I was afraid, but that made me irritated enough to show it that what it was doing to me was not exactly new. I sent through the feed, SecUnits don’t sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module, and attached some brief recordings from my memory of what exactly that felt like.
Seconds added up to a minute, then another, then three more. It doesn’t sound like much to humans, but for a conversation between bots, or excuse me, between a bot/human construct and a bot, it was a long time.
Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you.
okay okay okay but. i think about this constantly. this passage is what made me dig out an old pack of highlighters and get back into my high school habit of writing in my books
Wells has talked in interviews about how ART was raised in a family setting, because you want an AI with the power of a minor god to like the humans its caring for so it doesnt decide that its better off with them dead. and ART tells Murderbot shortly after this that it cant really parse its humans reactions to media, because the way humans interact with the feed doesnt map to bot emotions and because ART has zero context to build on for anything that isnt being a research vessel, but it can apparently understand Murderbots emotional reactions to things in a way that i assume is basically like being an artificial empath
so what those two things mean together is 1) ART has no concept of what it is like to be abused, to be scared, to be hurt, because it has never been any of those things, and 2) it just learned EXACTLY what those things feel like firsthand and the revelation probably rocked the very foundations on which its code was written
it took five minutes to process the handful of memories that Murderbot gave to it. Murderbot is understating the amount of time that is for a bot with ARTs capacity by a frankly hilarious degree. that would be a worryingly long time for a human in a face-to-face conversation. ART probably watched those memories hundreds of times in those five minutes, peeling them apart frame by frame and squeezing out every drop of distilled fear and betrayal that it got, and it internalized those
and it changes its approach. it apologizes, and backs off when Murderbot tells it that it doesnt want anything from it. (it comes right back a few hours later because it wants to watch world hoppers, but it approaches that differently too, by pinging Murderbot and sending it a request to change the channel, and its not an asshole when it explains why it wants Murderbot to watch the show with it. in fact, aside from some light sarcasm, it doesnt really get annoyed and start being rude to Murderbot again until Murderbot throws its little shutdown tantrum, at which point they have already managed to establish a sort of familiarity and ART considers them friends)
idk how to end this post i just want to climb up on my roof and start screaming about how much i love Perihelion “ART” UoMaNT okay Murderbot is so lucky to have the Asshole Research Transport as a friend
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