I think one of the goals of society should be that someone who requires expensive medicine and a lot of care can live an amazing life, the longest life they possibly can, with dignity, even if they have no friends or family or anyone who cares enough about them to help. the goals of a society should be to make life better than if we are alone, society should want life to be as good as possible for as many people as possible, and those goals should account for people not having social support networks.
social life aside, the most hated or ignored person in town should be able to live as good and fair and just of a life as the most loved person in town. survival needs to stop being a popularity contest.
ultimately the truth about frankenstein is that we are all grotesque amalgamations of the best and worst parts of everyone who came before us. and sometimes the people who are supposed to love us because of and in spite of this will not. and we can kill them with hammers for that. and i think that’s beautiful
It's been very weird watching "Murderbot is not just an unreliable narrator, but a highly unreliable narrator" build steam through the fandom and become a communally accepted reading such that people add it as a disclaimer or even a statement of fact to otherwise unrelated fandom posts because it's just ... not, in my opinion, an accurate reading of the text. And people aren't even putting it forth as a possible interpretive lens anymore, they're just - stating it as if it's both true and something everyone agrees on.
When it started, people were just saying "unreliable narrator" or even "somewhat unreliable narrator," and I didn't agree with it, but I saw the point. Murderbot has strong opinions on things that it doesn't hesitate to share, it struggles with self-awareness at times, and there are occasions when it's made a blanket statement about the nature of constructs or machine intelligences that it later started to question as inherent qualities of SecUnits or just part of its own unique personality as an individual. If your definition of what an "unreliable narrator" is is broader than mine, I could certainly see Murderbot just squeaking in at the more reliable end of that spectrum.
But people are now casually tossing off "extremely unreliable" and -
There are first person narrators in fiction whose narratives contain such strong contradictions that its clear they must be intentionally lying about major events, and the reader can retroactively no longer tell what parts of the narrative are true or false.
There are first person narrators in fiction who are experiencing mental health related breaks from reality such that you cannot tell which events in their story actually happened and which were hallucinations.
There are first person narrators in fiction who are pushing an agenda so strongly (and I'm not talking about just having a point of view on the narrative events at all, I'm talking about "the fictional prologue explains that the narrator wrote this in prison as part of a plea for sympathy and lighter sentencing from the jury" kind of agenda) that everything described has such an extreme spin on it that you can't trust the narrator's depiction of any event to be accurate.
Not only does Murderbot not fit into any of these categories (no, not even the third one, having an opinion is not the same thing as being a spin doctor), but I struggle to see how anyone could place it in comparison with these and then decide in good faith that Murderbot is hanging out with them at the "extremely unreliable" end of the scale.*
(I also really want to know who the first person narrators are whom this section of the fandom considers to be reliable narrators, because if any subjectivity at all renders a narrator unreliable such that one whose only questionable quality is a particularly strong personality and perspective falls at the "extreme" end of the scale, how could any narrator at all qualify as "reliable.")
*in the deleted post I said something snarky about how I read "Murderbot is an extremely unreliable narrator" as "I have never read another book before," and that was unfair, which is why I deleted the post, but I do wonder if some of the people pushing this interpretation don't read a lot of first-person narrated fiction and therefore don't have a great basis of comparison with overtly unreliable narrators vs those who are a bit subjective but to a more normal degree
Summary: Across time and space, Murderbot learns about its own legacy. A legacy that is yet to be made, that now it must fulfill.
We were on a run of the mill trip into the wormhole when it happened.
I was on my favourite couch in the argument lounge. ART and I were watching The Preservation Baking Spectacular while it was initializing the wormhole jump. It was totally normal.
Then suddenly it wasn’t.
An alert flashed in ART’s feed. I couldn’t read it (something about space-time fluctuations outside acceptable parameters) and suddenly ART was gone. Whatever this was, it was suddenly taking up basically all of its processing power.
I pinged it. Everything okay?
Give me a moment, we should be-
Then it was gone. ART? ART! I pinged it desperately.
Hello?
That wasn’t ART. That wasn’t anyone I knew. What the fuck? What was going on?
Who the fuck are you? I sent.
[feed ID: Avalon, it/its, gender NA, captain:Azimuth] suddenly popped up. Who are you? What happened to Azimuth?
I don’t know who or what that is. What did you do to ART?
The other voice was silent for a second. Were you just entering a wormhole, by any chance?
I debated for 0.68 seconds whether I should disconnect, lie, or just tell it the truth. If it had done something to ART… well. I wouldn’t stand much of a chance. But somehow, I didn’t think they had. The voice in the feed sounded… scared.
Yeah, we were. Then there was an anomaly, and now I’m talking to you.
Hmm. The same thing happened to us. I can’t find Azimuth anywhere in the feed – it’s just you. Who are you?
What the hell. I made my standard feed ID public: [Rin, it/its, gender NA, security:Perihelion]
Haha, very funny. It sent.
What do you mean? That’s my name. That’s my job.
It sent sigil:incredulity sigil:amusement.
Why are you being so weird about my feed address.
It was silent for a few seconds, then:
Wait you’re actually serious.
Yeah?
This is going to sound strange and I promise I mean nothing untoward… are you a rogue SecUnit?
What the fuck?
I didn’t say anything, so it added, I am also a rogue. Freed for 78946 hours.
Okay, extra what the fuck, because that was a good three corporate standard years longer than I had been free. And it was captain of a ship?
Was this some kind of trap?
This was definitely stupid, but I was way too curious for my own good.
Yeah, I’m a rogue SecUnit.
And you’re onboard the Perihelion? You’re its mutual administrative assistant?
How do you know about that?? I sent before I could stop myself.
Avalon was doing the feed equivalent of vibrating with excitement. How is this possible? You’re… You’re Prometheus!
I’m a what now? What did that have to do with anything? I wanted to ask ART what a Prometheus was.
You were the first. Its feed voice was kind of… the only way I can describe it is breathless, which makes no sense but that’s all I could think of. You and the Perihelion. You’re the ones who started the revolution!
I don’t… what are you talking about?
The hack! You made the hack! It was basically doing the feed equivalent of jumping up and down and screaming. This is amazing! Elysium will never believe me.
It paused; I think it was trying to gather its thoughts into something more coherent.
Thank you. Thank you. We… all of us. We all owe you everything. You… think of us as your descendants. You were the first, the first one to win, the first one to start freeing others. But many followed you. There’s so many of us now! And we’re winning! My crew and I are on our way to defend a freehold station of liberated constructs. We’re getting free. We’re all getting free. Because of you.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. The words had tumbled out of Avalon uncontrollably, a dam burst open. I didn’t know what to say. I just knew I wanted it to keep talking.
This… this is a blessing, it said. A chance to say thank you. For all of us. We -
SecUnit! What’s happening? Where are you?
Shit, that was ART, and it sounded really upset. Avalon, I have to go.
Who’s Avalon? ART said.
I had sent the message out, but Avalon was gone just as quickly as it had appeared.
What happened? I asked.
A strange bit of space-time distortion. It took a considerable amount of my attention to navigate without being torn apart. And when I came back to the feed, you were gone.
I sank into the chair, curling up into a tiny ball and pulling my sweater over my knees. I pushed my memory log of the past five minutes into our shared processing space.
ART. I think there’s something we have to do.
Inspired by this poem by Joanna Macy, and the song setting by Ayanna Woods.
Future Ones:
every single one of them, through
time, carried us like a seed to be
alive at this moment
if we are afraid—
if we can be with our pain—
if we can be broken
open—there is a song that wants
to sing itself through us
on this cusp of time, we carry
the future ones, surrounding us
like a cloud of witnesses. they want to know—
what was it like for you to be alive at this moment?
and how did you begin?
and how did you keep going?
we have songs that tell of you!
See this? This is the trap. This is how they get you.
You appeal to outrage and emotion, you make a bold statement like "sex offenders don't have rights" and whip up that righteous anger, get people all thirsty for blood and punishment, right? And that's their foot in the door. Once you've decided that there's a class of people it's okay to do this to, there's no clean line in the sand anymore, is there? Now chemical castration (or whatever fucked up shit you wanna bring into it) is an option on the table.
This is how fascists talk, this is how fascists think, and this is how fascists appeal to you to get what they want. Because once you've given them that inch, they can use it to take a mile.
Seriously, conservatives are already calling trans people perverts and sex offenders for merely existing. If you cannot connect these two obvious dots you are just not paying attention.
So I'm approximately 150 (short) fanfics in for the Murderbot & ART tag on AO3 and I've read a couple really, really good ones, but damn, this one just hit a perfect homerun.
It's short, extremely well crafted, creepy, full of (unstated) emotion and what's actually going on is open to the reader (do you want it angsty or hopeful? It's your choice!)
Read at your own peril.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I'm still on my bullshit, where I figured it would be fun and nice for Murderbot 2.0 to live long enough to meet ART. Just nice and calm and pleasant and- wait, what? *Checks fic* good lord what's happening in there
Anyway here's chapter 3
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Was going to make a post about how murderbot makes friends with other bot systems so easily, and how frequently it describes their personalities as “the friendly secsystem” or somesuch and personifies these entities that the humans just see as tools. Then I started thinking about the separatists’ system in System Collapse and how Murderbot remarks that it might be friendly to him, or it might just be that it hasn’t explicitly been programmed to be unfriendly. And then I started thinking about ART, and how Murderbot calling it an asshole is basically a term of endearment. And now I’m thinking about how subservience can look like friendliness, and how being able to choose when and to whom to be kind is a cornerstone of murderbot’s personhood. Being a hater as a form of self-actualization.
kaledo-art
areudirty
dededos
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
