Perihelion - Tumblr Posts
These are both glorious.
Two collab pieces I did with @hazelek! We've been working on these since October and it's been such a joy to see our styles come together like this.
The process:
I roughly sketched a pose idea
I sketched my Murderbot
Haze sketched their ART
I inked
Haze colored
This was for the one on the right. The left was the same process but the roles were swapped.
I can pinpoint the moment that destroyed my life today:
It’s been a handful of weeks since Murderbot came within inches of having a new, organic governor module implanted in its head via infection - do you think, maybe, that’s also been hiding behind the redacted? Not the way everything else is, just as a deep-seated reminder of what it can’t afford to lose?
What a way to be told “I love you” - to be told “I will not lose you, I will not let go, I will do the hard part of holding on even if you don’t want me to”
I have been brain deep in potential narrative shenanigans about tinyhelion several times and I clearly need to get on that again.
ok so my main takeaway from the new book has been
tiny ART canon? itty bitty super portable Perihelion? small? mini? hold gently like hamburger?
Pairs really nicely with the fanon in some circles that adoption by abduction is something ships are predisposed to find appealing.
I hope preservation and PUMNT start matching freed SecUnits with their hyper intelligent ship AIs like those anxious cheetahs that get service dogs
Oh my god I want to look at this for an hour and on a biiiiig screen and just fucking wow.
A while back someone drew ART’s feed presence as a dragon and it has lived in my head rent free, so here’s my take on feed dragon ART :D
[ID digital art of Murderbot and ART watching media together in the feed. MB is sitting in a chair on the lower left of the canvas, it is coloured gold, wearing cargo pants and a jumper and has bird like inorganic feet. It looks up to the right at several golden curved screens, the largest one showing media of a person in a spacesuit. ART is shown as a large blue and gold dragon with many golden eyes, it is covered in stars and is also looking at the media, from over Murderbots shoulder]
This feels to me like the kind of conversation bots and constructs would have with each other about some apparently stupid thing humans are doing. Why are we creeping up to the scary hole and tilting our faces in toward it like idiots? Our eyes are stuck on our *faces* Murderbot!
I don’t mean to sound exasperated bc this is actually a hilarious image in my head: Three, MB, ART, and Holism in a feed channel, watching some human thing going on in the BE channels they’ve hacked into, being a little judgmental, frankly… I might have to write this bc I don’t think I can draw it, but I’ve been thinking about it for a couple days now.
Couldn't resist a bit of Valentine's fun with the birds at work! This is one of our ambassador red-tailed hawks, Jesse, trying to get at her snack! Jesse is a non-releasable ambassador, not a pet, and she had been at our facility for 25 years this year, so she deserves some love! (She is not very good at enrichment, so sometimes she needs 'help!')
Really I don’t think it’s impossible that ART allowed the booby-trapped shuttle knowing it would force its new friend to let it demonstrate its trustworthiness.
That’s very fucked up and uncool and inexcusable, but also fascinating if accurate.
ART’s moral calculus is questionable - which makes its one comment about morals and kindness (iykyk) register as yet another gray moment.
*If* it is ruthless in that way, the question becomes whether that’s actually wrong. If the results of manipulation are always benign or even helpful, (even MB notes it would have been screwed without ART’s interference) are the mechanics of that manipulation a factor?
-excerpt from the transcript of Perihelion vs PUMNT, probably.
Do we think ART sabotaged the first ship MB was going to take in Artificial Condition? It had mysterious hauler bot problems and I just feel like ART might have done that...
ART having an annoying little sibling transport who shows up and tries to talk to MB specifically to annoy ART, because it knows how possessive ART is over its favorite construct. I'm losing my mind.
ART to someone it likes: I will take care of you.
ART to someone it hates: I will take care of you.
(Both of these are threats.)
SCREAMING.
the beginning of a beautiful friendship mutual administrative assistance
Ratthi: "So, how's living with the in-laws going?"
Murderbot: "You mean ART's crew? It's been good, I guess"
Murderbot, processing what Ratthi just asked it: ...
Murderbot: "THEY'RE NOT MY IN-LAWS-"
This fic is what made a fanfic fan out of me. It’s one of the funniest pieces of masterfully written brilliant what-the-fuckery it has been my entire pleasure to engulf with my attention like ART coming down on another bot that’s just minding its own business.
It is multilayered, emotionally and complexly intelligent, and will drag you down its corridor by a deathgrip on your the nearest appendage at the slightest provocation.
I did not even know I was hungry for what this series fed.
(Feeds. It’s still going, wtf. Get in here.)
HELLO MURDERBOT FANS!!!!
after finishing the books, have you found yourself wishing that you could immerse yourself in three hundred thousand words of fanfic so deliciously written and so masterfully constructed that you will NOT be able to stop thinking about it, ever? then i have GREAT NEWS FOR YOU:
NULLverse: The Bot-Construct Disaster Squad by @blessphemy
this series is a canon-divergence AU from the moment in Exit Strategy when Murderbot narrowly escapes the clutches of the Combat SecUnit it's fighting. In this AU, it is captured by Palisade (the security company running that whole showdown), experimented on, and forced into death matches with that very same CSU. That's the premise of the first installment! I'll tell you for free that they escape.
What follows is a few hundred thousand of the most riveting words I have ever read, an incredibly carefully woven story following murderbot and the machine intelligences and humans that it meets on its journey. note that this series does NOT closely follow canon--all the same characters will come back one way or another (with the addition of the CSU as the most delightful and deranged technically-canon OC you will ever see) (plus you will get LOTS more ART screentime), but it does not retread the path of the canon series. i truly cannot overstate how FRESH, CREATIVE, and UNIQUE this AU is.
To quote the series description on AO3: Consider this series if you like: feral shit, disaster, continuity of identity+memory, societies of people with divergent needs/wants, chaos, robot creation ethics, violence vs security, suffering, healing, bad puns.
there is no murderbot shipping here. there are a few short installments with some robo brain sex involving other characters, but those are also designed to be skippable if that's not your jam
I'm making this post because this series is STILL updating and the latest chapter was possibly the greatest thing I have ever read. It has filled my mind with electricity in the most fireworks way possible. The payoff you will get for reading this series is exquisite, and you will have so much fun along the way. Come join us!! Weekly updates await you if you catch up before the latest installment is complete.
SO WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?? GO GO GO READ THE FIRST INSTALLMENT
too bad Gurathin wasn't in Network Effect because his defining character moment in ASR was provoking Murderbot to see what it would do if it got angry and it turns out the answer was lock itself in the bathroom and give everyone the silent treatment
unstoppable force, immovable object
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.
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
Seriously, right. If a thing isn’t durable enough to take some chewing on, how’s it going to withstand the full force of my AFFECTION?!
“can’t you just enjoy things?” i enjoy critically engaging with media I love… it’s not the same as being hater. but I also enjoy being a hater so fuck you