MURDERBOT

MURDERBOT

All Systems Red intro - comic adaptation

ENG/CZ (CZ under cut)

A comic adaptation I did for a school assignment.

Originally made for the Czech translation of the book, so I had to change the original English text a little to fit the finished comic.

Czech:

Original book All Systems Red by the author Martha Wells, I claim no right to the original work. This is only a fan adaptation.

I am 112% ALWAYS on board for ART theories like this that allow for it to be actively plotting and powerful yet still with obvious gaps, ignorance, or weaknesses. Of course it’s calculating - it’s a fricking computer. I’m not sure any part of their relationship has been free of its attempts to control the situation (looking at you, killware shuttle) and I love the idea that it is constantly adjusting course in the process.

Okay so I’m still thinking about ART in Artificial Condition and I think that its possible that it didn’t just let MB board it out of curiosity or boredom, but out of professional curiosity. Because like as far as I can tell everyone in this universe seem to think that a SecUnit’s primary purpose is data mining and their secondary purpose is enforcement; only the SecUnit themselves appear to believe that their primary purpose is — or should be — security.

And we know that ART’s secret side job is corporate espionage. So what are the odds that it initially saw letting MB board it as an opportunity to observe and analyse a crucial component of a corporate surveillance system, something which would be very useful for it to know about in order to a) better prevent its crew from being surveilled and b) deploy counter surveillance or even piggyback on corporate surveillance when possible.

Like, MB thinks that ART must be worried about a rogue SecUnit damaging it or its systems because rogue SecUnits are known to be violent, right? But that’s how humans think. ART isn’t perceiving MB the way a human would, it’s not worried about MB attacking it or damaging its systems; it warns it not to attempt to hack them. Different thing. It’s worried about MB trying to access its data. It is thinking of SecUnits as crude instruments of data gathering first and whatever else they do as not being particularly relevant to it. I mean, it said it itself: it doesn’t really know what humans get up to outside of its hull and it doesn’t watch media.

I mean, think about it. Given as ART doesn’t even know what governor modules do when it meets MB, at that point it might not even think that a SecUnit being rogue is such a big deal. Like, okay so they don’t have to follow orders, but neither does ART. And it doesn’t understand the idea of not liking your function. So really you have to wonder whether ART even knows about the myth of rogue SecUnits being mass murderers, or if it did hear about that once and then immediately decided it was unlikely.

So, back to my initial theory: ART invited MB aboard with the goal to learn more about how corporations use SecUnits to spy on people. Sure, it ended up getting a whole lot more than that. But it also did get to do that, when it watched MB work on RaviHiral. Not only that, but aside from learning every way that corporations use SecUnits for surveillance, ART also got to learn ways that SecUnits and ComfortUnits can hide data from the corporations. Something which saved its life in Network Effect when it used that trick to hide its core files!

And if that wasn’t enough to give you an emotion, then lets consider the additional fact that ART was already heading to RaviHiral when it met MB. Probably to do some corporate spying. Putting aside the whole thing with Tapan, Rami & Maro and their stolen data — which obv ART must have been thrilled to be able to help with — there’s also the fact that here’s MB, telling it that something horrible happened here some time ago, and it was so completely deleted from existence that no one would be able to even know something happened without intense digging. And it has to be investigated in person.

So here you have ART presented with a scenario in which, if this was a mission with its crew, it would not be able to help with. They would have to go down alone, like MB is doing now. But then MB comes back and it turns out the data it recovered was hidden in such a way that nobody human or bot could have ever found it because nobody else would have known where to look. Not even ART itself or its crew, who are supposed professionals at this.

So now ART has observed two field missions (the security job and the investigation) during which:

- It got to ride along SecUnit’s feed and help in ways it never could do before, and then it also got to experience the frustration of not being able to help when MB is down in Ganaka pit and Tapan doesn’t get on the shuttle;

- Just like how watching media with MB helped it process emotional context, observing MB on the station must have also provided ART with a shitload of new data and better understanding;

- SecUnit is just like. Super competent at security and data retrieval, above and beyond what a human team can do, even ART’s own humans;

- SecUnit knows stuff that ART itself doesn’t know and can navigate corporate systems with ease; not only that, but during this book MB comes up with a new and more efficient way to loop cameras, which means ART got to watch it invent new ways to hide from corporate surveillance on its own on the fly.

TL;DR: when it gave MB the comm at the end, ART was absolutely already drafting its employment contract and rehearsing ways to convince Seth to let it try to hire MB. There is no way it didn’t go back to the university with a 200 slide powerpoint presentation on why it needs MB to join all its missions forever and ever. No way.

This is the best damned Jollybaby I’ve ever SEEN. It’s perfect. lol, MB’s so salty about it.

congratulations to my new favorite minor murderbot diaries character,

~JollyBaby~

AND IT WORKS!

It’s something I find hilarious about the CR as depicted: so often the solution to problems is just not being an asshole? I mean that from institutional level on down. SecUnits are dangerous bc they get orders to kill, they can’t refuse them bc the governors will hurt them, the humans can’t deal with construct realities bc they’re pushed to the brink all the time. There’s nowhere to rest in the CR.

MB shows again and again how much better things work with just a little basic decency. Not just bots and constructs but humans, too. It’s crazy that that simple quality of—- basic dignity? is pretty much all that differentiates Preservation from everywhere else.

CR people (of all kinds) are mostly decent people in terrible situations, and they show repeatedly that, given an inch of freedom, all they want is to be community-minded and normal instead of callous and cruel.

I deeply appreciate that roughly 70% of SecUnit's strategy in any given situation seems to be "find a bot that seems nice and ask for help"

I wanted to draw this:

I wonder how often team Preservation think about SecUnit's look of abject horror at the idea of having to spend more time with them, back in the first book.

You're a group of nice scientists who want generally to do the right thing. Over 20 days most of you grow to think of the spy drone amazon sent you as a useless appliance that exists to record you fucking and shoot things (what's it even going to shoot, some cute alien deer for straying too close to the hab? Pin-Lee, for leaving dirty mugs in the sink? please.)

Then in one single day it proves that, yes, you did need it to shoot stuff, and also it's literally a full person you've never even tried talking to, and also that you're about 20 days too late to start treating it with respect and also that, even if you start doing that right now, it doesn't even want to hang with you.