Been thinking about ART’s solitude as of late.
It didn’t seem to have the organic neural tissues to parse “reality”: unlike a construct, who negotiates a mind (part-human and part-bot) of its own, Perihelion’s entire world had been one of its own. It couldn’t relate to anyone, or anything - it knew that it was trustworthy, that it was accepted and even loved, but it couldn’t process much of it until Murderbot came along cuz there was just… no context for it. Realities outside of its hull were “largely unfamiliar”. In a way, its understanding of existence had been nothing but self-determination.
So it’s not a surprise that I found ART to be different than your typical neurodivergent metaphor of a construct - it’s the other way around.
Intelligence like ART doesn’t negotiate like a construct does. It’s sure of what it is, and open to understand what it is not. Maybe that’s why Iris said Peri always felt more affinity towards human than its fellow machine intelligence - in the same way that a (hypothetical) sentient mycelium network or a perspicacious octopus would have felt about homo sapiens: not to fit in, but to understand. To love life in a form that is not its own.
