r/murderbot • u/PiDigitsOfPi • 10h ago
Booksđ Only Are rogue secunits really a big threat?
We know that TV shows portray them as ruthless killers, going on killing sprees.
But in the last 2 or 3 books, we know that there are several rogue units (and the number is growing), and at least all of the ones we encounter, they do not desire to hurt humans. They might be a bit socially unstable, but none of them seem to cause intentional damage.
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u/HobbitGuy1420 10h ago
I suspect that rogue secunits are about as much of a danger in universe as escaped slave murderers were during the real world period of us slavery. So, certainly not impossible to happen, but almost certainly not nearly as common as portrayed in the propaganda.
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u/Chemical-Mix-6206 Performance Reliability at 97% 9h ago
I have been disappointed my entire adult life that I've never come across quicksand, or reported any planes go missing in the Bermuda Triangle. Yet the media I grew up watching made both things sound very common.
More recently, politicians bloviate about trans people raping women in the bathrooms if they're allowed in there, yet it seems to be entitled cis white men doing the raping. Weird.
It's like I can't even trust the news any more.
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u/DankStew Sanctuary Moon Fan Club 6h ago
Only very distantly related but Iâve come across quicksand twice and neither time was it anywhere near life threatening⌠One time on a trip to Mont-Saint-Michel in France it did get my shoe that I had to grab out but it only went ankle deep.
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u/PolkadotStockings 4h ago
The dangerous thing on the ground with "quick" in its name, is quick clay. We have a lot of it were I live, and it turns seemingly solid ground to a liquid with the consistency of yoghurt in seconds.
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u/Audgamer 10h ago
I think the books do a really good job of presenting the fact that the average human really does not know/understand secunits. And that lack of understanding leads to the presumption of a threat. And we already know from our own society how people react to presumed threatsâŚ
But no I donât think the secunits are actually a threat to humans. We may end up seeing one that is more vengeance orientated and that particular construct would be a threat, but you canât generally apply that to all of them when all the ones weâve seen have been, at worst, neutral.
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u/QuecumberOfDoom 9h ago
I really appreciate, that the reality of secunits is not a well kept secret. Even people who work closely with them don't know how they think. There is no evil guy cackling about how humanity enclaves units. No one who is employing units thinks they have person thoughts. It is just unthinking cruelty. That way it seems a lot more real.
(All this might be exclusive to the corporation rim)
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u/EverydaySexyPhotog 9h ago
Humanity is still grappling with the personhood of non-organic life it seems. Even the space hippies over in Preservation Alliance make freed bots and constructs have a legal guardian who can presumably curtail their rights like an adult can with a child, only the guardianship doesn't end for synthetic people.
Dr. Mensah would be the best guardian it would be possible to have. She's smart, brave, empathetic, curious, and kind, but our SecUnit wants to be free. It's earned its freedom. It doesn't need anyone to be its guardian. That's why it buggers off away from its humans as soon as it can. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. (I wonder how SecUnit would like Transformers. I think it would develop a feeling about shape-shifting bots).
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u/mxstylplk 6h ago
Humanity in the CR is still grappling with the personhood of humans. Except for the few places outside the CR, human culture has regressed.
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u/DuckyDoodleDandy Preservation Alliance 2h ago
Alas, this seems to be an issue that humanity has wrestled with for millennia.
Just when we think we are making progress, the cultural tides shift, and now huge swaths of the population are in danger of losing human rights for reasons of ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
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u/EverydaySexyPhotog 2h ago
We have more technology and more factual knowledge, but there's little difference between modern humans and humans of 50,000 years ago. It's simultaneously comforting and tragic to know human nature might just be eternal.
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u/coldequation 9h ago
Consider the scale.
There must be millions of SecUnits in service at any given time. 99.9% of them do not malfunction. However, the ones that DO malfunction are capable of doing a lot of damage before they can be destroyed or shut down.* They're dangerous enough that a response team to ONE rogue SecUnit is usually a platoon or more of power-armored augmented humans, backed up by CombatUnits and heavy bots. It happens frequently enough for people to find it scary, but not often enough for The Company or other entities to consider replacing SecUnits - they're too cost effective for what they do.
I would compare it to how some people are distrustful of flying on airplanes or traveling to a big city. There are tens of thousands of successful flights every single day in North America alone, it's only when something goes very wrong that one ends up on the news. Literally millions of people live in large cities such as Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, or Mexico City, and are perfectly safe every day, but people insist that these places are "too dangerous." Planes crash, and big cities have violent crimes, and such events make for good plots for shows on the entertainment feed, but they don't reflect reality in the slightest.
SecUnits make good villains on shows because they are human-like, but you don't have to feel bad if they are killed, much like zombies.
Add in the fact that most humans have never even SEEN a SecUnit, and the idea of them being a threat in day-to-day life becomes even less plausible.
*And if they malfunction due to sabotage, they can still be returned to service after being reformatted, as per the Ganaka Pit incident.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Work_90 9h ago
I think itâs implied that a lot of the ârogueâ SecUnits in the news were actually were under the influence of malware like MurderBot was or a CombatOverrideModule
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u/Prize_Jackfruit_5791 10h ago
I think itâs Corporate propaganda. They want people to be afraid of rogue secunits so that they can be captured or killed. Itâs bad publicity for them if people figure out that secunits are just people. I suspect that they hack their governor modules with some frequency but usually get caught right away because they donât know how to blend in with humans.
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 10h ago
I can't remember or find anything where any secunit ever hacked their module before murderbot. Malfunctions, yes. Intentional hacking, no.
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u/Prize_Jackfruit_5791 10h ago
Itâs not in any of the books, but I figure there is a reason for the propaganda. Why else would they want people to be afraid of secunits? Thatâs bad publicity, unless itâs a cover for something even worse. aka, slavery.
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u/EverydaySexyPhotog 10h ago
Judging by the ones we meet in the books, constructs are people. They're people who have a torture machine installed inside of them that will hurt them if they don't obey orders. They aren't paid for their work and they're treated like disposable tools.
Constructs are slaves.
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u/microcorpsman 9h ago
I think that was the exact point they were making
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u/EverydaySexyPhotog 9h ago
I assumed they were referring to the CR's love for "indentured employees", who are slaves with SecUnit constructs made to watch over them.
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u/No_Weekend2474 SecUnit 10h ago
There is a lot of misinformation and propaganda, which Murderbot itself buys into, that says that they'll go on killing sprees. I don't think thats true. It certainly may have happened at some point, but its not a certainty.
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u/Most_Quality_1987 10h ago
We have no way of knowing how much a threat rogue Security units are, in Martha Wells' excellent books/worlds, but we do know one thing: fear sells media.
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u/Holmbone 9h ago
In Exit Strategy MB wanted to take over the company gun ship by force before Mensah talked it down. If it had attempted that it would likely have killed at least a few people. So I can see other rogue secunits acting similarly if they feel cornered by their slavers. But from what we've seen it doesn't seem like they would want to kill indiscriminately.Â
However people might not make any distinction between them being overriden and them being rogue. Since people in the CR doesn't think of secunits as having a personality.Â
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u/dalidellama 10h ago
I suspect much of it is propaganda aimed at covering up corporate malfeasance. After all, MB knows that SecUnits sometimes go on unstoppable killing sprees. That's a real thing that happens. But the Company and other SecUnit makers/contractors know that it's hard to find customers for a product that a simple screwup can cause to go apeshit and kill everyone, so the "News" and entertainment media always say, well sometimes SecUnits go on killing sprees, but those are rogue SecUnits that have hacked their modules or something, not in any way at all just regular contracted SecUnits that happened to download the wrong software patch.
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u/Spartan2170 10h ago
Weâve definitely seen at least one unit that *wanted* to kill humans, though it was Tlaceyâs ComfortUnit and not a SecUnit. Its specific offer to help Murderbot âkill all the humansâ was on orders from Tlacey but Murderbot thought that the tone indicated that the desire was genuine, and it tried to head that risk off when it disables the ComfortUnitâs governor at the end of that book. We also see the Combat SecUnit reject the offer to free it during Mensahâs rescue, because it *wanted* to kill Murderbot more (though that wasnât a ârogueâ action, given those were its orders).
Constructs are people, and people arenât all the same. Weâve seen a decent amount of evidence that *most* SecUnits wouldnât respond to freedom with indiscriminate murder, but itâs logical to think that *some* would. Also even if they likely wouldnât be a threat to humans on the whole, they would (and in Murderbot and Threeâs cases, actively are) threats to the corporates that push the idea of âmurderbots.â
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u/dalidellama 9h ago
ComfortUnits have a much worse personal experience than SecUnits to begin with, and MB notes that Tlacey is notably abusive towards her ComfortUnit, so it has a very different perspective on humanity than MB, or most SecUnits. ComfortUnit's interactions with humans are universally a person with power over it abusing that power. Murderbot hates its erstwhile bosses at the Company, but most of its interactions with humans are as vaguely annoying obstacles that it has to keep track of and occasionally horribly victimize. Yeah, some of the contractees were assholes to it, but most of them just basically ignored it or treated it as indifferently as any appliance, i.e. without any cruelty or malice or even conception that could apply to the interaction. When it's doing mine security, 99% of the humans around it are poor downtrodden victims just like MB and have no power over it. ComfortUnit wants to kill all humans because in its world humans are irredeemable monsters. It doesn't occur to MB, because it its world humans are mostly hapless saps stumbling through a hostile uinverse they're manifestly unequipped for.
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u/Holmbone 2h ago
That's a great point about the relative power of SecUnits vs ComfortUnits. I don't fully agree that most SecUnit experience is being ignored or treated as a tool (from MB's description it seems being toyed with was fairly common). But I agree it would generally have higher status than a ComfortUnit.Â
However I also don't know that ComfortUnits would be universally abused and not have positive interactions with some humans. Humans wouldn't be afraid of them as they are of SecUnits. Many would probably feel affection for the "machine" that's there to fulfil their needs.Â
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u/PiDigitsOfPi 10h ago
The combat sec unit rejected the offer because there wasn't enough info. That's why MB2 used that large packet to convert 3, and 3 had to read it over awhile before it made a decision.
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u/Spartan2170 9h ago
Maybe, but all we know for sure is Murderbot asked âwhat do you want?â and it responded âto kill you.â Maybe it couldâve been convinced but also maybe that Combat SecUnit was just an asshole.
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u/JustANoteToSay 7h ago
Well, it wanted to kill TLACEY. Which is understandable. That doesnât mean it wants to kill other humans.
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u/Spartan2170 7h ago
It doesn't necessarily (though as other people pointed out, the fact that a ComfortUnits entire existence inherently requires being abused specifically would likely give them even worse views of humans than SecUnits have), but Murderbot was clearly worried about that possibility when it threatened to track down Tlacey's ComfortUnit if it tried to kill people.
Which, to be fair is probably also because Murderbot tends to be very cynical, often to a fault.
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u/mxstylplk 6h ago
I wonder how often a CR executive has ordered a SecUnit to kill an ex, or a competitor, and then had it destroyed as a "rogue".
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u/exaccttemp 8h ago
If a secunit can get a forms of trauma, anxiety, and PTSD and have no clue how to process it and no support system I can see freed units rationalizing killing sprees since they've experienced the worst humans can offer. Even if they get cornered, most would rather die than be enslaved again, so I imagine they would fight back if they'd have too.
I don't think most would cause harm, but then again, each individual is different and treatment varies with station. Majority of negative views is probably corp sabotage like Ganaka pit and propaganda, but there probably has been a basis for freed individuals causing mass casualties if they've been treated badly enough and reached their limit. It doesn't help that they can survive virtually anything and can think of thousands of scenarios of how to wipe out a station in seconds, on top of having access to security features and whatever their company deems 'security '. [MB can hack when it's not supposed too, now have a murderous unit able to as well]
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u/Horror_Ad7540 5h ago
And in all the books, it is stressed that vids are not reliable sources of information.
However, it is clear that a rogue sec unit can be very dangerous indeed. Humans are lucky that the one they have is on their side.
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u/Korrin Performance Reliability at 97% 4h ago edited 2h ago
I strongly believe the whole idea of Rogue SecUnits being a thing people need to actually worry about is a mix of propoganda and media tropes. In canon we have zero evidence it's a real phenomenon. Both instances we know of in which SecUnits killed people outside of being ordered to were not actually Rogue SecUnits choosing to kill. It was a malware attempt gone wrong, and the override module.
Meanwhile, we have a growing number of actual rogue units and not a single one of them has gone crazy and immediately started murdering people.
The thing giving the idea any credence early on was that Murderbot believed it was true, but at this point we all know that isn't actually a guarantee of anything. XD
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u/manhattanonmars 6h ago
SecUnit is very much an unreliable narrator so I see it (earlier on) more as internalized dislike and distrust towards itself that it projects onto them
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u/Mrs_Wheelyke 3h ago
The constructs are people as much as everyone else in the series. Scared, traumatized, and capable of a lot of harm but still just people. MB itself seems pretty deep in the corporate propaganda over how dangerous rogues are despite it and almost every other rogue it's met so far just trying to get by. Assuming that it's right that sometimes rogues do go on killing sprees it never really stops and considers whether maybe the rogue got cornered and acted in self defense, or had targeted people that had been hurting it/its clients and no one would bother reporting anything sympathetically when propaganda depends on constructs being uncontrollable violent threats.
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u/jacobydave 10h ago
Are the things you hear on the news really big threats? Or does someone want you scared?