Inhuman Interaction - Tumblr Posts

I love this idea because it forces attention to how alien Mb’s thoughts are in comparison to humans.’ It’s not just looking at all these things - it’s paying attention to all of them. And the amount of attention it considers inadequate for crisis situations is more attention than we pay with our single-track thinking.

In that context its ability to render itself in human terms is all the more impressive. It contextualizes the allusions it makes to forgetting that humans live in a mental world fundamentally different from its own. Its seemingly extreme stress in the face of human interaction is clearer. Yes, it’s undersocialized, and yes has a long experience of punishment for showing interest in socializing but it also finds human interactions unintuitive much of the time bc it literally cannot relate. It just has to remember that humans have hormones and partial memories and physical distress with consequences it just doesn’t have, all affecting our behavior. No wonder it resents its organic parts for dipping it into the shallow end of meat chaos.

Murderbot tv show where we see from Murderbot's perspective. Not just its eyes, but its actual perspective.

So of course at least 10% of the screen is playing Sanctuary Moon, half is actual eyesight, and the rest is various cameras and feeds shifting and swapping in importance.

You know shit's serious when the Sanctuary Moon view vanishes, and during boring (to SecUnit) moments of humans talking the show view slowly grows to take up most of the screen.

I think this is one of those examples of how MB and ART’s relationship and even way of thinking about each other is inhuman. ARTDrone is a container - like a vehicle that ART Prime rides in. (Not all of it, but if you’re sitting in a car, for example, you don’t have the same range of movement or field of vision you would have while traveling in your own body directly.

Iris is worried about losing parts of ART, and MB agrees, but Iris attaches that feeling to the tangible container (its corporeal representation) while MB, who perceives it primarily non-corporeally (note lack of attention to anything about it that isn’t about capability or feed connection - it’s those aspects of it that “are” ART to MB. Iris is obviously aware of its iterations as such, but she is also influenced by the vey human way she thinks of those iterations differently. The drone is literally more “personable” to work with, while ART’s real body is essentially *also* home. Bot pilot iteration is part of the shuttle and gets no interaction from Iris, but despite it not being verbal, MB frequently includes a check-in with it.

So between the human tendency to privilege tangible over intangible (looking at the ceiling to talk to ART is another example of this - and MB only does it to make its communication legible to the humans) and the different ways humans and MB conceptualize ART as an entity, I think its reaction actually makes a ton of sense. Added to that is MB’s tendency not to think of detachable or replaceable as being integral to its sense of self or its sense of other MI’s selves. “Everything that made it Mikki” is contained in its processors, and MB is unphased by its “injuries” before that critical hit - all the while Don Abene is gasping “your poor hand!” I think the message is simply that MI’s selfhood just sits somewhere different than it does for a human, and that bias has ripple effects in how either reacts to danger or loss.

Honestly at the end of System Collapse, i honesty expected MB to get possessive and a bit more emotional over ART-drone once it reconnected with ART-prime again and dropped out of the feed, cause like... the whole time, ART-drone has been ART in portable, physical form, something that could be held and touched and could touch back.

Then, when everyone was safe on the shuttle going back to ART-prime; ART-drone, which is still ART... was hurt, and damaged and basically dying. And even though it had some warning when the hand off happened, imagine you're next to your friend and suddenly its just not there anymore, all you have is just an inanimate empty husk beside you