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Ep 2.8- Climb on the DarkMagic School Bus
16 Plays8 days ago
Step inside (your best friend's corpse), it's a fucked up ride (through the wormhole)! Amena wishes this was a normal field trip, but with SecUnit? No way! Take your second right past Mars and join us while we talk about knees, gravity, faster than light travel, anxiety, and potential future cinematic choices for the show!
Covers Chapters 4-7 of The Murderbot Diaries: Network Effect by Martha Wells (2020)
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Transcript
Joining the Climbing Group
00:00:00
Speaker
I texted my friend who got me into this climbing group, um or not like got me in, there was no application process, just like told me about it. You get to know somebody. It's very, very exclusive.
00:00:13
Speaker
I know a guy. Rock climbers famously never want anyone to come rock climbing with them.
The Art of Convincing
00:00:20
Speaker
I've only had friends who've been asking me for literally years. I only used to live with a rock climber in undergrad who... wanted me to go with her all the time.
00:00:31
Speaker
and I hardly ever did. i went like on my own other times. But is this the atheist queer version of begging a friend to go to church with you? oh fuck. Is it? Is it the same?
00:00:42
Speaker
Sorry, keep saying your thing. That just occurred in my mind. And I remembered being the obnoxious middle school Christian trying to get friends to come to church with me. Oh, no. It's all connected.
00:00:54
Speaker
Anyway. Well, you know, some people are trying to get closer to God. And I hear sometimes if you
Communication Styles and Anecdotes
00:01:00
Speaker
climb up high on things, supposedly, i don't know, that's why all the spires are there, right? don't know. Tell that to the Tower of Babel people.
00:01:11
Speaker
But anyway, you were texting ah your friend and mine. i was texting our friend about... and I said, you know, the same thing I said to you in my text this morning, which was, you know, I'd like to have a word with whoever came up with the idea of knees. And I had knees in quotes.
00:01:28
Speaker
And he was like, what the fuck do you mean by... Like, I'm a little confused. I have to... I'm sorry, but I need... What do you mean by knees? And I was like, the bendy bit in the middle of your leg.
00:01:44
Speaker
And he was like, oh, like actual knees. He's like, this isn't some new terminology I'm not aware of. And I was like, don't know, like knees. We both talk, and we especially talk to each other in a very particular way that I
Introduction to The Fandom Apprentice
00:02:00
Speaker
am so completely desensitized to And I forget that that's not typical for most people.
00:02:06
Speaker
And I've always kind of been like that. When I was in high school, I was in a history class and I said something about one country that bordered another country that was in between them and someone who wanted to invade them.
00:02:20
Speaker
And I said something about them using that middle country. Oh, yeah, those people are their meat shields. And then everyone looked at me. It's like, what, did I say something weird? Like, that's that sounds normal to me. But yeah, many people will have questions about knees in quotation marks.
00:02:37
Speaker
No, yeah, I will. I will deliver things in
Exploring The Murderbot Diaries
00:02:40
Speaker
in language that confuses and or bothers people. I would say it's evocative.
00:02:48
Speaker
It evokes something diplomatic, Sammy. That is that's so diplomatic of you.
00:03:12
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Fandom Apprentice. My name is Rin, I'm one of your hosts. I'm a lifelong nerd who grew up on various sci-fi and fantasy stories, and whenever possible I like to find some sort of obscure, or not so obscure, sometimes very mainstream bit of fantasy literature or sci-fi literature,
00:03:41
Speaker
that my friends have not experienced and inflict it upon them, mostly so I can yell. Yippee! I'm Sam. I'm the other one. I have had this series inflicted upon me and just come back again and again. i have lost count of how many times I've reread this series.
00:04:01
Speaker
But we are reading The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. This is our second episode on the first full-length novel, Network Effect. So if you haven't listened to the first one or you don't know what happens in the book, maybe go back a teensy bit and then come back here.
00:04:16
Speaker
Yes, I suppose let's just dive into the airlock and dive out of the airlock, as it were. So this week we are going to be covering chapters four through seven. So we'll do the same thing we did last time, a little quick summary of chapter four.
00:04:34
Speaker
We pick up right where we left off with Murderbot and Amina heading out of the airlock of
Themes and Technology in Murderbot
00:04:40
Speaker
wherever the fuck it is they are. I lost track of what compartments of where they are. Whatever. They're going out in airlock. That's what matters.
00:04:46
Speaker
They're ready to be picked up by their base ship's tractor beam. We get a good look at the hostile ship and drumroll please, it's art! Art gets them in its tractor beam and Murderbot is terrified that it's having some kind of memory failure because this does not line up with its memories of art at all.
00:05:05
Speaker
Art or perihelion of the Pan System University of Mahira and New Tideland, we get its official designation, yay. Seems absent from itself, not answering pings or present in the feed.
00:05:18
Speaker
Murderbot gets knocked out by a mysterious party, who then starts interrogating Amina about some kind of weapon, which is obviously Murderbot. There are two other humans who the bad guys have taken prisoner, and there's a big fight with a condescending asshole.
00:05:32
Speaker
I'm going to talk a lot this episode about the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Hell yeah. It's been brewing. It's time. but Time to bring it to the light.
00:05:44
Speaker
Which was, again, another one of those pieces of random sci-fi media that I... ah had as a piece of my childhood and inflicted upon your spouse, actually, as we were growing up together.
00:05:59
Speaker
But point is,
Interpersonal Dynamics and Broader Themes
00:06:00
Speaker
this first scene to me, not that they spend a lot of time like out in like EVAC suits or like EVA suits in Battlestar, but I was thinking about how would they do this in the show?
00:06:15
Speaker
And we'll talk about the show and their directorial choices and music and ways they shoot it and all that when we get there. But I was thinking about, oftentimes the Murdurbat books are very, very cinematic in their descriptions. you can You can very well imagine what's happening.
00:06:33
Speaker
And so I was thinking about this... As if we're watching it happen, right? And thinking about how would you score this section?
00:06:45
Speaker
A lot of sci-fi you'll get sort of like, it out in space you'll either get like, because this is a fight scene, you might be getting the epic sort of fight scene music, tense, fast.
00:06:59
Speaker
You might be getting the synth, the like long drawn out whole notes. The thing that Battlestar did really, really well out in a lot of space scenes was it was either silent or there may have been some percussion.
00:07:18
Speaker
But meanwhile, that whole time, the scene is still happening. You're still seeing the... you know, starfighter battle happen. And that's very, that was very much the vibe I was getting from this scene um like, there is a lot of shit happening.
00:07:32
Speaker
And maybe you're seeing the shadows of the ships passing. Yeah. You know, because you're you're out in the middle of the darkness. You're not near the sun.
Closing Thoughts and Listener Interaction
00:07:41
Speaker
You know, maybe you're getting external lights from the evac suits from the ships.
00:07:46
Speaker
That's the only time you're actually seeing people's faces. That's the only time you're you get the little pieces of the calm audio kind of tinny through the speakers.
00:07:59
Speaker
Everything else is totally silent. Mm-hmm. And I like that because Murderbot, just by the nature of its personality and its narration, is always very zoomed in into what is happening to itself and its humans at any given moment.
00:08:16
Speaker
And it's kind of easy to forget the much grander scale that other things are happening on. Ship-to-ship combat is huge. Art, we don't know exactly its dimensions, but we're given to understand it's a pretty decently sized ship. This is a massive, interesting, unexpected space battle.
00:08:38
Speaker
But we are so zoomed in on our two characters who are caught and literally caught in the middle of it, wondering what the fuck is going on. And one of the pieces too, I feel like if you were to film this, if you wanted to keep that vibe, staying zoomed in on Sekuna and Amina, when you're starting to get the issues of, you know, oh, art or whoever's running the show up on art's ship is firing upon the base ship, the way to do that is just a flash of light.
00:09:15
Speaker
No sound, no impact, just a flash of light and out in the corner. And then, you know, the panic in the voices of people talking. And that's how you start to figure out that something is very, very wrong.
00:09:30
Speaker
Yeah. There's been a couple of other sci-fis I've watched at various times, but I i always find the the most compelling ways to do these stressful space scenes is in near silence and near pitch darkness.
00:09:49
Speaker
Anyway, that was just my first Battlestar-related thought, and that sort of directed several of my other thoughts, which will occur later in this. I love that. And this chapter also is just setting up a lot. I know that we said that about chapter three as well.
00:10:05
Speaker
But now chapter four, we have the reveal that it's art, asterisk. And so now we can start building, not even figuring out what's going on, but figuring out what questions we need to be asking to figure out what's going on.
00:10:21
Speaker
But the first sentimental thing that just absolutely got me way back at the end of Artificial Condition, art gives SecUnit a calm interface, one of its common interfaces to keep on it, you know, just in case we come in range of each other again one day, maybe I'll see you.
00:10:40
Speaker
And Murderbot has kept that in a pocket under its ribs, which, side note, apparently there's storage in there. I hate to make a Tesla reference on Main, but it's like how Teslas have the frunk, the front trunk, where otherwise there would be an engine where Murderbot, where a human would have organs and stuff. Murderbot just has some extra storage.
00:11:04
Speaker
But that's so... ah sweet and also so literally visceral, because that's again where your viscera goes. But just thinking about the intensity of their love that we've talked about before.
00:11:20
Speaker
It's one of those things that sounds really weird when you say it out loud, but I think a lot of people will understand that like sometimes you just want to like consume or meld with or take another person inside of your body somehow.
00:11:36
Speaker
For Murderbot to have a piece of art under its ribs, inside its chest. Oh, that's so good. i love it. That's really, that's good, tasty, deep, profound Bond stuff. And I love it.
00:11:47
Speaker
Vore Perihelion. No!
00:11:53
Speaker
I'm not going to kink shame on this podcast, but you know that's not what I was talking about We love our Vore listeners, especially in the age of credit card companies hating...
00:12:07
Speaker
any kind of adult content on anything. It's that stupid. Everyone should be able to enjoy what they enjoy. I could go on a whole rant about that, but that's not what we're here to do.
00:12:18
Speaker
But speaking of humans and human parts, I also liked that that was something that Murderbot chose about the configuration of its body. something that it likes about its body when it doesn't hesitate to remind us that it finds 99.9% of human parts physically disgusting and hates its own human parts.
00:12:41
Speaker
So that was fun. One of the other pieces that we see a lot throughout these chapters, but starting here, is the flip back and forth of Amina trying to be brave and showing that she's terrified.
00:12:58
Speaker
who Which just really reminds you she's a teenager. Yeah. It reminds you she's 17, maybe. had written both scared and dangerously overconfident.
00:13:12
Speaker
Right. She's trying desperately to, like, you know, help sec unit and show that she can do this and she's going to be okay and hold that confidence.
00:13:25
Speaker
And then there's the piece. We have a line at one point she's asking questions about. Where are the crew? Why did they do this to us? What do they want with us? Then, in a smaller voice, please talk to me.
00:13:37
Speaker
Because Sec Unit is just standing there in stunned silence, being inside Art's dead body. Like, what in the dark magic school bus is happening here?
00:13:52
Speaker
The fact that Art... is absent from itself, like we said, is upsetting on so many levels. The assumption that we have to operate under is that art is dead, more or less.
00:14:04
Speaker
And for anyone to take over art, who we saw immediately after it was introduced, is just incredibly powerful. Whoever that is, is a massive danger. so Murderbot is reflecting on this and it's thinking about...
00:14:22
Speaker
Who could have taken over Art? Who could have deleted it? Like, what the fuck happened? One big problem with that scenario. No, wait. Two. One, getting a board without Art's cooperation. And two, doing something to Art without getting violently murdered.
00:14:35
Speaker
I knew of 47 ways that Art could kill a human, augmented human, or bot intruder. And the only reason I didn't know more is because I got bored and stopped counting. So anyone who has been able to execute this is a massive fucking deal. A bigger deal than art somehow.
00:14:53
Speaker
And Sekyuna is also panicking, which we will see more of as these chapters go on. But we haven't really seen it panic before. We've seen it be stressed. We've seen it be uncertain and come up with things on the fly.
00:15:07
Speaker
But now one of the things that it's gotten from its new life, its relationship with art, has now been taken away. And this is going to bring out a side of Murderbot that we have not seen thus far.
00:15:22
Speaker
And I know this was written either before or right alongside that short story of Mensa that we read. Mm-hmm. Because that came out, I think, for people who pre-ordered Network Effect, too. Yes. So it was written roughly the same time.
00:15:38
Speaker
And again, we're seeing Martha Wells convincingly write a panic attack. Mm-hmm. I think she has, in fact, talked about her own struggles with anxiety.
00:15:51
Speaker
Because this is just so well done. Trying to keep it together, trying to operate while inside your brain is slowly unraveling itself. Piece by piece, and you're grasping at the threads in the hopes that maybe they will still hold you up like the rope they might once have been.
00:16:11
Speaker
I picked up on that as well. And I had a quote from chapter seven that I'll read here now because it's relevant. But thinking about the differences in the ways that Sec Unit and Mensa's panic manifests in the text, I felt like Mensa had a lot more short sentences, flipping from idea to idea.
00:16:33
Speaker
Murderbot is really a ruminator. It has these long paragraphs that are just one run on sentence and the one that I picked out that I thought illustrated this really well. I didn't like the idea of saying I don't know to Amina because humans panic and I almost don't blame them because right now I feel like panicking and I was not in control of this situation and I could see at least 10 instances now where I'd made wrong decisions and being in control of the situation was really important because otherwise it was in control of me and that felt like a short step to being back in the company's control.
00:17:04
Speaker
And that's just a whole ass paragraph. And that also very neatly... you know, illustrates one of the many existential threats that it's feeling because of the situation. But yeah, Murderbot's having a really bad fucking time and it's going to make it everyone else's problem.
00:17:22
Speaker
Especially after it gets whacked in the head and knocked the fuck out. Mm-hmm. And wakes up hearing a bunch of unidentified beings being some somewhere between condescending and threatening to Amina.
00:17:42
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And now it's not only anxious, but pissed. Oh yeah, the quote that I had, which maybe you also have. Probably. do you want to You can have it.
00:17:55
Speaker
You can hit a sec unit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown. Operative word. Temporary. But it's not really a good idea.
00:18:06
Speaker
Not if you want to keep your internal organs inside your body and not smeared on the bulkheads of your stolen transport. Oh. It's on now. The one that I had which I think was from a little after that, was immediately after these unidentified hostiles claim to have deleted art.
00:18:24
Speaker
I felt my face change. The muscles were all stiff and not from the hit I'd taken. I'm still not great at controlling my expression, and I had no idea what I looked like. Behind her hands, Amina whispered, oh shit.
00:18:37
Speaker
Oh.
00:18:39
Speaker
Oh, this one looks angry, Target 1 said. Target 2 said, how boring. Angry, then afraid, then dead. Boring, boring, boring.
00:18:50
Speaker
And then a fight ensues. Yeah. A couple of things I noticed from early here. We have when the targets, sorry, Arata, the targets are talking to Amina and to each other back and forth.
00:19:10
Speaker
We are getting a couple of interesting things through the translation. And maybe this is just their talking, like how their language is and how it's being rendered by the translation software. Or...
00:19:21
Speaker
Maybe this is how they're actually talking. We have all these things lie. And you lie, it lies.
00:19:33
Speaker
Referring to Amina. o They don't consider themselves the same type of thing. Which is interesting because they are tall, thin, augmented humans with dull gray skin.
00:19:46
Speaker
And I'm going to put a pin in that for a little bit later from your notes. isn' We'll talk about that in a wee bit. Yeah. But a fight ensues.
00:19:58
Speaker
Murderbot murders the shit out of Target 2. yes. ah Unfortunately, in way the fuck overkilling Target 2, fails to kill Target 1 and it escapes.
00:20:12
Speaker
It also realizes Target 3 is somewhere and we meet... two hostages casualties one and two also known as ross and elitra who are employees of some corporation called barish stranza and we're on to chapter five which i have very few notes for but we there are thoughts so i did have one last thing about please chapter four which is just that chapter four is the one with the most on the theme of memory in these chapters. And that one of the things, one of the many things that is really stressing Secunit out is that this experience is so different from everything that it knows about art.
00:20:56
Speaker
It believes that it's having a catastrophic memory failure. And to get real on the podcast for a minute, that is something that I have struggled with in my own mental health shit And doubting whether or not you can trust your own memories to be accurate and be real fucks you up so big. I was really feeling for Sec Unit in this chapter. And just in addition to all the other fucking shit going on, it's thinking, oh god, am I having some kind of catastrophic failure? Do I need to tell Amina?
00:21:28
Speaker
I wish Mensa was here. I wish anyone I knew and liked was here. And it's just totally alone with its own ever-increasing neuroses. And I wish that I could give it some media and a quiet room.
00:21:44
Speaker
Normally I would say give it a hug, but that would not be appropriate. No. And it wishes for media on more than one occasion, but says like it can't, it can't do that right now. And also the media is difficult too, because that is also filled with memories of art.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah. But anyway, chapter five. he So we have a new enemy. We have Target Control System, which is our name for whatever system is operating where Art should be.
00:22:16
Speaker
Murderbot is trying to get Amina to medical because if we remember from last time she got her leg crushed underneath a lab bench. It's trying to help the two new humans and get its own shit together. The same med system where Art changed Murderbot's appearance and saved Depan is now going to help Amina.
00:22:32
Speaker
Hopefully there aren't bodies in there. We'll see. Where is Art's crew? Our new humans don't know. Murderbot keeps investigating, dealing with stealth drones that the hostiles have, while Amina talks to the new humans and gets some backstory from them.
00:22:46
Speaker
The state of the ship overall looks like the crew just stepped away and disappeared. sec unit is a hundred percent certain they're all dead we learned that barish astranza was on ah kind of survey mission to recover a viable planet and we get some details about the economics of planetary speculation tldr highly profitable and my notes say i thought this was clever but it's really not that funny mb is on the verge of a menti and one of the new humans fires on it because of course he does
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, Raz does something and fucking shoots sec unit. Mm-hmm. I have very, very few notes for this chapter. It's, again, Murderbot spends a lot of time in its own head here while sort of narrating back and forth its own thoughts and sort of vaguely what it's trying to do with whatever conversation is happening between Raz, Elytra, and Amina, who are all chilling and medical. Mm-hmm.
00:23:49
Speaker
Things that I had picked up. I mean, we have the continuing horror of walking through its friend's corpse. Sekuna is being extremely careful in these chapters.
00:24:02
Speaker
Sort of as its stress and paranoia increases, it's understanding that it cannot... trust itself and it can't leave anything to chance also increases so it is checking around every corner it is leaving a drone everywhere to keep an eye on things it is not going to let anything go unchecked because i don't think that it could live with the guilt of knowing that it had missed anything in this exploration yeah if it if it loses amina too it can't go on
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah. And so, you know, using its knowledge of art's floor plan and just everything it has, there's a lot of very granular level picking through hallways and building tension that way.
00:24:47
Speaker
There's also all the stuff about planetary speculation, which we don't need to get into. But the gist of it is that before there was wormhole travel, there were a shit ton of colonies developed.
00:25:00
Speaker
And then they basically got lost because there weren't reliable ways to get back and forth between them. But if you can find those colonies and you can lay a claim to them, then if you're a corporation, then you can own them and make a shit ton of money, regardless of how many people have been living there for however long.
00:25:21
Speaker
There is a sassy little quote about how corporations, or no, specifically the company, didn't invent planets despite the patents they tried to file. This is the most extreme, explicit condemnation of colonialism you can get. This is just the taken to its most absurd extreme, just scooping up a whole planet saying, I own this now.
00:25:47
Speaker
This is just what they're doing and they're making so much money doing it. Well, and they're talking, too, about like after the corporation room was established, corporations started to fan out and try and find these old systems and lay claims to them.
00:26:01
Speaker
But they tried to do too much at once and they got overextended and then they and they went bankrupt. And any of these new colonies they tried to establish went belly up and they stopped supplying them. Mm hmm.
00:26:13
Speaker
And so now, 50 years later, so now you have not only pre-corporation rim settlements or terraforming or what have you, plus post-corporation rim attempt secondary attempts at settlement, and now the tertiary attempts by the modern corporation rim.
00:26:32
Speaker
Mm-hmm. They just keep trying the same shit. Yep. And somehow expecting their profits to go up quarter after quarter after quarter infinitely.
00:26:43
Speaker
Forever. Like a cancer. Another thing that we get a lot in this chapter is mounting tension with Amina. Because...
00:26:55
Speaker
Even though she is just a teen, she is just a human. Honestly, because of that, too. She and SecUnit just are not quite on the same wavelength. It's being snippy in its narration.
00:27:11
Speaker
The bearish Estranza humans are trying to get Amina to order SecUnit around. Amina made a derisive huff. It doesn't even like me. Admittedly, I am tired of the whole concept of humans at the moment, but that was unfair because she didn't like me first.
00:27:26
Speaker
And so there's that kind of level. And Murderbot threatens to kill one or both of the BE e humans. And Amina tries to play the mom will be mad at you card.
00:27:40
Speaker
I see I have some operational parameters to establish. I crossed the room, grabbed Ross by the front of his uniform jacket and slammed him down on the med platform. I said, answer my question. Behind me, Alytra had flinched and backed away.
00:27:53
Speaker
Amina said, sec unit, my mother will be angry if you hurt him. Oh, we were going to try that tactic, were we? I said, you obviously don't know how your mother actually feels about corporates.
00:28:05
Speaker
But that is just so petty. And this is not the time. Although it was smart of Amina to try playing the one card she had, which is, oh, shit, oh, shit. What does Sec Unit to care about? Sec Unit cares about my mom. Second mother, whatever.
00:28:19
Speaker
Let me try that.
00:28:23
Speaker
And that's that's also kind of underhanded from SecUnit, too, ah basically being like, you know because I think prior to all systems read, Mensa would have been mad about it.
00:28:38
Speaker
Post-exit strategy? Mensa has some other feelings about the corporates. Some very traumatic feelings about the corporates.
00:28:50
Speaker
Yeah. And so Sekyun being like, you don't know how your mother really feels about the corporates. Neither do you really at the moment, and neither does Mensa.
00:29:03
Speaker
Because Mensa is repeatedly having post-traumatic stress episodes about her time being held captive by corporates. We also have a beautiful little parallel between, so many beautiful parallels, between Sekuna and Mensa.
00:29:20
Speaker
Because Amina is surprised at the idea that a bot pilot could possibly kill someone. And we get the line, they're almost as dangerous as humans from Sec Unit about bot pilots, which is the same thing that Mensa had said about Sec Units in the short story.
00:29:39
Speaker
It might have been Bardwaj. Might have been Bardwaj. So I could be completely wrong. it was in there somewhere. Yeah, it's in the conversation between the two of them regardless. So yeah, we can we can safely assume it's an opinion that they both hold.
00:29:52
Speaker
But then also, despite all of this, Amina is still one of Sec Unit's humans. And all of this fear and panic about Art's crew, which Sec Unit is extra stressed about because these aren't just any humans. They're humans that Art loved. And so they are also gone somewhere.
00:30:13
Speaker
Now, Secuna is having horrible visions of what it would be like if this happened to Mensa's family. Maybe I do watch too much media, because in the empty corridors, passing empty but recently used rooms, I had an image of finding Mensa's family camp house like this.
00:30:29
Speaker
Empty. No humans, just their possessions left behind, and no trace in the feed. No cameras. No way to find them. So we've talked a couple of times about how we are very frequently in a sci-fi horror, but Murderbot's the only one that recognizes it's a horror and therefore can you know subvert the tropes and essentially become the monster to the monsters.
00:30:56
Speaker
Mm-hmm. This is the first time that Murderbot is experiencing what it's like to be part of the victim group. The first time it's it's now actively feeling the fear.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah. this is still It's still describing a sci-fi horror vibe but now instead of being the solution it's now not part of the problem but part of the set dressing yeah it's feeling extremely powerless in this current moment you know what's not powerless though an energy weapon an energy weapon yeah Which, coincidentally, is what Ross tried to shoot Secunit with.
00:31:46
Speaker
Thankfully, that doesn't really do anything besides making it mad. We find out that our Bearish Estranza guys have something in them that resembles a governor module.
00:31:56
Speaker
That's not good. Now, our group is locked out of the bridge. Art isn't there to help. One of the Bearish Estranza guys is dead. Roz, the shooty one, uh, died.
00:32:09
Speaker
Amina and Murderbot perform some hasty surgery to get Elytra's implant out, which really warms them up to each other. And Murderbot blurts out the truth about art to explain why it's acting so weird and sad.
00:32:21
Speaker
They make a plan for SecUnit to go to engineering. We get another excerpt from HelpMe.File. And Barjwaj suggests that SecUnit gets some actual therapy. The implant is really interesting.
00:32:35
Speaker
Secunit identifies these implants as as like a governor module. After it's already killed Roz, they somehow deliver some sort of electrical shock, which seems to, A, cause Roz to lose his grip on reality and then die and sends Elytra into some sort of seizure. Mm-hmm.
00:32:59
Speaker
And it's, yeah, like you said, only through that hasty surgery and blocking a signal that the targets are trying to send it to the implants that they are able to stop Elytra from also dying.
00:33:14
Speaker
Mm-hmm. um and These are clearly implants that have been installed by the targets. They are hastily done. They are done in such a way that, you know, this was clearly not like meant to help them at all. This was... Botched was putting it mildly. It looked like a bad human medic had jammed it in with their toes.
00:33:36
Speaker
What about is so evocative?
00:33:40
Speaker
Truly. we do get a little bit of interesting exposition about at least how SecUnit differentiates augments and implants.
00:33:52
Speaker
This is one of those things like the human augmented human division. I don't know if this means anything to anyone besides SecUnit, but at least in its definition, augments are nice and helpful and they help humans get interface with the feed or serve as extra memory space or they have a medical function.
00:34:10
Speaker
And an implant is something like a governor module or that the humans from, was it fugitive telemetry or exit strategy, which was the one with the refugees. We just recorded this episode.
00:34:23
Speaker
Fugitive telemetry. Yeah. So like one of the refugees in fugitive telemetry had corporate implant in its forehead. So things like that, the implants are always... They have a negative connotation.
00:34:36
Speaker
Apparently there's also a lot of style and fashion with augments and they can look like wood or stones or enamel art pieces, which I think is very cool and fun.
00:34:48
Speaker
augment as a noun, one the definition is enlargement by addition or increase. To augment something as a transitive verb is to enlarge or increase in size, amount, or degree to swell, to make bigger, to make greater as in size, extent, or quantity.
00:35:10
Speaker
So the idea of an augment is as an improvement, as a as making greater, as making better.
00:35:21
Speaker
That makes sense. As opposed to an implant is just a, yeah. My grasp of the English language is doing really well tonight. That's okay.
00:35:31
Speaker
So one of the concerns that SecUnit has about the MED system is that ART controlled the MED system. So it's not sure if Target Control System now controls the MED system.
00:35:44
Speaker
And it just kind of can't quite figure that out. So it puts Elytra into the med system and uses some sort of emergency medical stuff to hopefully sort of not give over total control to target control system, while also testing out whether the med system is a problem, so that if Amina needs it, Secunit hasn't killed one of its humans as test.
00:36:12
Speaker
as a test Was that in the narration? Because if so, I completely missed that angle, which is a very good angle. I'm pretty sure it was in there. It was... Because I remember about not wanting to use the med system and they were trying to make it work with the emergency...
00:36:30
Speaker
medical kit and that was just not cut again ah literally but hey i i could have totally passed over the thing about amina that was art's med system but without art it's reactivated feeds that it was operating in a factory standard It could be one more weird anomaly in this unending cycle of what the fuck.
00:36:48
Speaker
Or it could be a trick. Target control system trying to get us to put Alitra in there so it could kill her. Except that Alitra was dying anyway, so why bother? Well, fuck it. I stopped compression, scooped up Alitra, and carried her over to the med system's platform.
00:37:04
Speaker
Amina asks, so what turned the med system on? I said, I know as much as you do about what is happening on this ship, which is why I put the unknown corporate human who was dying anyway into the possibly compromised med system and not say Amina or myself.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, there we go. I also love that, you know, there is some noble effort being made before putting the corporate human in the unknown med system. You know, it tries with the emergency med kit and with its knowledge of med center argala.
00:37:38
Speaker
Which is, Martha Wells has talked about how the shows that she writes in are loosely based in her mind off of actual TV shows.
00:37:48
Speaker
isn't I don't know if MedCenter Argala has a specific correlation. She's mentioned that Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is loosely based on how to get away with murder.
00:38:00
Speaker
And World Hoppers is loosely based on Stargate, which I have also watched a whole lot of. um Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis were one of my quarantine watches.
00:38:13
Speaker
I think maybe next bestie day we need to watch some space shows. who Stargate's bad and also I watched seven seasons. I like watching bad things.
00:38:25
Speaker
I'm the person who read Commitment Ranch. Do you think that my bar for media? We're not going with the fucking Criterion Collection here. I'm good. Fantasy lover.
00:38:37
Speaker
Yeah. I'm open to things that are bad. Maybe need to do a bonus episode on Fantasy Lover. i could just read my play-by-play, line-by-line, dramatic reading.
00:38:49
Speaker
Anyway. Playboy by Playboy. of
00:38:55
Speaker
But anyway, i I feel like somewhere I read that MedCenter Argala was loosely based on Grey's Anatomy. That makes sense to me. Which makes sense. And also, if you try and do medicine based off of Grey's anatomy, no one is going to live.
00:39:13
Speaker
So many people are going to die in random plane crashes. There's like at least four of them. Like four separate plane crashes in which people die. And everyone's just going to end up fucking in the in the on-call room, I guess. Yeah.
00:39:30
Speaker
I suppose so. But second, it's going to speed over that. And then so are we. Med center, our gala. While it's in the med system, Sekunit and Amina have a little chat because Amina once again reminds it that cheese she's a a teen and she's freaking the fuck out.
00:39:54
Speaker
And as she keeps sort of trying to be like, what the fuck is going on? Murnavot keeps brushing her off. which like been there, done that. But she's concerned that it's mad at her, and which, you know, we've all been a teenager and concerned that people were mad at us when they were simply freaking the fuck out.
00:40:17
Speaker
But there's a whole long quote. If you're not angry, then what's wrong? I was definitely glaring now. "'How do you want the list sorted? By timestamp or degree of survivability?' Amina said in exasperation, "'I mean, what's wrong with you?' There's that question again, but I assumed she didn't want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. "'I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot. You were there!' "'Not that. Why are you sad and upset?' That was the point where even I could tell that Amina was terrified as well as furious."
00:40:52
Speaker
There's something you're not telling me and it's scaring me. I'm not a fucking hero like my second mom or a genius like everyone else in my family. I'm just ordinary and you're all I've got.
00:41:04
Speaker
She's 17 and she is in the worst situation that she has probably ever been in. She's a junior survey intern. She did not expect this to happen.
00:41:17
Speaker
No! No, she probably barely expected the ah the murder boat from chapter one to happen. Yeah. And Murderbot is so caught off guard by this declaration.
00:41:30
Speaker
It's just so not what it was expecting her to say that it just involuntarily spits out the truth about this bot pilot was my friend. It's dead. I'm freaking the fuck out. I don't know what's happening.
00:41:45
Speaker
And then once she knows the truth, Amina softens immediately. And to her enormous credit, remember it was not that long ago that she didn't even know SecUnit could talk?
00:41:59
Speaker
So... She's moving pretty fast on the accepting Secunits personhood track, and she does her best to help trying to force it to sit down and just take the equivalent of a deep breath, even though it doesn't really need to breathe.
00:42:15
Speaker
Amina started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. i think you're emotionally compromised right now. That was so completely not true.
00:42:26
Speaker
Stupid humans. Sure, I'd had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine. I am not.
00:42:38
Speaker
You're emotionally compromised. I know, but at the time it seemed like a relevant comeback. Lest we forget that Murderbot is also like maybe the equivalent of like 19. Mm-hmm.
00:42:52
Speaker
Murderbot does not have a ton of life experience either. Yeah. And it admits that it was being an asshole and apologizes.
00:43:04
Speaker
And the phrase that it chooses very succinct, which is, I'm sorry for being an asshole. But it is able to recognize that it hasn't been nice to Amina and they're both in an awful situation and maybe it can be the bigger person and just help them both to move on. But I think that it is very sweet once they both are able to get past their blustering and actually see where the other one is coming from, then they can actually start helping each other.
00:43:37
Speaker
That said, Murderbot does still make her cry. yeah Good job, Murderbot, it literally says. Murderbot, once Elytra eventually comes back to consciousness, they realize that there may be a secondary way to get access to the bridge and or get control of the ship via engineering.
00:44:02
Speaker
Via? Via? Via engineering. So Murderbot, goes down to engineering. There is also right at the end of chapter six before Murderbot goes to engineering that we get another excerpt from helpme.file.
00:44:18
Speaker
So in this section, which is very short, I think I'll just read the quote because it's short and funny. So it's an excerpt from an interview with Bardwaj.
00:44:30
Speaker
I noticed a thing about your transcript. This is Bardwaj speaking. Was the font wrong? No, the font was lovely. But whenever the company is mentioned, you edit out the company and change it to the company.
00:44:41
Speaker
Check session recording. In fact, you've done it just now. So the entire time in all of these books, in every record everywhere, Secunit has scrubbed whatever the true name of the company is and replaced it with the company.
00:44:58
Speaker
hmm. And I feel like that speaks for itself. I don't think that there's too much to analyze there because it pretty much lays it out. But it is a very powerful moment and presents some tremendous difficulties for the TV show, which we will put a pin in when we talk about that. But we will never find out the actual name of the company. And I i like that we'll never find out.
00:45:26
Speaker
I agree. This, of course, also prompts Bardwaj to go, have you thought about getting therapy? Maybe? And then the rest of the interview is redacted.
00:45:38
Speaker
Chapter seven. Yes. I will have tangents, but we'll get there. I'm so ready. So like you said, we are looking for basically an auxiliary control thing in engineering. It's sci-fi stuff, whatever. There's magic portal where we can find what we need to find there.
00:45:58
Speaker
The vibes on the ship are supremely creepy. Amina and Murderbot have a heart to heart or heart to whatever it Murderbot has over the feed while it explores.
00:46:08
Speaker
We get to Art's engine room and there's an alien remnant growing on its engine, which might explain why they're traveling way faster than physically possible. The hostels are also acting pretty weird.
00:46:22
Speaker
They're definitely aliens. We pop back out into normal space and get back in touch with Prezox, who did not make it back to the base ship and are now in their own danger. There's a big fight.
00:46:33
Speaker
We get Arada, Oversei, Tiago, and Rathi on board. And SecUnit gets a message that Art had left for it in its queue before being taken over. There's a lot in this one.
00:46:45
Speaker
But I want to start with Murderbot going to engineering and finding organic shit on the engine. yes And this sort of all snowballs together into our discussion of alien remnants and and are the people on board aliens?
00:47:08
Speaker
The weird gray people, are they aliens? Also... Is this why we've been traveling through the wormhole so much? Because they drop out of the wormhole here. This should not happen. It is 15 days by wormhole from preservation to the nearest inhabited system.
00:47:26
Speaker
And it's been a couple hours. ah Maximum. Yeah. And they're definitely not in the nearest inhabited system. So I think we need to talk quickly about three things.
00:47:42
Speaker
I think we need to talk about the greys. I think we need to talk about Cylons. And I think we need to talk about faster than light travel. Listeners, I'm nodding attentively.
00:47:52
Speaker
I assume you all are as well.
00:47:56
Speaker
Before we begin, i would like to mention once again, I'm a biologist You don't say. I'm an ecologist by training. i do molecular biology things in my day-to-day work now.
00:48:12
Speaker
You're a biologist. Also that too. I am so queer. The last time I did physics was high school. And I was very, very good at high school physics until we got to AP physics. And I would have i was doing o okay at that.
00:48:31
Speaker
Until all of a sudden our teacher switched and we were trying to do calc based physics with a teacher that admitted he didn't know calculus. That was a whole other long issue.
00:48:46
Speaker
Point is, when I fuck up the discussion of space ah shortly, don't come for me. Thank you. Let's let's start with the conspiracy theory bullshit. Let's start with the aliens.
00:48:57
Speaker
um Specifically, let's start with Gray's. my The first description that we get of these people as being tall and thin and gray skinned, I was like, oh, these are grays.
00:49:09
Speaker
Grays are, it's a colloquial name for gray aliens or Roswell grays or Zeta reticulans. There are other various names for them.
00:49:23
Speaker
They are purportedly the aliens that were behind the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and also behind the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.
00:49:36
Speaker
if you believe that sort of thing.
00:49:40
Speaker
They've shown up in a number of different sorts of media. the They've shown up in the X-Files. They've shown up in Stargate. it's You have seen images of them before. They are the tall, gray aliens with the high cheekbones and the big round bald head and the big beady black eyes and the long arms and the the tiny little nose.
00:50:04
Speaker
Right. And the and the the the tiny little mouth. Pretty generic alien, unless you're thinking about the green ones, which are also pretty generic. Which they're the little green men depiction of aliens comes from before the popularization of the gray aliens. Yeah.
00:50:24
Speaker
And then sort of modern popularizations have taken that sort of image of the gray aliens and sometimes turned it green. Ah, I see. Okay. So supposedly, depending on your your interpretation of the various conspiracy theories, the gray aliens that abducted Betty and Barney Hill were supposedly from Zeta Reticuli, according to a star map that Betty Hill drew under hypnosis.
00:50:54
Speaker
Hmm. Regardless, this was my immediate thought when we saw Greys. But that said, we still get a description of them that seems more human. Murderbot identifies them as augmented humans.
00:51:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Which suggests that, yeah, they've got kind of grayish skin, but they're not... And Murderbot comments multiple times like, is this like an aesthetic augment? Yeah.
00:51:22
Speaker
Like, what's going on here? Which sounds to me like they look human, but gray. Yeah. So are they aliens? Have they been corrupted by alien remnants, which we have discussed before isn in some of the various earlier Murderbot properties?
00:51:47
Speaker
So let's talk about Cylons. This segues into the little bit on organic, um the on the weird piece of organic technology.
00:51:59
Speaker
Yeah. One of the, again, popular tropes in science fiction is the race or grouping of beings that instead of using technology as we understand it, uses some form of organic growth to create technology.
00:52:19
Speaker
So some form of genetic engineering, some form of you know growing a living carbon, silicon, arsenic-based life form, That will do the job of a piece of technology instead.
00:52:34
Speaker
If you've ever read the Leviathan alternate history novels, that's a major piece of that of growing, you know, giant airships that are in fact whales. Ooh, growing, you know, bats that essentially are that they spit out little pieces of metal and they're, that's, you're bombing.
00:52:57
Speaker
The Broken Earth trilogy also, um I don't think that you've read those ones, but that also has a lot of, oh, you have. Yeah, so that's another example of yeah the same kind of thing. Yeah, Broken Earth trilogy, ah the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica. I said I was going to talk a little more about Battlestar Galactica again.
00:53:14
Speaker
They are part organic, part part machine created form of life. Hell, Murderbot is this fusion of technology and organic parts.
00:53:30
Speaker
um Replicants from Blade Runner, Robocop, General Grievous, the, what are they called?
00:53:42
Speaker
In Star Wars Legends, there is a group called um the Yuzhen Vong who abhor technology of all kinds and they grow they they grow their starships and all of their weapons. It's a whole weird thing.
00:54:00
Speaker
thing. The point is this fusion of organic technology and technology with what we would consider to be modern sci-fi technology is ah is a very common sci-fi trope.
00:54:13
Speaker
But because it is so, for lack of a better word, alien to us, fuck, I forgot the most recent one that we both have seen. The Illithid ships in Baldur's Gate.
00:54:30
Speaker
yeah Thank you. Yeah, just the... This is weird and fleshy, even though it's traveling through space and time and alternate dimensions.
00:54:42
Speaker
That weirds us out. Because we think of flesh as part of us, not as part of a starship. We do not need to be inside of flesh.
00:54:56
Speaker
That said, it's interesting now to see this combo and have... secunit and the others be a little bit weirded out by it when we know that, quite frankly, this might be the future that the corporation rim is heading towards.
00:55:12
Speaker
We're already seeing it with secunit and with art. We're two artificial life forms that have that fusion of technology and organic components.
00:55:23
Speaker
Yeah. And Murderbot observes this. It notes that, yes, I am also a combination of organic parts and technology, but I don't have a big, weird thing growing on me. This does not look correct.
00:55:37
Speaker
Well, but maybe that weird big thing is normal for its species. You don't know. Sekuna doesn't know either. But it's pretty sure, and I'm pretty sure. But somehow, this weird piece of growth technology has sped up their ability to travel through the wormhole.
00:55:54
Speaker
which suggests it's perhaps employing a different type of FTL travel. Now, if you have read, seen, played any sort of sci-fi,
00:56:05
Speaker
you will be familiar with the various different types of faster-than-light travel. Because in our universe, the speed of light acts as a speed limit. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light. And so to move through the vastness that is space, sci-fi has to come up with a way around that.
00:56:29
Speaker
One of the pieces that kind of has no bearing on reality is hyperspace. um That is the idea of punching through into an alternate reality that runs sort of sidelong along ours via the means of a hyperspace drive, a jump gate, ah hyperspace, slipspace, e-space, n-space, fluidic space. These are all names for the same sort of thing.
00:56:55
Speaker
a form of space where the laws of physics don't fully apply. Mass Effect does something kind of similar, except it happens in real space. It's this's just they have the ability to modify the mass of an object such that it doesn't register itself traveling At the same full speed, it's a there's some wonky physics around it.
00:57:23
Speaker
Other pieces of faster than light travel use things like warp or wormhole travel or the jump drive from Battlestar Galactica.
00:57:34
Speaker
I am getting a lot of this from a book that my parents got me for Christmas years and years and years ago called The Science of Battlestar Galactica. Very nice.
00:57:45
Speaker
Which has a number of sections on random shit in the show. Most notably, Moore's Law. Moore was one of the showrunners where he came up with the idea that basically...
00:57:59
Speaker
Don't explain things in sci-fi. And that saves you from having to come up with a solid scientific explanation for why any of this is happening. If you watch Star Trek, you get all the techno babble.
00:58:12
Speaker
you know If we invert and hurt the caliper and recalibrate the dilithium crystals and shift that into the left neutron drive, it'll all work out fine. But if you just say, i'm just I'm spinning up the jump drive, and you don't explain what the fuck the jump drive is...
00:58:27
Speaker
Cool. We don't know. We don't need to know shit. Yeah. You don't explain it. But because I am who I am, we're going to talk briefly about actual the actual science, which means we need to talk about normal space and gravity.
00:58:42
Speaker
Please do. This is an incredibly simplified way of thinking about this. Normal space, you can kind of visualize as a flat piece of paper, right? Right.
00:58:54
Speaker
Gravity warps normal space. If you were to place an object in a flat piece of paper, a big heavy object, that's going to bend the piece of paper somewhat around it.
00:59:06
Speaker
So, you know, if you put a marble on that flat piece of paper, it's going create a bend somewhere. And then you put a bowling ball that's going to create a much larger bend. it's these are So when you have an object that has a lot of mass, it creates a much larger bend in space.
00:59:26
Speaker
This is what black holes are. It's incredibly massive objects, usually condensed into a very, very, very small area. that create massive, massive poles in. Because when we're creating these bends, right, if we're thinking about space as a piece of paper, let's say you now have a marble, and you flick your marble across this massive piece of paper.
00:59:50
Speaker
What's going to happen if it rolls really close to the bowling ball? It'd be like those little coin donation things that they have at the zoo, where it spins around and around around around, and then goes down. Exactly.
01:00:02
Speaker
Exactly. Now... Your marble can only travel as fast across that piece of paper as you can flick it. Right? It can travel faster when it runs into one of those little gravity wells sometimes.
01:00:16
Speaker
But then it's pulled in towards something. So what if you could bend space around your marble, you could pick up, kind of push the space behind your marble, and just let it continuously roll down that space? Now it's going to travel a little faster than you just flicking it along.
01:00:35
Speaker
And that's the concept behind warp drive. Mm-hmm. is you bend the space around the starship or the whatever is traveling through space such that you're not moving faster than the speed of light, the space is.
01:00:51
Speaker
And then you've got wormholes, which are let's say you've got your flat piece of paper, right? But your flat piece of paper is so, so massive that when it seems like you're traveling in a straight line, eventually you're kind of traveling in a big curve, much like the curvature of the Earth.
01:01:08
Speaker
But here's the thing. We can create a tunnel between two points, right? So if you instead poke a hole through and stick a straw through the piece of paper, through this very, very massive piece of paper that slowly and steadily curves, okay, well, now you've created a shorter line between point A and point B instead of traveling around the curvature.
01:01:30
Speaker
So that takes less time to go through. So now instead of taking 200 light years, it only takes two. That's the idea behind wormholes. So in a wormhole, you're still technically traveling through normal space.
01:01:43
Speaker
You're just doing it along an alternate path. There's also the concept behind the the Battlestar jump drive, which This is the whole piece of, well, if you warp in warp, if you're bending the paper around your ship, and in wormholes, if you're creating a path between two points of the paper, what if, here's an idea, what if we bend the paper across the whole trajectory?
01:02:09
Speaker
What if we start in one point, and instead of moving the ship, we bend the paper in half, and then we bent unbend it, and now you're on the other side?
01:02:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So that's the sort of instantaneous travel idea. How do they do that? That's where Mors Law comes in. You don't explain that shit. yeah um So that brings up the question, what was this alien technology doing?
01:02:40
Speaker
Was it creating a warp bubble? Because we haven't established that there's any form of FTL travel, like true FTL travel. One of the theories behind wormholes, if they exist, is that they're not stable.
01:02:54
Speaker
So like you can't consistently you can't consistently see them because they kind of occur and then they're gone. Because they are they are a warping of space and time, which I believe in theory are kind of the same thing. Again, biologists, not physicists.
01:03:11
Speaker
But since a wormhole is in normal space... And we have wormhole stabilization technology as established by Roz earlier. What if this alien technology now is warping normal space around art?
01:03:27
Speaker
So not only are you traveling in a straight line, you're also traveling within this warped bubble. So now you're traveling extra fucking fast from point A to point B in a straight line. I am doing my utmost to follow. That makes some sense to me.
01:03:43
Speaker
The other option is that, you know, even with no FTL travel, traveling under, to use Star Trek terms, impulse power, they're traveling in a set speed and this was just enabled them to go faster. You just put some nitrous oxide into your into your car engine with this.
01:03:59
Speaker
That's also an option. But I like the idea that because we already seem to be dealing with weird fucking technology that we don't recognize as even remotely similar to ours.
01:04:11
Speaker
What if we are also dealing with a different form of ah FTL travel now combined with the one that we're aware of?
01:04:22
Speaker
That's my tangent. I like it. Sci-fi is... There is the fiction piece of the science fiction, but I've always found it amusing what pieces of actual science the science fiction writers choose to glom onto and decide, yes, this is what we're working with today.
01:04:41
Speaker
And I'm glad that you have the curiosity and the background knowledge to be able to investigate that because I just don't even try. and so I just focus on the parts that already make sense to me.
01:04:53
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, the science part is half of it. And it's really interesting when you have someone who's able to explain it. So I appreciate that. When you have someone who's able to...
01:05:05
Speaker
poke at it. When you have somebody who has even the inclination to Google it that I do not have, I am just willing to let it wash over me and go, sure, whatever.
01:05:17
Speaker
But then it's more fun. book To dig this random book I read in high school out of the random pile of old books from my parents' house in the back of my room. It's like what we said about Tolkien when we were doing that season.
01:05:33
Speaker
That our deep diving and tangenting and researching enhances our enjoyment of these things. And learning more and finding the random books from a bunch of Christmases ago, that makes it more fun.
01:05:48
Speaker
It makes it a better experience. Yeah. Yeah, I did spend 20 minutes trying to find the piece about faster than light travel in this book. ah First of all, find the book and then find the piece about faster than light travel.
01:05:59
Speaker
When I saw the line about, wow, that that journey through the wormhole took way less time than we expected it to. isn Okay, how did that happen?
01:06:11
Speaker
Murderbot doesn't care. it doesn't have a an education module on that.
01:06:17
Speaker
Catherine, however, also doesn't have an education module on that, but... But you can you can get one. You can make your own. Is a nerd. Yes. However, one of the things about traveling at a speed that um you're not quite used to out in space and therefore your technology is not designed for is this creates problems for people who are clinging on in technology definitely not designed to do this.
01:06:44
Speaker
yeah because it turns out the prezox team was in the safe pod this whole time and got pulled into the wormhole alongside arts corpse being piloted by alien remnant tech which slightly argues for that warp idea if you're creating a warp bubble and you just happen to be close enough that you're within the bubble yeah whoops there you go yeah that excuse me yeah that makes sense But um the things that I was interested in from this chapter, connecting back to our Prezox team, was just more interpersonal relationships.
01:07:26
Speaker
There's a bit that's not really the focus of the section, but something that stood out to me, where Murderbot is talking to Amina and reflecting itself about how it knows that it can never earn the respect of humans.
01:07:44
Speaker
paraphrasing a longer conversation that they're having. Your uncle Tiago doesn't trust me. Not that I was upset about that or cared at all. Sure he does. You saved him from those people who attacked the facility.
01:07:55
Speaker
That was beside the point. I'd saved a lot of humans and the number who had trusted and or noticed me as anything other than an appliance attached to hub system afterward was statistically insignificant. And it's Very much reading more queerness onto Murderbot.
01:08:11
Speaker
Respectability will not save you. There is no amount of performing its function correctly and saving humans that will ever make humans respect it. They do or they don't. and It is really a problem for other humans to solve. That is why Barred Watch is making her documentary.
01:08:30
Speaker
Because this is a human-on-human issue where constructs are the collateral damage, basically.
01:08:40
Speaker
It's not the exact right phrasing, but, you know, it's not something that Murderbot can control. And it's really frustrated that Amina doesn't get that. Just for general, statistically insignificant, that phrase, it depends on where Murderbot is deciding where its p-value cutoff is. Yeah.
01:09:03
Speaker
But as a general rule in many things science, we don't consider something statistically significant until we get a p-value of 0.05, which is 5%.
01:09:15
Speaker
five percent So Murderbot is saying that less than 5% of humans that it's saved have considered it anything other than an appliance attached to hub system.
01:09:31
Speaker
But its relationship with Amina is continuing to improve. She's helping it interpret all of the displays that it's seeing around art systems and explaining what they're showing using some of that intern knowledge. Yay.
01:09:45
Speaker
It's also kind of helping keep SecUnit grounded, having somebody to talk to and having a buddy who's just helping it along its little explorations.
01:09:56
Speaker
And then the only thing that really had left for this chapter was the message from art and how it is addressed and what it contains. And that smacked me, smited me dead at 10 a.m. m this morning when I was reading it.
01:10:15
Speaker
Yeah, no, that one's that one's big. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so... The message that SecUnit finds, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that it was basically in Art's queue, in its buffer of functions. This is not a message that it is consciously sending right now. It's something that it had been waiting for SecUnit to receive.
01:10:41
Speaker
It is an info packet addressed to Eden, which is the name that it had used back in artificial condition. And the message is encoded in a scene from World Hoppers.
01:10:54
Speaker
And even more so, it's it's locked down behind its address to Eden, and it's locked down behind the password that is Murderbot's hard feed code address.
01:11:08
Speaker
isn So specifically, what art calls it? Stabby in the heart. and That's something that no one else would ever know or be able to bring up. So this is absolutely 100% certain that the only person who will ever access this is Sekunit.
01:11:28
Speaker
The compressed video clip in the packet was from the serial World Hoppers from a story arc climax episode when a secondary main character's mind had been taken over by a sentient brain virus. I know.
01:11:38
Speaker
And the story was really much better than it sounds. But it was the moment when the character said, i am trapped in my own body. And that's all the information that SecUnit has to work with.
01:11:51
Speaker
And holy shit. So art is alive. It is trapped in there somewhere. And it... you know I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic that this can lead us to believe that hopefully art is alive and trapped in there somewhere.
01:12:09
Speaker
And that it knew that SecUnit would be the only one who could help it. Mm-hmm. And that's such a wild, like, it is so, so careful. It is addressed to Eden, which is which is a name that only SecUnit would recognize as being addressed to it.
01:12:26
Speaker
It is password protected behind SecUnit's hard feed name that only Art knows or would be able to call it by. And then it's a encoded video clip that only has relevance to the two of them.
01:12:45
Speaker
art put multiple layers on here to make sure that the only person who would be able to find this was sec unit the only person that would be able to understand this was sec unit and then potentially then the only person that's able to do anything with it is sec unit.
01:13:07
Speaker
And the chapter ends with sec unit having that same sort of, oh, fuck moment of, actually, I think I can do something with this. isn I also don't remember because I haven't read past this point yet. if I read too far ahead, then I get confused. And then it's not good for recording.
01:13:29
Speaker
But I don't think that SecUnit explicitly thinks about this on the page, but just connecting ideas in my mind. All of this reinforces to SecUnit that this was not by accident. it's This message wasn't just there for anyone to stumble across and find. It wasn't a directionless call into the void where sec unit might just be in the right place at the right time and be able to do something because that's what it always does this is a art is choosing it art is seeking it out specifically art is not loving it by accident it's saying like just in case you
01:14:17
Speaker
self-conscious, self-doubting little shit in case you thought that I didn't fully believe in you and your ability to solve this problem. I am giving you absolutely everything to prove that this is me.
01:14:31
Speaker
It's, you know, and has a nice little parallel to what we were saying before about Mensa's family not liking it because, not because it's a sec unit, but because it is our sec unit. It is this sec unit.
01:14:43
Speaker
Art is saying, I love you. I trust you because you are this second. You know you are this person specifically. And that's some good shit. The sentient mind virus thing is just a ah kind of amusing bit for people.
01:14:59
Speaker
since Martha Wells has mentioned that World Hoppers is based loosely off of Stargate. And the main villains in Stargate are the Goa'uld, who are parasitic slash symbiotic organisms that burrow into their host's spine and take over their bodies.
01:15:20
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it's gross. Yucky. No thanks. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Did you have any closing thoughts for these chapters?
01:15:35
Speaker
I'm very excited to ah see Art deliver revenge. Yes. Oh, it's going to be so good. That's about it.
01:15:46
Speaker
So if you want to see how art delivers revenge or moves towards delivering that revenge, you can catch us in the next one. And in the meantime, Bestie, where can folks find us if they choose to do so?
01:15:59
Speaker
They can subscribe to our podcast wherever they get their podcasts. They can help us get into more people's ears by leaving us a five star and or written review, depending on the podcast platform.
01:16:12
Speaker
by leaving us a comment on the episode you're listening on or on any of our other episodes that you've listened on, assuming the podcast platform you're listening on allows that sort of thing. They can check us out on any of our social media at fanapppod, F-A-N-A-P-P-P-O-D.
01:16:30
Speaker
If we're on a social media website, that's what we're on it as. We're more active on Instagram and Tumblr, but we're on other sites and who knows, maybe I'll choose to use them at some point.
01:16:43
Speaker
And at least no impersonators will pretend to be us, I guess. We won't be taken over by any alien remnants, knock on wood. No alien remnants, no sentient mind viruses, and no go-a-uld parasites that like to name themselves after Egyptian gods.
01:17:02
Speaker
You can always send us an email, thefandomapprentice at gmail.com. And ah you can always shout into the void and we won't hear you, but sometimes that feels good.
01:17:15
Speaker
Couldn't said it better myself. We'll see you all next time. Bye, see you next time. The Phantom of Brentis is produced and edited by Rin and Sam. Our music is composed and performed by James.
01:17:28
Speaker
You can find more of his work on Spotify and Bandcamp under Baeruz, B-A-E-R-U-Z. 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.
01:18:23
Speaker
The only other alternative ah banter bit I did have was about alternative milks. like Lactose has has purposes of destroying my insides and making cheese.