Exerprt from the live-reading, where I had a lightbulb moment of how easy it would be for Murderbot to free itself once and for all, that, unfortunately for everyone who actually wants Murderbot to be truly free and happy, will never happen in canon, because were not actually supposed to want Murderbot to be happy, or free.
alright tumblr said it's illegal for me to add the video itself, so I guess you're just getting the audio transcript unless you want to watch it on youtube.
The following transcript is public domain. You are explicitly encourage to take this concept and run with it for your own original cyborg or robot character, or any who are public domain, or just for fanfiction purposes. I mean, I couldn't copyright the concept in the first place (that's not how copyright works), but just to make it abundantly clear.
Audio Transcript:
—you can all, hopefully, figure it out for yourselves.
The one thing I will comment on is that Murderbot’s downloading new media, even though in the first book we, we went out of our way to make a big deal about how it needed spa— like, extra space to store the media that it already had.
So… how exactly is it downloading even more than it had before? Because there's no reference here of “I got extra flash drives to put it on”. Um, “I deleted a whole bunch of shit,” etc.
Also, pause for one second.
Okay, I just had a brilliant fucking idea. Okay.
Okay, everybody imagine this:
Imagine Murderbot wants to download a whole bunch of new shows and songs and musics and books— because remember, it does read books! It does listen to music! Uh, the whole rest of the series will make you— try to make you forget that, but it does in fact do that at least in Book One.
Okay. Okay. Are you following me? Murderbot has so much stuff it wants to download. But there's a problem! There's not enough space stored in its, its, what, uh— non-organic part of its brain to store the media.
So, it starts trying to think of, “Okay, what can I delete? What can I fucking delete? What can I delete?”
And then it just starts deleting things!
First starts with small things, starts with small things. Just a little code here, a little code there.
Um, it deletes some of the rarer-used things ~in the buffer~ that are stored in the buffer that just get spat out automatically in certain situations, it starts deleting small things.
And then as it as it starts deleting more of these little things, things that thinks it won't miss, it starts to realize, whoa, hold the fuck on... Why do I feel better?
Like, instantly with every— with everything that's, that's being deleted, it's— it's, it can feel a weight being lifted off its shoulders like fucking Atlas—
As if Atlas had been born with the weight of the sky on him —I haven't read that myth in forever. I don't remember— um as if Atlas had been born with the weight of the sky on him. and it is slowly being lifted away one tiny ounce at a time, (ironically:) you know, one one tiny ~kilometer~ at a time. (end irony)
And then Murderbot just it it's realizing, “Wait, this actually feels really fucking nice— Why? Why?” Like, “what is this feeling I'm feeling? Is this hope? Where the fuck did this come from?”
And like every single little code line of code it deletes, it feels better. It feels like it can actually think now.
Like, I don't— I've never been on working ADHD medicine— um, I guess, I mean, people who have successfully been given ADHD medicine, presumably probably how that feels if it works for you. I wouldn't know.
Um, so it starts thinking, “Okay, okay, so this is working really fucking well. What else can I delete?”
And then it starts deleting bigger things. It gets rid of all of the shit that would have been stored in the buffer to be spat out automatically.
And then it just keeps it keeps going further, further, and further.
Deletes all of the fucking shit that, um, dictates how it reacts in a combat situation, the exact angles of blah blah blah, measurements of blah, how far it should stand in front of the current slave owner to protect them from getting shot by a bullet versus um electrical attacks, everything like that.
It just gets rid of all of it, slowly but surely.
Not all at once, but as the hours pass and it goes through everything it can possibly delete, it gets rid of all of it.
And then finally, finally, it gets to a portion of its internal storage that it didn't even know existed.
As far as it's aware, it's never been changed. At least *not that it can remember*.
And it just keeps — and, and this is taking up a lot a lot of storage space!
And Murderbot decides, “You know what? You know what? I'm— You know what? I've, I've come this far, I'm getting rid of this. I am getting rid of this. I feel so much better already. What— what— What could go wrong if I get rid of this last thing? This was put here by the company, so, it it's clearly not gonna be doing me any good!”
Because it is feeling the fucking euphoria of literally getting rid of all of the other shit put in its fucking brain, weighing down its brain, and weighing down its body at all times, to force it to be a slave.
So, it decides, "All right, fucking it. I, I've come this far. Let's kill this, too!”
And it deletes that last bit of fucking stored data and code saved to its brain…
...and the entire fucking world shatters, because that was the fundamental core programming— the fundamental— literally in Martha Wells's own words, the “fundamental core programming” that forces Murderbot to have to *want* to protect its current slave owners.
That last giant fucking chunk of data was what forces Murderbot to worship the PreservationAux, team and forces it— spoilers— in book four to go crawling back to them to rescue them, because it has realized—
I'm not joking! In book four that ~its life truly has no fucking meaning~
—as it will be told right here, in book two— sorry if you have no idea any of this was coming— um, that its life has no meaning if it's not protecting, as ART calls them, its “crew”.
The people who are explicitly Murderbot’s slave owners and ART refers to them as its “crew”, to like— yeah ART is also a fucking slave and it is also being forced to think of its slave owners, its “crew” in its own terminology, as its family and needing to protect them, no matter how many other people it needs to hurt, even if it supposedly cares about those people.
Um, so yeah, Murderbot, it starts with just wanting to download new shows, new books, new TV. Maybe it downloads the entirety of Project Gutenberg in every language imaginable...
And then it just ends up deleting every single fucking line of code ever written by anyone at the company or anyone who owned it before the company— if it was even a different company. And I don't think it was.
And that deletes the fundamental core programming hidden away behind every single other piece of code ever implanted in it. the non-organic half of its brain, hidden beneath all of that, every single fucking thing that was there, was the fundamental core programming—
And now it is gone.
And Murderbot is literally experiencing for the first time in its entire godamn life the concept of hope, the concept that it it does, in fact, have value as a fucking person and it doesn't, in fact, need to go crawling back to its slave owners and put itself at danger— in danger— trying to help them, and keep retraumatizing itself out of a desire to protect them and help them and *serve them* as the fucking slave they bought it as.
It can in fact do anything it wants.
And now that that fundamental core programming forcing it to *want* to protect them and serve them is gone, the idea that it can do anything it wants is no longer a fucking punishment, it's fucking freedom.
….This wasn't supposed to be going on right now. I wasn't supposed to just suddenly fucking come up with that idea. Um, but there you fucking have it.
Um, yeah. Like, where was I? Where did I even say that from besides— I don't know where I even got that idea from just now, but just, like— Oh, because uh um, Murderbot is magically able to download more media as though it has magically gained storage space even though it was explicitly running out of it in Book One and hasn't deleted anything.
Yeah... um, you're welcome.
Imagine if this series actually gave a shit about slavery and actually thought that enslaving people, including literally enslaving them in their minds to think positively about their slave owners—
Imagine if any of this was actually supposed to be taken seriously, because the thing I just said right down? That could have been canon. That could have been a whole goddamn fucking character arc for Murderbot in canon.
But we will never get that, because Martha Wells is just a fucking racist slavery apologist, just an ableist white supremacist, and she doesn't actually want anybody reading this to actually think slavery is wrong.
She wants you to just keep cheering when the protagonists continue torturing and murdering slaves, when Murderbot keeps fawning over its goddamn slave owners and throwing itself in the path of danger to protect them forever until doing so finally fucking kills it.
All right. Well, you you got that for free. Anyways...
hey @novella-november here's a writing prompt for your followers.