My summary of The Murderbot Diaries so far, three books in:
Murderbot: I can’t believe I have to keep these humans from getting themselves killed. Everywhere I go, there are humans who need protecting and this cuts into really valuable media consumption time. This is so annoying.
Everything in the universe, including Murderbot’s own presumably unprecedented free will: You could just not protect the humans.
Pre-series TMBD soulmate AU where you share dreams/strong memories with your soulmates until you meet them.
Normally I prefer “soulmates are created by choice not pre-destined by fate” AUs for Murderbot, however I cannot stop thinking about pre-series PresAux all meeting each other on Preservation and establishing healthy and loving bonds- but collectively being plagued by corporate torture dreams from their lost soulmate. They’re all desperate to find their missing person who’s clearly being abused and enslaved, but have no idea where to start considering how large the Corporation Rim is.
Meanwhile, Murderbot is getting slammed with random human memories from a utopia-like world (re: Preservation) with no context for any of it. It assumes SecUnits don’t have soulmates, so it figures it must’ve fucked something up when it hacked its governor module and now it’s irreparably damaged
PresAux have been working hard to find their one (1) soulmate trapped in the Corporation Rim. They piece together enough to track down Gurathin, and Mensah convinces him to come home to Preservation.
But even though Gurathin is now safe on Preservation, the second-hand experiences of corporate abuse don’t stop. They come faster and seem more brutal than ever.
PresAux assumes they’re flashbacks from Gurathin, who is working to process decades of unresolved trauma. But nope! Gurathin’s memories are hazy (especially if we go with the addiction backstory) but he remembers enough to know he never experienced THIS particular brand of hell.
And you cannot tell me that it wouldn’t be extremely triggering to witness a stranger (your long-lost soulmate) experiencing abuse/humiliation/slavery when you had just escaped a very similar situation. Especially considering the rest of your soulmates hadn’t even realised this person existed and instead assumed all the trauma was coming from you. Plus, Gurathin is the only one who’s lived in the Corporation Rim. He’s more equipped to find their final soulmate than the rest of Pres Aux, and he’s probably experiencing a fucked up version of survivor’s guilt. PresAux all saved Gurathin, and now it’s Gurathin’s responsibility to help find this soulmate, who despertaely needs help.
Which is to say, Gurathin ends up spiraling
i imagine that depending on the context of the memories, it could go either way, BUT i think it’s more likely they would figure out that Something Is Up, bc constructs are not just treated as indentured but as *inventory*
altho i think there would be a strong element of denial to it, bc as you said, it’s common propaganda knowledge that constructs cant have soulmates
it would be a lot easier to accept for PresAux-born folk, bc they have much less preconcived notions of secunits/other constructs. i feel like show!gurathin (or book!tarik lol) would have a lot more internal turmoil over construct having soulmates, both bc of the violence he has seen secunits be forced to exhibit, and potential past abusing comfort units
The question becomes: do bots have soulmates?
Because if the answer is yes, I can see PresAux eventually accepting that their soulmate might be a bot. Might take Gurathin a bit longer to come around to the idea, though. It’s hard to deny when they get a sense-memories of being dismembered and locked away in a low-oxygen cargo box, though.
In Fugitive Telemetry, bots seem to be accepted a lot more readily than constructs. 1) because constructs are created for very specific, uncomfortable purposes (murder/violence or sex) whereas bots are common and usually harmless (e.g., cargo bots), and 2) the forced amalgamation of human/bot parts is nightmarish and freaks people out.
I don’t think it would change how PresAux treats Murderbot in ASR though. In canon, they still all believe constructs have rights and yet still keep their distance until the plot forces them closer. Especially if they assume their long-lost soulmate isn’t a SecUnit. It’s a bot. (Honestly, I can see Gurathin suspecting it first- and then confirming it after peeking into its systems)
And you’re right, it would ALSO mean ART and Murderbot are soulmates. ART has probably been foaming at the mouth to find the little traumatised idiot who has been plaguing it with contextless experiences. The only other soulmates it has are its crew, which is knows and understands. But Murderbot is a total mystery.
Which means when ART finally clocks Murderbot in Rogue Protocol, it POUNCES on it
Query: Murderbot is blaming the dreams on the fact that it borked with its governor module, yeah? So, it didn’t start having these dreams until after it borked its governor module.
Does that mean thar the governor module was suppressing/blocking/deleting the memory of the soulmate dreams? Is that part of the module’s purpose?
If so, does it work both ways; preventing the transmission of dreams as well?
So, the PresAux team think they had found all their soulmates and then suddenly get blindsided by a slew of corporate trauma ineffably interspersed soap opera?
If ART is also Muderbots soulmate in this scenario, how did its crew talk it out of nuking the entire corporate rim out of the universe?
Query 2: What kind of dreams does Muderbot get from ART?
Query 3: When do constructs dream? Is it any time that they’re offline? Is there a difference between “sleepmode” offline and “critical shut down” offline?
Query 4 (What I was originally getting at with Query 3, before it spawned more questions): since constructs don’t really have to sleep the same way humans do, do the PresAux get Concerning gaps where they don’t get anything from their unknown soulmate?
1) Yes, the governor module has tech that blocks all soulmate-related activity. Murderbot didn’t know that when it hacked its governor module.
Thankfully, the Corporation is very, VERY big and ART realises that it can’t create a mindless path of destruction through the universe in pursuit of its lost soulmate. It spends a LOT of time analysing every secondhand memory it receives and reading every single research paper published on soulmates, in the hopes it can triangulate where its soulmate is. (Even though the research suggests soulmates meeting is up to “fate”)
ALSO love the implication that Murderbot’s soulmates are getting glimpses of Sanctuary Moon. Imagine getting slammed by secondhand memories of graphic abuse and misery- interspersed by old reruns of fucking Law&Order. Absolutely wild.
2) Murderbot receives VERY confusing soulmate-memories from ART. It’s different to the memories from PresAux, which feel almost like lucid dreaming. When it recieves memories from ART, it’s like it becomes ART. It’s dizzing, but Murderbot quietly loves becoming something so big and confident and intelligent. Something that cannot be easily hurt.
¾) In this AU, it’s not just dreams soulmates are sending/receiving. It’s old memories, flashbacks, strong emotions, and even live experiences. I’ve been going back and forth in the language I use for these soulmate “memories/dreams” because I don’t see them as a perfect copy of ACTUAL dreams or memories, but something more entirely. I also imagine it’s different from person to person.
I imagine Murderbot’s not transmitting anything when it’s in force shutdown though. So yes, it’s very possible PresAux sometimes goes a while without hearing from it.
It sits down for the first time in ART and comes face first with a wall of Sanctuary Moon posters.
ART and MB come to a certain conclusion simultaneously, though ART will forever after insist that its superior processing power led it to said conclusion first.
Thanks to everyone’s encouragement alien boyfriend gave it a try and found love
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[ID copied from alt:
A comic featuring two green aliens on a spaceship, one wearing a hat and looking at earth and the other playing with a football. The hat one says “I don’t know man, I just feel like this could be my one shot at love, you know?” and the football one replies “Dude we’re not telling Earth we exist.” The hat one then says “Come on, bro! Chicks dig aliens down there!” to which the other one hands the hat alien a hot pink flip phone, saying “My guy, this is the type of alien they’re into.” The hat alien takes the phone and says “Oh… I can’t compete with that…” while the final panel reveals the phone to be showing the official Smash Ultimate image of Ridley from the Metroid game series.
A drawing of a small, electric green alien boyfriend holding hands with a dark-skinned human girlfriend against a light gray background with a star, planet, and peace sign decoration. The human girlfriend is making the Vulcan hand salute and has a black DSLR camera on her hip and is dressed in a casual alt outfit, including a black shirt with a green design on it that reads “I want to believe”. The alien boyfriend is wearing a purple backwards cap and a black shirt with a drawing of Naruto Uzumaki on it, with the text “Believe it.” Both of them are wearing colorful kandi bracelets.
A two-panel grayscale comic. In the first panel, two of Human Girlfriend’s friends stand together outside, one holding a phone and the other saying “We’re calling a ride – you want in?” Human girlfriend, wearing a rave outfit, holds her own phone and waves, saying “Nah, my boyfriend’s picking me up!” While her phone receives a text that reads “OMW” with an alien emoji and a heart emoji. She then starts to get lifted by a tractor beam along with a mailbox and waves with both hands while her phone floats next to her, and says “Text me when you get home!” while her two friends silently watch. End ID]
okay, hold on, time out. that’s not fair. if they’re allowed to shoot energy beams using the power of friendship, i should be able to summon a monster using the power of divorce
I think Clark did the Grew Up In A Small Town Thing where he’d been to Lois’ apartment enough times that he thought it would be fine if he just went in to make dinner, like entering someone’s house through the screen door, forgetting that Lois is paranoid and grew up in a city and has a Door Bat for this exact scenario. The question is how many times after this does Lois still grab the bat and how many times has she accidentally hit Clark?
This actually gives me a hilarious idea for how and why she knows he’s Superman, though.
Clark: um
Lois, holding splinters: …something you wanna share with the class, Clark?
having used tumblr as a teenager is a vaccination against using tiktok today
i realize you’re probably half-joking but legitimately having this level of control over what i see on my dash and not having the popularity of my posts determined by The Algorithm makes using tiktok feel like my body is fighting a Disease
If you got enough money to live happily and comfortably for the rest of your life, but everyone who saw you immediately knew what fandom you are in and understood what that means, would you take it?
You can have 20 billion dollars but you have to drink this perfectly fine glass of water first, would you do it?
Look, all I’m saying is, if “everybody you meet IRL instantly knows all about what being in your fandom means to you” amounts to a perfectly fine glass of water, you are NOT doing fandom weird enough.
Look, in both cases my answer is ‘yes’. I don’t think you appreciate how much I don’t care how weird people think I am, and how much I DO WANT to be able to own my own house. Also, I had an entire pint glass of water with my dinner this evening, and drank it all after already having an entire pint glass of orange juice. So.
“You get to live in comfort but people think you’re weird” ok well people already think I’m weird so this is free money
For “living comfortably the rest of my life” kinda money, I’d happily go on AO3 and un-anon all my weird fucked up kink fics
if you’d turn down living happily and comfortably for the rest of your life because everyone would know how weird you do fandom you are not being yourself hard enough
Do you think that Bruce sometimes pulls the ‘my parents are dead’ card? Yes, I get that it was a traumatic and formative event for him but it would also sort of be funny, especially if he’s doing it ironically.
Some socialite telling him that he can’t bring his kids to events, asking what his mother would have said and Bruce deadpans and goes, ‘I think she would have liked to have met her grandchildren. But of course, she never did’
His med school lecturers threatening to flunk him if he doesn’t hand in his essay on blood loss, only for Bruce to say ‘it’s just a touchy subject for me’ and the lecturer blue screening because shit
Some rogue tries to kidnap Bruce at some event, holding a gun to his head, just for Bruce to look at the rogue, almost tearfully and be like ‘i always knew I would end up like my dad’ and the rogue just panics because now they are in a room with a bunch of pissed off people because they’ve almost made the Princess Diana of Gotham cry.
Clark gets mad at him over something, yelling at him and of course Bruce is just no listening so Clark just snaps, Ma Kent’s favourite phrase of ‘who raised you???’ Only to completely fucking choke, pray for the ground to swallow him up because Bruce’s expression just slips a little (inside he’s hysterically laughing). Clark comes by again with a batch of cookies.
He can’t obviously use it on the kids and they can’t use it on him.
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