Regarding research transports
Jul. 11th, 2025 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfectHave I finally reached a critical mass of fannish enthusiasm such that I actually have the motivation to post? Let's find out!
Today a new Murderbot short story came out: Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, which is free to read at Reactor. It's 7.5k, set after Artificial Condition, and Murderbot appears only by implication, because the point of view character is one of ART's human crew members.
Everything else I have to say is spoilers, for both the short story and System Collapse. (But also, I haven't reread Network Effect or System Collapse in a while, so do let me know if I'm remembering something wrong.)
So, first off -- congratulations, ART/Murderbot shippers! ART's very favorite human ships it, too!
Personally, as someone who doesn't, I was briefly irritated by Iris interpreting Peri's feelings for its SecUnit friend through the lens of human romance (not to mention almost blurting out that it had fallen in love!)... but actually, I think it makes sense. Murderbot might be vocally uninterested in sex and romance, but I don't think ART has showed any sign of having similar aversions. So there's no particular reason for Iris not to think in terms that are familiar to her from her own experiences and cultural context. And she does make the effort to match ART's way of framing it, which is very respectful!
(I could still quibble about her assuming that a sufficiently significant relationship is necessarily romantic, but honestly, I'm willing to accept that what she's imagining isn't necessarily romantic, either. It seems that way at first glance to me, steeped in my heavily amatonormative culture, but people do talk about falling in love in contexts other than romance, and there's no reason she couldn't have meant it more broadly.)
Here's what completely fascinates me, though: the information that ART has never gotten along all that well with other machine intelligences! Obviously in System Collapse we have Perihelion's extremely prickly attitude towards Holism, but I'd imagined that as an individual rivalry, not a categorical preference for non-MI friends.
(Incidentally, I love machine intelligence as a less judgmental alternative to artificial intelligence. Well chosen, Martha Wells.)
My first thought was to wonder if ART grew up more surrounded by humans than other MIs did and just imprinted on them a bit. My second thought, which has instantly become a beloved headcanon, is that maybe ART is neurodivergent by MI standards, and interacting with humans and SecUnits is just easier.
One thing "Rapport" establishes beautifully is that ART is a magnificently manipulative monster of a ship and all the humans closest to it are very aware of this fact. Iris can tell it's staging a distraction because, unlike humans, it never flies off the handle because it's genuinely misunderstood something; ART can predict its crew well enough to bait them into distracting each other with trivial ease. When Iris explains how she saw through one of its ploys, she fully believes that it's intentionally going to start behaving irrationally more often, purely to give cover to the times when it needs to appear irrational for strategic purposes.
She also reflects that Peri definitionally cannot act impulsively, given how much thinking it can fit into what for humans is an extremely small amount of time. It can always deliberate before acting on any ordinary human time frame.
I'm guessing that's not an advantage it has over other sufficiently advanced MIs.
So now I'm imagining a Perihelion who's always a beat behind the other ships at picking up on something one of them has implied, or a Peri whose first instinct about anything is likely to be something other MIs might never have thought of at all. It presumably has the same general cognitive capacity as other MIs, but if it's thinking at just enough of a slant to the rest of them, it's always either going to be a little bit slower at the kind of discussion that comes naturally to the others, or else it's going to be dropping thoughts into conversation before it's had time to properly assess whether they're going to make sense outside its own head.
Enter humans, and eventually Murderbot. Peri can (in terms of raw processing power) think circles around any of them, and sometimes waxes snarky on that subject. But what if they're also just really relaxing to interact with, in a way? What if, for ART, a conversation with someone with organic neural tissue is kind of like getting 3-5 business days to compose its response -- or at least, you know, ten or fifteen minutes in which to brainstorm different possible answers and game out which one is probably going to work best?
I don't think I can claim that this is textually canon, but I think it is canon-compliant, and most importantly of all: it delights me. Neurodivergence is such a theme in the series as a whole -- I would argue the central theme of the first four novellas at least -- and while a hyperintelligent spaceship certainly does diverge from the neurology of human beings, I just really love the thought that maybe ART is a weirdo by MI standards, too. No wonder it bonded so hard with Murderbot!
Today a new Murderbot short story came out: Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, which is free to read at Reactor. It's 7.5k, set after Artificial Condition, and Murderbot appears only by implication, because the point of view character is one of ART's human crew members.
Everything else I have to say is spoilers, for both the short story and System Collapse. (But also, I haven't reread Network Effect or System Collapse in a while, so do let me know if I'm remembering something wrong.)
So, first off -- congratulations, ART/Murderbot shippers! ART's very favorite human ships it, too!
Personally, as someone who doesn't, I was briefly irritated by Iris interpreting Peri's feelings for its SecUnit friend through the lens of human romance (not to mention almost blurting out that it had fallen in love!)... but actually, I think it makes sense. Murderbot might be vocally uninterested in sex and romance, but I don't think ART has showed any sign of having similar aversions. So there's no particular reason for Iris not to think in terms that are familiar to her from her own experiences and cultural context. And she does make the effort to match ART's way of framing it, which is very respectful!
(I could still quibble about her assuming that a sufficiently significant relationship is necessarily romantic, but honestly, I'm willing to accept that what she's imagining isn't necessarily romantic, either. It seems that way at first glance to me, steeped in my heavily amatonormative culture, but people do talk about falling in love in contexts other than romance, and there's no reason she couldn't have meant it more broadly.)
Here's what completely fascinates me, though: the information that ART has never gotten along all that well with other machine intelligences! Obviously in System Collapse we have Perihelion's extremely prickly attitude towards Holism, but I'd imagined that as an individual rivalry, not a categorical preference for non-MI friends.
(Incidentally, I love machine intelligence as a less judgmental alternative to artificial intelligence. Well chosen, Martha Wells.)
My first thought was to wonder if ART grew up more surrounded by humans than other MIs did and just imprinted on them a bit. My second thought, which has instantly become a beloved headcanon, is that maybe ART is neurodivergent by MI standards, and interacting with humans and SecUnits is just easier.
One thing "Rapport" establishes beautifully is that ART is a magnificently manipulative monster of a ship and all the humans closest to it are very aware of this fact. Iris can tell it's staging a distraction because, unlike humans, it never flies off the handle because it's genuinely misunderstood something; ART can predict its crew well enough to bait them into distracting each other with trivial ease. When Iris explains how she saw through one of its ploys, she fully believes that it's intentionally going to start behaving irrationally more often, purely to give cover to the times when it needs to appear irrational for strategic purposes.
She also reflects that Peri definitionally cannot act impulsively, given how much thinking it can fit into what for humans is an extremely small amount of time. It can always deliberate before acting on any ordinary human time frame.
I'm guessing that's not an advantage it has over other sufficiently advanced MIs.
So now I'm imagining a Perihelion who's always a beat behind the other ships at picking up on something one of them has implied, or a Peri whose first instinct about anything is likely to be something other MIs might never have thought of at all. It presumably has the same general cognitive capacity as other MIs, but if it's thinking at just enough of a slant to the rest of them, it's always either going to be a little bit slower at the kind of discussion that comes naturally to the others, or else it's going to be dropping thoughts into conversation before it's had time to properly assess whether they're going to make sense outside its own head.
Enter humans, and eventually Murderbot. Peri can (in terms of raw processing power) think circles around any of them, and sometimes waxes snarky on that subject. But what if they're also just really relaxing to interact with, in a way? What if, for ART, a conversation with someone with organic neural tissue is kind of like getting 3-5 business days to compose its response -- or at least, you know, ten or fifteen minutes in which to brainstorm different possible answers and game out which one is probably going to work best?
I don't think I can claim that this is textually canon, but I think it is canon-compliant, and most importantly of all: it delights me. Neurodivergence is such a theme in the series as a whole -- I would argue the central theme of the first four novellas at least -- and while a hyperintelligent spaceship certainly does diverge from the neurology of human beings, I just really love the thought that maybe ART is a weirdo by MI standards, too. No wonder it bonded so hard with Murderbot!
no subject
Date: 2025-07-13 01:48 am (UTC)"So there's no particular reason for Iris not to think in terms that are familiar to her from her own experiences and cultural context. And she does make the effort to match ART's way of framing it, which is very respectful!"
Yeah--I also don't really ship them in a romantic sense. I do agree that it makes sense that it would have been Iris's first thought--especially since I don't have the impression that there are really very many models for close personal relationships even between bots (let alone between bots and constructs). So when in doubt, people tend to auto-fill with whatever kinda fits from their own experience.
Re: your comments about neurodivergence--I like your headcanons a lot!
I also feel like in general, being neurodivergent can feel like being caught between worlds and not entirely fitting in any of them. Murderbot isn't a human or a bot and it doesn't want to be either, and it has to figure out what that looks like. I love this in showing that ART has its own stuff going on too. It's a bot that doesn't get on with other MIs; it's lived much of its life alongside its crew, but it isn't human either. Finding another person who can share a sense of being different can be just...really powerful, I feel like, and it was so nice to see what that was like from ART's side of things.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-13 02:38 am (UTC)This is a very interesting point! I tend to read Iris's thoughts about Peri's lack of rapport with other MIs as suggesting that there are other MIs who might be more drawn to each other, but even if that's true, that's got to make up only a tiny fraction of the total number of close relationships she's witnessed.
Yes! From Murderbot's perspective, we mostly see that ART is very smart, very dangerous, very sarcastic, very protective of its friends, etc. -- I don't think we've gotten much of a look before now at ART's own feelings of there having been something that was missing from its life. And I feel like it brings something full circle that not only does Murderbot get to have a friend who isn't human, but ART also gets to connect with someone in a way that it hasn't before.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-13 11:45 am (UTC)True. I was basing it off the fact that Murderbot doesn't seem to have a lot of applicable relationship models. It didn't really expect the other bots to react as they did about Balin, for example. That said, a lot of its references come from CR-based media and it isn't exactly interested in poking into real life relationship details of any sort if it can possibly avoid it, so it wouldn't be surprising if Iris had a broader reference base. Especially since Murderbot hadn't even heard of any MIs like ART before it stumbled into one.
At any rate, yes, as you said, there can't be enough close MI relationships that Iris would be most likely to mentally go there first. Especially since ART was being evasive about it.
And I feel like it brings something full circle that not only does Murderbot get to have a friend who isn't human, but ART also gets to connect with someone in a way that it hasn't before.
Yes, absolutely! It helps make it clearer that even though ART has much more processing power, it does benefit from Murderbot's company as much as Murderbot benefits from ART's company. That's important for a peer relationship, regardless of whether it's platonic or romantic.
I also like that it shows that Murderbot sometimes affects things in ways it couldn't predict. Even if ART had never met Murderbot again, it would have learned new ways to get through security that would have benefited their entire team and given their missions a higher chance of success. I think it's a good way to show that even when people are just existing (from their own perspective), they have an affect on the world. That people can make the world better just from connecting with others.
no subject
Date: 2025-07-14 03:21 am (UTC)Yeah, within the Corporation Rim especially... well, Murderbot probably has good reason to think that bots can't/shouldn't trust other bots.
This is such a lovely point. We all make little ripples in the world, even if we never know about most of them. Given Murderbot's unique circumstances, it probably makes more than most! But it's true for people who aren't rogue SecUnits, too.