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Ep 2.1- Pass the (Preservation) Aux
14 Plays5 days ago
Welcome to season 2! We begin with everyone's favorite heartless killing machine that just wants to watch Space Netflix and unfortunately keeps having emotions! Join Ryn and Sam as we discuss aliens, why capitalism is always the problem, international law in space, and sci-fi horror!
Covers The Murderbot Diaries Book 1: All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
Recommended
Transcript
Rin's Quirky Fidget Habit
00:00:00
Speaker
I have my butter knife. it's I didn't think to ask about whether or not it was a butter knife because that just seemed like the kind of thing you would do.
00:00:11
Speaker
it seemed in character. For listeners who obviously this is an audio medium, Rin is playing with a fancy silver letter opener and has been for the last several episodes. It's a nice, you know, quiet fidget toy that doesn't make weird noises into the microphone.
00:00:27
Speaker
And I just assumed that it was a butter knife this whole time. I love you very much. You're my best friend the universe. I will not say a word against you.
Podcasting Tips: Avoid Eating Sounds
00:00:41
Speaker
Although we do have another friend who is working on starting a podcast and I was telling them like, yes, you should totally do it. It's not that hard. Just make sure you don't eat crackers into the microphone like some people do and you'll be fine. ah have receipts.
00:00:59
Speaker
I'm just waiting for the sirens to go away. I can't hear them. so As they tempt you with their forbidden knowledge, their promises of forbidden knowledge, they will dash you upon the rocks. Tie myself to the mast and everyone else can shove wax in their ears and go on. Sounds like something that happens at the Brooklyn Underground sex party.
00:01:25
Speaker
I'm in a mood tonight, listeners. I'm um on my bullshit today. you know who's not in the mood?
00:01:53
Speaker
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company's satellites. It had been well over
Murderbot's Entertainment Escape
00:02:03
Speaker
35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, don't know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed.
00:02:14
Speaker
As a heartless killing machine, i was a terrible failure. Hello, everyone. Hello. You have just experienced everything you need to know about Murderbot.
00:02:28
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of The Fandom Apprentice. The first episode of Season 2. Let's go, let's go, let's go!
00:02:40
Speaker
This will not be as long as Season 1. We don't stand on making our seasons the same length here. don't do that. But... ah If you didn't listen to our sci-fi breakdown, welcome to the podcast for new listeners, intro to Murderbot episode last time, you don't really have to, but if you're new to Murderbot, the last 20 minutes or so of that episode are a good place to start.
Rin's Media Obsession Journey
00:03:10
Speaker
But hi, I'm Rin. I'm one of your hosts. And what we do here on this podcast is... I come to some form of media. First, I get obsessed with it.
00:03:26
Speaker
In season one, that was Lord of the Rings, which I read as a child and grew up on. And then I bring those forms of media to my best friend who has not yet experienced them and change her life.
00:03:40
Speaker
You change my life in many ways, but one of the prominent ones is media. Hello, I'm Sam. I'm the other one. This is a departure from last season because I am not experiencing these books for the first time.
00:03:53
Speaker
This is maybe the fifth, sixth, or seventh time. have lost track of how many times I have read these books. These are my favorite. This is my favorite series of books ever, probably.
00:04:05
Speaker
Which is maybe controversial to say after I just spent a lot of time talking about Lord of the Rings because that series is also very important to me. But Murderbot has a very special place in my heart.
00:04:17
Speaker
And i am so excited to finally... be getting into it. And yeah, that first paragraph really sets the tone for everything else that we're about to experience. This is my first, one thing that it is my first time is reading the text of these books. i have already mentioned several times the audiobooks narrated by Kevin Arfrey are amazing.
00:04:40
Speaker
Up to this point, they have been the only way that I have read them, but it was fun to actually sit down and look at the text and highlight it and make notes on it. But I was just reading everything in Kevin Arfrey's voice because that is the only that is the only murder bot to me.
00:04:57
Speaker
That's fair. Yeah.
Spoiler Alert: 'All Systems Red' Discussion
00:04:58
Speaker
So we are discussing today the novella, the 2017 novella, All Systems Red by Martha Wells.
00:05:08
Speaker
And when we say the 2017 novella, we mean the Nebula award-winning hugo award-winning aleck Award winning, Award winning,
00:05:20
Speaker
Philip K. Dick nominated novella. Goddamn. By Martha Wells. You deserve all those prizes, Martha. If you have not read this, this is going to be a very spoiler heavy episode.
00:05:33
Speaker
The audiobook is under four hours long. Even less if you speed it up like we do. Yeah, and holds up very well to being sped up. And the text doesn't take very long to read. So I highly recommend, if you weren't reading along with our Lord of the Rings season, understand that completely.
00:05:56
Speaker
I highly recommend reading along with us this time through for no other reason than they're so much fun. They really are. You deserve to take the time for yourself to read these books.
Read Along with Murderbot
00:06:10
Speaker
And we are going to do our goddamn best to keep it pretty tight and mostly do one episode per book. So, you know, not a terrible investment. Every two weeks, two weeks, you can read a novella.
00:06:25
Speaker
You keep up. I believe in you. And if you can't, it's a podcast. It's not going anywhere. So anything else before we dive into ah a weird giant hole in the ground?
00:06:37
Speaker
I was about to make the same joke, except I was going to talk about bursting up through a hole in the ground as sort of an inversion of our classic dive in imagery. We're meeting in the middle.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. in Right where Valescu and Bardwaj are. So our protagonist is a security unit. We will learn more about what that is as this book goes on.
00:07:03
Speaker
And this sec unit is working on a contract for a company, as yet unspecified, supervising two scientists, doctors Bardwaj and Valescu.
00:07:14
Speaker
who are collecting samples of some kind, and it is very boring. And Sekhuna doesn't care. Until a giant monster bursts out of the ground and gobbles Bardwaj up. Oopsie.
00:07:27
Speaker
She is very badly injured. Velaski was in shock. I am just sort of moving quickly through the plot elements. if If you want me to stop or if you have things to interject, just go for it. Because there's so much to cover.
00:07:42
Speaker
There is so much to cover. Murderbot leaps down into the hole. it For all its protestations, even in these first like four paragraphs, that it doesn't care. It's just there doing a job. It really just wants to be watching episode 397 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.
00:08:01
Speaker
Which, that's a lot of episodes.
Murderbot's 'Sanctuary Moon' Obsession
00:08:05
Speaker
That's like, you know in in a you know, in 22 to 25 episode season of like eighty s television.
00:08:15
Speaker
That's a lot of episodes. I just had to quickly Google how many episodes of One Piece because I have not seen that. But I know that show has a lot. As of 2025, One Piece more than 1,100 episodes.
00:08:30
Speaker
So we're talking, you know, the and it seems like Sanctuary Moon has a lot. Grey's Anatomy, which has been going since 2005, has 435 episodes.
00:08:44
Speaker
Oh, damn. I wonder about Law & Order. But then there's also all of the sub-series of Law & Order. So just that's that is a lot of Sanctuary Moon that has been either going for a long time, or it's like a telenovela and it produces like an episode a day.
00:09:01
Speaker
hmm. And just does that for 20 years. Yeah.
Corporate Exploitation in Entertainment
00:09:05
Speaker
with I'm sure the corporations that own the entertainment feeds are just exploiting the hell out of their workers, like 50s style, just pumping them up on drugs so that they can just act all day and all night. I'm sure the conditions are terrible, but we we're getting ahead of ourselves. Yeah, we'll get more into the horrible corporatocracy that we live in in this in this universe. Yeah.
00:09:30
Speaker
So Murderbot, it jumps down into the hole. um The first highlight that I have is the hostile that had just exploded up out of the out of the ground had a really big mouth.
00:09:40
Speaker
So I felt I needed a really big gun. and I think that that's really reasonable. We'll switch between referring to this character as Murderbot and Sec Unit. There is nuance about what this character likes to be called and how we will refer to it. But right now we're just trying to get everybody up to speed on the plot and introducing our large cast of characters. But don't you worry, there there's many things to say.
00:10:04
Speaker
But
Murderbot's Human-like Actions
00:10:05
Speaker
Murderbot successfully rescues Dr. Baradwaj from the big evil alien monster thing that's attacking her. she is injured very badly so it has to carry her back to the other scientists in their ship and dr valescu is in shock murder bot needs valescu wait what the fuck are valescu's i don't remember the genders of any of the less you valescu's a man valescu at least uses he him pronouns yeah it's i don't fucking know
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, so we need Valesky to walk. We need him to pull his own weight because Murderbot only has two hands and needs to focus on barred wash. And despite everything, I only have two hands.
00:10:47
Speaker
Listen, it's doing its best. It retracts its helmet to reveal a human face. Surprise! That
Identity Crisis and Crew Access Restrictions
00:10:57
Speaker
is sort of comforting to Valescu when they're able to get back to the spaceship, the little hopper.
00:11:03
Speaker
There's some calm chatter. We learn that there is another doctor, Dr. Mensa, who appears to be in charge of this whole operation. We get back to the ship. We get two more scientists, Pinley and Arata. This is a big cast and we haven't met them all yet. Don't worry.
00:11:18
Speaker
And then everybody is ah fretting and fussing and trying to see what the hell just happened. So Mensa, Pinley and Arata, and Dr. Raffi, who's another scientist, are, according to the book, 10 kilos away at another site.
00:11:36
Speaker
Interesting use of kilo here to refer to kilometer, because kilo is usually the abbreviation for kilogram. if you're If you're referring to like kilometers in the field, it's usually like clicks.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah. How did you imagine the hopper to look in the hop when the hoppers first mentioned? You know what I envisioned? i envisioned the runabouts from Deep Space Nine.
00:12:04
Speaker
That's what was in my mind. A sort of small... planet, like, I don't know, space words. This is a problem that I'm realizing now.
00:12:15
Speaker
Something that's traveling, not quite like an airplane, like a hovercraft mixed with like a hovercraft or like a low orbit spaceship, maybe. It's not designed for interplanetary travel, but you can use it to like scoot around.
00:12:28
Speaker
That's it's called hopper. You just hop from place to place. So yeah, I think in Deep Space Nine runabout, size of they bus or a medium-sized boat.
00:12:39
Speaker
Not like huge. Yeah, i was I was very much imagining the the little one being... i i was imagining the Avatar being the blue people movie helicopter.
00:12:53
Speaker
I haven't seen that movie since 2013. It's, it's essentially like, it's somewhere between like an ornith, like a dune ornithopter and like, it's, it's like helicopter style body, except it's got like two rotors off to the side.
00:13:08
Speaker
a And so I was, I was sort of imagining that I was imagining somewhere between like that size and for the little one. And like, a BSG, rap a Battlestar Galactica Raptor, which is which is like a runabout.
00:13:22
Speaker
It's the same thing as the DS9 runabout. Roughly that size for the little hopper. And then the big hopper, which gets mentioned later, i i was thinking it's like it's like an RV size. like These aren't like big vehicles, but they get around.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yeah. And you know you're doing science. You need to transport a lot of equipment and tools and stuff. You're the scientist. You know what kind of stuff scientists need to carry around. All that Tragically, I'm a lab scientist these days, but...
00:13:49
Speaker
I miss my birds. Yeah. I miss the field sometimes, but also field jobs don't pay. As somebody who has a family member, also a friend of the show, hello who has done field work, living on an island for three months, putting backpacks on seagulls, you don't get money in exchange for that.
00:14:13
Speaker
So that's fair. Your family member is braver than i um I wish that I could have stuck that out, but I couldn't manage I get benefits at my job. ah for But anyway, they they ah Mensa and Pinley, Arata, and Rafi arrive to help out.
00:14:37
Speaker
And Murderbot informs Dr. Mensa, who's in charge, that it can't put Dr. Bardwatch down. Like, it's holding her wounds closed.
00:14:49
Speaker
And so Mensa asks it to come up into the cargo cabin, or not into the cargo cabin, into the crew cabin. Which we learn is a big deal, and we get a little hint about the role of sec units in broader society.
Murderbot's Social Awkwardness
00:15:04
Speaker
because this sec unit, all of them presumably, are not allowed to enter crew areas without express verbal permission. So kind of vampire rules, it has to be invited in ah to be allowed to bring this injured crew member inside.
00:15:21
Speaker
And Rothy goes to run after the equipment and has to be like Yeah. reminded to get back in the hopper like no time for the equipment and also there is a dangerous life form down there so maybe don't go down there
00:15:40
Speaker
humans are dumb in a crisis So I've been told. I recall a distinct moment from when I was like 12. I was on an overnight school trip thing. were in the hotel and the alarm the fire alarm went off at like 3 in the morning.
00:16:02
Speaker
And we could smell smoke in the hallway. So like, is this an actual fire? We don't know. And I went out of the room and then I stopped and tried to go back in the room and all I could say to the chaperone, it was like, no, go get out.
00:16:16
Speaker
I was like, I'm still wearing my retainer. I have to take it out. Oh. And then when my roommate's still in there because we couldn't wake them.
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah. It was fine. It was just some trucker was smoking in the, in the hallway and set off the fire alarm. But like, humans in a crisis? Trivial thing.
00:16:40
Speaker
Gotta do the trivial thing. And they kind of have to be reminded, no, be logical, get the fuck out. Anyway, Murderbot's performance reliability drops.
00:16:53
Speaker
And we return to the Habitat. Yes. Murderbot is painfully, horribly awkward around humans and just really wants all of this messy, bleeding, leaking human, everyone being worried to just be happening somewhere else. It would much rather be with the cargo.
00:17:13
Speaker
So it does its best to be as much like an appliance as possible, then finds an excuse to leave and go do some security stuff to...
00:17:25
Speaker
seem busy Then it basically clocks out, sends a message in this shared communication feed. We get a lot of references to feeds and the feed, which just seems like kind of an overarching umbrella term for people.
00:17:41
Speaker
all communication. There's the feed TM, which has all of like the entertainment media and news and stuff. There's communication feeds. There's private feed channels.
00:17:53
Speaker
it's all It's all the... It's the internet, but there's something about like feed interfaces. And again, I have to ask, how did you imagine the feed interface? That's a good question. I think... I was imagining kind of a little Google lens situation, like a little headband with like a tiny screen in the corner and eye movement commands and stuff like that. Yeah.
00:18:16
Speaker
There's a lot of talk, if not in this book, then in later books about humans sub vocalizing and using that to send messages and control things on the feed.
00:18:30
Speaker
there's also somewhat skipping ahead to the last member of our crew that we meet dr garothan who is an augmented human there are some humans who have feed interfaces or other augmentations directly implanted into their body so i don't know how the fuck that works but yeah i was imagining a tiny screen where the things happening on it are really only visible to that person because i feel like when there's Yeah.
00:18:59
Speaker
then that's explicitly noted that they're using hand yeah interfaces and otherwise he' like five yeah i felt like there was either like glasses or like something i could like flip down and up and maybe like when they're in because Murdurbat mentions Mensa's helmet at one point. Like maybe when they're in a helmet, it's like more of an augmented reality type situation.
00:19:21
Speaker
But i yeah, i sort of felt like it was it was either like one little screen or like a glasses type thing. But that it's something that they all seem connected to like at all times, even if they're not augmented.
00:19:36
Speaker
um There's also Dr. Oversay. We also haven't mentioned Dr. Oversay, who is gay married to Dr. Arada. Yes. And that's important. Is that, see, this is a problem of me having read all of these books and them just combining in my mind into one big thing.
00:19:53
Speaker
Is that explicitly mentioned in this book? I think it is. that I think it's mentioned that they're in a romantic relationship. Does it say that they're married? I believe it says that they're marital partners. Yes. Okay. Cool, cool, cool. And we have things to say about these romantic relationships as well. But there's just, there's simply so much. So much.
00:20:11
Speaker
But circling back a little bit to Murderbot doing security stuff, clocking out in the feed. And then it just goes into its little recovery cubicle, curls up in an emergency blanket, which I imagine is one of those sort of shiny tinfoil blanket things, and just goes to watch media, which is just...
00:20:31
Speaker
So it's it's Blorbo from your shows. It's a sad wet cat. It just wants to watch media. It's so lovable. And you then the worst possible thing that could happen happens from Murderbot's perspective, which is a human comes to ask it how it's doing. And i highlighted the first impression that we get of Dr. Mensa, which I would like to share. Because ah first of all, it's Dr. Mensa. She fucking rules.
Dr. Mensa's Leadership and Murderbot's Indifference
00:21:01
Speaker
And second of all, the way that Murderbot describes things and the details that it chooses to highlight or ignore, I think are really telling of how it interprets the world. Because we only get this story from Murderbot's perspective. Yeah.
00:21:15
Speaker
And it is very funny and very obvious to see when there are things that are clearly being left out. But Dr. Mensah opened the door and peered in at me.
00:21:26
Speaker
I'm not good at guessing actual humans ages, even with all the visual entertainment I watch. People in the shows don't usually look much like people in real life, at least not in the good shows. She had dark brown skin and lighter brown hair cut very short.
00:21:39
Speaker
And I'm guessing she wasn't young or she wouldn't be in charge. Amazing. This is the person who is concerned about the equipment, the appliance, the security unit.
00:21:52
Speaker
This is also where we find out, hasn't been mentioned until this point, that Murderbot lost 20% of its body mass in the confrontation with the hostile life form and just didn't mention it in the narration.
00:22:08
Speaker
Mensa notes that... Murderbot did a really good job talking to Valescu, and Murderbot has to review its own footage that it took of that moment. It's like it's it's racking its memory is what it's doing, but because it's, you know, a a partly computerized construct, it literally does that by watching the video of that moment.
00:22:33
Speaker
And, you know, talks to v it talks to Valescu about... his kids and his family, which by the way, Valescu is married to three people and together the four of them have seven kids.
00:22:48
Speaker
Hell yeah, they do. This is a series where non-monogamy is the norm. I think, and we may have mentioned this last time, I think Oversay and Arata might be the only romantic couple who we don't explicitly see them also have other partners in the books as far as I can recall.
00:23:13
Speaker
But the fact that Murderbot was making small talk with Valescu and, you know, asking him about his life is very uncharacteristic for a SEC unit. We learn from Murderbot tapping into security feeds and watching the rest of the crew's reaction to everything that happened.
00:23:31
Speaker
They didn't even know it had a human face under the helmet. that This is not just a soulless robot. So there is an organic being in there who can talk and...
00:23:42
Speaker
care about your feelings and ask about your life. The reason that Murderbot can talk and ask about feelings and inquire about other people's lives is because it has, in its words, borked its governor module, which we haven't actually mentioned up to this point.
Murderbot's Hacked State and Nervousness
00:24:01
Speaker
isnt The governor module is some sort of controlling mechanism that forces it to follow orders. And it has somehow disabled that.
00:24:14
Speaker
And it is now a free agent. And it just said, all right, I guess I'll keep doing my job for now. It could do anything. It could violently rebel against the people who have enslaved it.
00:24:28
Speaker
It could do any number of horrifying things. And that is kind of related to why it's so nervous around humans, which I have a quote to support.
00:24:43
Speaker
So I'm awkward with actual humans. It's not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it's not them. It's me. I know I'm a horrifying murder bot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.
00:24:56
Speaker
Also, if I'm not in the armor, then it's because I'm wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment, and no one wants to see that. So in addition to just being worried about its safety and its big giant secret being revealed, it's also just awkward.
00:25:14
Speaker
and Just that's just inherent to its personality. hmm. Mm hmm. Another thing about, I guess, Murderbot's capabilities and the technologies built into it, the reason that it can see these security feeds is that it can tap into basically any electronic device in its
Enhanced Security Abilities
00:25:37
Speaker
proximity. It is an expert hacker since it hacked its own governor module.
00:25:41
Speaker
But it can see through security cameras, it can see through drones, and it is always operating on multiple streams of input at once. It, to a certain extent, can divide its attention in multiple places. And that is very important for the structure of the story and the things that it is processing simultaneously and what it chooses to highlight and what it chooses to ignore, like the rest of the narration.
00:26:05
Speaker
Mm-hmm. We are barely through chapter one. So so ah moving on to chapter two, because Murderbot's injuries are catastrophic enough that its cubicle shuts it down for repairs.
00:26:22
Speaker
Chapter two, it wakes up and goes out to meet the group. um Its armor hasn't been repaired, so it's wearing a uniform. And once again, fit group is surprised to see it has a face.
00:26:39
Speaker
And we learn that this group is called Preservation Ox. They are from some sort of community called Preservation. We'll learn more about it later in the book.
00:26:50
Speaker
But they they are a group of friends and co-workers who are doing this planetary survey, um specifically looking for natural resources to extract.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah, basically they are doing the survey to see if they want to buy the rights to then extract those resources. So that's cool. Or study, I guess. it It's not really established. I think Murderbot assumes at this point that it's for resource extraction.
00:27:22
Speaker
So true. But meeting the rest of Prezox, I'm not sure that they would... be focused so much on that as as much as on maybe research more so.
00:27:37
Speaker
So our group, just to recap, we have Dr. Mensah's in charge. We have Oversay and Arada who are married to each other. We have Rafi who is friends with Oversay and Arada, good friends with Oversay and Arada, and also good friends with Pin Lee.
00:27:53
Speaker
We have Valescu and Baradwaj who were at the scene of the crime. And we have Garofan, who's a little bit standoffish, particularly to Murderbot, but is still beloved by everybody else in the group.
00:28:07
Speaker
Again, like Sam said, big cast. Yeah, so the thing that they're discussing out in the crew cabin is why they were not aware of this giant terrifying monster, because that was not in the information packet they were given about the planet.
00:28:23
Speaker
They suspect that the data that they were given about the planet may have been tampered with. This seems to be their main working theory. Tampered with or just faulty.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah, or just bad in some way, because we learned that the company, which so far has only been referred to as the company, we do not get a name for it, is very cheap.
00:28:45
Speaker
And they will do less than the bare minimum if they think they can get away with it. So it would not be unheard of for them to just not include pertinent information. But there is another survey group on the planet. Their group is called DeltFall.
00:28:59
Speaker
So Preservation Ox wants to get in contact with them and see if they have the same issues with their data.
Struggle with Crew Interactions
00:29:06
Speaker
Mensa offers that Murderbot can hang out in the crew cabin if it wants.
00:29:10
Speaker
And that goes about as well as you can expect. It does not want. They all looked at me, most of them smiling. One disadvantage in wearing the armor is that I get used to opaicing the faceplate.
00:29:23
Speaker
I'm out of practice at controlling my expression. Right now, I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in the region of stunned horror. Or maybe appalled horror. the You know, I think this is... I did read these books for the first time during the pandemic.
00:29:40
Speaker
So this is very much me ah being used to wearing a mask or being used to having my camera off in Zoom meetings. o Because then when people so can see my face...
00:29:54
Speaker
I forget that I can't just like mutter to myself or make ridiculous facial expressions or fidget on camera and like...
00:30:06
Speaker
Whoops. Oopsie. Anyway. Just in general, the economy of language in these books is so wonderful. Everything is so snappy. And I just want to quote the whole thing.
00:30:19
Speaker
but I have to restrain myself so that way we don't have more hours of podcast than hours of audiobook. But it's very tempting. That being said, I do have another quote about another important part of Murderbot's
Murderbot's Asexual Design
00:30:33
Speaker
characterization. This is very important.
00:30:35
Speaker
So it is zoning out, thinking about media, watching media. And we get... A commentary on sex, which is important.
00:30:47
Speaker
I'd watched three episodes of Sanctuary Moon and was fast-forwarding through a sex scene when Dr. Mensah sent me some images through the feed. I don't have any gender or sex-related parts. If a construct has those, you're a sexbot in a brothel, not a murderbot.
00:30:59
Speaker
So maybe that's why I find sex scenes boring. Though I think that even if I did have sex-related parts, I would find them boring. That's, on the one hand, it is difficult, particularly as somebody on the ace spectrum, two to call a robot-type character ace, because that is so often what we get reduced to in media.
00:31:25
Speaker
isn um it you know If you don't have sexual desire, then you're clearly no better than a robot. But like that's pretty definitive, right? the yeah i technically have no ability to engage in this but even if i did i don't think i would care yeah so we we stan ace murder bot in my notes i had our favorite ace robot parentheses nuance um and like with the social awkwardness Again, I keep putting so many pins in things. It's a fucking pin cushion of pins to save for later.
00:31:59
Speaker
This is another instance of Murderbot asserting its individuality, its personality outside of what it has been constructed to be and saying, I am this way because I know who I am.
00:32:13
Speaker
And this is a feature of my personality regardless of whether or not it was something that the company intended. But moving on, because there is so much more to discuss. We learned that Murderbot has no idea where they are located or what planet they're on because it doesn't care.
00:32:31
Speaker
it got the information packet. It just didn't read it because fuck it. It's a job that doesn't get paid enough to care. It doesn't get paid at all. So it suggests about to say it suggests that they go to check out one of the sections of the map that looks sketchy to see if there's anything weird that somebody might be trying to hide.
00:32:50
Speaker
It doesn't want the humans to go. It wants to go alone. But that would reveal the hacked governor module because it has to stay within a certain radius of clients. I think more to the point, when we're at this point in the book, they're not assuming nefarious intent.
00:33:06
Speaker
They're assuming that like, something got borked. isn You know, they were given faulty data through negligence or just bullshit from the company. Like, it's not like somebody was setting out to hurt them yet.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah. And so, you know, i the Prezox is is on board to, like, jump into this possibly hazardous situation because...
00:33:38
Speaker
They don't realize yet they're in a horror movie. ah If we get past Murderbot's kind of droll narration of all of this and, you know, sort of dry wit, we have to realize this is a horror movie and the only one who knows it is Murderbot.
Horror Movie Setup Realization
00:33:59
Speaker
Mm, that's very true. It has all the hallmarks of a horror movie. As you read through the rest of it it, it has missing information and bloody, cute dead people lying around and mysterious things that you don't fully know the nature of around the corner.
00:34:20
Speaker
This is a horror movie. The only other person who started to figure it out maybe is Garrothan. Yeah. Except Garrothan is convinced that Murderbot is the horror movie antagonist.
00:34:32
Speaker
Which is not an unfair assumption, but we will let that one simmer. So they, a bunch of them write out, I don't think Baradwaj comes.
00:34:44
Speaker
Mm-mm. Some number of them stay behind. Some number of them go. Murderbot rides in the crew cabin again as they go to check out the other survey team's habitat and it's thinking, okay, I'm in the crew cabin.
00:34:56
Speaker
I must have played it pretty cool before when I was in the crew cabin. Everyone must just think that I'm really normal and great. And then it runs the tapes and realizes... it It was not great. It did not do a good job.
00:35:08
Speaker
Everyone had a meeting after it left to go watch media talking about, oh, no, we made it uncomfortable. okay we can't push it farther than it's willing to go. OK, you guys, just don't don't make it awkward. Don't push it. You know, it'll open up in its own time. And they're all just holding hands and talking about their feelings.
00:35:27
Speaker
And then there's a quote later on as it's reviewing the tapes. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97% efficiency. yeah hates it Preservation Ox, notably, has no previous experience with sec units. They do not exist in their society.
00:35:47
Speaker
They don't know what is normal and expected behavior, and they're obviously not comfortable treating it like a robot. So they're just kind of freestyling social interactions, which is just making Murderbot's anxiety worse because it has no idea what to expect.
00:36:04
Speaker
But the humans land. They do some science stuff. they They realize that Murderbot can see information on the map that everyone else can't. So there's definitely something wrong. Because they're about to wander into hazards.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yes. that's That's the problem. one of the One of the hazards they do wander into is a hot mud pit. Which made me immediately think like Yellowstone. The like mud pits in Yellowstone. The geothermal features.
00:36:32
Speaker
Which are... wildly dangerous. that That shit kills anything that falls into it. Yeah, and these humans are very cautious. They are very about doing things by the books, following protocol.
00:36:48
Speaker
So they would not just be blithely wandering into danger if they could see a hazard marker on the map. So stuff is wrong. They cannot get a hold of this other survey group. And they figure that they're going to have to prepare for some kind of rescue mission, which the ever optimistic preservation ox thinks, well, maybe one of the alien creatures got it. Maybe there was some kind of environmental hazard. Maybe they had an equipment failure.
00:37:15
Speaker
And it's just something that we can go and help them with because we're Prezox and we're so helpful and we see the best in everything. Because they don't realize they're in a horror movie.
00:37:26
Speaker
Exactly. So they go in their big hopper, which is you know bigger than the little one they use to fly around because Deltfall is located on the other side of the planet.
Pin Lee's Competence
00:37:37
Speaker
And again, only some of them come along. And I want to highlight Pin Lee here real quick as one of the people that comes along because Pin Lee is wildly competent.
00:37:48
Speaker
we have so love henley We have so far mentioned that she's she is clearly some sort of scientist of note, clearly that is fine with fieldwork.
00:37:59
Speaker
She has, quote, past experience in habitat and shelter construction. She is an amateur systems analyst. And later we will learn she is also a lawyer. Just some hobbies.
00:38:11
Speaker
She's just simply the most competent. And Rothy and Oversay, who are... ah Rothy's a biologist. Arata's a biologist. Oversay is a certified field medic.
00:38:24
Speaker
But they go to see Deltfall. Halfway into the journey as they're flying over a mountain range, the autopilot cuts out. And thankfully, because Mensa is does things by the book, she's actually still sitting in the cockpit and manages to take over fine.
00:38:47
Speaker
But Murderbot realizes this is not just the autopilot cut out, everything cut out. Mm-hmm. We also get more discussion here that Prezox having no experience with sec units is in part due to their general uncomfortableness With treating bots and constructs as tools or as property as when they can think for themselves.
00:39:14
Speaker
Rathi corner Murderbot and try to human-splain its own oppression to it. And saying, you know, so in our society, we consider you full citizens. Your situation is basically slavery.
00:39:30
Speaker
And Oversay cuts in and goes, you don't think it fucking knows that? Like, yeah, I think we're all aware that this is not okay. And everyone rags on Rothy for making the Torment Nexus uncomfortable, which is very funny.
00:39:45
Speaker
But they recover from this equipment failure. They arrive... At the adult fall habitat. And everything is creepy. In the horror movie. This is the part where there's no music in the movie. And there's just creepy little noises. And skittering bugs and footsteps.
00:40:05
Speaker
There's nothing on the feed. There is no contact. From the other security units. Because this survey team. Has a similar situation. To Preservation Ox. They have been required to hire some security units. As part of their equipment rental.
00:40:21
Speaker
for insurance purposes, basically. And Murderbot is 100% convinced that everyone here is dead. And they are. and Well, yes. so Yes, and they are dead.
00:40:34
Speaker
About which Murderbot has to say, this is why I didn't want to come. I've got four perfectly good humans here, and I didn't want them to get killed by whatever took out Deltfall. That's just a little, a little glimmer of, oh, your your humans are perfectly good?
00:40:48
Speaker
Okay, you maybe kind of like them a little bit. Maybe we'll get back to that. But everybody gets their weapons. They start investigating the scene. We get a little bit of distinction between combat units and security units.
00:41:05
Speaker
Our protagonist is a security unit. It is not a combat unit. It has no fucking idea what it's doing. It is not really prepared for a combat situation, but it's watched a lot of media with fighting in it.
00:41:20
Speaker
It has weapons built into its arms and it's going to do its goddamn best. Mensa and Murderbot find a dead sec unit and 11, quote, messily dead humans.
00:41:34
Speaker
even We know that Deltfall has three sec units. So there are two sec units that are not accounted for. And Murderbot realizes that these sec units are lying in ambush somewhere.
00:41:49
Speaker
and so murderbot sends mensa back to the ship walks into the ambush but here's the thing if you know it's an ambush it's still an ambush for the other guy and so murderbot takes out the other sec units and it has things to say about its reasoning for this Maybe these clients, the 11 messily dead humans, so the clients of the other sec units, had been terrible and abusive.
00:42:18
Speaker
Maybe they had deserved it. I didn't care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that, I had to kill those two rogue units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue units stuck on the other side of an ocean.
00:42:31
Speaker
That would have been the smart thing to do. But I wanted to kill them. It really cares. about security. It cares about its humans specifically being safe.
00:42:46
Speaker
And it will not stand for the I am reading into this a little bit, but what it seems to view as a sacred oath of security that these rogue units have violated by killing their clients, it doesn't matter if they were horrible people.
00:43:02
Speaker
You don't fucking do that. A security unit is supposed to ensure security. And it is now not only failing to do that, but also threatening murder bots clients. And they're going to get fucking dead.
00:43:15
Speaker
Well, and the issue is if if these security units killed their clients, something has happened to their governor modules, which theoretically should prevent them from doing that.
00:43:27
Speaker
But Murderbot then finds there is another sec unit here. And the the fourth unexpected sec unit attempts to insert something into its neck.
00:43:43
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And is ultimately killed by a surprise arrival of Dr. Mensa with a mining, like a laser mining drill that destroys the enemy sec unit.
00:43:57
Speaker
But it still managed to put something in the back of Murderbot's neck in its data port, which is a combat override module, um which is designed to...
00:44:10
Speaker
take some sort of overall control of a sec unit in violation of its governor module or any other standing orders that it had. And more to the point of its ability to, it it ends its ability to improvise or, you know, take any actions of its own, which that that ability to improvise is over the course of the book suggested to be curtailed somewhat by the governor module.
00:44:39
Speaker
Which is Murderbot can kind of do as it pleases, which is kind of what gives Murderbot the advantage over these other over the other set units. So even when it's outnumbered, it is still able to you know come up with things on the fly and apply its past experience and its ah past media consumption.
00:45:02
Speaker
Yeah.
Sacrificial Selflessness for Crew Safety
00:45:03
Speaker
to its planning where the other sec units can't do that. The combat override module further restricts these other sec units, which allows Murderbot to have two up on them.
00:45:16
Speaker
But the combat override module is starting to take, ah basically, it's it's starting to drug Murderbot and turn it into an actual murder bot.
00:45:27
Speaker
And so with its last little bit of free will, it tells Mensa to kill it immediately. Say, this is what's going to happen. You are all in danger.
00:45:39
Speaker
i am not safe to be around. You have to kill me right now. And then, of course, nobody wants to do that because they're a bunch of weenies and they don't want to kill their security unit friend.
00:45:49
Speaker
So it shoots itself in the chest to protect its clients. And if you're not crying, you should be. Because, oh my, heartless killing machine, no feelings, no self-sacrifice above and beyond the call of duty.
00:46:09
Speaker
i love Murderbot so much. So it wakes up in a medical, in a human medical suite, which is typically beyond what murder bots are allowed, what sec units are allowed, and finds that the combat override module has been removed from its neck and the the data has been purged from its system.
00:46:31
Speaker
And it says, my clients are the best clients. Because they are. And that is, it is not abundantly clear, this is not something that anyone would do for a security unit.
00:46:45
Speaker
The fact that they have taken it into a human medical suite, made every effort to save it and succeeded, absolutely unprecedented. it's It's unprecedented for it because it it understands itself through the company and through its previous jobs as equipment.
00:47:05
Speaker
corporate Corporate society treats it as a piece of machinery, much as as we'll find the corporations also treat humans associated with them as well. Mm-hmm. But Merbot especially is a disposable piece of machinery. We've seen how quickly it can be repaired.
00:47:21
Speaker
So what what does it matter if three quarters of it get destroyed, you can repair it? But Preservation Ox doesn't think that way. Preservation Ox sees constructs and bots as people, is it even if they're not humans.
00:47:38
Speaker
But they did also take the opportunity to poke around in Murderbot systems a little bit while it was out. And Garothan drops the bomb to the rest of the crew about the hacked governor module.
00:47:49
Speaker
And Valescu verifies this, saying that it was definitely hacked. This is definitely a roguesect unit that they have been dealing with this entire time. But it has also been acting to preserve their lives.
00:48:02
Speaker
And therefore they should trust it because if it wanted to kill everyone, then it wouldn't have said, please kill me to ensure your own safety. So, you know, Murderbot does then pipe up from its position on the examining table to go.
00:48:18
Speaker
yeah this isn't some kind of corporate plot to kill you. I don't um don't want to kill you. This is just kind of the situation. Garofen has supposedly used their hub system to immobilize Murderbot on the examination table while they discuss whether or not Murderbot is a danger to all of them.
00:48:40
Speaker
Garofen is suspicious of the fact that it's been watching so much media.
00:48:47
Speaker
Which, side note, Murderbot refers to media in the way that our society refers to content. Yes. Like it's a general catch-all term for anything to consume.
Media vs. Content Debate
00:49:03
Speaker
But that said, I like the term media but more than I like the term content. Yeah, we've talked about the term content on the show. Media, seat i don't know, it just seems better. It seems like it is a more, has a little more pride. Yeah, it feels like it's acknowledging the fact that it actually like has value as opposed to being something just to consume and discard.
00:49:27
Speaker
The crew does talk a little bit about, it's a fucking security unit. What do you mean it's watching media? And Garothan's saying, don't know, it's watched lot of Sanctuary Moon. i don't know if that's a thing.
00:49:39
Speaker
And then Rothy says, the one where the company's solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby? Again, I couldn't help it. I said, she didn't kill him. That's a fucking lie.
00:49:51
Speaker
Rothy turned to Mensa. It's watching it. Is this the first time that we've seen Murderbot swear, too? In dialogue with the humans? I think so. So it it gets snippy and it gets aggressive about its media.
00:50:09
Speaker
that's what That's what bridges the gap between it and the humans. But they are also right to be a little bit cautious of Murderbot because we get another bomb dropped. And I would have to check and see if this is something that Garofen knows or if Murderbot is keeping this to itself in the narration.
00:50:27
Speaker
But it did kill 57 people in the past. So the name Murderbot is not entirely symbolic.
00:50:38
Speaker
But It didn't hack its governor module in order to kill 57 people. The governor module malfunctioned because the company is cheap and makes things shittily.
00:50:49
Speaker
And so it hacked itself to prevent that from ever happening again, which then also put some new perspective on the combat override module, which is basically Murderbot's worst fear that all of its hard work, this massive risk that it's taken to make sure it could never be forced to kill would never happen again.
00:51:10
Speaker
Poor murder bot. And then it reveals that it's not actually immobilized at all. And it slams Garofan into a wall. Gently.
00:51:20
Speaker
Mostly. Mostly gently. Big difference between mostly gently and all gently. But Mensa asks Murderbot to put Garothan down. And this is really what convinces the whole group that they've been sabotaged by not the company, because if they don't make it back, the company has to pay an obscene amount of money, but by some other group that is on the planet without their knowledge.
00:51:53
Speaker
And that group doesn't want anybody else making it off the planet. And so they label it Evil Survey. And Evil Survey is responsible for the deaths of Deltfall and responsible for multiple instances of the attempted deaths of Preservation Ox.
00:52:10
Speaker
And they're trying to figure out how this could possibly happen.
Sabotage Suspicions on Preservation Ox
00:52:14
Speaker
And the story that they put together is that the Evil Survey team pretended to be them went to Deltfall saying, oh, we're preservation, we need help, killed everybody.
00:52:29
Speaker
And that the company has likely been bribed to conceal the existence of this evil survey team. And that the company directly isn't trying to kill them, but they will certainly take money to look the other way.
00:52:43
Speaker
they They will take money to look the other way, but they don't know that Evil Survey is conducting murders. Because again, if Preservation Ox all dies, and now that Deltfall is all dead, the company has to pay a lot of money because it's it's an insurance company. So if they die, they have to pay out you know life insurance payments.
00:53:07
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So, and you know, they'll conceal that there's a third survey, but they work didn't know that the third survey was going to kill everyone. However, the third survey is going to kill everyone.
00:53:18
Speaker
And Murderbot makes some remarks about how corporate overlords don't give a shit about anybody's safety and Preservation Ox's corporate overlords don't care about them either.
Focus on Client Survival
00:53:29
Speaker
And then there's an awkward pause as we realize that Murderbot, in addition to not knowing where on the planet they are, doesn't really understand who these people are.
00:53:42
Speaker
And they don't explain quite yet. But they sort of try to diffuse the situation by teasing Murderbot about eye contact. But later, Rathi explains that Mensa is basically the leader of their planet.
00:53:58
Speaker
Mensa's their president. Basically. She's like the president of their whole society. She's very, very important. Prime minister. Which is why it was so expensive to take out insurance on their group because you're sending your glorious leader out to the world. And we learned some more about Preservation Oc Society, more about bots being full citizens, that elected leaders still have to keep doing their regular job in addition to government work. And Dr. Mensah is a terraformer. So this is what she's here to do.
00:54:27
Speaker
And yeah, they're there're space communists, basically. And so they don't like coming into the corporation room, but they do have to occasionally interact with corporate entities as well.
00:54:42
Speaker
And strategically, this is a good move for them because the they know that the company knows who Mensa is and who their group is, but Evil Survey doesn't know who they are.
00:54:54
Speaker
So they can use that to their advantage in negotiations later. Garothan and Murderbot have a conversation. Garothan asks Murderbot about how it was punished for killing those 57 people that it killed before. So I guess, yeah, then at least Garothan knows. Can I forget if he reveals that to the rest of the group?
00:55:12
Speaker
But he's saying, you know, do you hate all humans because you killed them all? Do you hate humans for what they did to you? And we learned that sec units are very expensive.
00:55:25
Speaker
And because the company is cheap, they are not going to be destroyed. But Murderbot has had a good deal of its memory erased. It can't be completely erased because it has some organic parts. It has some organic neural tissue.
00:55:37
Speaker
But it was very painful and awful and traumatic to both experience having to kill all those people and then also the sort of re-education.
00:55:48
Speaker
that it underwent. But despite all that, it doesn't want to kill all humans. But they come to the conclusion that Evil Survey is going to try again to kill them, especially now that they know that Preservation Ox knows about Deltfall.
00:56:04
Speaker
So they decide to not be at their habitat when Evil Survey arrives.
Evil Survey's Deadly Intentions
00:56:10
Speaker
So they all get together, get in the hoppers and run off.
00:56:17
Speaker
I had quick thought when I was, when I got to this point in the book. Yes. I was thinking back to the fourth security unit that was in Delft Falls Habitat.
00:56:29
Speaker
That fourth security unit clearly came from Evil Survey, isn which we are also informed earlier in the book that murder bots can't be more than 100 meters away from their clients at any one time. Mm-hmm.
00:56:44
Speaker
So either the combat override module, which we assume that ah the evil survey units also have, either that combat override module takes care of that problem, or alternatively, there was also an evil survey operative there somewhere.
00:57:03
Speaker
Oh, that's so much worse! I think mechanically the combat module overrides the governor module, so you wouldn't Anyway, they escape.
00:57:15
Speaker
but it's so much worse imagining there being a human collaborator i'm going to choose to believe that instead
00:57:24
Speaker
anyway they escape And they go find sort of a remote spot to camp out while Murderbot leaves a few camera drones in the habitat to record Evil Survey.
00:57:39
Speaker
They do reveal that Evil Survey is called Gray Chris, which is not a company that anybody else has ever heard of. And They sort of, you know, in I feel like in chapter six where they're camping out, we get a lot of sense of more Murderbot's personality, specifically how it wants to hold itself apart.
00:58:02
Speaker
But we we now understand, especially through this chapter, how much personality is actually in Murderbot. it's not ah It's not a robot. It's not, you know, quote, half bot, half human.
00:58:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm. That makes it sound like the halves are discreet, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job, and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here, as opposed to the reality, which is that I was one whole confused entity with no idea what I wanted to do, what I should do, what I needed to do.
00:58:38
Speaker
At a later, Mensa asks Murderbot to keep its helmet down so that the party can see its face. so that they can also think of it as a person who is trying to help.
00:58:56
Speaker
And Murderbot's response is, my insides melted. That's the only way I could describe it. Yeah.
Preference for Media Characters
00:59:03
Speaker
Cool. It does try to deflect later about not wanting to kill all humans ah because of what was done to it.
00:59:14
Speaker
Just because the company was callous. It tries to deflect and say like, I liked humans in the entertainment feed more than real ones, but you can't have the entertainment feed without the real humans, which is very, I don't want the universe destroyed because I fucking live here. Energy.
00:59:32
Speaker
energy which is, I feel like that's definitely it trying to pull itself back from feeling emotions about its people. Yeah. Be like, I'm just doing a job. I'm just keeping myself safe. You're keeping them safe too.
00:59:47
Speaker
And there is all sorts of planning and scheming and the descriptions of action and the plan is all so tight and so fun. But honestly, I care way less about getting into the details of that than I do about the character.
01:00:03
Speaker
stuff. But just, you know, plot is also happening. They make a plan. They negotiate with Gray Chris. They figure out why Gray Chris is there.
01:00:15
Speaker
Yeah, they make a plan. They negotiate. Murderbot kills... One of the Deltfall units, which I think is the last one. Yeah, the last one that was unaccounted for in the previous fight. Well, no, because there was one Deltfall unit that was killed and then it destroyed the other two.
01:00:34
Speaker
But Greycris repaired them in their cubicles after Prezox left. there's so Grey Chris clearly had four sec units to start with. One was destroyed at the Deltfall habitat.
01:00:47
Speaker
They have three and then they poached the two remaining Deltfall units. And so then there's more Delft Fall murder and more feelings because after dispatching one of them, Murderbot says, I wished it wasn't one of the Delft Fall units.
01:01:03
Speaker
It was in there somewhere, trapped in its own head, maybe be aware, maybe not. Not that it matters. None of us had a choice. So more feelings again, just putting another pin in that little pin cushion.
01:01:15
Speaker
But then there's a whole switching identities, secret trickery plan. And during all of this, they figure out what's happening. Prezox realizes that their data wasn't intentionally tampered with, but that this planet has alien remnant materials. It could be technology. It could be raw materials. It's sort of nonspecific what it is.
01:01:41
Speaker
But it's something. There's weird alien shit that is just by its very existence corrupting their map data. And there is a huge black market for this material and Gray Crisp wants it. So that is why they are here. That is why they are being evil.
01:01:57
Speaker
And now that they have this information, now they have the upper hand. I sort of understood that the data was intentionally corrupted by Gray Crisp to hide the alien remnants.
Alien Remnant Misunderstanding
01:02:10
Speaker
I thought it was the remnants because they exude weird vibes. You can't map them. Well, what Mensah was saying, yes, they're strong enough to confuse her our mapping functions. Is that how you found them?
01:02:21
Speaker
And well, yeah, and it says the unmapped sections weren't an intentional hack. They were an error caused by the remnants that were buried under the dirt and rock, I guess. i I sort of assumed initially that was Mensa sort of trying to placate Grey Chris.
01:02:35
Speaker
Ooh. Before we go to the end, I'm going to Tangent because Tangent Podcast. Yes, please. Let's hear it. Let's talk about aliens. I love aliens. Let's talk about them.
01:02:47
Speaker
And let's talk about life in the galaxy and how life comes to be. I have an astrobiologist friend who I know is a listener of the show.
01:02:59
Speaker
So first of all, hi, friend. And second of all, I'm sorry. I'm about to fully fuck up your your ah your discipline.
01:03:11
Speaker
So are you familiar with the Drake equation? Not a fucking clue what that is. The Drake equation is an an argument to estimate the number of alien civilizations that could conceivably you know send out signals that we could detect within the galaxy.
01:03:33
Speaker
N equals R star times FP times NE times FL times FI times FC times L, where N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way with which communication might be possible.
01:03:46
Speaker
R star is ah the average rate of star formation. FP is the fraction of those stars that have planets. NE is the average number of planets that could potentially support life per star that has planets.
01:04:00
Speaker
FL or F1 is the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point. FI is the fraction of planets that with life that could develop intelligent life.
01:04:13
Speaker
FC is the fraction of intelligent life that ah could develop civilization and a technology to release detectable signs of their existence into space. And L is the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
01:04:30
Speaker
Which, depending on where you count those variables, some of those we have rough estimations of, some of them are speculation. The estimation should be roughly...
01:04:43
Speaker
somewhere between 150,000 and 15 million civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that could be releasing detectable signs of life.
01:04:57
Speaker
I don't know what I expected. i have a hard time conceiving of the vastness of the universe, but holy shit, that's a lot. Which leads to the Fermi paradox.
01:05:08
Speaker
Which is, we assume that these are these civilizations are common, right? Based on that that calculation.
01:05:19
Speaker
But we haven't sensed them. So why haven't we sensed them? That could suggest that there's the rare earth hypothesis, which means that the the conditions for life arising are just so incredibly rare that the number of assumed civilizations is actually so much significantly lower.
Theories on Alien Life
01:05:44
Speaker
There's also ah theory about us being relatively early in the history of the universe to develop intelligent life and civilization.
01:05:56
Speaker
Look at the number of mass extinctions that have occurred in our planet in just in the course of our 4.6 billion years as ah as a living planet. that you know Those sort of disasters happening on you know on this scale on any other planet could just wipe out life over and over and over again.
01:06:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So how common is life? How does it emerge? How similar are these technologies that they'd be something that we could detect?
01:06:28
Speaker
Because if we assume that life evolves the same way on every planet or starts the same way on every planet, then it's starting from one of a couple of different origins. There's the primordial soup origin in which there's a bunch of chemicals floating around in the primordial soup.
01:06:46
Speaker
And some of them come together. And that chemical reaction creates amino acids. Or creates RNA.
01:06:58
Speaker
There's the RNA first life theory. There's the amino acid first life theory. What about the God life theory, Ren?
01:07:08
Speaker
Yeah. If we assume a divine creator, all of this goes out the fucking window and Murderbot clearly doesn't believe in one so we're not even going to bother with it. I'm taking the piss, as they say.
01:07:24
Speaker
Taking the... That's one way of creating primordial soup, I guess. That would be adding the piss. If you're taking it away, then that's less material for the soup.
01:07:37
Speaker
Then there's the panspermia theory, which is that the building blocks for life were already made somewhere out there and traveled on comets or meteors or asteroids or whatever theyre they are.
01:07:53
Speaker
I'm an earth biologist. I don't i don't do space. It's a meteor when it's in space and it's a meteorite when it's in the atmosphere. I did not know that. That's cool. There's a They Might Be Giants song about it.
01:08:05
Speaker
Nice. Are they the ones that do Istanbul, not Constantinople? Yes, they are. They also have a lot of science songs for kids. I love that. I said that my career in childcare wouldn't be relevant, and yet, here it is.
01:08:19
Speaker
ah Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants. Amazing album. Very fun, even for grownups. Please continue. So, you know, if we assume that early life came from outer space somewhere and therefore has some similarity to life out there, even then we're talking 4.6 billion years of however many billion years of evolution that separate us.
01:08:46
Speaker
Think about how far we are from the octopus, right? Hmm. Another creature on Earth that has some sort of cognitive ability that we take notice of as humans.
01:09:03
Speaker
Yeah. But they are so fundamentally different from us. Their brains are ring-shaped. There's some debate over whether or not every one of their arms has a separate brain. I... What the fuck?
01:09:16
Speaker
I tend to sort of think that's all just part of their brain because it's all connected to the same nervous system. Anyway, point is, even species on Earth can be so far out of our understanding of what in...
01:09:31
Speaker
intelligence, quote unquote, which we tend not to use that word when referring to animal cognitive abilities, because it implies human-like characteristics that they don't necessarily have.
01:09:43
Speaker
But our concept of quote unquote intelligence is so difficult to understand on this planet alone. you know Imagining what an alien civilization separated from us by billions of years of evolution would look like, would communicate like, what their technology would be like, is just, it's it boggles the mind.
01:10:11
Speaker
Yeah. um And by boggles, I do mean ah puts the mind in that board game where you shake up the word. Oh, yeah. dice yeah it just It just keeps shaking it, though.
01:10:23
Speaker
um Tosses it around with a bunch of pieces of plastic. Like those things where you make a smoothie, it's the blender bottles and you put the protein powder. It has a little ball where you shake it up and it blends everything. Put one of those in there.
01:10:36
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So also, once again, apologies to my astrobiologist friends for ah inadequately explaining all of that. Point is, Murderbot, the series in general, will make reference to alien remnant technology often.
01:10:53
Speaker
It's clear from the series that humans have not encountered any living aliens. other Like living intelligent life. There is alien life on these planets.
01:11:08
Speaker
Whether or not that's a result of terraforming to some extent or whether or not those are that's native life, it's not really explained all the time. But they have not encountered...
01:11:19
Speaker
intelligent life with which they can currently communicate all of the intelligent life has died out or left behind pieces of its civilization or multiple civilizations.
01:11:32
Speaker
Yeah. So i can fully understand why this would be incredibly valuable to a company like Grey Chris to mine because that technology has got to be so far off from anything we understand.
01:11:45
Speaker
You know, there's, you play the um Mass Effect games, uncovering alien remnant tech is, they say, they say it jumps human civilization forward by like 400 years overnight. Yeah.
01:12:01
Speaker
overnight Damn. ah Like 400 years of technological advancement overnight. So that that's valuable.
01:12:12
Speaker
But also with with the, like, you know, how common is alien civilization? Are we early in the alien civilization timeline?
01:12:24
Speaker
i I have to wonder sort of where we fit in with the remnants. How far in the future is this? All sorts of questions that this raises to which, unfortunately, we have to come back to it's sci-fi.
01:12:38
Speaker
um And it is not hard sci-fi where they're explaining how everything works. And so I am forced to go, yep Yep.
01:12:50
Speaker
And move on. Desi, you're inquiring mind. i am just willing to let it wash over me. I go, sure. Okay, alien remnants. Whatever. It's all good. I don't have any context for this.
01:13:01
Speaker
Not that I'm not smart, but this is not a thing that I know about. So, sure. ah See, I'm a biologist. And so I am like life, where life come from, what life look like.
Hostile Creature Analogy
01:13:15
Speaker
Big question. How life interact. but little There's a throwaway line earlier where they're talking about hostile one, the giant creature at the bottom of the pit. and um And how the little islands are dotted with those little pits.
01:13:30
Speaker
And they assume that hostile one or, you know, a member of its species probably lives at the bottom of every one of those pits and preys on the, you know, ocean-going avian-like creatures that land on the islands.
01:13:46
Speaker
And I immediately went, oh, it's an antlion. I don't know what that is. Antlion is a larval form of ah a neuropteran from the family Myrmalantidae.
01:13:59
Speaker
Larval antlions basically dig little pits and they have big jaws and they burrow down into the sand. And in ant... falls into the pit and the sides of the pit, the, the sand is not packed very tightly.
01:14:15
Speaker
And so the ant can't crawl out of there very easily. And the ant lion eats it. That sounds about right. So the humans were at the bottom of its feeding hole.
01:14:26
Speaker
Yeah. There's that little throwaway line. And I went, Oh, that's what it is. That's exactly what that is. Cool. Yeah. And now circling back because we still have an entire other chapter to get through in closing thoughts.
Crew Loyalty to Murderbot
01:14:41
Speaker
So alien remnants, that's the problem. There's a big fight, whatever. Murderbot goes down. It completely goes offline. But its friends rescue it. And Murderbot is confused about why it's alive again.
01:14:57
Speaker
Pin Lee leaned over me and I said, this unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it. It's an automatic reaction triggered by catastrophic malfunction. Also, I really didn't want them to try to move me because it hurt bad enough the way it was.
01:15:11
Speaker
Your contract allows... Shut up, Mensa snapped. You shut the fuck up. We're not leaving you. So good again, the humans standing up for Murderbot, saying that they are not going to leave it behind because it's part of the team.
01:15:24
Speaker
Murderbot wakes up at the company station where it was originally rented from, and Rathi shows up to announce that Mensa has permanently bought Murderbot's contract, and it's coming home with them, which never happens. This...
01:15:41
Speaker
It seems like it's not completely unprecedented, but it is very, very, very rare. The only reason I think it may have happened before is that the company is really insisting that they wipe Murderbot's memory before releasing it, saying that this is their protocol, this is what they do. So they clearly have at least a protocol in place for this eventuality.
01:16:04
Speaker
But Pinley says, fuck you, I have a court order. And drags Murderbot away. we're in. Which then the question is, what does law look, what is what is international law like here?
01:16:18
Speaker
Because it's implied that most of these companies at this point are their own sort of pseudo-nations. Maybe some of them operate together as like a nation, but a lot of the, quote as Murtabat describes it, political entities in the corporation rim and around it are corporatocracies. They are nations ruled by corporations.
01:16:46
Speaker
Mm-hmm. you know You are born, work for, and die as ah part of ah corporate as as a as an employee of a corporation, not even like a citizen of a nation.
01:16:59
Speaker
isn it So what does international law look like here? Because Preservation Ox is is its own nation state. And they are negotiating with the company, which whether or not the company is powerful enough or big enough to be their own nation state is sort of left up for debate.
01:17:22
Speaker
You know, Deltfall is its own nation state. Gray Chris seems to be its own nation state. So what does international law look like? How does that work? Who is enforcing these court orders?
01:17:36
Speaker
How do the, like, where's the level of respect for these court orders? Who is the court? Are they just lying? Is this something that they're capable of just making up and seeming convincing?
01:17:49
Speaker
Who knows? But Pinley's a lawyer, too, in addition to everything we mentioned before. Yes. Fucking love Pinley. So while Pinley is doing her thing, Mensa explains the deal to Murderbot that it's going to come home with them. it will be a free citizen.
01:18:05
Speaker
It can do whatever it wants. It can start a new life. It can live on a farm with Mensa and her family. It can get an education. It can do whatever. They'll figure it out. The only thing that Murderbot really wants to do, as has been shown through its narration, is make choices for itself.
Murderbot's Quest for Freedom
01:18:25
Speaker
And so despite how kind and wonderful and fully unique in the universe this offer is, it just wants to go do its own thing.
01:18:37
Speaker
Or at least maybe because i would like to read the very last paragraph of the book. I don't know what I want. I said that at some point, I think.
01:18:49
Speaker
But it isn't that. It's that I don't want anyone to tell me what I want or to make decisions for me. That's why I left you, Dr. Mensa, my favorite human. By the time you get this, I'll be leaving Corporation Rim, out of inventory and out of sight.
01:19:05
Speaker
Murderbot, end message. I'm making a face in the camera of just shock and emotional overwhelm. And that's how we end the book. That's also like, it's not in italics. It's not in any sort of separate font. It's not in any quotes.
01:19:20
Speaker
It almost implies that Murderbot was like keeping these thoughts down and then just sent this whole thing to Dr. Mensah. Yes, that is absolutely the implication that Dr. Mensah has received this book.
01:19:34
Speaker
Mm-hmm. ah you know, complete with explanations on who Dr. Mensa Oh yeah, absolutely. Because, you know, you need to have a complete account. and I would, i think I would love to Murderbot's evaluation of me.
01:19:49
Speaker
I would love to see that paragraph written out. That would be very funny. I was reading back some of our old messages about some of the other Murderbot books and were talking about, what's his last name?
Murderbot's Security Perception
01:20:04
Speaker
ah We're talking about ah Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop. Oh my God, Cowboy Bebop. Yeah. And how Spike would probably consider Murderbot to be like a competent colleague and Murderbot would consider Spike to be an unnecessary security risk.
01:20:19
Speaker
Yeah. now anytime i consume any media that has any kind of dangerous situation Or especially when I'm watching leverage, I go, Murderbot would fucking hate this. Not necessarily that the leverages are making bad choices, but just that there are flaws in the existing security systems for them to exploit.
01:20:43
Speaker
Oh, it would I see everything through Murderbot's eyes now. Well, and that's why Murderbot would make ah such a good addition to the leverage team. Yeah. is because in the rest of the books, it's going to make liberal use of of security exploits.
01:21:01
Speaker
Mm-hmm. in in other groups' security systems to fuck with them. There are just so many seeds that have been planted in this first book. I love the twist reveal at the very end that this has all been a communication to Mensa, the way that it feels about Dr. Mensa, the way that it feels about its humans, the phrase my favorite human is so good that it has an emotional attachment.
01:21:26
Speaker
But We have just barely lightly brushed a feather across the surface of personhood, capitalism, sexuality, gender, family, friendship, aliens, free will.
01:21:42
Speaker
There's so much that these books deal with. And... you know There's the stuff that we talked about, about specifically the sexuality and gender stuff and the non-monogamy and family structure of it all.
01:21:57
Speaker
These are queer books. They're so queer. And I was not a expecting that at all when I first, and we talked about this last time too, when I first was like, oh, sure, I'll read the Murderbot novella. And I did not expect to be swept off my feet by this queer normative world that is...
01:22:18
Speaker
still a dystopia it's a space capitalist hellscape but the ways that various forms of queerness or things that we can interpret to be queerness are not themselves the conflict they're just kind of a fact of the world and they're so interesting and everything about it is interesting and i just love murder bot so much i think i've said that like 15 times this episode but it's just so exciting Well, if you are a fan of queerness and queer platonic relationships, if you're a fan of queer platonic relationships, tune in next time.
01:22:54
Speaker
Tune in to every episode if you're fan of platonic relationships. Tune in to every episode. especially next episode. Yeah, we we are a queer platonic relationship. But tune in next time because...
01:23:06
Speaker
We're going to get the mother of all queer platonic relationships. It blew my fucking mind. Blew my fucking mind, everyone. And we won't be we won't be done with...
01:23:20
Speaker
Sci-fi horror narrated in such a way that you kind of don't realize it's horror until you think about it through the human's eyes for a second. We also won't be done with these characters. They will come back.
01:23:32
Speaker
This is a core group that we are going to revisit throughout this whole series. Other stories will... branch off into separate directions but don't worry we know Murderbot is seeking its freedom but you're not going to have to learn like seven new names all at once again we have front loaded a lot of information here Yes.
Teaser for 'Artificial Condition' Episode
01:23:52
Speaker
Which means next time we will be reading the 2018 Hugo Award winning novella, Artificial Condition.
01:24:05
Speaker
So if you would like to tune in to that, please. and You can catch us here in your podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
01:24:16
Speaker
Give us a follow, subscribe to the podcast to get notified as soon as the episode drops. Leave us a five-star review or a written review or a comment if you like what you're hearing. If I got my astrobiology bullshit wrong or you want to hear me expand more on that in future episodes, leave a comment.
01:24:34
Speaker
Send us an email at thefandomapprentice at gmail.com. DM us on our social media at fan app pod on social media. On the feed. and on the That's our feed signature.
01:24:48
Speaker
Basically, yes. If you have alternate imaginings, how things look and would like to send us fan art, we're super down to see fan art of Murderbot.
01:24:59
Speaker
Big fan of fan art. This is actually a good time to also mention we are obviously aware of and have seen the Murderbot TV show that has its own visual interpretations of the Murderbot world and its own interpretation of the story of All Systems Red.
01:25:17
Speaker
um We will be discussing that at some later point. But for now, we're focused on the novellas. At time of recording, there is only, what, four episodes? Three episodes?
01:25:28
Speaker
Three. The fourth one comes out this week. um three episodes out of the show. I like it a lot so far. I also love it. I think that it captures the spirit.
01:25:39
Speaker
Yes. That said, it only goes through all systems read. So at this point, we're officially all caught up to the TV show.
01:25:50
Speaker
Suck it, Apple. ah and Even our incredibly slow podcast is faster. So if you want to get ahead of Apple, you can follow us here and catch us in two weeks for Artificial Condition.
01:26:06
Speaker
We'll see you next time. See you next time. Bye. The Phantom Apprentice is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music is composed and performed by James. You can find more of his work on Spotify and Bandcamp under Beiruz, B-A-E-R-U-Z.
01:26:23
Speaker
Our art is by Casey Turgeon. You can find more of her work at KCT Designs on Instagram. The content discussed is the property of the original copyright holders and is used here under fair use.