Call it the Gurathin simp in me, but I have a few thoughts on this passage in particular that I wanted to share.
“He said, “Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?”
It wasn’t completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It’s one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.
I said, “No, not like you’re thinking. Not the way a human would be punished. They shut me down for a while, and then brought me back online at intervals.”
He hesitated. “You weren’t aware of it?”
Yeah, that would be the easy way out, wouldn’t it? “The organic parts mostly sleep, but not always. You know something’s happening. They were trying to purge my memory. We’re too expensive to destroy.”
He looked out the port again. We were flying low over trees, and I had a lot of my attention on the terrain sensors. I felt the brush of Mensah’s awareness in the feed. She must have woken when Gurathin spoke. He finally said, “You don’t blame humans for what you were forced to do? For what happened to you?”
This is why I’m glad I’m not human. They come up with stuff like this. I said, “No. That’s a human thing to do. Constructs aren’t that stupid.”
What was I supposed to do, kill all humans because the ones in charge of constructs in the company were callous? Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.”
— All Systems Red (Kindle Single): The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
At this point in the story, MB holds some pretty righteous dislike for Gurathin due to Gurathin reading its logs and constantly testing it and is assuming all the worst intentions on Gurathin’s part. It treats everything Gurathin does with suspicion. So when Gurathin asks if Murderbot blames humans for what happened to it in this scene, it immediately assumes Gurathin is asking whether it’s angry at humans for the memory wipe. This is apparent when it comments how it would be stupid to get mad at all humans because a few at the company are callous. The techs at the company. Not whoever used a hack or malware or combat override module on it. The memory wipe was done by the company in pursuit of maintaining the profit from Murderbot’s continued use, but the memory wipe was not malicious. Therefore, it does not make sense to put real blame on anyone (except the Corporation Rim structure in general) for the memory wipe because that’s considered baseline normal (though that’s a different set of fridge horrors). And memory wipe isn’t enough for the generally minimum-damage-possible Murderbot to want to murder all humans.
But, looking closely, whether Murderbot was mad about the memory wipe is NOT actually what Gurathin asked. While he may not completely trust Murderbot yet, Gurathin has seen enough of Murderbot and apparently knows enough about constructs (I doubt Gurathin could have picked out Murderbot’s rogue behavior when Murderbot has been successfully hiding from people supposedly with more SecUnit experience for the last 4 years if he didn’t have some detailed knowledge on how SecUnits and their governor modules worked) to know that what happened at Ganaka Pit was neither voluntary nor was it a malfunction. Murderbot still believes the massacre was due to a glitch or fault from the company being cheap at this point and wouldn’t have reason to make the logical jump Gurathin has. I suspect Gurathin has realized almost a full book earlier than Murderbot itself does that Ganaka Pit was a hack like the combat override modules and that Murderbot would not have been a willing participant.
That would be more than enough to hold a grudge against a human or group of humans over.
So what Gurathin actually asked was “Do you blame humans for turning you into a murder machine against your will?” rather than “Do you blame humans for wiping your memory?”
Oh Murderbot. So perceptive in some things. So blind in others.
Related, I suspect if Murderbot ever did find out who did the Ganaka Pit hack, we’d find out just how much it supposedly doesn’t hold grudges.
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