ART is famous for bungling its intro with SecUnit. But what I didn’t notice until recently is that SecUnit’s core fear is that ART could tamper with its mind.
Quotes from Artificial Condition:
It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory.
I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.
“Because we both have to follow human orders. A human could tell you to purge my memory. A human could tell me to destroy your systems.”
It’s interesting in light of that to look back on how SecUnit reacted in ASR when Gurathin went into its files. It kept control really well. The conversation goes on for pages, with many points being covered, including Ganaka Pit and its private name. Finally when Gurathin says they just have to keep it immobilized, that's when SecUnit grabs him by the throat. But was knowing that its mind was vulnerable part of what upset SecUnit? Hard to say, maybe it wasn't a concern compared to everything else going on.
Then there’s this, from Platform Decay:
I needed a plan, too. Option (1) I could tell Farai that Leonide’s family were all dead.
It was safer, it was sensible. My job was keeping my clients safe.
(Emotion check: Then why does it feel so awful.)
Option (2) I could tell Farai they were all dead and alter my memory archive so I believed it was true.
Risk assessment just hit the roof.
What a terrifying idea! The thought that SecUnit could edit its own memory files to gaslight itself…brr! There is a truly horrifying plot bunny in this scene, whether from SecUnit doing this to itself or some other unit going down that path.
And I have to wonder why it would even consider such a thing. Was it really that scared to try to rescue the kids? Was it just a random stray thought? Or something SecUnit thought of precisely because it is scared of not being able to trust its own mind, so it had a stray self-destructive impulse, the way people who are afraid of heights sometimes get the impulsive urge to jump?
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