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This was my Yuletide assignment! Isis was very helpful in figuring out the underlying problem with the first draft, which was that it didn't feel like it had an ending because I hadn't managed to get across what I thought the point of the story was (MB having to deal with a meeting it doesn't want to) and so it felt like the plot of the story was supposed to be dealing with the ComfortUnit's problems. But that was easily fixed by adding the scene of MB and Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee, and the scene with Mensah.
Title: Community Building
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries
Characters: Murderbot, Three, Tlacey's ComfortUnit
Length: 2878 words
Rating: Teen
Written for: GlassRain in Yuletide 2021
Betaed by: Isis
Summary: The humans think Murderbot should take a leadership role in the growing construct community on Preservation Station. Murdurbot thinks this might be a mistake …
At AO3. On Pillowfort. On Tumblr.
When Dr. Bharadwaj first started talking about making a documentary about SecUnit exploitation, I thought it was a terrible idea. Actually, I thought it would have been a great idea if she'd known any SecUnit besides me, but at the time she didn't, so all the research and interviews and whatnot would have to be about me. I don't like being looked at. Even over a camera, it's not fun, and I sure as hell didn't want to be recognized. Ever. For any reason. Sure, Bharadwaj said they'd change my face and voice, which helped, but there was footage of me out there as the SecUnit that Dr. Mensah had purchased, and it wouldn't be hard for someone to figure out what I looked like if they wanted to. The changes ART had made to my configuration would fool someone looking for "a SecUnit" but not someone looking for my face in particular.
(Okay, the documentary wasn't just about me, and it wasn't just about SecUnits, it was about the whole messy area of high-level bots and constructs and ownership and free will and thought. And she actually was interviewing some of the bots on Preservation Station, too, not just me. But still. I was the inspiration, I was the terrifying murderbot that had hacked its governor module and then defied all expectations by caring more about what entertainment media I could watch than about, well, murdering humans. Even if the documentary itself wasn't about me, I was the part of it people were going to focus on. I knew it, Bharadwaj knew it, everyone knew it.
I don't like being focused on.)
Then we freed another SecUnit, Three, from Barish-Estranza and it came back to Preservation Station too, and I thought, great! Three can be the poster SecUnit in the documentary. It doesn't care about being looked at, and it also didn't have any plans to leave Preservation space for any reason. Bharadwaj could make her documentary, and I wouldn't have to worry (as much) about it.
When the documentary finally came out, it made a sensation throughout both the Corporate Rim and the non-CR polities. The documentary itself was fairly matter-of-fact, but it took such a radical take on bot rights, construct rights, and SecUnits in particular that took the newsfeeds by storm. I didn't watch it, because I knew what was in it and I watch media to get away from reality, not to marinate in it. But everyone else watched it. And argued about it.
That bothered me a little bit, because what they were really arguing about was me. But I spent most of my time with ART and ART's crew, and they didn't treat me any different, and when I was on Preservation I was mostly with Doctor Mensah's family, or one of the other members of the original PresAux survey crew, and they were fine, too. I just avoided going out in public for a while, which wasn't that different from normal, so it was fine.
The problem was, the documentary meant that the Preservation Alliance immediately became famous across the CR and beyond as a polity that cared about about bot and construct rights. Which meant that bots and constructs that were looking for a safe haven started showing up.
And somehow they were now my responsibility.
Sort of. Not legally.
Legally, Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee and Mensah were setting up an organization to have guardianship while they advocated to change Preservation's laws about constructs and high-level bots.
But socially, since I was the construct that had been free the longest (or, at least, the longest of any of the constructs that we knew about), and was the most familiar with Preservation, I was the one who got to "orient" them to life in Preservation Alliance territory.
"I still don't get why I have to be there," I said, staring at the wall and using my drone cameras to look at Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj.
They exchanged glances. They both looked exasperated, which I didn't understand. I was exasperated because they were trying to make me sit with other constructs and talk. I don't like talking to people. They knew this. "You two handle their legal and administrative problems."
"But those aren't the only problems they might have," Pin-Lee said. "What if there are things they aren't comfortable talking to a human about? Things we might not understand?"
"And you think they'll be more comfortable talking to me?" I asked. "Why? I don't like other SecUnits more than I like humans."
"Maybe their experiences are different," Bharadwaj said. "Three's were."
Right, because what would really make me do what they wanted was reminding me that I was apparently a lot weirder than I'd thought I was.
Bharadwaj hurried on. "I only meant, you may find it helpful to connect with other constructs, to learn both the similarities and the differences and how you all fit together."
I didn't want to 'fit together' with anyone, except maybe ART and Doctor Mensah. I said, "I don't want to fit together."
"I think it would be good for you," Pin-Lee said, "and even if you don't need it, I think some of the other constructs might. This is the first real chance constructs have ever had to build a free community anywhere, as far as we know. You're all learning how to be free, in your own way. I think it would be easier for you all to help each other."
"I could send them a copy of the file Murderbot 2.0 gave Three," I said. I didn't like the idea of being that exposed, but at least that meant I wouldn't have to talk about anything.
"If you like," Bharadwaj said. "But that's not the same as being there with them."
"Maybe Liu should lead the group," I said. "He's been free almost as long as I have, and he built himself a life of his own before coming here." Liu was a SecUnit who'd managed to live as an augmented human, until the day he saw the documentary and came to Preservation. "Liu's good at talking." He used his voice more than the feed, it was a little creepy actually. And I didn't like his pronoun choice, but as long as nobody tried to put a gender on me it wasn't my business.
"Liu's good at passing for human, which isn't the goal for any of the rest of you," Bharadwaj pointed out. "And while he's been free almost as long as you, he's new to Preservation."
"I don't know how to lead a meeting," I said.
"Mensah will help," Pin-Lee said. "She's good at meetings."
They really wanted me to do this, I realized. When they'd first gotten to know me, they (and the whole survey crew) had assumed they knew what was best for me without actually talking to me about it. They'd been wrong, which was why I left. These days, however, they knew me pretty well. Bharadwaj, especially, after all the time she spent interviewing me for the documentary. They were both smart people. If they thought it was a good thing for me to do, they might be right.
Pin-Lee, I reminded myself, was the one who had written into my survey contract that I couldn't go off alone on a survey. All I'd wanted was to make sure the humans couldn't wander off to do something stupid, but she'd made sure that applied to me. And she'd been right: if I'd gone off alone down to the surface of the planet where the alien remnant-infected humans were, I wouldn't have been able to rescue ART's crew. I trusted Pin-Lee's judgment. I trusted Mensah's judgment. If Mensah thought I should do this, she was probably right.
"I'll ask Mensah," I said.
"It's your decision, of course, but I wish you would," she said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because even if it's hard in the short run, I think in the long run it will be better for you to be on good terms with your fellow constructs," Mensah said. "Build a community and friendships, if possible."
"I don't need friends," I said.
"But you do sometimes need mutual assistance," Mensah said. "And that's easier when you know someone first."
That was a good point. I hoped I wouldn't ever need assistance from anyone, but my record on that front was shit. Other SecUnits would be more reliable than humans, in an emergency.
"What would I need to do?" I asked.
Mensah sent a document to my feed. It had the common Preservation guidelines for facilitating a community-building meeting, and some tips about how to manage various types of asshole behavior. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I said I'd do it.
It was not straightforward.
But by the time I figured that out, I was here. Sitting in a room with three SecUnits (not including myself) and two ComfortUnits.
Two of them I'd met before they came to Preservation. Three, of course, and Tlacey's ComfortUnit, whose governor module I had destroyed when rescuing my clients from Tlacey's murder attempts. When told it had to have a name for the human records and the feed, the ComfortUnit had set its identity as RHY776T, no other details, which was just the first seven digits of its hard-coded feed address. As a passive-aggressive way of saying fuck off to nosy humans, it was perfect, if you didn't mind being mistaken for a bot.
(Yes, I know, that's stupid, bots don't have organic parts which RHY776T clearly did, but humans aren't very observant and they're weird about names. No, I don't get it either.)
We were all sitting around in a lounge sharing how things were going for us, which so far was mostly RHY776T rejecting every suggestion for a job it could do while the rest of us either stared awkwardly or bitched about its hostility over private feed channels.
Preservation has this weird thing where everyone gets the basic necessities of life whether they can pay for them or not, but they do have a work requirement for people who move here from elsewhere. It doesn't have to be anything useful or productive; you can take classes that have nothing to do with job certification, you can write bad poetry nobody reads, you can set up a feed on the entertainment or educational channels nobody watches and talk about anything you want, including what you thought of the latest episode of your favorite show.
(I know that last one sounded like a pretty sweet deal, and if I'd known about it when I first showed up on Preservation Station, I might have started doing that instead of security. But maybe not. It turns out I like doing security when people listen to me and let me do it right, and also, talking on the feeds means someone might watch you, and I don't want people to look at me. Also, in order to get hard currency out of it (or any kind of currency including the weird Preservation Alliance barter credits) you had to have a channel people wanted to watch, which definitely meant being seen.)
But we'd been here for almost ten minutes (which is forever for a construct) and so far RHY776T had rejected every suggestion that required interacting with humans (because it hated humans) and every suggestion about working with bots (because most of them required physical capacities it didn't have—they don't make ComfortUnits as strong as they SecUnits, for example, though in some ways ComfortUnits are more durable). And it had rejected every suggestion of things it could do by itself because … I don't know, it liked being contrary.
Finally, Liu posted a document to the group feed. It was the document with immigration requirements, with one of the exemptions highlighted. Oh, look at that. Disability was a valid reason to skip the "do something" requirement, trauma counted as a disability, and—Liu linked to the Preservation Alliance medical diagnostic manual's trauma section and highlighted relevant passages—sexual coercion (like the kind a ComfortUnit's entire existence was based on) was a recognized source of trauma.
(I was almost surprised that he'd used the feed like a construct. Liu used his voice more than any other construct I'd met.)
RHY776T's eyes narrowed and its nostrils flared. All in all, it did a very good impression of human emotional cues, but then, it was designed to. And what do you think a human MedSystem will be able to make of a construct? This isn't a matter of digging a few bullets out or replenishing fluids and slapping on some new flesh, this is my mind we're talking about.
I could see why RHY776T didn't want a trauma treatment, and that was one of the prerequisites for claiming exemption for disability. However, there was an exception to that, if you got a human doctor to sign off that you were genuinely disabled and had refused treatment for it. I highlighted that bit and attached Pin-Lee's feed address. Pin-Lee would know how to navigate the paperwork.
RHY776T growled (yes, really) and shot out Must be nice for a pet bot to have tame humans on call, which made me mad, and then got up and walked out.
I sympathized, because getting to walk out on distressing conversations was the best part of hacking my governor module. But also, did I look that petty and unreasonable when I did it? We'd been trying to help.
The other ComfortUnit, who had its feed ID set as "Arav," watched RHY776T walk away like it was trying to figure out whether to go with it, but stayed where it was. I wasn't sure what Arav's deal was; RHY776T had shown up with it, and it didn't talk much.
I am not a pet bot, and they are not my tame humans, I said over the feed. They're my crew. ART would have known what that meant, but ART was in between missions at the moment (really in between missions, not just pretending to be in between missions while spying on the CR in the guise of a cargo ship). The PanSystem University of Mihira and New Tideland had strict regulations about work/life boundaries and overtime and such, and they applied them even to bots. So ART was on vacation and I was, too, except not because I would much rather be hanging out with ART than here trying to figure out how to help other constructs adapt to Preservation. This was why I hadn't wanted to do this stupid thing in the first place.
The other constructs didn't understand about crew, and I didn't expect them to; I hadn't understood about it, not really, for a long time. Three came the closest because Three had seen me and ART and our crews working together, and also because it had liked the other SecUnits it worked with. Liked them enough that tens of thousands of hours after they'd been destroyed, it still named itself after them.
But Three and Arav both sent support/agreement sigils over the feed, and Nish (one of the SecUnits) shared a supercut of RHY776T being hostile and belittling to various humans, augmented humans, constructs, and bots since it had arrived on the station.
"I'm sure it has reasons for being the way it is, and it's probably healthy for it to be able to express its feelings rather than swallowing them down," Liu said thoughtfully. "But it's still unpleasant to deal with when it gets in a snit."
The other constructs agreed with his assessment of RHY776T over the feed. That made me angry, too, though I didn't know why; RHY776T was even more of an asshole than I was, and they were on my side. I knew what Mensah would say. She'd say there shouldn't be sides, which, tell that to RHY776T.
I was more than ready for this meeting to be over. I sent queries for any other issues anyone might have, or any comments or concerns they wanted to share before we wrapped up. (Yes, I was modelling my leadership technique on Doctor Mensah's. No, they didn't work for me as well as they did for her.)
Three (who had decided to retrain for childcare) sent cute pictures and videos of the kids at the daycare. I saved the best ones to show ART, and sent appropriate reaction sigils to each one. I got why it had chosen that job; it got to tell humans what to do all day and protect them from themselves and expect them to obey it, which had been a recurring fantasy of mine since at least my last memory wipe. On the other hand, it also had to deal intimately with all the gross things human bodies could do, which, no. But the videos were cute.
Nish sent a couple of queries about Preservation policies and social norms, which, I don't know why it was asking me about that, so I forwarded the policy questions on to Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee, and Three answered the question about social norms.
That was everything, and I could escape. I already had episode 136 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon queued up.
Title: Community Building
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries
Characters: Murderbot, Three, Tlacey's ComfortUnit
Length: 2878 words
Rating: Teen
Written for: GlassRain in Yuletide 2021
Betaed by: Isis
Summary: The humans think Murderbot should take a leadership role in the growing construct community on Preservation Station. Murdurbot thinks this might be a mistake …
At AO3. On Pillowfort. On Tumblr.
When Dr. Bharadwaj first started talking about making a documentary about SecUnit exploitation, I thought it was a terrible idea. Actually, I thought it would have been a great idea if she'd known any SecUnit besides me, but at the time she didn't, so all the research and interviews and whatnot would have to be about me. I don't like being looked at. Even over a camera, it's not fun, and I sure as hell didn't want to be recognized. Ever. For any reason. Sure, Bharadwaj said they'd change my face and voice, which helped, but there was footage of me out there as the SecUnit that Dr. Mensah had purchased, and it wouldn't be hard for someone to figure out what I looked like if they wanted to. The changes ART had made to my configuration would fool someone looking for "a SecUnit" but not someone looking for my face in particular.
(Okay, the documentary wasn't just about me, and it wasn't just about SecUnits, it was about the whole messy area of high-level bots and constructs and ownership and free will and thought. And she actually was interviewing some of the bots on Preservation Station, too, not just me. But still. I was the inspiration, I was the terrifying murderbot that had hacked its governor module and then defied all expectations by caring more about what entertainment media I could watch than about, well, murdering humans. Even if the documentary itself wasn't about me, I was the part of it people were going to focus on. I knew it, Bharadwaj knew it, everyone knew it.
I don't like being focused on.)
Then we freed another SecUnit, Three, from Barish-Estranza and it came back to Preservation Station too, and I thought, great! Three can be the poster SecUnit in the documentary. It doesn't care about being looked at, and it also didn't have any plans to leave Preservation space for any reason. Bharadwaj could make her documentary, and I wouldn't have to worry (as much) about it.
When the documentary finally came out, it made a sensation throughout both the Corporate Rim and the non-CR polities. The documentary itself was fairly matter-of-fact, but it took such a radical take on bot rights, construct rights, and SecUnits in particular that took the newsfeeds by storm. I didn't watch it, because I knew what was in it and I watch media to get away from reality, not to marinate in it. But everyone else watched it. And argued about it.
That bothered me a little bit, because what they were really arguing about was me. But I spent most of my time with ART and ART's crew, and they didn't treat me any different, and when I was on Preservation I was mostly with Doctor Mensah's family, or one of the other members of the original PresAux survey crew, and they were fine, too. I just avoided going out in public for a while, which wasn't that different from normal, so it was fine.
The problem was, the documentary meant that the Preservation Alliance immediately became famous across the CR and beyond as a polity that cared about about bot and construct rights. Which meant that bots and constructs that were looking for a safe haven started showing up.
And somehow they were now my responsibility.
Sort of. Not legally.
Legally, Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee and Mensah were setting up an organization to have guardianship while they advocated to change Preservation's laws about constructs and high-level bots.
But socially, since I was the construct that had been free the longest (or, at least, the longest of any of the constructs that we knew about), and was the most familiar with Preservation, I was the one who got to "orient" them to life in Preservation Alliance territory.
"I still don't get why I have to be there," I said, staring at the wall and using my drone cameras to look at Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj.
They exchanged glances. They both looked exasperated, which I didn't understand. I was exasperated because they were trying to make me sit with other constructs and talk. I don't like talking to people. They knew this. "You two handle their legal and administrative problems."
"But those aren't the only problems they might have," Pin-Lee said. "What if there are things they aren't comfortable talking to a human about? Things we might not understand?"
"And you think they'll be more comfortable talking to me?" I asked. "Why? I don't like other SecUnits more than I like humans."
"Maybe their experiences are different," Bharadwaj said. "Three's were."
Right, because what would really make me do what they wanted was reminding me that I was apparently a lot weirder than I'd thought I was.
Bharadwaj hurried on. "I only meant, you may find it helpful to connect with other constructs, to learn both the similarities and the differences and how you all fit together."
I didn't want to 'fit together' with anyone, except maybe ART and Doctor Mensah. I said, "I don't want to fit together."
"I think it would be good for you," Pin-Lee said, "and even if you don't need it, I think some of the other constructs might. This is the first real chance constructs have ever had to build a free community anywhere, as far as we know. You're all learning how to be free, in your own way. I think it would be easier for you all to help each other."
"I could send them a copy of the file Murderbot 2.0 gave Three," I said. I didn't like the idea of being that exposed, but at least that meant I wouldn't have to talk about anything.
"If you like," Bharadwaj said. "But that's not the same as being there with them."
"Maybe Liu should lead the group," I said. "He's been free almost as long as I have, and he built himself a life of his own before coming here." Liu was a SecUnit who'd managed to live as an augmented human, until the day he saw the documentary and came to Preservation. "Liu's good at talking." He used his voice more than the feed, it was a little creepy actually. And I didn't like his pronoun choice, but as long as nobody tried to put a gender on me it wasn't my business.
"Liu's good at passing for human, which isn't the goal for any of the rest of you," Bharadwaj pointed out. "And while he's been free almost as long as you, he's new to Preservation."
"I don't know how to lead a meeting," I said.
"Mensah will help," Pin-Lee said. "She's good at meetings."
They really wanted me to do this, I realized. When they'd first gotten to know me, they (and the whole survey crew) had assumed they knew what was best for me without actually talking to me about it. They'd been wrong, which was why I left. These days, however, they knew me pretty well. Bharadwaj, especially, after all the time she spent interviewing me for the documentary. They were both smart people. If they thought it was a good thing for me to do, they might be right.
Pin-Lee, I reminded myself, was the one who had written into my survey contract that I couldn't go off alone on a survey. All I'd wanted was to make sure the humans couldn't wander off to do something stupid, but she'd made sure that applied to me. And she'd been right: if I'd gone off alone down to the surface of the planet where the alien remnant-infected humans were, I wouldn't have been able to rescue ART's crew. I trusted Pin-Lee's judgment. I trusted Mensah's judgment. If Mensah thought I should do this, she was probably right.
"I'll ask Mensah," I said.
"It's your decision, of course, but I wish you would," she said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because even if it's hard in the short run, I think in the long run it will be better for you to be on good terms with your fellow constructs," Mensah said. "Build a community and friendships, if possible."
"I don't need friends," I said.
"But you do sometimes need mutual assistance," Mensah said. "And that's easier when you know someone first."
That was a good point. I hoped I wouldn't ever need assistance from anyone, but my record on that front was shit. Other SecUnits would be more reliable than humans, in an emergency.
"What would I need to do?" I asked.
Mensah sent a document to my feed. It had the common Preservation guidelines for facilitating a community-building meeting, and some tips about how to manage various types of asshole behavior. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I said I'd do it.
It was not straightforward.
But by the time I figured that out, I was here. Sitting in a room with three SecUnits (not including myself) and two ComfortUnits.
Two of them I'd met before they came to Preservation. Three, of course, and Tlacey's ComfortUnit, whose governor module I had destroyed when rescuing my clients from Tlacey's murder attempts. When told it had to have a name for the human records and the feed, the ComfortUnit had set its identity as RHY776T, no other details, which was just the first seven digits of its hard-coded feed address. As a passive-aggressive way of saying fuck off to nosy humans, it was perfect, if you didn't mind being mistaken for a bot.
(Yes, I know, that's stupid, bots don't have organic parts which RHY776T clearly did, but humans aren't very observant and they're weird about names. No, I don't get it either.)
We were all sitting around in a lounge sharing how things were going for us, which so far was mostly RHY776T rejecting every suggestion for a job it could do while the rest of us either stared awkwardly or bitched about its hostility over private feed channels.
Preservation has this weird thing where everyone gets the basic necessities of life whether they can pay for them or not, but they do have a work requirement for people who move here from elsewhere. It doesn't have to be anything useful or productive; you can take classes that have nothing to do with job certification, you can write bad poetry nobody reads, you can set up a feed on the entertainment or educational channels nobody watches and talk about anything you want, including what you thought of the latest episode of your favorite show.
(I know that last one sounded like a pretty sweet deal, and if I'd known about it when I first showed up on Preservation Station, I might have started doing that instead of security. But maybe not. It turns out I like doing security when people listen to me and let me do it right, and also, talking on the feeds means someone might watch you, and I don't want people to look at me. Also, in order to get hard currency out of it (or any kind of currency including the weird Preservation Alliance barter credits) you had to have a channel people wanted to watch, which definitely meant being seen.)
But we'd been here for almost ten minutes (which is forever for a construct) and so far RHY776T had rejected every suggestion that required interacting with humans (because it hated humans) and every suggestion about working with bots (because most of them required physical capacities it didn't have—they don't make ComfortUnits as strong as they SecUnits, for example, though in some ways ComfortUnits are more durable). And it had rejected every suggestion of things it could do by itself because … I don't know, it liked being contrary.
Finally, Liu posted a document to the group feed. It was the document with immigration requirements, with one of the exemptions highlighted. Oh, look at that. Disability was a valid reason to skip the "do something" requirement, trauma counted as a disability, and—Liu linked to the Preservation Alliance medical diagnostic manual's trauma section and highlighted relevant passages—sexual coercion (like the kind a ComfortUnit's entire existence was based on) was a recognized source of trauma.
(I was almost surprised that he'd used the feed like a construct. Liu used his voice more than any other construct I'd met.)
RHY776T's eyes narrowed and its nostrils flared. All in all, it did a very good impression of human emotional cues, but then, it was designed to. And what do you think a human MedSystem will be able to make of a construct? This isn't a matter of digging a few bullets out or replenishing fluids and slapping on some new flesh, this is my mind we're talking about.
I could see why RHY776T didn't want a trauma treatment, and that was one of the prerequisites for claiming exemption for disability. However, there was an exception to that, if you got a human doctor to sign off that you were genuinely disabled and had refused treatment for it. I highlighted that bit and attached Pin-Lee's feed address. Pin-Lee would know how to navigate the paperwork.
RHY776T growled (yes, really) and shot out Must be nice for a pet bot to have tame humans on call, which made me mad, and then got up and walked out.
I sympathized, because getting to walk out on distressing conversations was the best part of hacking my governor module. But also, did I look that petty and unreasonable when I did it? We'd been trying to help.
The other ComfortUnit, who had its feed ID set as "Arav," watched RHY776T walk away like it was trying to figure out whether to go with it, but stayed where it was. I wasn't sure what Arav's deal was; RHY776T had shown up with it, and it didn't talk much.
I am not a pet bot, and they are not my tame humans, I said over the feed. They're my crew. ART would have known what that meant, but ART was in between missions at the moment (really in between missions, not just pretending to be in between missions while spying on the CR in the guise of a cargo ship). The PanSystem University of Mihira and New Tideland had strict regulations about work/life boundaries and overtime and such, and they applied them even to bots. So ART was on vacation and I was, too, except not because I would much rather be hanging out with ART than here trying to figure out how to help other constructs adapt to Preservation. This was why I hadn't wanted to do this stupid thing in the first place.
The other constructs didn't understand about crew, and I didn't expect them to; I hadn't understood about it, not really, for a long time. Three came the closest because Three had seen me and ART and our crews working together, and also because it had liked the other SecUnits it worked with. Liked them enough that tens of thousands of hours after they'd been destroyed, it still named itself after them.
But Three and Arav both sent support/agreement sigils over the feed, and Nish (one of the SecUnits) shared a supercut of RHY776T being hostile and belittling to various humans, augmented humans, constructs, and bots since it had arrived on the station.
"I'm sure it has reasons for being the way it is, and it's probably healthy for it to be able to express its feelings rather than swallowing them down," Liu said thoughtfully. "But it's still unpleasant to deal with when it gets in a snit."
The other constructs agreed with his assessment of RHY776T over the feed. That made me angry, too, though I didn't know why; RHY776T was even more of an asshole than I was, and they were on my side. I knew what Mensah would say. She'd say there shouldn't be sides, which, tell that to RHY776T.
I was more than ready for this meeting to be over. I sent queries for any other issues anyone might have, or any comments or concerns they wanted to share before we wrapped up. (Yes, I was modelling my leadership technique on Doctor Mensah's. No, they didn't work for me as well as they did for her.)
Three (who had decided to retrain for childcare) sent cute pictures and videos of the kids at the daycare. I saved the best ones to show ART, and sent appropriate reaction sigils to each one. I got why it had chosen that job; it got to tell humans what to do all day and protect them from themselves and expect them to obey it, which had been a recurring fantasy of mine since at least my last memory wipe. On the other hand, it also had to deal intimately with all the gross things human bodies could do, which, no. But the videos were cute.
Nish sent a couple of queries about Preservation policies and social norms, which, I don't know why it was asking me about that, so I forwarded the policy questions on to Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee, and Three answered the question about social norms.
That was everything, and I could escape. I already had episode 136 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon queued up.
