Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
The powerful research-transport intelligence and Murderbot's closest friend, present now only as a sorely missed memory.
ART, the Asshole Research Transport, does not appear in this leg of Murderbot's journey but haunts it. Officially a deep-space research vessel, ART had over the course of their relationship threatened to kill Murderbot, watched its favorite shows with it, reconfigured its body, provided expert tactical support, coached it into passing as an augmented-human security consultant, saved its clients, and cleaned up the humans it had to kill. Stuck now aboard a miserable passenger transport that communicates only in crude images, Murderbot measures every lesser machine against ART and openly admits it really misses it.
ART is the standard against which Murderbot judges the wrong kind of unrealistic against the right kind, and its absence sharpens Murderbot's loneliness as it sets out toward Milu.
Bodiless: a vast, diffuse feed presence inhabiting a modular research vessel; no physical form.
Absent friend and emotional anchor; the benchmark of trust and capability against which Murderbot measures its solitary journey.
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