Thinking About How In Artificial Condition, ART Keeps Reassuring Murderbot That All Traces Of It Have

Thinking about how in Artificial Condition, ART keeps reassuring Murderbot that all traces of it have been erased. Being so careful to doctor its logs and erase any trace of Murserbot’s presence. ART even uses its need to hide their activities to bond with Murderbot: “I have a secret too.”

And then later we find out that ART excitedly told its crew all about Murderbot and even showed them its picture. “Look at this Secunit it’s my best friend 🥰🥰🥰”

So basically ART is such a huge liar and so desperately wants to be Murderbot’s best friend.

uh hi. i wanted to illustrate one of the introductary scenes for SecUnit's character, since that would go along well with this being kind of my first post here. i... think that makes some sense. i promise more Murderbot diaries fanart after this (calling it content feels icky)). (did I start overusing brackets becouse of these books? possibly).

and i hope i captured SecUnit freaking out while trying to keep its composure at the same time well. as weird as it sounds, i like seeing depictions of it being nervous, becouse this side of it is what got me to relate to it so much in the first place (besides the heavily implied neurodivergence. though i guess the two go hand in hand). examples: in the second panel of the second page i tried showing how Gurathin's words affected it by making the speech bubbles visually "choke" (?) it, though it kept its face straight. oh, and i made it look much shorter than it actually is to mirror the way it is feeling!! figuring out details like that was pretty fun

(i'm sorry for any inconsistencies and the messy colouring and linework, i have ADHD and i get incredibly bored when i spend time trying to make everything "perfect" and looking the same in each panel... )

utilising the gift of imagination to hallucinate moments of tenderness between fictional people

Yearning

made using the inspect element.

hi im relistening to artificial condition and just realized that at no point do murderbot or ART make proper introductions and it's making me giggle. ART pretends to be a normal bot pilot to lull mb into a false sense of security, waits until murderbot is effectively trapped and unable to escape, and then proceeds to threaten it and scare the shit out of it by way of greeting. and murderbot, understandably, does not then proceed to ask what to call it or anything, it's just like. this guy fucking sucks. i'm gonna call it "fucking sucks".

AND ART PUTS UP NO PROTEST.

like okay we don't know exactly how much access ART has to murderbot's... data? thought data? we know it derives something from how murderbot interacts with the feed (access to interpretable emotion), we know it just sort of barges in wherever it wants, we know from system collapse that "no, ART can't read my mind, it just knows me really well", so like. it probably doesn't have context for the origin of this new nickname, which murderbot presumably begins calling it with no explanation.

but ART's smart so like it definitely knows what ART stands for, given (gestures at murderbot's entire disposition), and this is just so funny to me. ART refers to murderbot by some complicated string of letters and numbers that any other bot would use, and murderbot refers to ART as "you jackass" and ART's probably just soooo pleased that its newest bestie4lyfe gave it a nickname it's all so unbelievably funny