deercountry | 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music

Entry tags:

35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music

who: Murderbot aka Eden Rin & others
what: The Entertainment Feed events, other plots with Murderbot.
when: All month
where: The Entertainment Feed, around Trench, in memories

content warnings: see individual starters. None in main post.
Note: This post includes open prompts for The Entertainment Feed. Feel free to write TL's and tag each other.

I don't care. I'm a cat. (Book Club)

This month, the book club meets Tuesdays September 13th and 27th. It is reading The Trials of Morrigan Crowe by Jessica Townsend, available via written or audio formats.

Murderbot mostly facilitates the conversation—asking questions about the idea of a person being cursed. Can a child truly be responsible for all the terrible instances in an area? What is it like living with a death sentence? How does Morrigan being plucked away from death and taken to a wholly different land strike everyone when they too have been plucked away from their homes, death sentence or no?

Given the memory shares, other books come up as well. Discussions without a common base not only derail the book club but raises some tempers. Eventually Murderbot stands up to someone exclaiming 'Eden!' and another 'Rin?' "How about you two go read those books and meet back afterward?" it asks deadpan.

All this pressure give me anxiety (Silent Disco)

This month, the silent disco happens Fridays September 2nd, 16th, and 30th. Headphones and music are available. Play your own music or listen to DJ's mix. (open)

Though Murderbot wears headphones much like anything else, the music is so soft as to be nearly silent. It listens more in its personal feed, where the sound quality isn't lose being routed to an external device and reprocessed with environmental sounds. It doesn't dance but walks around the disco and sometimes across the floor. When anyone appears in distress, it glowers at the 'guilty' party and offers what help someone might need.

Small drones, wispy smoky things, float amid the dim lighting, listening and watching everything and everyone. Recognition software (again for distress) helps Murderbot more inputs than it can otherwise handle. It bobs its head slightly to demonstrate it's chill, and rounds once more close to the DJ's set up.

We improvise, all right? (Fast & Furious viewings)

This month, two Fast & Furious films air Thursdays September 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th. Come and go as you please. See one, see both, see them all. Watch missed movies at any time during the week in smaller viewing settings.

Sitting in the back, Murderbot watches the large viewing screen as cars are stolen, raced, and complete utterly unrealistic stunts. It's unlike any life it has lived, even when it stole modes of transportation, flew quickly, and were dramatically destroyed. It smiles at a quip, and when it's done, Murderbot lets everyone else file out first.

The question isn’t ‘what are we going to do’, the question is ‘what aren’t we going to do?' (Memshare books)

Murderbot is collecting as many of the memshare books as it can. Feel free to read and go into any memshare here, find your own book, etc.

On a special bookcase close to the entrance, special magical books sit. Engrossing reads. These are books Murderbot has found or been given. Within them lie any number of memories. Some of them Murderbot has gone to. Others it hasn't. They may be people's lives, but books are books. Historical themes are popular over and over again. Why wouldn't these?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It watches 2B wade into the chaos with all the determination of the ComfortUnits, no matter that she too must understand the same thing. It's a massacre. The odds she can save anyone in the control room is minimal. Witnessing it, being a part of it, messes with Murderbot's vitals. Its performance reliability is dropping steadily with each moment they are there. It turns off its feed so the malware cannot jump into its head, if it's vulnerable again.

"Fine," Murderbot mutters. It's here. It may as well.

Someone lowered a barrier, closing a heavy steel door, to prevent some of the malfunctioning murderous 'equipment' from getting through. It digs its fingers into the seams and starts pulling them apart. It jerks its head for 2B to help it, and they pull the door open. The SecUnit on the other side is in armor with a greyed out faceplate. Even Murderbot doesn't know if that SecUnit is it or some other SecUnit.

It motions toward a couple corpses to one side with weapons amid their messy remains.

She's on it, quickly and using her strength at its highest to draw the doors apart. Pod would be telling her to keep calm, that her vitals were escalating too dangerously. I'm fine, she'd bark anyway. She was seeing humans contorted and slew in places she couldn't imagine. Once inside, the combat android turns her attention briskly toward where SecUnit had gestured. Weapons, mostly firearms.

It wasn't her preferred choice of ammunition, but she takes two among the remains, anyway. She knew what a gun was, even if these seemed awfully archaic to her. Apart from the humans— they also had infected constructs to put down, and do so quickly.

"Are these even effective against androids?" she asks, agile and active to find the locks and pull them away from pulling the trigger.

Edited 2022-09-14 12:49 (UTC)

Murderbot knows better than to pause before a rampaging SecUnit. That's what is happening here, really, the kind of thing humans fear in the entertainment feeds. SecUnits out of control, and only of note to constructs and perhaps bots, the knowledge they cannot stop themselves, no matter how much they dislike what they're doing.

That's why it shot itself during the PreservationAux survey. So it didn't kill its humans.

The ComfortUnits worked together. Three worked with its comrades and missed them. Even though Murderbot likely never had warm feelings toward the other SecUnits at Ganaka Pit, it doesn't want to kill them, even in a memory. Shouldn't better versions exist if they have to exist? If they're going to be 'entertainment' on a page?

"Projectile weapons yes, energy weapons no," Murderbot replies. "Have to get past the armor. If you get a solid hit to the chest, you'll trigger an involuntary shutdown." Headshots kill. It doesn't want to explain that. These SecUnits and bots did nothing wrong. The humans are crying and screaming now, but they forced the updates. That's the problem with humans working security. They suck at it.

Thankfully it can experience that kind of existential crisis at fast processing speeds.

The SecUnit changes focus with the new threat assessment. Murderbot comes up the winner as its modifications do nothing to fool the other SecUnit and 2B currently is a ComfortUnit. It dives out of the way as projectiles hit wall behind it and the floor following its path. All its instincts say to throw itself at the other SecUnit. That's how they're trained, but it doesn't have armor. It has to fight differently. It makes its way around the room, setting up a couple shots for 2B while getting its own projectile weapons.

She does better with swords, but . . . These, they're not impossible to use. Military-grade units were adept in most things born from conflict and combat. Guns, ammunition, and sort— she could shoot them. Once 2B has the right place to shoot for, she aims, and fires consistently. If it depended on her true programming, it would be incredibly precise. If that's not what ComfortUnits have, well.

She'll be awfully pissed at the slightest miss off her mark, especially if it doesn't cause that shut down.

"They won't suffer."

She wants to confirm—ironically, even if this was a memory, she's not acting like it is one. her senses can't seem to separate what's real or not. It poses threat at the moment, it's real, at the moment.

So she will treat it realistically.

What kind of life does 2B think SecUnits have? Murderbot tries not to get frustrated. There's a SecUnit trapped in its own body shooting at it. There's a SecUnit that could even be Murderbot shooting at itself. These humans are idiots, and they may piss it off. That's a far cry from nondiscriminatory violence against everything else that moves. It's suffering now, and they're shooting at it with projectile weapons. Those hurt. They're trying to hurt it enough it shuts down. None of that sounds pleasant.

"Not once they shut down!" Murderbot shouts. It dives and hits a damaged point near the SecUnit's knee. It sinks in, and the construct cannot track them as easily. It ignores the pain because it follows the programming; it has to. It gives them a break, not it.

She gives up on the chest; her true programming takes over. She is an E type. She is an executor. She won’t allow her kin to suffer a shut down if she has to miss and miss and shoot for the knee and have them hurt more. Call it mercy. Call it hardwiring.

2B clicks her teeth together and lets loose. She aims for the head. One shot was all it took.

She wished she could stop, sometimes, but she lies to herself for comfort: it’s necessary to get through.

Any cover that Murderbot needs, 2B gives it. It knows how to navigate much better than her, but— it’s at the expense of the memory of the infected SecUnits.

The fighting is distributed. They leave the shaken but otherwise mildly to moderately damaged humans behind. Those humans call for help. That will put an end to this faster. Perhaps not all of them will die.

That also leads to a lull, a temporarily empty corridor. Murderbot understands, but it's also shocked.

"That might have been me," it says, voice flat and devoid of all feeling. It's numb to those feelings. They're there at a long distance. It wondered, sometimes it still wonders, why it's still alive when this... something like this happens. It knows the answers now, years later. It wasn't its fault.

It doesn't want to die. It doesn't want to be dead or to have been dead. If it dies here, some other SecUnit will be assigned to PreservationAux, some other SecUnit with an intact governor module. GrayCris will send a similar update through, bypassing security. That one is purposeful, not like this. That SecUnit will slaughter all of them. No one will know GrayCris did it. GrayCris will carry on killing people and profiting off alien artifacts. It's far worse than the people who died here, as horrific as this all is.

"If I don't go through this, if I don't live through this, I don't hack my governor module. Then more people die," it says, "not today. Later." Hindsight and all. It gets the impulse, but impulses can be wrong. Killing things isn't always the answer.

That could've been me. 2B's filter pump feels like it just shut and squeezed so uncomfortably. Weight dropped from her chest to what would be her 'gut'. Abdominal cavity. She feels numb. She feels herself loathe her designation and wish for the light. It's so dark without it, without those moments—

"It's not you," she declares, harsh and spitting, frustrated beyond herself. "You're here— You're here with me. You're not infected. You're not going to die here."

If it was any rigid reassurance to save her psychological state, it was for herself, and not entirely for Murderbot to hear. Still— she had to say it.

"What we need is to get out of here," she reaffirms. It's no longer about staying here to help these people that aren't real, even though they are, and even though her mind's eye fights with her every second to react in one way when she was beginning to see it from another angle.

This was not her mission. Fierce in continuing, she wants to leave and couldn't fathom a don't k.o.s from no authority beyond, perhaps . . . A friend. Could she listen to a friend amidst the chaos? She's finding it hard to. Why was she made this way?

This chaos is familiar, both the specifics and the general nonsensical violence when security fails. It remembers the instinct to slaughter its way through Targets. If it had been by itself, it probably would have. Amena needed it, so it prioritized her. That's a SecUnit thing, not a CombatBot thing. This is a security SNAFU not a battle scene.

"It's my memory," Murderbot explains. "I'm one of the SecUnits who was forced to download and install the update that overrode what free will we have and attack anyone and anything. In combat armor with the faceplate down, even I cannot tell which one is me." Because its memories were wiped. It doesn't know if it killed humans in the command center or where it was when this started. The book probably knows more than it does.

Running away sounds great. Murderbot knows something of the layout from visiting years later. It knows where the access tunnel is. When it tries to turn, it doesn't. Because (ugh) that isn't what it wants, not really. Turning a new leaf as a Nightwalker hasn't made it any less a SecUnit.

"We need to do my job," Murderbot says. It looks back at the security center. "Two living humans are better than no living humans." They even know a safe space. It was undisturbed for years. The fighting never reached it.

Her last memory before Trench was chaos— It was just like this one, sans the humans. Androids suffering from a massive virus infection spread rapidly across their systems. 2B's files were beginning to corrupt. The virus was multiplying at a terrifying rate. She took as many of her infected comrades down, and did her absolute best to bring herself to the only location with the least amount of android population. Desolate. Quiet. Skittering with a few infected here and there, but mostly secure for anyone else clean.

She wanted to die. She asked for it. A2 was kind enough to give it.

There's very little 2B thinks she would change from what she knows. "Do your job," she barks, keeping the SecUnit protected on all fronts and her eyes on ones that may need them most, "I'll do mine, and we'll get it done."

Protect human life. That seems mutual.

If this were anything but a memory, it would be so fucking dumb. It is a memory, and in Trench, even if they die, they come back. It wants more— it needs more for its friend than murder. ART could squash it like a bug anytime it chooses. In all likelihood, in a straight out fight, 2B would win. (That wouldn't stop Murderbot from doing what it could to win, to live, but it acknowledges that its slim record against CombatBots doesn't make it better than them).

It stands there, close to 2B and equally stubborn. "Shutdowns, not deaths," it insists, "or I'm taking you back and locking your ComfortUnit ass into a cubicle." Because in this memory, it has the upper hand. It stands there amid the chaos glaring 2B down because it will not let this go. Not today.

It really said that! 2B could put your ass in a cubicle. But, she must digress:

"I'm far from Comforting, SecUnit," she says with an ironic huff tagged right before her words. Shutdowns. That's going to be a challenge, but not entirely impossible. 2B doesn't like remembering the theater room at the creaking, abandoned amusement park. Androids were stripped of their skins and used as weapons, even conscious as they were turned against their own kind.

She does not like this, but reluctantly, she will comply.

Murderbot motions toward the ComfortUnit 2B walks around this memory in. This is not the time to ask 2B why she dresses like a comfort unit. No humans, but somehow androids dress like their fantasies. Not the point today.

"One star reviews, I'm sure," Murderbot agrees. Even so it leads the way back toward the security room. A short walk, but everything happens so quickly. A bot small enough to fit through the doorway (still large compared to them or the humans) flies straight at the humans.

Murderbot springs at top speed, grabbing a human under each arm, and running up the wall because it runs out of floor. "Vents, vents, vents!" it shouts, following a curve of wall back down to the floor. Adrenaline floods its system.

The bots are even more victims than the SecUnits.

It’s accurate to what she thinks of herself when it comes to comfort. She could hardly calm her operator after being rejected by another android— I’m not the one to talk about these things to, and yet, she tried her best.

Only shutdowns, she remembers as she swiftly inhales, holds her breath to aim, then fires her weapon for the SecUnit to drop still in an upheaval of smoke and sparks. It is a memory that brings back a harmful memory of her own, and she pushes it down with a tight swallow to do as the boy says: vents.

2B swiftly pries them an opening, offers them boosts to reach, and lags behind to cover their backs.

As soon as the latest bout of immediate fighting is over, the humans wriggle in its grip. It's pointless movement if Murderbot wanted to hold them. However, unlike what humans think, SecUnits want physical contact less than they do. It's more terrifying for them. Plus, SecUnits have the human standard two arms, and Murderbot prefers to keep its options open, even with 2B covering its back. With more care than either CorporateOne and CorporateTwo deserve, it sets them down and leads the way out.

Its knuckles graze the robot in passing, a silent apology for any damage its system takes from overheating. It doesn't know how many bots and SecUnits survived the event. How many were destroyed before backup arrived, how many were wiped and put back into service, and how many were taken apart for parts. It chooses to imagine this bot back at work in the years since. It's a nice idea.

Out of sight, out of mind. When they reach the ComfortUnit cubicle room, Murderbot stuffs both humans into one cubicle, a tight fit. "Stay put," it orders them and closes the door. There's a latch so they can be opened from the inside, if the humans stop to think about it. It hopes they don't.

"Two humans," Murderbot says. Possibly no more.

"Better two than none," 2B replies. When humans supposedly fled to the moon, 2B was yet to be a prototype. Until Trench, she's never seen one. The Machine War was devastating in dwindling the human population, and it doesn't make this one any lesser.

But, two. Two was where they were. Whether they could have done better or not, their best at the moment had been two.

It's not long until they are no longer running through the lines of the pages in a book. They're where they started, with the open spine of it in 2B's hands. She quickly shuts them when her sensors have tested their reality. She doesn't say a word yet, not beyond a soft, murmured "Two".

"Two more than before," Murderbot mutters. It doesn't bother to find (human) furniture. It sinks down where it was when it fell into the memory, when it came back out, with its knees before its face. It's the worst memory it couldn't remember. The book knows more than it does. It had more information than made it to the memory archives it found.

The memory is horrible and horrifying. That's not news. What haunts it is what it told 2B—all the bad things that would have happened if it hadn't participated in that slaughter, if the company hadn't wiped its memories, if it hadn't hacked its governor module to avoid ever doing that again. The thought that Mensah and Ratthi and everyone else, even Gurathin, would be dead is many times worse because it wasn't their fault that they nearly died. They listened to it. They did the right thing. They are good people, even Gurathin.

"I wouldn't have risked it," it says so softly a human might not make it out.

She would have, but 2B holds her tongue. They’re programmed differently. They have different objectives and purposes. If she felt the need to do it, she would shut Pod up with its warnings and rational advice until she got it done. In the face of humans— she would have executed every infected android there to save them.

She doesn’t know how to feel about that. It comes with a melting pot of pride and dread.

“You said there was a virus,” she starts, “Does it have a name?”

The risk it wouldn't take is its governor module. Success in one hack or permanent death. That's what hadn't been worth the risk ever before. Only that violence made it worth it. Only having done it let it do the rest. Horrifying.

"No," Murderbot answers, exhausted, "It wasn't meant to do that. It was meant to shut everything down. Corporate espionage. Cost them too much money. Take over Ganaka Pit. Instead it all was shut down, swept up, and probably a massive payout. Got taken off the map, out of the public records, as erased as they could make it."

It pauses. "Including me. SecUnits are too valuable to trash, so they wiped my memory. I figured out the rest of that later."

2B's brows faintly crease upward at a story so close to her she wishes she could shove it away. Memories were important. If you lost them, the current you would cease to exist. The you in that moment is gone, forever. So many times was 2B forced to say goodbye and wipe those memories herself.

"Do you resent them for that?" she asks, soft yet grim.

Murderbot watches to the side of 2B. It's an easy and difficult question at the same time. Again, if it knew it wasn't responsible, it wouldn't have bothered to hack its governor module. Same outcome. Dead crew.

"I resent the fuck out of them for treating me like a piece of equipment," Murderbot says, "one more item on the inventory. I resent how negative of fucks they give that SecUnits have emotions. Just the cost of doing business. I resent the kill switch in my head that should have fried my brain as soon as I got here. No living client!" Murderbot motions around them.

"I hate the company."

If she knew the truth about herself, perhaps 2B would have thought similarly. There had been something wrong with YoRHa— classified. She would receive an order and she would execute. She would listen and hold them so high she was blind to their actions. She died without knowing. She lives now and still thinks she has great purpose.

If only she could have known, with 9S in shambles of resentment and disdain for the very same reason: just a piece of equipment, when they were not. Sacrificial lambs fighting for nothing and raised to believe everything. Or perhaps her ignorance was for the better? It wasn’t humanity’s fault, after all.

“. . . I’m sorry.”

They are short, simple words, but they are genuine.

Murderbot slumps. It feels pointless, almost, to be mad. It got away. It's so far away it couldn't nuke the company's headquarters even if it didn't care how many people and SecUnits and bots that killed. The company is out of its life completely, so long as its here. Once upon a time, that would've felt like something in a serial. It does except for the fact it's happening for real.

"Thanks?" Murderbot says. It doesn't know how to handle that either, but the tone is confused, not sarcastic.

"They never bothered to make SecUnits like them. Companies don't care if their SecUnits like them, just if they do the job, if they obey the governor module in their heads," Murderbot explains. It pauses a moment. "I guess that made it easier in a way. I didn't have to deprogram that from myself. Disable the hardware and I was free. A rogue SecUnit. Wow that is a terrible security flaw." Rogue SecUnits happen all the time in serials (popular villains), but they are rarer in reality. Maybe not worth the money to address, if they thought about it at all.

Murderbot’s telling pinches something within 2B. If she were to run a quick scan, perform diagnostics, nothing would show up. She was perfectly functional. She was, in the was of something artificial, in working order.

But something has been placed, there. Something that makes her go quiet and allows the conversation to fade into quiet. Possibility. Answers. Perhaps—?

She must think, but she will leave the other construct with her book of many, many memories, flaws, and misery born from exactly what the SecUnit has freed itself from. 2B wonders, in her silence, if she could do the same. If she should.

It was something to ponder, and ponder is what she does.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music

I don't care. I'm a cat. (Book Club)

All this pressure give me anxiety (Silent Disco)

We improvise, all right? (Fast & Furious viewings)

The question isn’t ‘what are we going to do’, the question is ‘what aren’t we going to do?' (Memshare books)

CW: gore/death, mind control

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cw: android suicide + ideation

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