Sometimes I think about how so much of what makes Murderbot who it is comes down to it being a rental SecUnit. When Leonide tells Arada in Network Effect that Company Units have a reputation for being dangerous, she's probably 100% correct. Because of their nature as plug-and-play security for anyone, they have to be designed to be far more versatile than the SecUnits a corporate like BE owns. Three has to be able to secure salvage operations and mining outposts and work with BE's systems and that's kind of it. BE might need its security to fend off hostile takeovers and workplace uprisings, but Murderbot has to be able to do all those things and planetary surveys with unknown hostile fauna, and asteroid mining belts, and whatever the next client might need it to do, and it has to be able to work with whatever other proprietary software the new clients have every single time. It's better at adapting to new situations than Three partly because it's older and more experienced, but also because that's a big part of its function.
And at the same time, Company SecUnits are treated much worse than Three by virtue of being rentals. Many--if not most--of Murderbot's clients didn't want to have any SecUnits, but were required to take them per Company rental agreements for other equipment. Even the ones who specifically did want SecUnits didn't have any investment in what happened to them. They were the equivalents of the U-haul you'd rent to move your couch across town. They just needed to do a job briefly and hopefully be in good enough shape to get their deposit back at the end, but if not, eh. No big deal. Murderbot has never had the same clients for very long, and it's never had to work with the same SecUnits for very long. Every contract changes. Nothing lasts.
No wonder MB loves fiction while Three loves nonfiction. Three has seen basically nothing about reality outside of its job and wants to know what's out there. MB has seen way too much reality and would like some breaks from that shit now, please.
