I'm back to read this again because I love it and I'm fascinated by this line: "Strict enough that he hadn’t even been able to crush spiders if he’d wanted to. ". Did Bruce never see the issue with compelling someone to follow your order never too kill like this? Did he truly think it was better to do this than to give Jason the choice? Or did he simply not know about the strings?
I've been choosing to leave Bruce's actual perspective a little vague because Jason is SO not a reliable narrator when it comes to Bruce. What he considers to be Fact might not actually be the truth.
Bruce tries his best but he is an inherently flawed individual (like most people, he is only human after all) and he can't totally understand what Jason is going through. To him, the mandate might be similar to the no-kill rule that he himself follows.
If Jason never directly expressed discomfort with those rules then Bruce might have just. Never thought to change those rules.
You also have to remember that, in context, Jason was already very skittish when he first came to live with Bruce. He'd been hurt by humans before and he had no reason to trust Bruce near his personal codes. It takes him MONTHS to trust Bruce to fix his broken hardware in the first place. Why would Bruce think to push and change things that Jason hadn't asked him to? And risk breaking the trust that they'd built? Weighing the pros and cons of that you can understand why, even if he had considered it, Bruce might not even try to change those parameters.
In the beginning, Jason only allowed Bruce to change the barest minimum of his codes to let him live freely without fear. Would he realize that more of them could be changed? Would he trust Bruce enough to let him in to do it? By the time Bruce has earned that trust then would Jason even think to ask for those changes? It might be an annoyance, but it's not like Jason WANTED to kill anyone, so why would he ask for it to be allowed?
Anyway, I'm rambling.
...I also need to double check that all of this makes sense in universe and I'm not contradicting myself, but that's the basic idea.
Ah-haaaa, I had wondered if there was some unreliable narrator stuff going on there... but I completely disregarded the possibility that the ''no killing'' rule might have predated Bruce/been a general feature of androids in this world! Which is particularly silly of me because my very first introduction to androids in fiction was literally I, Robot, of three laws of robotics fame.
This is absolutely heartbreakiiiing thank you for sharing this!
Comment on Trust and Maintenance
foxes_in_sockses Sat 09 Aug 2025 09:40AM UTC
Comment Actions
batsandbees Wed 01 Oct 2025 05:10PM UTC
Comment Actions
foxes_in_sockses Wed 01 Oct 2025 09:06PM UTC
Last Edited Thu 02 Oct 2025 01:25AM UTC
Comment Actions