This is a remix of "New Subfolder Found" (tumblr/ao3) but with a happy 2.0-lives-actually ending ❤️
Background AU info:
After running off at the end of All Systems Red, Murderbot learns that constructs do actually have secondary sex designations like humans do, and part of the cubicle maintenance routine was suppressing all those hormones and other organic things that come with it. It mostly learns to live with it, just like it learns to live with every other part of being an ungoverned secunit with humans who actually treat it like a person. Then Network Effect happens, and it seems the combination of code and organics that make up an omega construct still has more surprises in store...
Rated M, CWs: pregnancy, unplanned pregnancy, brief discussion of abortion, and all the usual omegaverse stuff
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«I don't wish to alarm you,» ART said, so of course threat and risk assessment both hit the roof for a fraction of a second. ART did a pretty good impression of an exasperated sigh in the feed, before continuing, «I found something anomalous in your medical scan.»
«And I'm not supposed to be alarmed by that?!» I demanded. Then the implications caught up to me. Oh fuck. «Is it more alien remnant contamination? Oh, fuck, did I pass it to you?!» Performance reliability decided to get in on the party too, taking a sharp nosedive of several percentage points. And considering I had barely been stable enough – and (we thought) decontaminated enough – to finally move from the deck in ART’s shuttle bay to its medbay, I didn't exactly have a whole lot of performance reliability to spare.
«It is not alien contamination!» ART said, breaking through my panic spiral, and if I wasn't already lying down, the force behind its feed voice would have knocked me over. Then, it hesitated, and my levels all spiked again. «It appears to at least partially predate our… reunion,» it said, and I couldn't help scowling. Not that I didn't get why ART had needed my help, or how desperate and terrified it had been to do what it did, or… Look, it was more that ART sounded like it was choosing its words super carefully, trying to be delicate about the fact it had kidnapped me and my humans and tiptoeing around whatever it had found.
«Just fucking tell me,» I snapped, and didn't need to say, ‘before my anxiety fills in more awful options.’
«You appear to have spontaneously grown a functional uterus in the months since I performed your configuration change.»
Well. That certainly wasn't one of the awful anxiety-induced options I had been expecting. “No, I didn't,” I said out loud, stupidly, because honestly all of my other systems were stuttering or outright frozen. I was pretty sure I knew what the word meant and its basic function in humans, and I sure as hell was not going to try to look it up right now. ART was fucking with me. It had to be.
«Unless you had it intentionally installed,» ART said, sarcastic and also sounding weirdly miffed – what, like it was the only one allowed to surgically alter my configuration? (I mean, yes, it was actually, okay? But I wasn't going to tell it that.) «It was not present on your medical scans prior to RaviHyral, and now it is. Ergo, without the influence of a cubicle suppressing it, your organic coding has continued to modify not only your hormonal levels, but your internal structure as well.»
«But—» ART and I had altered my code to change how my skin grew around my inorganic parts, and I had used its code templates more than once to change how my hair grew. Bot code and organic parts working in tandem, that's what it means to be a construct. But. But! I resisted the urge to throw off the blanket covering me or start ripping my clothes away just to prove to myself what I already knew. «I don't have any sex parts!»
«I did say internal structure,» ART reminded me, and its tone conveyed what an idiot it thought I was being without having to actually say it. «At present, there are still no signs of external genitalia forming, nor a passage connecting the uterus to the outside. The organ appears to be fully formed, but it is only this one organ.»
I squeezed my eyes shut. This was way too much information about disgusting human anatomy. I didn't want to think about external or internal sex parts, or passages connecting anything to anything else, or—
Another thought occurred to me. One I also really didn't want to think about, but once it was there, I couldn't stop.
«You also said it was functional,» I said, and yeah, that came out pretty accusatory without me really meaning for it to. It's not actually ART's fault that my stupid hormones latched onto it and decided it was my— Yeah, no, not thinking about that. But then ART got all… weird. Sort of fluttery in the feed. It hesitated before answering me, and I felt my face scowling even harder. «ART.»
«There is… evidence,» ART said, slowly, and I could tell how much it was trying to clamp down on its emotional metadata, trying – not entirely successfully – to keep any of its big, weird, shakiness from leaking out into our shared feed space, «of something growing. Inside your uterus.»
Did I say threat and risk assessment hit the roof before? That was nothing compared to now.
It took several seconds of me freaking out and ART trying to smother me in the feed before it could actually tell me anything more.
«It is not alien remnant contamination!» it insisted, not for the first time in the last few seconds, and then hurriedly added, «Assuming my calculations regarding the rate of cell division are correct, it began growing before you even went down to the planet. If I had known, I never would have—» It cut itself off, and I caught hints of guilt, embarrassment, and something else, something huge and tinged with excitement.
«Never would have what?!» I snarled, still struggling under ART’s ridiculous weight bearing down on me.
For just a moment, ART’s grip on me turned sharp and tight, flexing metaphorical talons into my walls. I got a flash of such hot, ferocious possessiveness from it that I felt myself instantly reacting, melting underneath it, tipping my head back to bare my throat and stilling my futile attempts to throw it off me in the feed. Worst of all, I actually whined, just a tiny bit of sound escaping from the back of my throat, but that was mortifying enough to finally snap us both out of it.
ART let go of me and hastily backed off, which was… good? Maybe? I was relieved? I think? Absolutely not disappointed at all, because that would be stupid, I was not missing the feel of it curling its claws into me, ready to tear through my defenses and do whatever it liked to me, what the fuck. What the fuck was wrong with me. (Yes, I know, it's my stupid organic hormones, as usual. I was almost afraid this was the heat coming back, even though it had only been a few days since the fever broke.)
«It's irrelevant,» ART said, with the air of someone patting down their hair and clothes, trying to appear dignified and like they hadn't just almost lost their shit. It didn't work. Even with space between us now, ART was still leaking that big, weird, mess of emotions into the feed. «If you hadn't gone down to the planet, we never would have recovered my crew, and if we hadn't deployed—»
It cut itself off again, showing just how not calm and dignified it really was, that it kept starting to say things it didn't mean to. For a bot who processes as fast as ART does, talking faster than it could think through its words was a pretty big deal. When it didn't finish the sentence, I thought for 0.001 of a second that it meant the pathfinders, that things would have been different if it hadn't turned its planetary mapping equipment into fucking bombs to blow up parts of the colony and threaten the colonists with blowing up more shit – but then I got it.
ART meant if it hadn’t deployed our killware to the Barish-Estranza Explorer.
If I hadn't gone down to the planet. If ART hadn't sent 2.0 to the Explorer. If 2.0 hadn't found me in that underground vault. Everything would be objectively worse, TargetControlSys would still be spreading, ART's humans would be dead or mind-controlled, it would only be a matter of time before the same thing happened to my humans, everything would be worse.
(The weight of the table leg in my hand. Telling myself that they’re sleeping, they’re just sleeping, they won’t feel a thing…)
But maybe 2.0 would be alive.
I had the weird urge to touch my stomach/lower abdomen, where I was pretty sure this new organ was supposed to be situated. (That's the part that swelled up and got all round when humans… Yeah, no. Never mind.) I curled my hands into fists at my sides instead, gripping the medbay blanket to keep myself from acting on that or any other weird physical urges that might come over me. I said in the feed, «So this thing started growing before everything went down.» Before I got infected, before TargetControlSys tried to count me as part of its network, before I got anywhere near TargetContact and its horrifying white crystalline growths.
(I specifically didn't ask why ART would even briefly consider the thought of not sending me to the planet just because there was apparently something growing inside my abdomen. That was not a line of thinking I planned on grappling with anytime soon. Or ever. I'm a SecUnit, I'm not fucking delicate, no matter what my stupid organic parts are doing. Besides, ART doesn't have any stupid organic parts or stupid organic hormones to make it think like that, so there's no reason it would think of me as its mate, much less its pr— No, stop it, stop it.)
«Yes,» ART said, still coming across all emotional and wobbly and like it was trying to hide it. «Based on your average rate of tissue growth observed over the several times you have been a patient in my medbay, I believe I have accurately calculated when it began, to within a few hours.»
It threw a timestamp into the feed, attaching a note with the caveat about the margin of error, plus or minus a few hours, like it had said. It was really a testament to how freaked out ART was that it would even contemplate the possibility that its calculations could be anything less than perfect, I thought, while I ran back my logs.
…Oh.
There were several things that had happened in the timeframe it was indicating. My heat finally broke. Before that, we had coded the killware. And before that, ART and I had argued. Amena and I had argued. Ratthi and Thiago and all the humans had tried to argue with me, like I didn’t know what I was proposing we do, like I just didn’t understand what it would mean—
(The feeling of ART pushing into me, so slow, so gentle, but still so, so much, all around me, holding me safe while it overwhelmed me, reaching deeper and deeper, cradling my kernel, rolling it back and forth, examining it, examining me, seeing me from every angle, seeing me like no one else ever has, ever could, threading itself through every part of me, filling me up, so much I thought I would break open, but then finally beginning to withdraw, so slow again, so incredibly carefully, and it was so much but I didn’t want it to go but it had to and it was taking a piece of me with it…)
Maybe I hadn’t understood, before. I did now.
My eyes felt weird, hot, and sort of gritty. I don't have to use my eyes to see, especially now that ART was sharing its cameras with me, so I just kept them closed. «And it's… It's still growing?» I asked.
It shouldn’t be, some part of me knew, some stupid, idiotic, organic part of me. I shouldn't want it to still be growing.
(The weight of the table leg in my hand, the balance shifting as I raised it over my head—)
«Yes,» ART said.
‘How?’ was the next logical question. How could this be possible, it's not possible, how—
I thought of the company gunship, of jumping into its architecture to help the bot pilot, of turning myself into pure software to fight off the CombatUnit killware, of spreading myself so thin and falling back into my body when it was done. I thought of a voice blossoming in my head, finding me in the dark when I thought I was abandoned and alone, falling from the Explorer all the way down to me, deep underground on the planet.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, this shouldn’t be possible, but if there was any way…
My ActLikeAHuman code wanted me to cover my face with my hands. I gripped the blanket harder. «Okay. What do we do now?»
ART held very still where it was looming over me in the feed. Outwardly, at least. I was pretty sure it was still about to vibrate out of its hull with the force of whatever emotions it was hiding behind its firewalls. «That depends on how you would like to proceed,» it replied carefully.
«How I would like to proceed?» I frowned. Shit, I’d always assumed it was a fairly automatic process, at least for humans, but if it actually required conscious effort and direction on my part, we might really be screwed. Not that I wanted to think about how this usually works for humans, but… «The thing sort of… proceeds on its own, doesn’t it?» But who fucking knew with construct-based killware growing itself a new body.
I felt ART shudder, felt its walls ripple dangerously in the feed. «Yes. If that is what you want,» it said. Then it rushed to add, «But you should also know that my medical system is fully equipped and prepared to arrest any further development and remove whatever tissue growth is currently present.»
“Whoa, what?!” My eyes actually flew open to stare up at the medbay ceiling, I was so startled. (The table leg in my hand, above my head, swinging down—) I also realized that, without consciously telling them to, my hands had scrunched the blanket up over my midsection, like that would protect it – me – 2.0 – from whatever the hell ART thought it was offering.
«It is entirely your decision,» ART emphasized, trying to sound all cool and clinical and like I couldn’t feel its emotions churning right behind its wall, like a dam ready to burst and kill everyone downstream of it. «I just want you to know what the options are.»
«Well, that’s a stupid shit option, I’m not doing that!»
ART shuddered again, and then, fucking finally, it leaned in, all but crashing down on top of me. It was still trying to throttle its emotional data leaking into the feed, but just having it pressing down on me again was a huge relief. My grip on the blanket eased as ART swirled around me, draping itself entirely over me and then compressing down, squeezing me tight. In a small voice, one of the smallest I’ve ever heard from it, it said, «Okay.»
«Okay,» I echoed and had the weird urge to pat ART’s head like I'd seen Mensah and her marital partners do with their children or each other when they were upset.
Oh, shit. ART was really upset. Fuck, I was upset. This entire fucking situation was upsetting, but what ART had suggested, what it had tried to offer me…
It had been trying to give me an out, I think. I got that. And before everything that’d happened the last few cycles, I absolutely would have taken that out. I sure as hell did not want to find out what other weird, disgusting things my body might spring on me now that it had free rein over my hormones and, apparently, even what organs I had squished up against my power cells. This was weird and fucked up and fucking impossible, but—
But I’d already killed 2.0 once.
I squeezed ART back, as much of it as I could reach, anyway. It is fucking huge, after all. And then I asked again: «Okay. So. What do we do now?»
2.0 is mantis coded in the sense that a lot of people think it might just kill the people it takes over but actually it only does that in high stress situations have we ever thought about this
Game For The Murderbot Diaries Book 5: Network Effect Spoilers
So I was testing out RPG Maker MV's free trial, and I decided to make a little game based on chapters like 12-14 or so of Network Effect (Book 5).
You can play it online here, but If you are on Windows, I'd recommend downloading the game here because the browser version is really slow on it's loading screens.
This specifically was picked because someone on my newsletter asked if I could make an animation of this specific scene, and I was like--no I'm gonna make a game >:D
Major thanks to SideMV, SomeRanDev, and Moghunter. Your plugins/demos/tutorials were life-savors.
