#my mb posts

[coquelicoq]

i liked that mb got to preserve its deus ex machina role in platform decay despite the fact mensah's family was pretty much expecting it to show up and rescue them...you know who wasn't expecting that, though? the militia. from the militia's perspective, a rando with the exact skillset and knowledge they needed appeared out of nowhere on the cusp of a firefight and volunteered its services, nonchalantly pulled one of them out of the line of fire in the nick of time, asked politely for a weapon and exploded an enemy's gun basically instantaneously, and then peaced out and they never saw it again. i think they had an even more quintessential deus ex machina experience than the ravihyral polycule.

[coquelicoq]

this meeting could have been an email 🤝 this ground transport could have been a transit pipe

[coquelicoq]

the children in your post-scarcity collectivist society yearn for grand theft auto.

[coquelicoq]

[...] Three looked at me and said, "Perihelion-drone is angry that I didn't follow the plan." Yeah, I bet. "You know that's a you problem." "Oh." Three was disconcerted. Welcome to the consequences of your actions, Three. It said hopefully, "It can't be a we problem?" "No, it can't," I said. "Get in the shuttle." (Platform Decay, ch 13, p 241)

three used COMMUNIST BUGS BUNNY

it was not super effective!

[coquelicoq]

She [Naja] had put a receiver outside the house and hardwired it to the internal feed. It was a one-way connection, pulling in a public news and info channel but not sending anything. Not bad, especially since Naja wasn't augmented. (Platform Decay, ch 3, p 47)

five pages later...

Naja had small knee augments compensating for eroding joints. (ch 4, p 52)

so she has augments but isn't augmented? meanwhile we have this from Network Effect:

Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules. (p 93)

confirming that there are different types of augments, including the kind that naja has in her knees. maybe when murderbot says "augmented human" it means specifically "human with augments that have [some criterion that is salient to murderbot]"? i guess that kind of fits with my prior observations that murderbot's use of "humans and augmented humans" is a) not super clear and b) at least partly predicated on how the presence of augments affects murderbot's ability to do its job and/or avoid being caught and dismantled...

[coquelicoq]

On the other wall of the foyer, my scan found some metal plates with inscribed writing. It didn't match anything in the language module Thiago had written to communicate with the Targets and colonists, so it was likely yet another Pre-CR language. I made sure I got good images and sent stills to Ratthi to tag for later, once we got out of blackout. Without access to ART's enormous archive storage and Thiago's translation abilities, we weren't going to be able to read it. (System Collapse, ch 5, p 96)

It [AdaCol2] had left the channel accessible with the camera view of where B-E was meeting with its humans, so ART-drone was monitoring. [...] Ratthi and Tarik were monitoring it and probably understanding more of what was going on than the B-E negotiator because Thiago's translation module was clearly better. (6, 118-119)

i love how frequently mb mentions thiago's translation module in system collapse. it's like [anything happens] shoutout to my boy thiago without whom we wouldn't have a fucking clue right now. instead of constantly going "thiago, the guy who HATES ME" it's now all "thiago my translator genius human thiago". i don't have a searchable version of this text but it would be hilarious to see how many of the hits on his name are just some variant of the phrase "thiago's language module 🥰"

[coquelicoq]

i can't stress enough that outside of this one moment in rogue protocol when murderbot wants to kill a human for betraying its sort-of clients but settles for the next best thing of menacingly hovering a drone in her face for 26 seconds while she's frozen in place by her armor, for the rest of the first four books mb is really only using drones for security purposes and doesn't have the time or inclination to be performing close-range facial analysis:

in ASR it doesn't seem to be all that familiar with drones outside of maybe using them to set a perimeter. it exhibits several other uses of drones as events escalate, but they're all related to protecting itself and its humans and getting intel on EvilSurvey. at no point does it mention watching a human with a drone; it's all "using drones to draw fire" this and "sending drones flying off in the wrong direction as a diversion tactic" that. et cetera.

it has no access to drones whatsoever in AC from what i can tell.

in RP it uses Ship's drones to record conversations between wilken and gerth, but it's not a participant in those conversations and it doesn't even watch them in real time. it also forgoes getting a good look at their weapons via drone because it thinks they would notice. later it takes control of a station drone to watch (from afar) their first meeting with don abene & co., but miki notices the drone and almost catches mb because of it, which freaks it out. then it hacks the combatbots' drones, but other than the aforementioned 26-second intimidation of wilken, it's too busy doing actual security work to use them to look at people.

in ES it accesses drones many times, including to observe its humans, but it only seems to actually control a drone to look at something one time, and only in order to zoom in on a suit logo. so at no point could it conceivably be directing a drone to get up in somebody's face, since it's just piggybacking on drones as they go about their normal business.

it does use cameras to watch people in the first four books, but in a much less obvious way: either it's using fixed cameras that are built into habitats/hoppers/whatever, or it's accessing mobile cameras (suit cams, station drones) but not controlling where those cameras go or what they're pointing at.

it's interesting, because while drones can be startling or intrusive, on the flip side, cameras that don't move don't draw attention to themselves and thus may make it easier to forget you're being watched (plus you have no way of knowing if that particular camera is being monitored at that moment or if it's just recording for later analysis). so in a way, having a drone in your face actively signals to you that mb is paying attention to you. it's making mb's gaze visible in a way it might not otherwise be. this changes the dynamic from "passive surveillance for datamining and threat assessment purposes" to "person actively choosing to pay attention to you in real time". one of these is covert and the other isn't; one of these holds the possibility of interaction and exchange and the other doesn't. maybe it puts a drone in your face to show you it cares.

[coquelicoq]

what really strikes me in rereading artificial condition is that once murderbot gets past its initial "oh my god this evil genius research transport could squash me like a bug, i'm so fucked" reaction to ART threatening it, it is WAY more chill about being vulnerable to ART than it is about being vulnerable to humans. MB is stressed out if a human so much as looks at it, but it lets ART hitch a ride in its brain and observe everything it's doing the whole time it's on RaviHyral, not to mention the two times it lets down its wall (!!) or the time it allows ART to modify its physical body while it's unconscious (!!!!). that's about as vulnerable as it's possible for MB to be, and it consents to it. so what's the deal with that?

not only is ART more of a direct threat to MB than any human is ("I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before"), but also MB is more emotionally vulnerable (i.e., more exposed) to ART than it is to humans just in the sense that ART is privy to more of MB's perceptions/reactions/experience/feelings (its interiority) than humans are. with humans, MB is constantly checking its expression in the security cameras, trying to figure out if it's giving anything away. ART can't read MB's mind, but it can, e.g., perceive MB's emotions while watching Worldhoppers in a way that a human would not be able to. it's afraid of humans recognizing and reacting to the fact that it is sentient and has an inner life, but not of ART doing the same thing.

ultimately the root of this discrepancy is that MB is terrified of its own ability to hurt others. in artificial condition, the thing it's most immediately afraid of is being recognized as a rogue SecUnit. this would threaten its autonomy, and losing its autonomy would mean it could be used to hurt people against its will. (there's a ton more to say about this, and about the other things MB is afraid of, but i will save it for another day.)

but crucially, MB can't really hurt ART. it could do some damage if it really tried, but the power imbalance is in ART's favor. it doesn't need to worry about losing control/being controlled and hurting ART, because ART can defend itself from rogue SecUnits. and it doesn't need to worry about ART controlling it in order to hurt humans, because ART sobs into its figurative ice cream any time a fictional human bites it on a TV show.

with humans, MB is in the weird position of fearing their power over it (both their structural power as entities that are legally considered people where it is considered a thing, and their more immediate power to force it to carry out their commands) and also fearing its ability to harm them (humans are so squishy, guys). ART doesn't have structural power over MB - there is the potential for bot/construct solidarity there - and it wouldn't use its other power to wield MB as a tool to harm humans because it doesn't want to harm humans either (remember that at this point MB doesn't know about ART's trigger-happy colony-exploding proclivities). and MB isn't even the slightest bit of afraid of hurting ART, because MB is but a tiny bug in comparison.

ART is a safe entity for MB to be friends with, not in spite of the power imbalance in ART's favor but precisely because of it. MB can only have a relationship that's not overshadowed by fear when it is freed from its fear of its own potential to harm.