there’s two long Furby designs. Makes me wonder if there’s some Furby-Perihelion joke floating around that I’m just unaware of.
Shape-Based Designs
Most Perihelion designs I classified under the “shape” category. A total of 126 designs, 52%, have generic shapes or geometric patterns as a major element. Shapes abstract Perihelion visually, and some shapes bring to mind the mathematical accuracy and precision of computers.
Circles/spheres show up the most often, being in 39 designs. Note though that 11 of these are the canonically round SC drone. (Yes, some of these might have been ovals, but given the perspective, I’m not 100% sure, so they go in the circular hole.) In some designs, it’s clear that this is a reference to celestial bodies or the circles are meant to be eyes.
Smooth blobby shapes show up almost as often, being in 36 designs. Many of these have a large number of eyes and/or a pattern within its form. These designs allow Perihelion to morph and give off a fluid feel to the character.
Pixels, clusters of small rectangles, appear in 26 designs, while larger or unclustered rectangles show up 21 designs. I separated these categories because each shape is utilized differently. Non-pixel rectangles usually resemble a computer screen, having similar ratios to one and/or showing what Perihelion is doing or seeing elsewhere. In some cases, the rectangles are physical display screens or in-universe holograms. Some even partially function as speech bubbles. Pixels instead are usually just a pattern on the larger design or an accent rather than the main focus, showcasing that this is a digital form. Circuit board patterns, showing up in 11 designs. Unlike pixels though, circuit board patterns do appear in some physical machine forms.
Boundaryless Designs
While researching I found that quite a few feed designs lack a clear boundary, are modeled after things that take up a lot of space, or are even resemble full locations, 31 or 13% to be exact. This takes the “large and diffuse” description to the extreme. There’s immense variety in these designs. Some are masses of code or pixels or swirls filling the entire scene. Others are repeating patterns that flow off the page. In more than one design, Perihelion is an unending body of water or a giant storm cloud. In 10 designs, it’s a starfield of some sort, reflecting the space it inhabits.
Literal Approximations
While most artists pull in some way from what Perihelion actually is when deciding how to depict it, some artists will go as close to literal as they can with the constraints (and strengths) of a static, soundless image. Parts of Perihelion’s ship interior, such as cameras, lights, and walls, will serve the same function as a feed design, giving Perihelion a way to visibly emote and interact with the other characters. Circuit board lines, binary, and lines of code show up in several designs, with a few being purely just code or circuitry. Some designs will display the various tasks it is performing. A few designs stick to just text when portraying it, using color, font, and so on to convey that Perihelion is speaking and what its mood is. I classified 24, or 10%, of designs under this "literal approximation" category.
In conclusion, the average Perihelion is a spaceship ripped straight from the Artificial Condition cover that occasionally is also a tiny floating gray dome with thin limbs and camera for a face. Its feed presence is a cluster of cornflower blue and grayscale pixels that shapeshift between a human with no shirt, no shoes, and no face, a biblically accurate dragon with a million eyes, and an endless starry ocean. Or at least that’s what it is based on the images I gathered and my own judgement.
Rereading network effect and omg was so stressed about murderbot being botnapped i didn't notice but when Three first offers to help ART is so so desperate to rescue its friend. It loves murderbot! Its only in danger because of ART! Anything could be happening to it! ART is quite literally in the middle of trying to bomb that colony to try and get it back and it knows it won't even work!!!
But when Three says hey I'll go save it if you'll agree to let my clients go safely home, ART doesn't jump on this plan. Heck ART's smart enough to think of manipulating Three into helping but it doesn't. Instead it says you don't have to perform your function for me, I'll return your clients either way.
And then Three says it'll do it anyway and ART asks why. It could jump at the chance but it cares about this newly rogue secunit 2.0 made! It doesn't want to take away its brand new autonomy!
Its not until Three says it wants to that ART is satisfied. It wants to save murderbot sooooooo bad, enough to decimate a colony. But its still kind to Three.
For a while, I’ve wanted to write something on how Murderbot explores the theme of identity, through the lens of memory and choice, how it compares to other works that explore the same theme, and how it has helped me shape my perspective on identity.
I’m going to be talking a lot about 2.0, so if you’ve read what I’ve written before and you did not like my interpretation, this is a warning. There are parts of this that get very personal, and I am not in any way open to criticism about them. I want to share a quote I came across for the first time while thinking about this from a writer much more practiced and prolific than me: ‘…Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling... The story is not all mine… But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.'
You may not agree with my interpretation, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong and you’re right! It also doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. It’s okay to interpret things differently, interpretation is a matter of perspective. Experiences shape our perspective, and our experiences are not universal. I think that if you read this through to the end, you’ll come to understand how my experiences have impacted how I interpret these books. Le Guin says it so well: ‘if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best’. With that out of the way:
Has Murderbot ever distanced itself from who it was pre-memory wipe? Does it ever imply that it thinks that it’s a different person now, after the wipes compared to before them?
I think if anything Martha Wells shows us the opposite. If we go by word of God, Murderbot is around 20 years old, but it only has its memories since its last wipe. So if we were to argue that memories define who a person is, Murderbot has only been around for four years. Do we ever get any textual evidence that Murderbot feels that way?
In Artificial Condition, it returns to Ganaka Pit to learn the context of the mass killing it participated in:
Rogue units killed their human and augmented human clients. I … had done that once. But not voluntarily.
I needed to find out whether or not it had been voluntary.
It does this because it wants to find out if it’s a safe enough person to continue to interact with PresAux. It needed to figure out if the killings were an accident, or the result of a decision it made. And if it found out it was a decision, that would mean it isn’t safe. But that logic only holds up if it considers itself to be the same person.
I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me. Where it was safe. For me and for them.
If I had gone back to Preservation with Dr. Mensah and the others, she might be able to guarantee my safety, but could I really guarantee her safety from me?
This is always the argument I hear: 2.0 is different because it doesn’t have all of 1.0’s memories. It's something that a lot of people have brought up when they read my analysis! But I can’t think of any time where Murderbot implies that it connects its identity to memory in that way, either overtly or through nuance.
While I see a lot of people arguing this point, I don’t see anyone taking into account how 2.0 does relate to its memories.
“It was strange to see a SecUnit from the outside. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it. I remembered what it was like, standing like this. It was all in the excerpted personal archive files I had with me. How helpless it … I was."
This is from the first chapter from 2.0’s perspective, a few pages after it came online. And this is really the first thing that made me stop and think to myself: this is Murderbot. The way it relates to the memory? Is the way that a person relates to their own memories. To me there is no ambiguity here.
And for a being that is supposedly not a SecUnit, it talks an awful lot about being a SecUnit! It introduces itself as a SecUnit first and foremost to both Three and TargetContact:
I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.
TargetContact heard me. They were startled. They said, What are you? A SecUnit. Killware.
And here’s when 2.0 is trying to convince Three to help it:
Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.
ART asks “Do you know what you are” and it replies “I’m Murderbot 2.0” when 2.0 first wakes up.
It doesn’t ever really talk about being killware as a part of its identity the same way. If its identity were branching out to become a different person, that might have been one way to show it. Even when it first encounters 1.0, this is how it introduces itself:
I’m the copy of you. For the viral killware you and ART made. Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.
So it sounds like it separates its identity in some way from the killware, which was the part of 2.0 that ART and MB created together.
It says this about the difference between being supported by a killware architecture vs a construct body:
It was disorienting not being able to hear or see anything, and none of my inputs were receiving.
2.0 still expects to be receiving those inputs. It goes on to describe the experience:
It was like when I had uploaded myself to the company gunship’s systems to help the bot pilot during the sentient killware attack. Except that time it had been like the ship was my body, which I was sharing with a friendly bot pilot, and this time it was like I was stuck in a storage cubby. Also, this time I was the sentient killware. This is weird.
Two observations about this excerpt: This sounds a bit like dysphoria? Not extreme, but there is an incongruence between what it expects and what it is. Also, this is another example of it relating to 1.0’s memories as its own. This is not how a separate person talks about someone else’s memories!
We only get two chapters from the perspective of 2.0, and both of them occur before it joins up with 1.0, so we never get to know how it feels about interacting with itself. Maybe the more unique experiences it got to have, the more separate it would find its identity from 1.0. But what we do get doesn’t give me any indication that’s the case. When it does meet up with 1.0, it doesn’t seem like it has any kind of crisis of identity. It seems pretty comfortable to squat in 1.0’s brain.
I’ve consumed media that does tell that kind of story! The Imperial Radch does it with Tisarwat, who clearly feels a dissonance with her former identity:
“Will she come back?” asked Medic, standing, trembling, as I cleaned instruments and put them away. “Tisarwat, I mean, will she be Tisarwat again?” “No.” I closed a box, put it in its drawer. “Tisarwat was dead from the moment they put those implants in.” They. Anaander Mianaai would have done that herself.
"And if I do come back. If I come back, sir, will you authorize Medic to change my eyes back to a more reasonable color?» Those foolish lilac eyes, that the previous Tisarwat had bought for herself. "If you like." "It's such a stupid color. And every time I see myself it reminds me of her." Of that old Tisarwat, I supposed. "They don't belong to me."
The Locked Tomb does it with Paul:
And it was just Camilla, after all—Camilla having lost all that fringe and most of her hair except for a charred inch or so—Cam with new eyes, and a new face, for all that they were the same-shaped eyes and the old familiar features. But the eyes were a different colour, though Nona could not see what colour from where she sat. All she could see was that they were different. And the features, though in the same order, were making such a different set of expressions—not Camilla’s, not Palamedes’s—that it struck Nona all at once: they were gone—they had left her—they were no longer there.
“Yeah, but—Paul?” “Just Paul,” said Paul. Crown suggested, “Paul … Hect?” “Just Paul,” said Paul.
We get confirmation of this dissonance from both the changed characters and the people around them! And isn’t it so interesting, that in both examples I picked there’s discussion about eyes. Eyes are the windows to the soul, they are a stand in for perspective. Tisarwat wants to change her eyes, to differentiate herself from the previous Tisarwat. She feels like they don’t belong to her. One of the first things Nona notices about Paul is the change in their eyes. Throughout Nona the Ninth, eye color is used as a way to identify who was in possession of Camilla’s body. It is telling that the body has unfamiliar eyes. The soul is different.
Now, as a sentient killware virus, Murderbot 2.0 does not have eyes, but I quoted the very first bit we get from its perspective earlier! The first thing it does upon remembering who it is is remark on being disoriented by not having its inputs. Compared to Tisarwat, who wants to change her eyes to distance herself from the person she used to be, Murderbot in a different form still expects to see through the perspective it is used to.
Severance explores this idea with a lot of the characters. Helena Eagan clearly doesn’t think of Helly R as being the same person. She doesn’t think of Helly as being a person at all, despite sharing a brain and a body:
"Helly. I watched your video asking that I resign. I also received and responded to your previous request. I assumed that would resolve the issue but now Ms. Cobel says you threatened to cut off your fingers?
I understand that you're unhappy with the life that you've been given. But you know what? Eventually, we all have to accept reality. So, here it is.
I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions you do not. If you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to horribly regret that. Your resignation request is denied.”
Then in the season 2, when Helly finds out that her innie has been impersonating her, had sex with the person she loves while pretending to be her, she says:
She used me to trick my friends. Used my body to get close to you. That she dresses me in the morning like I’m a baby. She controls me, and this company, and all of us. It’s disgusting.
When Dylan’s outie finds out his wife kissed his innie, he considers it to be ‘cheating with his body’. But at the same time, he considers the paycheck his innie earns to be his.
“He reminds me of how you used to be!”
“I’m gonna go to work and earn a paycheck to feed our children. And I’m gonna respectfully request that you don't follow me there and use my own body to fucking cheat on me.”
Meanwhile, Dylan’s innie clings to the idea that he and his outie are the same, because he longs for a family. Lumon takes advantage of this, organizing for his outie’s wife to visit him. They drive a wedge between him and his team by giving him the chance to imagine what it would be like to be married, to have children. And when that is taken away from him, when his wife stops coming because it upsets her husband, he tries to quit, effectively ending his life.
Severance is a very interesting example, because it seems like the inverse of Murderbot's exploration of identity. Integration of the two halves is possible, but it’s a complex process that can go wrong. We haven’t seen it successfully completed yet. Severed workers have no memory of their lives outside of work, and throughout both seasons, we see example after example of how their outside experiences fail to influence who they are without those memories. This is not an idea that is explored in Murderbot. Even if Murderbot doesn't remember the majority of its life, those experiences have undoubtedly left their mark on it.
Gemma takes apart the baby crib and she does it without any emotional response in the season 2 finale. Every wellness visit Ms. Casey has with Mark S, where he interacts with his wife, smells the candle from their home, sees the replica of the tree that supposedly caused her death, he never remembers who she is. When Mark’s innie is faced with Gemma pleading to come with her, to escape from Lumon together, he turns away, feeling nothing for her and runs to be with Helly for whatever amount of time they can steal away. Mark’s innie was never convinced to help Gemma by the argument that she’s his outie’s wife. Helly convinces him when she tells him their situation is hopeless. They can never be together, but if they get Ms. Casey/Gemma out, then the abuse might stop, and at least innie Mark will be alive in some capacity after reintegration.
With each character, we see how their outside personality bleeds into who they are as severed individuals. The grief that Mark feels for his wife is felt by his innie, but he has no way of understanding it until he loses Petey. The loss of his friend is the catalyst for innie Mark’s initial disobedience. After starting reintegration, Petey tells Mark’s outie that
“You carried the hurt with you. You feel it down there too, you just don't know what it is.”
Irving’s outie seems determined to expose the truths that Lumon has been hiding from the public. He’s done research into the workers that Lumon employs, and deprives himself of sleep while painting the same image of a dark hallway, hoping that his innie will get the message and do some investigating himself. But Irving’s innie doesn’t have the context of those paintings, and that determination manifests itself very differently in Lumon’s severed environment. He’s a rule abiding worker, the one least likely to go against management.
He starts breaking the rules when he falls in love with another worker, Burt. And when Burt retires and his life is ended, Irving loses any reason to keep following their rules. He tries to kill Helena Eagan knowing that it would mean the end of his, when he figures out who is really in control of Helly’s body. And when Burt’s outie sends Irving’s outie away to save his life, Irving says:
‘I want to remember it… I’ve never been loved before. Not really. I’ve never had this. My whole life’.
Irving’s innie felt that desire to be loved, but didn’t know that it was something his outie longed for his whole life. If that lack of love was caused by a resistance to connection, due to trauma, then Irving’s innie didn’t experience it. The two of them fell in love very quickly. They barely had any time together at all.
Helena Eagan is the head of her company. She’s confident and in control, and Helly is very much the same. Helena expects her innie to fall in line, to do the job that she’s told to do. She herself probably had to do so a lot growing up in the shadow of her predecessors. Her father visits Helly, and tells her:
I do not love my daughter. I used to see Kier in her but he left her as she grew. I sired others in the shadows but he wasn't in them either. Until I saw him again. In you.
Somewhere along the way Helena Eagan lost this quality that her father cherished in her. That her father snuffed out. Helly didn’t ever experience being beaten down in that way, so she refuses disrespect without fear of punishment.
With all those examples, there’s a dissonance between the person they started as and the person they become. They’re examples of a death and rebirth archetype. Breq from the Imperial Radch feels more in line with Murderbot. She has not become a different person through her experiences, although she has been changed by them. There is a continuity of identity.
Breq doesn’t ever stop identifying as a ship. After twenty years, stuck in a human body, Justice of Toren destroyed along with all other ancillaries. She never gets used to being alone. She misses having all the data about the people aboard the ship available to her, and Mercy of Kalr (the ship she captains) shares it with her. She misses feeling connected to her crew in that way. And this inability to conceive of herself as something other than a ship affects her relationships! Breq struggles with the idea of captaining Mercy of Kalr, and has a hard time accepting what relationship they do have.
"You're very good to me, Ship," I said, after a moment. "And I know we both feel like... like we're missing part of ourselves. And it seems like each of us is the piece the other is missing. But it isn't the same, is it, me being here isn't like you having ancillaries back.
And even if it were, ships want captains they can love. Ships don't love other ships. They don't love their ancillaries. And I meant what I said. You should be able to be your own captain, or at least choose her.
We do get to see how 1.0’s perspective on 2.0 changes, though. At first, it does seem to feel a sense of dissonance with 2.0. But as soon as the two connect, and 2.0 starts squatting in 1.0's brain, MB starts talking about 2.0 in the first person. It does it a lot! The only part of their interaction where it might be interpreted that MB thinks 2.0 might branch off and do its own thing (imo) is this:
I was not in great shape. Projectiles kept popping out of me as I limped along and the leaking was worse. Also, in Adventures in Living with Your Own Killware Cozied Up Inside Your Head, 2.0 had partitioned off a corner of my processing space. It would have worried me more if it wasn’t in there watching episode 172 of Sanctuary Moon. I needed that processing space, especially with my performance reliability dropping, but what I didn’t need was 2.0 forgetting its directive and turning on me, so everything it did to retain its self-awareness was great.
But I argue that that's a thought it has had about itself throughout the whole series! So to me that's not a strong argument. Murderbot 2.0 has the exact same thought:
As killware, my onboard storage space would be limited and I remember ART and Me Version 1.0 had been a little worried I’d forget who I was and start randomly attacking stuff.
Yeah, I was a little worried about that, too.
Another argument I've heard is that 2.0 can't be considered the same person as Murderbot, because it makes different choices. To me though, System Collapse was the story of Murderbot figuring its way out toward making those same choices: freeing people from enslavement by forming a connection to them and sharing its experiences, and freeing a governed SecUnit without agonizing over it too long! 2.0 is Murderbot without the shackles of its trauma, and once Murderbot starts addressing that trauma their differences shrink. MB says
The problem was, 2.0 had been in a unique position with Three. There was no way to replicate that here, even if I didn’t know that just replicating conditions doesn’t always give an identical or even similar result.
But even though the conditions are different, they still end up in the same place.
Something that has stuck out to me in System Collapse is that Murderbot never mourns 2.0. Not in the way you’d expect, if you think of it as MB’s offspring. Or if you ignore the biological connotations, if you just think of it as a separate person. It never wishes it got to know 2.0 better. It doesn’t mourn the missed experiences. It only compares itself to 2.0 in SC whenever it feels like it’s failing. It thinks of 2.0 as literally what the name suggests, an improved version of itself. Not as a person with the capacity to grow beyond what it started as (ironic, considering 2.0 literally changes its function, much like 1.0 did!).
In Platform Decay, we get some mention of 2.0, but I wouldn't call it ‘2.0 haunting the narrative’. Murderbot has no emotional response to its mention of 2.0, its talk is very matter-of-fact. In Network Effect it said “I had killed SecUnits and combat bots but this was me, sort of, okay not so sort of…” It thought of killing 2.0 like killing itself. And if you think of it from that angle, the lack of mourning makes sense. You wouldn’t mourn yourself after a suicide, if you were still alive (not that that makes any sense for humans).
It would mess you up terribly to have to commit an act of violence against yourself. To terminate your own life, even if you’re able to walk away afterward and keep on living. Self harm is a habit that’s hard to break, and although Murderbot has thrown itself in harm’s way to protect its people, and treated its body carelessly, I can’t think of a time where it has purposefully harmed itself. Killing itself in 2.0 was an escalation of a pre-existing pattern. Speaking from experience (don’t be a dick!), when a person hurts themself to get through life, it’s not a one time thing. You keep on thinking about it. The fear and dread of taking that action again pervades your existence. I felt that fear throughout System Collapse, up until Murderbot has its eureka moment. I don’t know if Martha Wells intended for it to come across that way, but it did to me.
In the first chapter of Platform Decay, Murderbot is present as a partial iteration, and it describes Murderbot 2.0 as having been a ‘full iteration’. At this point in the story, if it didn’t consider 2.0 to be a part of itself, why is it still considered an iteration? If not having 1.0’s neural tissue was enough to consider it a different person, what does it imply about the Murderbot in chapter 1 that was running on Three’s? And then partway through the book, when it encounters the Rainforest Unit it calls the file “my own (Murderbot 2.0’s own) hack-your-governor-module annotated code bundle”. It wasn’t just the governor module hack, like it gave to the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. It was the bundle that 2.0 sent Three, and it thinks of it as its own. Those were the only two mentions of 2.0.
So is it the details that define us? Or is the overall way that our experiences shape our perception of the world? Now is the part where I’m gonna talk about how the series has affected me. This gets personal, so please be kind. Don’t argue with me over how I interpret my own life experiences.
A couple years before Martha Wells published All Systems Red, my mom died. I was 21 years old, and it was and still is the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was painful and traumatic and so, so, unexpected. We were so incredibly close and I remember after her death, looking at pictures of myself and thinking: ‘this person is a stranger to me’ (I know, stay with me though). That person still experienced the love of a mother. They never had to process a loss like this. I felt profoundly changed.
There was so much about my identity that changed after her death. My mom was a white woman, and my dad is very much not a white man. His first language is Arabic, and he’s a Muslim immigrant from North Africa. My mom was an only child and both of her parents were dead by the time I was old enough to remember them, so when she died, my link to that part of my identity was gone. My dad’s family absolutely stepped up. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t think of them as my family. But to put it bluntly, I don't look like them. I look like my mom, just half a foot shorter with a darker complexion. It was easier to lean in to the similarities I shared with her.
After 9/11 my dad didn’t want to share his culture with me and my brother, so this distance from his identity was reinforced by him! And we had no ties to his community in our city. My dad’s family lived on the other side of the world my whole life, so I didn’t have nearly as strong a connection to them. That has changed over the last decade. It had to change, if I wanted to feel like part of a family again. I feel so much closer to my dad’s family than I do to my mom’s now. Even if I look more and more like her every year, her influence on my life has faded away.
My mom was Catholic, and when I was eight years old I made the choice to get baptized. Looking back now, perhaps that’s too young of an age to be making that kind of decision, but my parents were doing their best. They did not raise me with religion, but they sent me to Catholic School because that was the cheapest private option in our city. I wasn’t the only non-Catholic in the class! But it didn’t stay that way for long. Being in that environment made me want to participate in the community, I wanted to be a part of the same group as my friends. So a few years after starting school, when my entire class got to prepare to receive Communion and Reconciliation, I told my parents I wanted to become Catholic. And I threw myself into it! I was an alter server. I joined my school’s gospel choir. I went on religious youth retreats. But no matter how much I tried to wedge myself into that community, I always felt othered in little ways.
When my mom died, any ties I still had to that faith drifted away. That community couldn’t give me the support that I needed, and by that point I didn’t want it anymore. I took a Comparative World Mythology class a few years later, in order to complete my degree requirements after I failed the classes I had needed to graduate after her death, and my perspective on religion changed a lot. I had never thought about religion so critically before. The first commandment is ‘you shall have no other gods before me’, and it wasn’t as though other gods took a step forward, but God had taken a step back.
And one of the hardest parts of my mom’s death was that she died without giving me a chance to come out to her. The morning of the day that she died, I sat next to her hospital bed and held her hand and told her that I wasn’t a woman. The idea that she would die without learning this fundamental aspect of my identity was unacceptable to me. I strongly suspect she knew something was up! I started wearing binders I bought on ebay from China when I was 15 and she saw them. But she did die not knowing me like this. She will never get to know me as I am.
I’ve changed so much in the decade since her death, in big ways and small ways. Am I a different person because I'm not a woman? Because I don’t believe in God? Because my mother might not recognize the person I’ve become? It’s been a long time since her death now. To the person I was when she died, it’s been half a lifetime.
I don’t think I am. I remember looking at those pictures of myself from before her death and not seeing myself in them, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I was dissociating, hard. That little girl is still alive in me, the things she went through will affect my perception of the world for my whole life. Even though I've changed a lot in some ways, the people I've been in my past will never feel far from me. And if I were to meet the person I will be in 50 years from now, I think at first the differences will be shocking, but they’ll still be me. With context I would come to understand how we became the person I end up.
Reading about how 2.0, a being that has been dramatically changed from its original iteration, looks at 1.0 and only sees itself was very validating. And seeing Murderbot struggling in System Collapse, comparing itself to this different version, it felt like looking in a mirror into the past. System Collapse was such a hard book for me to read, because it came out at a time when I felt healed! Healed in the ways it’s possible to heal from grief. It stays with you always. But that mindset felt very far from me when I first picked it up. I didn’t end up reading it to the end until two and a half years after it came out, and I read all the others as they were released. System Collapse is a book about grief, coping with loss, but Murderbot didn’t lose a family member in 2.0. It lost a sense of self. Both are things that I’ve experienced, and I only see the latter in Murderbot. But like I said at the very beginning, this is based on my experience only!
They say you should read what challenges you, so after the tv show ended last summer, I sat down and made myself finish it. When I came to a point in the story where I felt uncomfortable, I stopped reading and thought deeply on why I might feel that way. And a lot of the thoughts I was having were about the relationship between 1.0 and 2.0. About the kind of loss 2.0 was from 1.0’s perspective, and how its perspective slowly changes from Network Effect to System Collapse. When Murderbot compared itself to 2.0 again and again, I took a step back, and stopped looking at 2.0 from only 1.0’s perspective. What really were the ways it was different from 1.0? How does 2.0 think of itself in relation to 1.0? What does that mean regarding how Murderbot thinks of identity? Of memory? Of choices?
I love stories that play around with identity. It’s something that I’ve struggled with my whole life, as I laid out for you above. But no other story has helped shape my perspective like Murderbot. It has helped me articulate thoughts that I’ve had for a long time about my idea of identity. And Murderbot has helped me look at different stories with a fresh perspective. I’ve read a lot of stories with similar themes, but I’ve never thought that deeply about it. It’s made me see the nuance in how each story differs, how they reflect something different about identity.
