Content Warning:

Content warning:

A potentially sensitive blog and I need to say it mentions abuse of autistic children.

The two critical factor about me which I suppose lead to this blog are two loves and a hatred:

I love the Murderbot Diaries and the character who I (don’t need to say this, but some people may have missed it) love the most (other than SecUnit, obviously) is Gurathin*.

I also love science, it’s my passion: especially the communication of science.

My hatred (and this will need clarifying, as I have limited reserves of hate and use it sparingly) is of the people who run, coordinate, organise and monetize the anti-vaccination movement. I don’t hate someone caught up in their often seemingly plausible and oh so seductive lies, I hate the Wakefields and the Kennedys and the Bigtrees.

And one reason I hate them is for the way they portray autism: they claim autistic children are “vaccine damaged” and they promote dangerous “cures” (horrific things like MMS, aka bleach).

As if autism were a thing to be feared, that autistic children are somehow broken.

I HATE THIS

This idea that you can cure autism, that autism could or should be defeated, that it’s a form of damage.

Hopefully that indicates where I’m coming from…

The Corporation Rim in The Murderbot Diaries is a capitalist hellscape.

In this horrific future world where we have the literal, explicit, slavery of constructs and the enslavement of bond workers I can imagine that those in power might encourage (even force) parents of autistic children to “treat them”, make them “normal”.

Hopefully you can see this would be very much NOT what I’d see as a good thing, but an extension of the terrible things we already see being done today.

And what if one “treatment” was a form of augmentation: something that is in the autistic person's brain “correcting” their behaviour to “act normal”, a device which might be said to “govern” their behaviour. Like ABA, but a device in your brain.

In the Murderbot Diaries we have Gurathin, an augmented individual who has made his way to Preservation. The nature of his augments are never made explicit (though he does apparently have a better connection with the feed, and visual augments- though we don’t know if the two are related). I think Gurathin is great, and the Murderbot Gurathin canon relationship is brilliant and extremely funny, Exit Strategy:

(“I don’t want to be a pet robot.”

“I don’t think anyone wants that.”

That was Gurathin. I don’t like him. “I don’t like you.”

“I know.”

He sounded like he thought it was funny. “That is not funny.”

“I’m going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s make that sixty percent.”)

There is friction, a lot of it, in their relationship. An obvious root cause of this is their similarity**, as Murderbot says in Fugitive Telemetry to take just one little example:

“Gurathin seems to hate talking to strange humans almost as much as I do. ”

Perhaps his augments are why? Perhaps Gurathin’s augments’ purpose (or one purpose) was to moderate his behaviour, like the awful treatments promoted for autistic children in our world, the augments’ intent was to make him act like “normal”, or allistic people. Perhaps this is why he (remarkably) notices that their SecUnit is acting unusually, or not like a normal SecUnit? Perhaps Gurathin knows what it is to have something in your head controlling you, like SecUnit’s governor module.

Gurathin asks:

“You don’t blame humans for…what happened to you?”

I wonder what happened to Gurathin?

I’m so glad the both of them found Preservation.

So- it’s just a thought!

*I adore ART

** there is the ‘revealing that it’s rogue, calls itself Murderbot and the whole ‘killing 57 clients’ thing’ too, but they seem to have gotten past that!