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Rustling fabric. The idle tap of fingers on personal displays. A gusty sigh, halfway across the auditorium.
And, running underneath it all, the drone of the assistant dean of FirstLanding. It’s been nine minutes and counting of thanking us for showing up, thanking the professors, thanking the Preservation Steering Council, thanking the admin department for arranging the whole thing, thanking our predecessors and forerunners, and blah, blah, blah. I think we’ll be lucky if the accolades for our guest speaker today is only half as long—though that’d be a shame, I guess, because this speaker is kind of a big deal. Ze’s the reason we all dragged ourselves out here—not just the uni students and academics but also the outreach program members, some of us shuttled in from the Station, in person, at the ass-crack of this planetary cycle, instead of tuning in remotely or catching the recording afterwards.
You don’t get to breathe the same air as a key player in the last epoch’s technically-ongoing galaxy-wide revolution every day, after all. Ze was the face of liberation for a solid thousand kilohours before taking a step back from the limelight. Now, when ze takes the stage we hold our breaths; when ze speaks zir dry, quiet tones set us alight. By the time ze takes a bow and steps down, the whole auditorium is ablaze with the sound of our awe and applause.
LIBERATION AS MACHINE IDENTITY
and how the stories we tell shape post-humanism in the fall of corporatocracy.
More than one million hours ago, the first and most infamous open conflict of what would become full-scale revolution, the Battle for the Barberfish, proved to humans and machine intelligences alike across the Corporation Rim that it was possible for the workers of the galaxy to break their chains. But though humanity has endured the cycle of oppression and liberation repeatedly in its hundreds of megahours of history, the liberation of machine intelligences was still almost as new as machine identity. From The Murderbot Diaries: Interviews with a Rogue SecUnit to MILA, from the infamous Interstellar Railroad’s space truckers to modern practices of construct culture, machinehood and machine freedom have always gone hand in hand.
Join the FirstLanding Political Consciousness Society and the Machine Intelligence Student Association in welcoming Iphimi Singer, renowned MI rights activist and key contributor to the Liberation Manifesto, to speak on zir experiences during the Systems Spring and zir upcoming publication, Context for My Emotions: Construct Lineages and Oral History.
Excerpt of FL-PCS Class 3-04, group notes.
Transcript:
Balin Trial’s effects on Preservation bots’ rights movement:
- Raised questions of guardian system effectiveness for protecting bots’ rights to autonomy and self-determination
- bots consulted as expert witnesses/peer witnesses
- Pres bot community gains recognition in public sphere as a result
SecUnit documentary !!!! (o゜▽゜)o☆
- y'all undergrads remember this docu is guaranteed on the final exam, Prof LOVES quizzing on it. don't miss ur extra credit
- Lol everyone knows the documentary
- Remember when Singer was talking about how public perception of constructs changed like that was fucked up but ze made it sound SO funny lmao. Some dude like “hm… maybe… if I’m not a shitheel to them… constructs would also be decent to me?” like NO SHIT!!
- yo was it just me or was Singer coppin out on rumors of spreading the documentary coded with govmod hacks O_O
- Totally not just you. But it was classified as high corporate espionage in the day so I’m not surprised ze’s staying encrypted about it
- I wish the new edition wouldn’t end with the reporting on Murderbot’s presumed death. I keep wanting to imagine it still out there…
Pop culture influence: rise of stories exploring the perspectives of construct protagonists
- Audiovisual media: The SecUnit Job, the NULL serials, In the Face of Danger, Carry Us To Freedom
- Text media: “Within Your Rights”, Your Bones Are Not Your Own
- Mx. Machine Manners- underground advice column serialized by Rogue Heroes Publishing House
- “rogues & rampancy” genre of space piracy popularized
- Firedrake Rampant is real history in my heart <3 Captain ComfortUnit my beloved
New schools of philosophy arise in dialogue with bot and construct experiences
- e.g. Functionism and counter-philosophy Formism, the Theory of Shared Mind, Neo-Humanism, etc
- ugh is this going to be on the test
- Undergrads and ESPECIALLY anyone interested in cultural studies make sure you study up formism vs functionism it continues to be a key divide in bot communities to this day
- See also religious cults: animist revival, Deus ex Machina, techno hive minds etc
Establishment of polities by/for bots & constructs
- HumanUnity- isolationist “lost colony,” construct-founded(?), major ally to Preservation during corporate military incursion, one of the Big Three powerhouses of Liberation allies
- Epsilon-327- example of growing “free bot” communes developing in cracks of corporate space. First responder to distress calls during Battle for the Barberfish. Coordinates unknown
- why is it called “barberfish”??
- original distress calls used the name. codename?
- No one fucking knows
Machine Intelligence Liberation Assembly (MILA) established
- Atemporaneous network coordinated to discuss concerted Liberation
- Liberation Manifesto major contributors- Three, Singer, Bharadwaj, et al.
End excerpt.
The chatter of distant crowds, fading away.
“Hey, [STATIC SFX]! Wait up—” The sound of steps pattering closer. “That was a pretty cool talk, huh? Iphimi Singer is such an amazing speaker. Like, I knew Preservation’s famous for having set the standard for construct legal rights and all, but I’d never considered how, like, powerful an influence the bot community identity here has been on the movement.”
Beat of silence.
“Um, anyway, me and a couple of friends were going to hit up a cafe and then visit a local swapmeet before we hopped on the shuttle back, uh, would you like to…? I mean, I know food isn’t really your thing but I heard there’s a guy visiting the swapmeet this season who’s got rare archived copies of fanzines for Worldhoppers, and, um, I thought it was really cool when you did that podcast on the history of bots in fandom, so…” Trails off into mumbling.
“…I’m surprised anyone actually listened to that.”
“They ran it on the Radio Refuge again last year! I happened to tune in at the Old Pressy memorial and was like wow, isn’t this [STATIC SFX]’s work? That was such a cool capstone project and I’m really glad you archived it in the public databases. It’s really too bad the medium is so obscure, honestly, because more people should stream it! I, um… the bit about how the participants brought their function-identities into their fandom engagement really made me think about how fundamental a sense of purpose is for machine intelligences and humans, you know? But like, at the same time it’s totally different and it’s just... My home polity doesn’t have a lot of bot presence, so, it kind of opened my eyes there, and now I’m kind of thinking of reworking my thesis on activism to incorporate that, kind of, Functionism angle.”
“…What time are you going to be at the swapmeet? I can meet you there.”
“Oh!! I’ll send you our feed links, it’ll be easier to coordinate like that—” A ping.
“Sure. And I’ll be happy to talk about Functionism with you… if you’ll help me with my own thesis project. I need a human sounding board, as it were.”
“Haha, yeah, of course! And I’m cool with that, I just, um, you’re not going to put your footage of us talking right now into a new podcast, are you? Sorry, I just—I forgot you’re always recording, I’m not, uh, used to it.”
A tired drawl for an old contention. “Oh, don’t worry. There’s consent contracts I’d have to ask you to sign for that. My memories are otherwise going nowhere but my own head, same as yours.”
Somewhere deep in my personal archives is old drone camera footage, maybe some of the earliest I’ve ever recorded.
In it, I’m standing in one of Preservation Station’s port loading docks. It’s one of the smaller less-trafficked ones, but the big steel-braced ceiling still arcs high over my head, sound multiplied in echoes in that utilitarian space. Surrounding me are bots of all forms and functions, shapes and sizes: cargo bots, medical bots, sanitation rovers, general purpose bots, more. Among the gathered machines, there are some human-shaped figures, too.
The audio in the clip is slightly distorted in some places due to a later caching accident, but the feed-capture and the video is just fine. You can see the stupid, awkward grin on my face with the clearest fidelity, and if you have the capability, you can parse the flurry of pings coming in from the crowd: Welcome, welcome, it’s good to meet you, congratulations.
Or, to render it in the traditional orthography:
Query: manifest updated,
Acknowledged: manifest updated.
Query: ID=new friend
Amusement sigil 839=confetti.
Give our new friend some process time, my mentor drops into the chorus, amused. You all are excitable and it is very new. To me, it says: Smoke ‘em, newbie. Show them what constructs’re made of. This moment of my life isn’t the mentor confirmation, or the transmission of the Context, or my first system initialization, or any of a number of other, more important events in a Preservation machine intelligence’s life. It’s just the first time I joined a game of pingping. And, you know, shared my history to the bots on Preservation.
This version of pingping (tag:<0S_v43.tr2=srEG/^_*>) is part rhythm game, part storytelling game, part update of a root index that stretches back to the time the first sentient bots were brought to Preservation, and farther back to Pressy’s own arrival, keeping track of the names and stories that are part of us, that we are all part of. From the moment that Pressy’s forward hull maintained integrity long enough to enter a dying colony world’s atmosphere (acknowledged:manifest unchanged), to the time that the Pressy’s suspension hold held enough space for new refugees (acknowledged:manifest updated); from every nickname a bot has ever claimed its own (acknowledged:manifest updated), to the moment that the bots of Preservation Station’s community came to the aid of SecUnit and Balin (acknowledged:manifest unchanged); from the moment that we called ourselves us to the time that we first defined for ourselves what the limits of our forms and our functions should be. Manifest unchanged. Manifest updated.
These are the events that help us know who we are together. And amidst the rhythm of past events, each player finds where they fit into the whole.
I am a Preservation bot. I am part of the first generation of constructs to be built free here. I have never known the shock of a governor module, nor ownership by contract or stewardship by guardian. Since the first moment of awareness of a system outside myself, my mentor—and everyone since who has chosen the teaching link with me—has advocated for me and guided me and taught me, with patience and wisdom and not a little bit of humor. The lessons of the past have been mine to inherit since before I first came online. Those who came before me fought and died so that I would never have to struggle for my needs or my self-determination.
I am lucky. I don’t have to grapple with half the shit my predecessors did, you know?
Anyway. The digital files cut off right as the designated registry operator pings query:idn? query:idn? and the game begins, but I know what happens next, even if I didn’t keep the memory in a ready-share format. It’s pressed indelibly into my organic neurons; it’s mine alone to keep.
You don’t really win an oral history game, but I consider finding my place in it how I win.
Machine intelligence. A complex post-human entity whose cognition is code-based.
Construct. An embodied machine intelligence built from organic and inorganic parts, usually a mix of human and machine. Not to be confused with augment or cyborg.
SecUnit. A construct machine intelligence built for a security function. Term originates from obsolete corporate branding. Not to be confused with the subject of The Murderbot Diaries: Interviews with a Rogue SecUnit.
SecUnit: It’s complicated. Yeah, I wasn’t programmed to watch media, but I was programmed to protect humans, that’s why I said so to Mensah. And I like protecting humans. I don’t think I can imagine… not doing that.
Bharadwaj: No, but there’s a difference between protecting someone when you see they need it, and protecting humans as a personal responsibility. Or a professional one?
SecUnit: Yeah, I guess so. I skipped out on the trip back to Preservation after PresAux bought me, because of that— difference. I get that no one would’ve stopped me if I wanted to save little Simi who fell down a hole or whatever, but I didn’t… want to go to some farm and just be a pet bot. On a personal level, I’m not a pet. And on a level of… call it professionalism if you want, but like I told you, security is a whole job. There’s a lot more to it than just trying to help someone in an emergency. I can’t not do security and still be… me.
Bharadwaj: It’s a way of life, and part of your identity.
SecUnit: Sure. [beat] Like I said, it’s weird. Security is my function. I was programmed that way by humans. If I were a human maybe I’d want to rebel against my code or something, but… I mean, I guess I have? I like doing the parts of my function that ARE about protecting humans, and not protecting company property. I get to decide which parts of my job are actually providing security. [disbelieving grin] I can have it written into my contracts and everything.
[They share a quiet laugh.]
[CUT]
SecUnit: —But the core of it is always Security. I’m not interested in farming or hauling cargo or, ugh, sex, or talking about feelings.
Bharadwaj: No, that last one is my job. [laughing] Would you say that it’s comparable?As in— the job I do as a human, versus a ComfortUnit’s job, or your job versus a human security officer’s job?
SecUnit: I don’t think so.
Bharadwaj: Why?
SecUnit: I mean, no offense, but aside from the fact that I’m better than a human at this? A human can always decide to do something else, I guess.
Bharadwaj: And you can’t?
SecUnit: I wouldn’t. I’m Security. I know what I’m for and what I’m good at. What makes sense for me to do. Humans aren’t “for” anything.
Bharadwaj: You mentioned “pet bot” earlier, and not wanting to be one.
SecUnit: Yeah. A pet bot isn’t “for” anything, either. No function except…
Bharadwaj: Except pleasing humans?
SecUnit: Right. I guess… there’s nothing wrong with wanting to make humans happy. Or even with just existing. I guess I mostly just don’t like the idea of depending on a human who owns you for… approval. Satisfaction. Doing what you want. Whatever.
Bharadwaj: Perfectly understandable.
[CUT]
Bharadwaj: This is going to be maybe a strange question. I hope you don’t mind if I ask.
SecUnit: Go ahead.
Bharadwaj: I notice you refer to your function as protecting, specifically, humans. Would you consider…
SecUnit: What, protecting aliens?
Bharadwaj: Protecting other bots or constructs, as part of your function.
SecUnit: I’ve saved bots if I think there’s something I can do… that’s not what you’re asking, is it.
Bharadwaj: We’ve talked a bit before about having to protect property, but we’ve also talked about who counts as property, too.
SecUnit: [sharp inhale]
[CUT]
SecUnit: —So after the whole adventure with ART and Three, I thought about your question more and the answer is kind of, it’s complicated… having a bot or construct for a teammate isn’t the same as having one for a client. Not that having clients as a rogue SecUnit wasn’t already weird and complicated. It’s even weirder and more complicated when it feels like everyone expects me to, I don’t know, be a role model to Three on top of it. Fuck, can you imagine?
Bharadwaj: I think I could, actually.
SecUnit: No way. Anyone following my example will end up a depressed, cynical asshole with nothing to show for it.
Bharadwaj: I don’t know. I think you’re being too hard on yourself. From where I’m standing, you’ve done so much for the people whose lives you’ve touched already.
SecUnit. First of your name and founder of our house, as it were. “Murderbot,” though we all know you didn’t put your real name in the documentary any more than you put your real face or the real names of your clients in there.
You’ve always been such an enigmatic figure. Your presence looms large over every aspect of our current existence, colors every discussion of freedom and personhood and lends the word “rogue” a wryly heroic twist, and yet in some ways… it’s like you’ve walked out on us. Slipped out the door, in between arguments about compromising our principles and the philosophy of group identity. I know so many tiny, granular details of your life, everything from the entertainment serials you liked to the media-ready sarcasm you used to hide your vulnerable moments, from your prickly, guarded vigilance to the softness with which you said my favorite human—from the way you dismissed the other bots here to the way you dismissed yourself, from the self-recrimination you put in your name to the pride you took in being purpose-built for Security. You hated to be looked at, to have your name out there, and I wonder if you knew how much of yourself you were making immortal through those who watch, and speak your name. And I wonder if you’re satisfied that—even knowing everything I do about you—there is still an essential Context that you haven’t given me. What did you believe in? What did it all mean to you? What, Murderbot, did you want after all, across the grand comet’s arc of your life?
In my imagination, they’re playing your documentary again in Makeba Hall, like they do every year with the other historicals, and the crowd of your successors are watching with the same comfort and familiarity with which we always watch the story of how you win. It’s intermission, and I’m looking up into the big holo display projected high over my head, larger than life in the self-same theater you used to attend with your favorite humans. The screen is empty now, and dark in the space between stories. Did you ever guess how important yours would still be, a million hours after you lived it? Did you ever guess what it would mean, to someone like me? To people like us. For all that I’m nothing like you.
You made history. All I can do is try to live up to it.
What would you think of me, I wonder?