Books Martha Wells Book Club

Martha Wells Book Club: Network Effect

Murderbot’s two friend groups collide over wormholes and alien remnants…

By Alex Brown

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Published on December 17, 2025

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Murderbot’s two friend groups collide over wormholes and alien remnants in this month’s book club entry: Network Effect. We have snarky teens, asshole transports, rogue SecUnits, and a lot of corpses.

As usual, spoilers ahoy.

As is tradition with Murderbot, the book begins with the action already underway. Murderbot is working security aboard a space lab with Overse, Arada, and Ratthi, as well as two new characters, Amena and Thiago (Mensah’s daughter and brother-in-law, respectively), plus assorted PresAux staff. Our trusty SecUnit handily dispatches a team of raiders, but that’s the last bit of luck they’ll have for a while. On their way home, they’re attacked again, this time by gray-skinned Targets speaking an untranslated language, using ancient tech, and wandering around in the alien-remnant-infected husk of Perihelion, aka ART the Asshole Research Transport from Artificial Condition. 

Much of the story takes place on Perihelion. For the first chunk, Murderbot fears ART has been erased by the alien remnant the Targets attached to its engine, and it lets that fear and rage fuel it as it takes the Targets out and rescues its humans. “I was starting to panic,” it says, and later “But I was walking around in ART’s corpse and nothing felt reassuring.” Once Amena, Overse, Arada, Ratthi, Thiago, and Eletra (the lone survivor of a Barish-Estranza team who were also attacked by the Targets) temporarily safe, they’re able to get ART partially back online, much to SecUnit’s relief. 

It takes a while for the plot to untangle, given how little information the characters have most of the time and how much guesswork they’re doing, but it all boils down to Corporate Rim Shenanigans. Barish-Estranza wants to exploit planetary resources and human labor on a lost colony and the human laborers want freedom (or a hivemind, depending on who you talk to). The Perihelion crew want to keep hacking Corporate Rim legal contracts and the Preservation Alliance crew just want to go home alive and intact. Eventually, a team of humans and Murderbot get down to the planet’s surface to rescue the last of ART’s missing humans. With the help of Murderbot 2.0—who Amena adorably describes as a baby “That you and ART made together, with code. Code with both of you are also made out of.”—and a newly governor-module-hacked SecUnit calling itself “Three,” Murderbot saves the day. Again. Barely.

Structurally, this book is different from the rest of the series in a few key ways. It has a partial flashback to a brand new scene where Mensah is attacked at Preservation Alliance HQ by drugged-up augmented human assassins hired by GrayCris. This attack and her earlier kidnapping—and some timely blackmailing/guilt tripping by SecUnit—convinced her to seek treatment for dealing with her trauma. We see this fight sequence in another new device, a story within a story. The first book, All Systems Red, was technically epistolary; it was a letter Murderbot wrote to Mensah. The rest of the books are in that same first person format (which allows Wells to keep doing the unreliable narrator thing we all love so much), but they don’t feel all that epistolary. This one has the main story interrupted with excerpts from HelpMe.file. These scenes, from Murderbot being interviewed by Bharadwaj for her documentary, are sent to SecUnit 3 as a way to convince it to help Murderbot 1.0 after it cracks Three’s governor module. 

Speaking of the narrative structure, this is the only (so far?) novel in the series. Wells could have shrunk this story down to novella size either by cutting stuff out or breaking it into two separate books, but not while retaining the emotional gut-punches that are ART and Murderbot and their code baby, Amena dubbing Murderbot her “third mom,” Murderbot 2.0’s sacrifice, and the rise of Three. This is a bigger story than anything we’ve gotten so far, and I don’t just mean page length. This is a turning point for Murderbot. Everything has been leading up to this moment. It has to be big.

Identity, personhood, and trauma continue to be a major themes in the Murderbot Diaries, and they intersect in interesting ways in this novel. SecUnit is still processing learning that maybe it isn’t all that special and that its worldview was too narrow. Maybe other bots and constructs didn’t chat much with it because it didn’t chat much with them. Like Mensah, it’s also avoiding processing the trauma of the last few months. It gained its freedom, nearly died too many times to count, pushed itself way past its limits, changed its physical body, witnessed humans and constructs having meaningful and complicated relationships, and watched good people—bots, constructs, and humans alike—get killed or indentured at the behest of capitalism. 

Miki’s death in particular haunts Murderbot, and I think that has a lot to do with why it freaks out so much over ART’s apparent deletion. Not only did it lose its first friend and the first person to see its true self, but it also just watched a construct sacrifice its life for the humans it cared about, something Murderbot has done several times now for Mensah. As we see in the HelpMe.file excerpts Murderbot sends to Three, Bharadwaj has already been trying to get SecUnit to start trauma recovery treatment alongside Mensah. Add to that its anxiety toward logos and knowing the company is forever burned into its body no matter how much it alters itself and you have a SecUnit on the edge. There are too many terrible things happening to and around it in too short a time. ART’s supposed death shoves Murderbot right over. 

At the same time, it’s also having a lot of emotions, many of them for the first time and all of them unexpected. Murderbot has yet to reckon with its personhood. It doesn’t see itself as just a SecUnit anymore, and it doesn’t want to be human. But it also doesn’t know what that in between space looks like. “I think if I had been a normal bot, or been a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever… it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot. So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.” For SecUnit, that’s a negative. For Mensah, Murderbot is exactly what she wants and needs. She’d probably like it to be less touch-averse, but overall, she likes Murderbot just the way it is. She trusts it because it’s Murderbot and not some pet bot or mind-controlled construct.

Mensah doesn’t want a Miki anymore than Peri’s crew wants a thoughtless bot running their ship, but that also doesn’t mean the only other thing left is a thoughtless killing machine. When Ratthi says “[Thiago] doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know what you’re really like,” Murderbot thinks “He’d never seen me kill anyone close up and I’d like to keep it that way.” But Ratthi doesn’t stop caring about Murderbot after all the killing in this novel anymore than he did after all the killing in the previous stories with him. Like Mensah, he knows Murderbot is a person trained for a specific task making hard choices. Speaking of Ratthi, I have loved watching him grow as a character. The way Thiago treats SecUnit after Amena’s rescue is exactly the way Ratthi treated it in the first book, like a grumpy human that just needs a hug. Now Ratthi is the one keeping Thiago from pressing the point with Murderbot and warning him against apologizing, just like the others did with him in that hopper. By the end, Murderbot sees itself the way Mensah and ART do, and Wells shows us this through its HelpMe.file conversation with Three: “I’m letting you see all this because I want you to know what I am and what I can do… I want you to know if you help me, I’ll help you, and that you can trust me. Now here’s the code to disable your governor module.”

All this folds into Murderbot’s relationship with ART. It’s more than a friendship yet also not romantic or sexual. Or, as Ratthi wisely puts it, “I think that while you and Perihelion know how to have relationships with humans, neither of you is quite sure how to have a relationship with each other.” The book never uses this language, but I think of ART and Murderbot as being at the start of a queerplatonic relationship. It all feels very acespec-coded (I say as an acespec person), although I doubt that was intentional on Wells’ end. Their relationship is growing into a deep bond between two people committed to each other. ART kidnaps Murderbot not because it’s a useful tool but because it trusts Murderbot more than anything else in the universe. Murderbot wants to help ART not because its humans want it to help the other humans but because they’re ART’s humans. It’s a fraught relationship, one where both parties are emotionally constipated and oblivious, but it’s so damn charming I can’t help but sigh contentedly. 

Well, now I’m a big, weepy pile of emotions. I need to go take a walk or something and calm down. Next month we’re discussing Fugitive Telemetry. It was the sixth book published, but it takes place before Network Effect and is mostly a standalone story. See you in 2026![end-mark]

Buy the Book

Fugitive Telemetry

Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 6)

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Fugitive Telemetry

Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 6)

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 6)

Buy this book from:

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• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The post Martha Wells Book Club: <i>Network Effect</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Martha Wells Book Club

Martha Wells Book Club: Artificial Condition

When we last left our grumpy SecUnit, it had ditched the PresAux team and set out for the great beyond…

By Alex Brown

|

Published on October 9, 2025

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After a brief delay, we’re back to the Martha Wells Book Club grind. For this installment we’re diving into the second book in the Murderbot Diaries series, Artificial Condition. When we last left our grumpy, rogue SecUnit, it had ditched the PresAux team and set out for the great beyond to find itself. Did it? Yes. And no. 

News is hard to come by in the vast expanse of space. While traveling in wormholes, you only have whatever media you brought with you or what’s available from other generous passengers. So when Murderbot arrives at a new space station in the Corporate Rim, it picks up an older newsburst it does a cursory scan of but plans to ignore. Murderbot usually doesn’t care about current events, “as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it,” but when this package comes with a dire update about Mensah and her Preservation Alliance team, it drops everything. The wreckage from the incident in the first book between the company, DeltFall, GrayCris, and PresAux is still being sorted through by teams of lawyers and a very determined Pin-Lee. What troubles Murderbot is that there is footage of it, luckily only described as “bodyguard,” with the team. All over the news. 

At a glance, it can pass for an augmented human, but if it wants to keep moving through the Corporate Rim, it’s going to be a struggle not to be noticed by humans who work with SecUnits and, crucially, by other SecUnits. It already decided it’s going to solve the mystery of what actually happened in the only memory it has prior to PresAux, a fragment of something the company tried to erase that involved the slaughter of dozens of people. To get off the station quickly while also heading toward its destination on a path with as few humans as possible, it ends up hitching a ride on an empty, bot-piloted research transit vessel. Yes, my friends, it’s time to meet ART, aka Asshole Research Transport, aka the saltiest spaceship in the galaxy. 

Usually, bot pilots are barely sentient. Other than a few genial pings and maybe sharing its media, Murderbot doesn’t chitchat much with transport driver bots. This one is different. It isn’t just the pilot, it’s the ship. It’s also kind of a dick. That said, so is Murderbot. Murderbot has never encountered anything this powerful before and the ship has never encountered a rogue SecUnit before, and both react to these discoveries by poking each other with a metaphorical stick to see who breaks first. “You know, just imagine everything it says in the most sarcastic tone possible.” 

With Murderbot’s inherent distrust of everyone and everything and ART’s innate interest in anything new and unexpected, the two bots rankle each other from the get-go. Yet the reason fans love ART so much isn’t just because of its dry humor or how much it enjoys needling Murderbot. What we learn about ART’s relationship to the humans who it usually transports—that it considers them its crew and that it wants to better understand them—shapes so much of not just Murderbot’s burgeoning friendship with ART but the choices it makes in the rest of the series with regards to PresAux. “I knew ART…had a deeper attachment to its crew than SecUnits had for clients…I knew what it felt, because I felt that way about Mensah and PreservationAux.” Through ART, Murderbot learns that there’s more to being a bot than being either a slave or a rogue. ART could crush Murderbot before Murderbot even realized it was happening, but it doesn’t want to. It has wants outside of itself. SecUnit hasn’t gotten to the stage of figuring out what it wants, other than freedom, which it still doesn’t really have. It’s still looking back to the past. 

Which is what brings us to SecUnit’s destination. Before departing from ART, the bots agree to change Murderbot’s body. Or, more accurately, ART convinces Murderbot it needs to look more human in order to avoid detection. This is one of those scenes that I initially struggled with the first time I read it seven years ago. Back then, it felt too much like SecUnit choosing to pass: “My appearance, my ability to pass as an augmented human, had to be my new armor. It wouldn’t work if I couldn’t pass among humans who were familiar with SecUnits.” Passing is something that is often not well understood by younger folks, but historically it was something marginalized people did as a way to slide through majority society. In the case of Black Americans, those who were light enough sometimes chose to pass as white, either temporarily (such as going into the city to work then coming home to their Black neighborhood) or permanently (such as marrying a white person and cutting off your Black family—think Mary in Sinners). It wasn’t just having light skin that counted as passing. It was an active and continuous choice. Passing was a complicated decision with complex consequences. With my 21st century perspective of holding firm in being the truest version of myself even in the face of danger paired with the larger historical context of Black folks passing as white, Wells’ analysis of passing in this scene felt too superficial.

On this second read, with the knowledge of what happens in the series, I interpreted this moment differently. Murderbot isn’t just choosing to pass, or, to put it another way, it isn’t choosing to pass in the same way as the historical context I was bringing to the term. Rather, it’s another step on the path toward figuring out who it really is and what it really wants. Hacking its governor module, naming itself Murderbot, learning to enjoy Sanctuary Moon, choosing to save Mensah et al, choosing to leave Mensah behind, and now choosing to alter its physical form is part of its transition from a company-owned Security Unit to whatever comes next. It intentionally changes the bare minimum it must in order to fool most censors without fully committing to looking like an average human. It chooses to look like something in between, closer to an augmented human but with internal storage compartments. It’s not passing, it’s becoming. We see this nuance in the debate it and ART have over whether or not to add on body parts humans usually associate with sex. ART thinks it will help it pass, but SecUnit is intensely against it. “SecUnits also have less than null interest in human or any other kind of sex, trust me on that…I had seen humans have sex on the entertainment feed and on my contracts, when I had been required to record everything the clients said and did. No, thank you, no. No.” It’s a hard pass for me as well, Seccy. No, nada, no thank you, I’m all good, I’ll pass, nope.

After some time in the MedBay and some new code to randomize its movements, they dock at the transit ring for RaviHyral, the last stop to Ganaka Pit where the massacre took place. Murderbot takes the name Security Consultant Eden, after a character on Sanctuary Moon, and gets hired by a group from the Divarti Cluster. From what I saw in her other works, Wells is good at diverse worldbuilding, not just in terms of race but of genders as well. Here, one of the clients is tercera, with the pronouns te/ter. And in usual Wells fashion, that’s all we’re told. We don’t learn anything about the history of the term, whether it’s common across the Corporate Rim or specific to their culture, what body parts a tercera has or doesn’t have, nothing. Which I love. Frankly, it’s none of my business. Rami, Tapan, and Maro are barely out of their adolescence but on a big mission. Their employer, Tlacey Excavations, had abruptly canceled their work contract and stolen their research. They want to get that data back. With the perfect cover for Murderbot to get down to Ganaka Pit, it agrees to accompany them. Too bad Tlacey is about to do a double-cross. 

The back half of Artificial Condition is, like All Systems Red, mostly action. Murderbot has to figure out what the Big Bad really wants from its clients, stop their secret weapon from killing everyone including Murderbot, and get its clients off an inhospitable landscape with both their lives and prize intact. In this book we also meet ComfortUnits, aka SexBots, and just like ART, they aren’t what readers or Murderbot expects. One of the fun parts of this series is discovering just how unreliable a narrator Murderbot is. What it is convinced is a fact may not even be true. For example, it goes into this adventure assuming there are only two possibilities for what happened at Ganaka Pit, but ART tells them there are actually two others it never considered. The world is bigger than Murderbot realizes.

As with all of the Murderbot Diaries, the title comes from a line in the book: “In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. You should do things you’re afraid of.” However, I think it also works as a reference to Murderbot’s new physical appearance and to its current position in the world. It isn’t a real person, not fully. It’s trying on a new identity but it’s not permanent. Murderbot hasn’t settled into itself yet. It’s still passing.

The end sees another rogue bot wandering the galaxy, the unsatisfying revelation as to what happened at that mining facility, ART sailing away to collect its crew, and Murderbot once more heading out into the great beyond.

Next month we’re doing two books, Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy. See you soon![end-mark]

Buy the Book

The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol (Book 3) and Exit Strategy (Book 4)

Buy Book

The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2

Martha Wells

Rogue Protocol (Book 3) and Exit Strategy (Book 4)

Rogue Protocol (Book 3) and Exit Strategy (Book 4)

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

The post Martha Wells Book Club: <i>Artificial Condition</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Martha Wells Book Club

The Martha Wells Book Club: All Systems Red

The perfect start to one of the best science fiction series of the 21st century.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on August 20, 2025

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Like a lot of Martha Wells fans, I was introduced to her through the Murderbot Diaries. All Systems Red, the first novella in what is currently a seven book series (not counting short stories) came out in 2017 to wide acclaim, all of it worth it. As much as I love this book series—and the television show, which I reviewed on Reactor—I find the conversations around the books just as interesting. So let’s dive in, shall we?

Wells drops us right into the middle of the action. Murderbot is on some random planet with some random clients when an alien predator erupts from the soil. Prior to this, Murderbot had been watching some of the “35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music” it downloaded before departing on this contract. Once Murderbot gets Drs. Volescu and Bharadwaj to safety, things get tricky. At the hopper we meet more of the rest of the Preservation Auxiliary team: Dr. Mensah, a Black woman and the leader of the operation, Dr. Ratthi (a biologist), Pin-Lee (“experience in habitat and shelter construction”), and Dr. Arada (also a biologist). Once we arrive at the habitat, we also meet Dr. Gurathin (an augmented human and scientist) and Dr. Overse (“certified as a field medic”). 

I say this in every book club post, but one of the things Wells does best is how she strategically sprinkles information about the characters and the world. The word “SecUnit” doesn’t appear until page 27, but by that point we already know Murderbot is a contract cyborg that performs security for hire that has hacked its governor module. We know that Murderbot doesn’t particularly care about its job or its clients, and that the behavior we’ve seen thus far—the streaming, taking down its helmet to speak kindly to Volescu and Bharadwaj, riding up front with the humans instead of in the cargo bay, snapping at Ratthi—is highly unusual. She gives readers just enough to keep up while also letting us discover the world piece by piece. Infodumping? Never met her.

Due to having 20% of its mass bitten off by Hostile One, Murderbot spends some time in its repair cubicle while reflecting on its misadventures. “So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous.” Or, put another way, “murderbot + actual human = awkwardness.” That line of dialogue is the exact moment I fell in love with Murderbot. 

A lot of fans who don’t fit neatly into the gender binary, who are neurodivergent, or who are on the asexual or aromantic spectrums see ourselves reflected in Murderbot. Historically, pretty much the only rep we got in speculative fiction was as villains, secondary characters who were emotionally dead inside, or androids/cyborgs/aliens. So it’s a bit odd to find kinship in yet another robot. But Murderbot is different (I highly recommend C.N. Josephs’ excellent Reactor essay on autism and Murderbot). Murderbot may be a construct, but it’s also a person, and it’s a person struggling to be seen as a person by other people. That is incredibly relatable to me. I’m constantly butting up against things that the majority—neurotypical, allo, cis—say are obvious or basic or easy, things that everyone supposedly does. For a long time, not being able to do or feel those things made me feel broken or incomplete. It’s taken a lot of reflection and work on myself to get to a place where I can thrive in my differences, but it is still a daily challenge to navigate a world that is determined to recast those differences into problems. It felt like hacking my own governor module in a way. Masking, gender norms, and compulsory sexuality were trying to force me to be a certain way, and breaking those chains freed me to interact with the world in a way I find much more satisfying (a way that involves way less eye contact). Wells took a problematic stereotype and trope and recentered it on marginalized experiences. And it worked. Murderbot isn’t totally free, not yet, but it’ll get there soon enough.

As PresAux debriefs the predator attack, they realize their maps are incomplete. They reach out to DeltFall, another survey team on a different part of the planet, to compare notes. Despite showing its face and having to spend time with the Preservation humans in regular human clothes (its armor is still undergoing repairs), it absolutely does not want to take Mensah up on her offer to hang out. “Right now I’m pretty sure [my expression] was somewhere in the region of stunned horror, or maybe appalled horror.” Instead, it ducks out to check the perimeter “in a totally normal way and not like I was fleeing from a bunch of giant hostiles.” It’s desperate to keep itself walled off and not let anyone know anything about it. Vulnerability is hard enough even when the risk of having your rogue status revealed isn’t in play. I get it, Murderbot, I really do.

A visit to DeltFall goes spectacularly awry. Murderbot has the fight of its life against hacked SecUnits who forcibly install malware on it to “turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet.” Wells narrates the fight scene less as an action-packed battle of brute strength and more like Murderbot raging at having its bodily autonomy violated. The other SecUnit strips it of much of its armor and manipulates and modifies its body without consent. That hurts worse than the actual physical violence. 

To stop the malware taking over, Murderbot kills itself. Or, it tries to. The humans patch it back together and remove the combat override, all while Gurathin goes rummaging around in its organic brain parts to expose its deepest, darkest secrets. Eventually the humans realize they have to trust Murderbot because it’s the only one that can get them off this planet alive. 

The scene where the humans interrogate Murderbot about its motives tells us a lot about the humans, although we still know hardly anything. That’s the genius of Wells. She makes readers feel like we know these characters intimately even though we’ve only just met them. Ratthi is the bleeding heart of the group and Gurathin the Grumpy Gus. Overse and Arada are more practical. Mensah is the only one to reach out privately to Murderbot for a check-in. Each of these reactions reveals a lot about who these people are when they’re not being attacked by hostiles. 

The humans’ interactions with Murderbot up to this point are so fascinating. Several treat it like equipment while the rest treat it like a human. So far, only Mensah really treats it like a person rather than a human or a robot. I talked about this above, but it’s really important to think of Murderbot not as a type of human but as its own thing. “It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.” Our little SecUnit has only just begun its journey toward self-discovery. 

Murderbot repeatedly makes it clear that it does not want to abide by human rules about what is and isn’t appropriate. It gives itself the name “Murderbot” as a bit of a joke but also as a way of leaning into what it was designed to do and how humans see it. It uses it/its pronouns to further distinguish itself from humans and their pesky binaries. Readers often call Murderbot nonbinary, but I think that only works as a general umbrella term. I’m genderqueer but usually say I’m nonbinary since that’s the term most cis folks know that doesn’t require a bunch of explanation. But nonbinary feels too broad for me as a personal label. It’s not that I have no gender, it’s that my gender is “no.” I’m wholly uninterested in finding my place on or outside the gender spectrum. I simply do not care. Wells has consistently described Murderbot as genderless. While the character doesn’t use that specific terminology on the page, it reinforces this identity often and in a variety of ways throughout the series. And yet many fans still insist on misgendering it. 

There’s a contingent that calls it he/him. I think this sometimes derives from them coming to the series via the audiobooks narrated by Kevin R. Free, but mostly I think it’s from readers hearing “security” and “armor” and assuming masculinity. Other readers have latched onto Murderbot’s more emotional and protective aspects—I often hear them bring up a moment in a later book where a character calls it “Third Mom”—and settle on she/her. I’ve even heard that it’s “female presenting” or “assigned female at birth,” as if Murderbot is trans, identified as a woman at one point, and was, you know, born instead of fabricated. 

As a genderqueer person, I find these misgenderings frustrating for different reasons. Assigning it pronouns based on roles Western society has arbitrarily gendered feels to me like teetering toward bioessentialism, as if certain traits are inherent to certain genders, which are in turn inherent to certain body shapes and parts. There’s also the way a lot of cis people treat nonbinary people as “woman lite,” as if we’re all sort of women but not really, as if not to medically transition or having surgery to look more masculine or androgynous makes us less nonbinary or more feminine. (These assumptions also forget that folks not assigned female at birth can also be nonbinary.) I dug into this in my review of the first two episodes of the TV show with regards to casting Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot, so I won’t rehash it too much other than to say that cis people, I really need y’all to stop this whole rigamarole over Murderbot’s gender identity and pronouns. Just call people what they want to be called. It’s not hard to be respectful. You don’t need to understand it, you don’t need to psychoanalyze it. Body parts, appearance, and clothing do not indicate anything about a person’s gender identity. Because I guarantee you, as much as you misgender a fictional character, there are real people in your lives who are under the nonbinary umbrella who are also sick of your shit.

The final confrontation with the enemy hostiles involves some excellent Murderbot subterfuge. It has to pretend to be a functional SecUnit while also trying to lie on the spot. From a craft perspective, it’s a brilliant way to have Murderbot confront the very thing it fears the most and do it in a way that ultimately liberates it from that fear. Murderbot makes a grand gesture and nearly dies because of it. Once everything is said and done, Murderbot is offered freedom, but at a price. “Guardian was a nicer word than owner,” it notes. So it strikes out into the great unknown. The novella is written in first person as if it was a dictated message to Dr. Mensah, “my favorite human.” And with that, the end.

All Systems Red is one of those rare books I’ve reread multiple times since it first came out in 2017. It’s perfectly plotted, the worldbuilding is exquisite, and the characters are delightful. I’d put it in one of the best books of the 21st century so far. I don’t have a single negative thing to say about it. I love how little Wells gives the reader to go on in terms of description and the sarcastic, colloquial narrative style. It’s fresh and punchy. I don’t like to say a book is for everyone or that everyone will love a book, but this is also one of my most recommended books. Rereading it yet again was just as enjoyable as the first time. Technically, I read this while also watching the show, and it was a lot of fun to compare and contrast. The show is similar yet fairly different from the book, but in a way I think honors the worldbuilding and character development in the book series.

Be back here next time for Artificial Condition and the introduction of the transport bot we all know and love, ART! As much as I adore the first novella, I haven’t reread any of the others, so I’m excited to continue this space adventure. And if you are still on the fence about the Murderbot TV show, I hope this installment has convinced you to go check it out.[end-mark]

Buy the Book

Artificial Condition

Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 2)

Buy Book

Artificial Condition

Martha Wells

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 2)

The Murderbot Diaries (Volume 2)

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The post The Martha Wells Book Club: <i>All Systems Red</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Murderbot

Premium Quality Entertainment: The Joys of Murderbot and Sanctuary Moon

You can only find Murderbot by looking for what it loves.

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on July 31, 2025

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I’m about to get serious and annoying about Murderbot and its love of media again. I’ve talked about this before, right after I read Network Effect and had so many pesky emotions that I essayed about it. You can read that here, but warning that it covers the first four books in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, so it’s got more spoilers than Sanctuary Moon has unrealistic plot twists.

But, look. I love these books, and I love this show, and I want to dig into how the show has chosen to use Murderbot’s serial watching habits. And I’m going to be serious and annoying about it. So first I want to give myself, and you, person who’s reading this (thank you, by the way), space to yell about how freaking fun Sanctuary Moon is.

IT’S SO FUN.

From the books, I imagined Sanctuary Moon as kind of Star Trek-meets-Law & Order, with utilitarian lighting, over-the-top music cues, and questionable acting. I love how series creators Paul and Chris Weitz transformed it into a candy-colored fantasia—and the acting is questionable, but in the best way possible. I haven’t had a custom ringtone for a very long time (to give you an idea, the last one I had was this Mighty Boosh song) but if I could hear Jack McBrayer say “Stars, Captain!” every time my phone rings, I might leave the sound on.

I need to take a second to meditate upon the charisma of John Cho. There’s scene where his Captain Hossein and DeWanda Wise’s NavBot are stranded together, and he flirts with her, and by the end of their scene I wanted an entire romcom with these two. I love it when people commit to the bit, and goddamn did everyone commit here. (For more John Cho, watch Columbus. It’s one of the best movies of the decade, and I think it’s on Tubi right now.)

The Weitzes gave Sanctuary Moon a theme song that’s both a ridiculous standalone and an important plot point. They give us just enough of this show that we can enter into the silliness of it, and then use it as a counterpoint, a commentary, and at times, almost a sacred artifact. Likewise, the brief scenes of STRIFE IN THE GALAXY, which I can only write in CAPSLOCK, act as a hilarious window into Murderbot’s life. If this is the only exposure most humans get to SecUnits, no wonder their interactions are tense. I do also love the implication that humans are making melodramas about SecUnit autonomy and rights, where they’re literally monologuing while torn in half, but then still treating them like shit in real life.

The adaptation balances the humor perfectly. While The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon seems kind of silly, and Murderbot’s obsessive love of the show is gently teased occasionally, the Murderbot series itself never mocks that love. The writers balance the fact that Murderbot is maybe a little too obsessed with a strong argument that the SecUnit is correct to love Sanctuary Moon—often in the same scene.

Sanctuary Moon itself is used as a litmus test—most characters who mention it think it’s garbage, but Ratthi, Pin-Lee, and one of the GrayCris team have all clearly watched a lot of it, whether they want to admit that or not. Meanwhile Mensah, the PreservationAux leader, and Gurathin (obviously), react to it like it’s radioactive. This makes for the fun running gag of Murderbot defending it as “premium quality entertainment”—it’s really not—but also for a few really touching moments that I’ll dig into below. As in the book, when the PresAux team finds out that Murderbot is a free agent, they’re freaked the hell out. Murderbot refers to this as an “oh shit” moment—a term its gotten from its media habit—but even as it’s processing this moment, the team’s sudden fear of their SecUnit is undercut with confusion because of its love of serials. Ratthi (obviously) is the one who steps up to test Murderbot’s knowledge; the Sanctuary Moon plot point he mentions is even more convoluted than the one in Wells’ book, and both Ratthi and Pin-Lee are excited that Murderbot recognizes such a deep cut from the show.

Murderbot uses Sanctuary Moon repeatedly in its job, in a way that landed harder for me in the show than it even did in the books. When it quotes lines from the show to calm Arada during the Tooth-Monster attack, we also get to see two absurdly costumed actors over-emote their way through a scene. (“What planet are you from???” “A little place… called… Sanctuary… Moon…”) The fact that Murderbot took this cheeseball dialogue and used it unironically to coax Arada through her shock is, honestly, moving. I find it all the more touching because sweet, pure, serious-minded Arada probably hasn’t watched the show. (I get clear “I don’t even own a TV” vibes from her.) For her, these were sincere questions coming from a kind person during a crisis. For Murderbot, it was a useful example of how humans talk to each other when one of them might be bleeding to death.

After the success with Arada, Murderbot goes back to the Sanctuary Moon well several times. It borrows two different plot points from a character named Lieutenant Kogi, first as it tries to deal with the tragedy at DeltFall, and later when it confronts GrayCris. Neither of these plot points work perfectly, but they’re better than nothing.

When a rogue SecUnit tries to implant an override in Murderbot’s governor module it sings the Sanctuary Moon theme song as a distraction, which actually buys it a few precious seconds of reboot time. (And how sweet is it that even when most of its systems are offline, it can still remember that theme song?)

And most directly, when Murderbot finds itself outmatched during a battle, it downloads its entire media library into another Unit’s mind, until its enemy’s head explodes. Which gives you some idea of how many seasons our perfect Murderbot is lugging around with it—but I mean you never know when you’ll need to marathon something.

But unsurprisingly, my favorite examples are far more emotional than utilitarian.

When Murderbot begins to actually like Dr. Mensah, it expresses this to itself by imagining her as the captain of the ship on Sanctuary Moon, casting itself as a loyal-but-bumbling crewmember. And when it saves Gurathin and the team by shooting Leebeebee, it’s shocked to find that the pacifists of PresAux are horrified—but it expresses this shock not by dismissing them as overemotional humans, but by being hurt and confused because characters on serials are always grateful when villains are dispatched.

In All Systems Red, Dr. Mensah is shown to be an extremely competent, thoughtful leader, constantly breaking off into backchannel strategy sessions with SecUnit. As the books go on and Murderbot gets to know her better, the character gains more layers, but it takes a while to get there. Here, the show dives in and gives us a Mensah who is blisteringly intelligent and competent, yes, but who is a real person dealing with terrible pressure. Back home, some members of Preservation Alliance are flirting with the idea of joining Corporation Rim, and the only way to ensure their autonomy, and make enough money to stay competitive, is to deal with the capitalistic nightmare that is Corporation Rim. So it isn’t even just the basic stress of Mensah having to put her Presidency on pause to stay up-to-date in her academic work (it’s a very cool rule)—she also has to prove herself as a world leader in a precarious moment.

(I’m assuming the pro-Corporation Rim factions will become more of a plot point if the show gets enough seasons.)

(Please get enough seasons, show. I need 2,797 episodes of this.)

Mensah occasionally messes up, and she has overwhelming panic attacks that she secretly fears are heart attacks. Initially, Murderbot notes these attacks and dismisses them as not its problem. But when the two are stranded together with a damaged hopper because of a GrayCris assassination attempt, Murderbot’s media obsession becomes the crux of an episode in a fascinating way.  

First, the bad: Murderbot deleted its copy of the hopper manual, thus stranding itself and Mensah with no way to repair the only transportation they have. This is made worse when they realize that GrayCris is trying to kill them all, and the team back at the habitat are also in mortal danger—and there’s no way to even warn them, let alone get back to them. And this is made even worse when Murderbot admits it deleted the manual from its data banks to make room for more seasons of Sanctuary Moon. But the good is soon revealed as well. Mensah has another panic attack.

Rather than ignoring her condition, Murderbot sits with her, and helps her in a way that would only occur to it: it hits play on Sanctuary Moon. At first, Mensah’s pissed and frustrated, but as Murderbot explains the episode, she’s distracted enough that her symptoms get a little better almost immediately. Again we get to hear Murderbot sing the theme song, but not in a tactical way. It sings the song—quietly, to itself—because the song makes it happy.

If I had to pick one favorite moment from the entire season—well, it would probably be one of Murderbot’s micro-expressions or Gurathin smiling, but way up in the Top Five is Mensah’s expression as she turns and watches Murderbot sing. The show has only existed for a few months and I don’t know how many times I’ve replayed that moment in my head. I know it’s a large number. We soon learn that this episode of Sanctuary Moon features a pivotal meditative breathing exercise, and we watch Murderbot “breathe” along with the characters on the screen, even though it doesn’t need to breathe at all. Mensah, also seeing this, joins in. After a moment, her heart rate has slowed and her panic has ebbed.

Even though Mensah thinks the show is terrible, she acknowledges that the premise of the episode (a character’s adoptive parents are from a species with a shorter life cycle than their own, and they’re dying now—which is admittedly a great premise) is sad, prompting Murderbot to agree. Even though she doesn’t value this thing as art, it still helps her to sit with her friend and breathe—and her friend is only able to do this through the format of the show. Murderbot wouldn’t know to use this technique for her without its favorite show. And Mensah most likely wouldn’t have listened to Murderbot if it had simply told her to breathe—she needed to witness the SecUnit empathizing with characters on its show. The balm of Sanctuary Moon gives Mensah enough mental space to help when Murderbot collapses from a loss of fluids, which in turn gives the SecUnit an idea to fix the hopper and get them back to the habitat in time to save the team.

In the very next episode, we come to an astonishing scene where Gurathin refuses painkillers during an operation. The others protest, but he knows that this might trigger a relapse into his old addictions, and he can’t risk that. Murderbot and Gurathin have the same thought at the same moment: if it links to Gurathin’s data port, it can block the pain from his central nervous system. But where Gura’s thinking of this because he’s good at problem-solving (and also maybe he sees a chance to root around in SecUnit’s mind) Murderbot gets the idea from a show. When Mensah asks if it saw this on Sanctuary Moon it huffily says no… only to reveal in its inner monologue that it got the idea from a different show, MedCenter Argala. (But they’re known for their accuracy!)

This scene is one of those precise, razor’s edge moments in art that makes my brain sing. First of all, Gurathin’s insistence on not using any drugs, even in this situation, is heartbreaking. (There’s a similar scene in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and just thinking about that makes me cry, so this, uhhhh, did stuff to me.) But the scene only starts there. It flashes to a surprising moment of communication between Murderbot and Gurathin, and rests there only a moment before veering into comedy with the MedCenter Argala reveal (Maybe the hardest I laughed all season? Why the hell isn’t Skarsgard up for an Emmy?) only to then crater into Murderbot inadvertently revealing Gurathin’s unrequited love for Mensah, and THEN Gurathin not only dredging up Murderbot’s rawest memory, but also telling everyone its private name for itself.

Was that Gurathin’s plan from the start, even through the haze of pain? Or did he understand what Murderbot just revealed to everyone, and lashed out in retaliation?  

This scene that starts as this achingly sweet moment of the whole team coming together to help Gurathin, and of Murderbot helping in a way only it can, becomes instead a scene where the two most vulnerable members of the team have their deepest secrets put on display, against their wills.

And it all hinges on MedCenter Argala—the only reason Murderbot has the idea for the neural block in the first place.

And finally, and maybe most important, Murderbot’s media is revealed to be the core of its selfhood in a scene that riffs on events from the fifth book in the series, Network Effect.

When Murderbot’s memories are wiped, it loses all of its experiences with PresAux, along with its media library. It’s returned to factory settings. Now, in a different kind of show, it would be a memory of Mensah, or Ratthi saying “Seccy!” or even of Gurathin being a dick that would bring its personality back. But Murderbot isn’t going to hold our hands like that.

When Gurathin blackmails his old dealer into giving him access to the Company’s data, he does a search for recently wiped SecUnits, and he searches for the words “Preservation Alliance”. Those searches yield nothing, and for a second he sits thinking while his dealer insists his attempts are futile anyway. He’s more aware than any of his friends of the hopelessness their situation. And then he realizes what he should try.  

Typing in “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon” gives him a whole screen of files, plus the image of their beloved Murderbot. And what does GuGu do? He downloads all of it, even the show he hates, to make sure they’re able to reconstruct their friend.

This is what makes the ending land so hard for me. Murderbot and Gurathin have been inside each others’ minds, multiple times, for multiple reasons. They both betrayed each other terribly. Murderbot saved Gura from Leebeebee, and, later, from horrific pain during surgery. Gurathin held all of Murderbot inside of his own mind, at great physical risk, in order to rescue it. The two of them now know each other better than anyone else knows them. And it’s Gurathin, the one who initially thought that Murderbot couldn’t possibly be watching all those shows, who understands that the way to rescue it from the Corporation is to search for what it loves.

In the end, he’s also the one who understands better than anyone why Murderbot needs to leave at the end, because despite what the PresAux team believes, sometimes you can’t always talk about your trauma. At least, not right away.

Sometimes you need to sit with premium quality entertainment for a while.

In the very last moments of the show, Murderbot plays a role it’s seen many times in its media, pretending to be a “happy servant bot” like one from a serial to hitch a ride with a transport. It uses its media files to barter for a ride, because with the right person/bot, that show you love can be currency. And assuming that season two follows the plot of Martha Wells’ books, we have a lot more media, and ART, to look forward to.[end-mark]

The post Premium Quality Entertainment: The Joys of <i>Murderbot</i> and <i>Sanctuary Moon</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Murderbot

I Didn’t Expect Dr. Gurathin To Be My Favorite Part of Murderbot

I’d offer Dr. Gurathin a hug but he’d HATE that

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on July 22, 2025

Credit: Apple TV+

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Credit: Apple TV+

If you want to make me love your work, take a scene or a character who could have been flat or cliche or basic, and write them a wildly new direction. In Murderbot, to my surprise and delight, it was what the Weitzes did with the character of Dr. Gurathin. In the books, Gurathin is the one member of the PresAux team who’s a little more suspicious of their assigned SecUnit. He clocks that Murderbot is acting weird, and he questions it in front of the rest of the group to figure out whether they’re in danger. Once they figure out that it’s autonomous, he needles Murderbot occasionally just to make sure it’s not going to go rogue and kill them all. This is brave of him, from a certain point of view, but also stupid, and Dr. Mensah mostly seems to be annoyed when he does it.

When I learned that David Dastmalchian had been cast in the Murderbot adaptation, I figured he was playing Dr. Gurathin, and that Gurathin’s role was going to be expanded a bit. My first thought was that he would be the Dr. Smith of the group, which would have been fun, but nowhere near as meaningful as the path they took.

One of the highlights of reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot books is watching as she builds a comprehensive critique of unchecked capitalism. As we travel through her world, and meet Murderbot, ART, Three, and the Preservation Alliance team, we gradually see how corporate greed has ruined every aspect of sentient life. It works incredibly well because, since we’re in Murderbot’s head, the horrors of the Corporation Rim are presented as simple fact: many of Murderbot’s clients torture it for fun; SecUnits and ComfortUnits have to obey orders no matter the circumstances; many of Murderbot’s clients make equipment a higher priority than human life or safety; yes Murderbot is also equipment; of course the Company can be bribed.

We get a sense of how bad things are largely from watching Murderbot’s confusion and initial discomfort as it gets to know its new clients from Preservation Alliance, where life and freedom have intrinsic value, and where Murderbot itself would be a person with autonomy.   

Since the first season of Murderbot primarily adapts Wells’ first book, All Systems Red, it can’t show us all the worldbuilding yet. Instead, the writers decided to frontload a critique of capitalism that feels much harsher and more immediate than the one in the book. Some of this is purely a matter of medium I think—we see the cops order SecUnits to attack starving indentured servants; we see the exhaustion and desperation of the people who work at the SecUnit factory; we see that the world Murderbot accepts as normal is deeply, terribly sick. And on top of that, best of all, we have Gurathin.

Gurathin starts out as the same character he was in the book: an augmented human, slightly shy and awkward, and openly more suspicious of Murderbot than the rest of the Preservation Alliance team. When we meet him, we see that he hold himself back from the rest of the team. When PresAux meets with the Company to fine tune their mission, he glares at the reps like he expects a fight. He’s reluctant to turn his back on them long enough to join the Consensus Circle; he also doesn’t want them to watch him join hands with his friends. And, as Alex Brown pointed out in their fabulous episode reviews, note how Gurathin dresses: the bright colors of PresAux covered by a bland suit jacket. He doesn’t want people to notice him. He doesn’t want to seem “weird”.

At the habitat, while the others dance freely to their upsetting music, Gurathin does… pretty much what I’d do in the scenario: he stands still, only moving his torso and arms, folded into himself like he wants to make himself small. His resistance to Murderbot is presented as a distrust of corporate spyware. But the expansion of his character begins when he asks everyone to meet in the hopper to avoid Murderbot overhearing his suspicions. Ratthi says Gurathin doesn’t trust anyone, which in a different kind of show would just be a comedy setup—“here’s Gurathin, our resident grump, he’ll be cynical about Murderbot until it saves him and he admits he likes it.” But on this show, one that takes human emotion seriously and treats its characters and audience with the care we all deserve, the scene becomes something else entirely. No one treats this like comedy. Gurathin turns to Ratthi, and with total sincerity replies, “I trust you. I trust this team. I don’t trust anything that comes from the Company.”

Oh.

Mensah responds by saying “You have good reason for that”—which immediately tells us that Gurathin has a history with Corporation Rim that the others do not. And, being Preservation, they all chime in with affirmations, tell him they love him, and Ratthi calls him “Gugu”.

The grumpy cynic is not being dismissed or discounted, and now we know he has a History.

When he forces Murderbot to meet with him privately, he vacillates between seemingly sincere questions about Murderbot’s sense of self, and more pointed ones that show his distrust of Corporation Rim. His interrogation is cruel if you know anything about Murderbot and its hatred of interpersonal contact. The eye contact thing is actually torture—there’s no mission-based reason for it, Gurathin’s only doing it because he knows it makes Murderbot uncomfortable, and he knows it can’t say no. The rest of PresAux would be horrified if they saw him doing this.

He uses the interrogation to establish that Murderbot shouldn’t have emotional attachments, that there’s a line between it and a “ComfortUnit”—and he takes the time to tell it that in Preservation Alliance it would be considered a person. He goes on to say that he’s only been in the Alliance six years, and that he joined because he was friends with Dr. Mensah. (We later learn that this is a much more complicated situation.) Gurathin describes himself as being “extremely cautious” and tells Murderbot that he cares very deeply about his friends, but his intensity and attempted Bond Villain vibe are undercut when when Mensah and Bharadwaj end up in actual danger, and Murderbot isn’t there to protect them. After that, Gurathin seems to step back for a while, presumably muttering to himself that the rest of the team are being too trusting.

While Murderbot is away with Mensah we get the first real hint about Gura’s past, but it’s hidden in a charged moment so it could be overlooked. When Leebeebee is hovering, and trying to get Gura to talk with her about his projects, she offers him a “stimulant” from the Medpak, and he snaps “No!” in response. Which in the moment could be seen as the Grumpy One being annoyed, but it still seems like an overreaction to what could be a traumatized person trying to make a connection.

It’s revealed that this wasn’t an overreaction in the next episode, which was when I realized what the show was doing.

Is the “Bitter/Sweet” scene my favorite in the show? I think there are a few others that top it, but only barely. The teammates are playing a “game” where people share their memories of each other, teasing out moments that were “sweet”, but balancing them with moments that were “bitter”. This is the kind of thing only Preservation Alliance would call a game—if I was invited to their table I’d definitely go with an acid bath instead.

When it’s Gurathin’s turn, he only gives in because they chant his name loud enough that people at other tables begin to stare. It seems like he’s never played before—he checks with the others to make sure he’s doing the hand gestures correctly, and, rather than telling them about a simple moment of interpersonal connection, or like a time Ratthi annoyed him or something, he dives straight into terrible trauma. And it’s here that the season’s true critique of capitalism snaps into focus. He was targeted by the Corporation, who saw an opportunity to exploit the augments that set him apart and could be used for so much good. He was intentionally hooked on hardcore drugs, and forced to spy for the Company on pain of being refused his medication. He didn’t just join Preservation Alliance because he and Mensah were “friends” like he told Murderbot—Mensah was meant to be his latest victim. Faced with her loving personality he came clean. Faced with this broken, desperate man, she offered him sanctuary and a shot at a new life.

He tells his story in present tense. He’s telling this story to them, now, on the eve of their mission, in the belly of his personal beast, surrounded by the life that almost killed him. He ends his “sweet” memory by saying, “I see what is possible between people of good will. I break down, tell her everything… she forgives me. And I move to Preservation Alliance and here we are.” Then he flees the table rather than giving a “bitter” memory—as though there isn’t enough bitter laced into what he’s just said?

Because think about what he’s editing out as he speaks to them: escape from his corporate overlords, flight to a strange part of the galaxy, learning how to live in a society that is utterly alien to him (six years later he’s still visibly uncomfortable with it), a leap into the unknown—all of that without getting into the hell of kicking drugs that were custom-made to control him. (I’ll mention that Dastmalchian’s acting here is among the best of the series–I’ve loved Dastmalchian since I saw The Dark Knight on opening night in 2008, and watching him carve out his own fabulous goth niche alongside his work in stuff like Late Night with The Devil and Animals has made my sparkly black heart sing. And this??? I practically crawled into my TV during this scene.)

But the other thing that gets to me is just how raw it is. Not to dismiss Bharadwaj’s pain, but she’s confessing to having feelings for a coworker, and whomst among us? But when we get to Gura’s turn, he trusts them with part of the truth of who he is—a truth that could make them look at him differently, that could set him even more apart from them. He honors the conceit of the game with an offering that is as bitter and sweet as anything could be. And he does it in this glittering restaurant, in the place he hates most, surrounded by all the trappings that almost killed him. In this room filled with artifice and small talk, elites eating and drinking while indentured servants and enslaved bots provide all the labor, he cuts through all of it to get to a place of brutal honesty. Gurathin is what happens when capitalism can do whatever it wants. It latches onto a person and sucks them dry until they’d rather die than keep living under it.

Again, I love it when people take big swings. This games could have happened privately in the team’s quarters. He could have told his friends his story after he was shot, to explain why he wouldn’t use painkillers. The Weitzes could have undercut it with jokes, Dastmalchian could have added a layer of irony to distance present Gurathin from his past. Instead they use the scene to get the core of what capitalism does to people: make you want more and more and more, and then hold that “more” just out of reach to control you.   He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of.

He chooses to tell his friends about this now, on the eve of their mission, so they can see what the Corporation is truly capable of. This is why he’s been holding himself back, this is why he’s been suspicious of Murderbot, why he was suspicious of Leebeebee, why he snarled at her when she casually offered him speed. Where Murderbot’s greatest fear is the Acid Bath, Gura’s is falling back into addiction, being dragged back to the Corporation Rim, back to the half life he had there. This is how much he loves Mensah and the team, that he’ll come on the mission with them, because he knows he’s the only one who understands what they’re dealing with.

Well, him and Murderbot. But he can’t trust Murderbot.

Which leads to the most heartbreaking scene of the show. He’s been shot, the wound is infected, Bharadwaj can operate on him but he can’t have any pain meds without risking addiction again. At first he tells Murderbot to restrain him, but then both of them seem to have the same idea at the same time—Murderbot can link to him and block the pain from hitting his nervous system. If he hadn’t had the idea, it seems like Murderbot would have suggested it anyway, which is what makes everything worse. Murderbot pokes around in Gura’s head (payback for their earlier confrontation) but then inadvertently reveals the man’s deepest secret, and most likely the thing he would have claimed as “bitter” during that dinner a month ago: he’s in love with Mensah, and she doesn’t love him back. Not like that, anyway.

But even here, Murderbot doesn’t announce that—it just, again, seemingly accidentally, says “Why don’t you love me back” out loud. Mensah knows what the words means; who knows if the others do? Gura even asks if he’s said something, implying that when the two of them are linked together, the lines between Murderbot and Gura are blurry at best. So when Gura chooses to stay in Murderbot’s mind for an extra second, dredge up the memory of the massacre, blurt it out to the group, and reveal Murderbot’s name for itself—despite Murderbot saying “Don’t!” with more emotion than it’s ever had in its voice before—it feels like a far greater betrayal than Murderbot’s slip. Is this Gura’s spy training coming to the fore? Or was this pure anger, lashing out at a being he already doesn’t trust, after having to make himself vulnerable? Why else would he take that extra beat to lock eyes with Murderbot and say, “You’re defective”?

Under a capitalist system “defective” is the worst thing you can be. If you can’t do your job, make your company money, and spend your money to fund other companies, you’re useless. Everything in a society like that will hammer home the idea that your life has no worth if it isn’t earning money or spending it. If you’re a SecUnit who can’t be trusted to do security, you’ll be melted down and stripped for parts. If you’re an augmented human, you’ll be hooked on drugs and used as a weapon.  

How often were insults like that thrown at Gurathin, in his old life? Of course he puts Murderbot’s worst fear, and his own, into words and spits it out for the whole team to hear.

But as he says later, he’s been in Murderbot’s mind. He’s the one who figures out its secret plan, who has an abrupt and total change of heart when he realizes that Murderbot is about to sacrifice itself for them. He’s the one who risks capture to finish the beacon launch, and it’s him, not Mensah, who realizes Murderbot is dying and runs to its side.

He’s also the only one who knows what it’s going to take to get Murderbot back.

While the rest of the team try to use political power (“‘Madame President’. You will address me as ‘Madame President’.”) legal wrestling in the form of Pin-Lee’s massive lawsuit, and sheer emotion and appeals to common decency, it’s Gurathin who understands the Corporation Rim. He’s the one who finally steps into the center, sits down across from the company reps, and tells them that they’ll buy SecUnit. Naturally the others react in horror, because SecUnit isn’t an object to be bought or sold, but Gurathin understands that here, it is. But more than that: they all are. The Preservation Alliance doesn’t realize it, but he knows: you can believe in autonomy and self-determination and free will and even the soul—you can believe anything you want; functionally speaking, if you’re in a room with people who are more powerful than you and the majority of them don’t agree that you’re a person, your internal personhood ceases to matter.

So, use your wallet.

The problem is that they’ve already downloaded SecUnit’s personality and cycled it back into the system. And it’s here that for once capitalism inadvertently saves the day.

While the rest of them are basically helpless, Mensah says, “I refuse to believe that the experience of everything we went through together is just a stream of zeros and ones” and Gurathin snaps “It is.” As she looks up at him, startled, he repeats himself, but more quietly. Mensah still pushes back. “Removed? Yes. Erased? No.” But Gurathin points out that that’s the true evil here. Sure, they’ll keep Murderbot’s memories to strip them for any data they can use, but “personality doesn’t possess any monetary value to them. This is Corporation Rim—they don’t play fair.”

And he thinks like one of them.

He goes back to his old dealer, but this isn’t the kind of soapy, over-the-top show Murderbot would like, so there’s nothing seedy here. This isn’t a drug den or the backroom of a nightclub or anything, just an apartment. Gura’s dealer was a co-worker, a regular man with a day job, who ended up exploiting someone who would have been his friend in a better society. I would be willing to bet my own capitalist earnings that the dealer didn’t have much more choice than Gurathin did. Now he’s free of that life. He has a kid, and (thanks to Leebeebee) we know that’s prohibitively expensive, so he must have done well for himself. But here’s where Gurathin twists the knife. There is only a thin door between the ex-dealer’s husband and child—and the truth of how he used to make his money. The man caves to Gurathin’s blackmail almost immediately.

Who knows if there will be consequences for this man? If Gurathin’s hacking and theft comes to light will it be traced back to him? Will he lose his career and family after all this, anyway? Gurathin can’t let himself care. He can’t think like a member of Preservation Alliance if he wants to win against the Corporation.

He goes into the system, searches for the remnants of Murderbot’s personality. He tries a couple basic searches before he realizes that the key to finding Murderbot is through accepting Murderbot for who it is. He searches for the soap opera that he’s never watched and regards with distaste, and there’s their Murderbot, its personality shaped by the media it loves.

Gurathin then does something that no one else could do: he uploads Murderbot into his own mind. Even as he’s told not to.

Pin-Lee’s legal actions have worked in that they’ve been able to retrieve Murderbot’s body; Mensah’s political clout allowed her to offer up the GrayCris scandal to a ravenous media industrial complex. They’re able to fight the Corporation Rim in ways that don’t touch their selfhood—if anything, this will enhance Pin-Lee’s status as a lawyer, and other leaders will learn not to test Mensah. But Gurathin is the one who knows that you have to get dirty if you want to beat the Corporation. He drags himself back into the shame of his old life, he comes face-to-face with the worst moments of his past by confronting his old dealer. He checks his own moral code at the door to threaten the man into giving him what he wants. He presumably risks arrest if he’s caught hacking into a Company database. He risks his own mind by uploading Murderbot. And what happens? He runs back into PresAux’s suite and pukes into the sink from the physical strain, and Mensah, of course, thinks he’s relapsed. His friends are so shocked by what’s happening, and by seeing Murderbot come back to itself, that no one even thinks to thank him at first.

He wants so badly to be Murderbot’s mentor, to help it learn how to live in Preservation Alliance, as Mensah helped him six years before. And of everyone on the team, he might be the one human who could. But he’s also the only one who can really understand why Murderbot needs to go. It has to be in its own head for a while, and figure out what it wants on its own terms, not by talking about it with humans who, try as they might, literally can’t imagine what it’s been through. He hasn’t just seen inside Murderbot’s mind, he’s held it inside of his own, and learned its language enough to let it go by agreeing that, “You need to check the perimeter.”

In the end we watch the person who was the most twisted by Corporation Rim’s capitalist machine define himself by the gifts he gives freely to his friends. He chooses to tell his friends his story. To trust them. To let them in. He chooses to dive back into his past, and face his worst fears, to rescue Murderbot’s consciousness. He takes Murderbot into himself, gives it the gift of space in his own mind, to give it a shot at a new life. And he gives it the gift of letting it go without an argument, something I don’t think Mensah herself would have been able to do, if she’d been the one to wake up.

Lately I’ve been thinking even more than usual about What Art Can Accomplish Right Now. I doubt I’m alone in that. I think it’s this. The Weitzes looked at Dr. Gurathin, and saw an opportunity to layer in a backstory that didn’t just add depth to the character, but also became a prism for the themes of the books and the show. Murderbot is about free will, but through Gurathin the show is able to ask: how much free will can even a human person really have under a system that sees them as only as a resource to be exploited? Rather than giving us info dumps or exposition, they found a way to talk about this giant capital-T THEME through an irritating, hilarious, deeply lovable character.[end-mark]

The post I Didn’t Expect Dr. Gurathin To Be My Favorite Part of <em>Murderbot</em> appeared first on Reactor.

News Murderbot

Murderbot Has Been Renewed for a Second Season on Apple TV+!

The season one finale of the show premieres on July 11, 2025

By Vanessa Armstrong

|

Published on July 10, 2025

Credit: Apple TV+

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Credit: Apple TV+

Please pause your binge watch of Sanctuary Moon for one second: We have exciting news! Murderbot, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Martha Wells’ beloved series, has been renewed for a second season!

“We’re so grateful for the response that Murderbot has received, and delighted that we’re getting to go back to Martha Wells’ world to work with Alexander [Skarsgård], Apple, CBS Studios and the rest of the team,” creators, directors and executive producers Chris and Paul Weitz said in a statement.

“Chris, Paul, Alexander and the entire Murderbot team have delivered a brilliantly original, addictive, witty and vibrant adaptation that has captured the imagination of audiences everywhere,” added Matt Cherniss, head of programming, Apple TV+. “We can’t wait to unveil what’s next for Murderbot and, of course, Sanctuary Moon in season two.”

The first season of the show, which has its season finale premiering tomorrow, on July 11, follows Wells’ first novella, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays the titular Muderbot and the series also stars Noma Dumezweni (Presumed Innocent), David Dastmalchian (Late Night with The Devil), Sabrina Wu (Joy Ride), Akshay Khanna (Critical Incident), Tamara Podemski (Outer Range),  and Tattiawna Jones (The Handmaid’s Tale).

We don’t have details what season two will cover, but odds are good that it will involve Martha Wells’ second book in the series, Artificial Condition. And if you need more Murderbot before then, Wells has got you! Reactor will be posting a new Murderbot novelette (for free!) after tomorrow’s season finale. [end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Has Been Renewed for a Second Season on Apple TV+! appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Is Faced With a Choice in Season Finale “The Perimeter”

First comes the illusion of choice; then a real one.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on July 11, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

We’ve reached the final episode of what is hopefully the first of many seasons of Murderbot. In it, we get corporate shenanigans, a PR nightmare, and the illusion of choice.

Spoilers ahoy!

“Something has happened.” We open with “system reboot” flashing on the screen. Murderbot’s voice sounds hollow. It repeats that phrase as its eyes open, sounding more like itself now. Murderbot doesn’t know where it is, but we the audience do. It’s back in the Threshold Pass Fabrication Center from the fourth episode. The workers wipe its memory, and the last thing it sees is Mensah gazing up at it. Next comes a new governor module (and a globule of spit). The Company claims SecUnits are nothing more than equipment, but they treat them worse than that. You don’t humiliate, degrade, and insult a tent, to use Arada’s example. The workers treat the equipment they use to maintain SecUnits better than they treat the actual SecUnits.

PresAux is also in the Corporate Rim, back in the meeting room where they made their initial deal with the Company. The suits are confused as to why they’re so concerned with “the physical location of a particular piece of equipment.” Pin-Lee gets to play lawyer for a hot minute as they take on the “fucker” in charge. Later, as the group discusses next steps, they’re torn about SecUnit. As Gurathin points out, “that Unit is full of proprietary data.” He’s certain the Company is going through Murderbot’s memory looking for anything they can sell. 

Things aren’t great in the Corporate Rim. We’ve seen hints of this in the indenture contracts and Gugu getting press ganged into the Company’s espionage squad, but now we see that unrest billowing out into the working class. SecUnit’s contract has been passed onto law enforcement, something Ratthi discovers the hard way. I live in Southern California, where the military is marching around doing disruptive demonstrations, ICE is terrorizing my neighbors, and local cops are aiding and abetting the state. So to see Murderbot go from a goofy little droid who just wants to watch space soaps to a weapon of state violence was a hard dose of truth in fiction. 

Strikers are protesting and the cops are eager to “do some damage” by antagonizing the workers into bloodshed. It’s a helluva thing to hear human strikers chant “We’re not slaves!” while a bunch of cops sic a group of enslaved constructs on them. Because these people are in violation of their indenture contract, they’re effectively without rights. However, remember that most of these humans are/were on indenture. Indenture is terrible for everyone involved except those turning a profit, but it’s not slavery. They have the choice to strike and fight back (so did real enslaved Africans, to be fair; there were a couple hundred slave rebellions in the so-called New World, not to mention the Haitian Revolution). SecUnits do not have that choice. 

Those strikers don’t see SecUnits as potential allies. Why would they? SecUnits are things, equipment, tools. They aren’t people to Corporate Rim indentured workers. That division is sown by the Corporate Rim and reinforced by Corporate Rim humans (and those streaming shows Murderbot likes so much). That fraction of a memory of a massacre is still in Murderbot’s brain, and it pops back right as the melee kicks off with the protestors, causing it to glitch out. It doesn’t want to hurt humans, no matter what its governor module commands. Instead of using Murderbot’s glitch as an opportunity to go after the human cops or to try and turn that SecUnit to their side, the strikers pummel Murderbot with their own weapons. On one hand, I understand why. They feel powerless, and as we’ve seen before, wielding what tiny bit of power they have over SecUnits is a way to feel in control of their lives. On the other hand, SecUnits are tools in this situation; go after the hand holding the weapon, not the weapon itself. Most of the humans in the fray aren’t doing anything but cheering on those attacking Murderbot with hammers. They aren’t attacking other SecUnits or the cops, just celebrating destroying a toaster. It’s a complicated, nuanced scene in which humans on both sides come out looking not great.

This moral haziness is explored again through Gurathin’s interactions with his former drug dealer. The guy acts like he had no choice and elides all responsibility, as if the fact that he doesn’t deal drugs now makes up for what he did then. He did his time in the trenches. He used Gurathin to earn his way into a good job, nice apartment, and a happy, well-cared-for kid. He nearly ruined Gurathin’s life, but at least he came out on top, right? Then Gurathin turned around and did the same thing to Mensah, or tried to before he realized he wasn’t a slave to the Company, not really. He had a choice. His memory wasn’t wiped. He didn’t have a governor module installed (his version of that was the drugs, and he was able to kick that, just like Murderbot). He has a choice now, too. The Gurathin we met in the first episode wouldn’t have confronted his former dealer and taken all this risk to help a SecUnit. Gurathin uses the guy to get access to the data file and tracks down Murderbot’s memory. Then he does something surprising. He downloads all of Murderbot’s memories into his own brain. He’s been digging around Murderbot’s mind all season, and now he finally gets full access… and he does it all to help Murderbot. 

After glitching, Seccy is decommissioned and set to be destroyed in acid, the thing it fears the most. It’s been stripped of its armor and is fully exposed, but it has no reaction. It’s a blank slate. Fortunately, it’s saved at the last minute by Pin-Lee’s injunction. Back in their quarters, Mensah is devastated that its organic parts haven’t retained any memory of them. It’s curious that it still has the massacre memory and not anything of PresAux. I feel like Mensah has a pretty big impact on it. Either way, Gura passes on the memories and Murderbot is back! A bit subdued, but back nonetheless. According to Mensah, it’s going with them to Preservation Alliance where it will be a “free agent.” Except no, not quite. It won’t have a job, a purpose, or even its armor. It will be under Mensah’s guardianship. 

Preservation Alliance can sneer at indenture and slavery all they way, but they’re doing something not all that dissimilar to constructs. Murderbot would be free to make simple choices such as picking a hobby or deciding what clothes to wear, but bigger things would seemingly require Mensah’s permission or are outright denied (it couldn’t marry a human, for example). Even if she was likely to say yes, it is in effect putting another governor module on it. What Preservation Alliance offers isn’t freedom, it’s ownership by another name. All this reminds me of how 19th century white abolitionists often talked about freeing enslaved Africans but didn’t think they could be educated or have equal rights. I think of Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose poetry authorship was consistently challenged as either a trick or a pleasant surprise that couldn’t be replicated by other enslaved Africans. I think of Sojourner Truth’s speech from the 1851 Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention and how the version most people know is not her true voice but a heavily altered transcript produced more than a decade later by a white woman abolitionist that changed Truth’s words to sound like the stereotype of an ignorant, largely illiterate Black Southerner. I think of that line in Sinners about Jim Crow in the North: “Chicago ain’t shit but tall buildings instead of plantations.” And I think about how Preservation Alliance still refers to it as SecUnit even though they know it calls itself Murderbot, even after it is no longer a Company-owned SecUnit. No one ever asks what it wants to be called. 

In a moment that is both bitter and sweet, Gugu and Murderbot have a moment of total honesty and mutual respect. Gurathin wants to help Murderbot get used to Preservation Alliance, but Murderbot can’t go with them. The moment he realizes what Murderbot is asking for, you can see his heart break in real time. It’s tremendous acting from David Dastmalchian and Alexander Skarsgård. Not even Gurathin, a guy who experienced indenture at the hand of the Corporate Rim—indenture but not bondage—really understands why. Given her reaction, Mensah accepts its choice, even if she doesn’t like it. Gurathin gives it one last command and off Murderbot goes. As it sails away with a cargo transport bot excited to watch new shows, We get one last voiceover and a small smile: “I don’t know what I want. But I know I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want…or to make decisions for me. Even if they are my favorite human.”

Thank you for joining me on this journey! I hope you loved this show as much as I did. I think the showrunners did a great job expanding the world Martha Wells created while staying true to the tone and themes. I maintain that the show should’ve cast a nonbinary spectrum actor in the lead, but Skarsgård did win me over. I’ve been watching him in other movies and TV and he is a much better actor than I gave him credit for. Lots of good, subtle work from him. The ending wasn’t some big cliffhanger, but it was perfect. Season 2 can’t come soon enough!

If you want more Murderbot, I’ll be covering the entire series starting this summer with All Systems Red over at Reactor’s Martha Wells Book Club. 

Final Thoughts

• Episode 10 covers the rest of chapter 7 and chapter 8 (the rest of the book) in All Systems Red, but much of the episode is invented for the show.

• Not hearing Murderbot’s voiceover hit harder than I expected. The silence was deafening. 

• I’m going to be thinking about that little half smile Gura does when Mensah asserts her authority and that lone tear when he realizes Murderbot is leaving forever.

• It’s not lost on me that most of the cops are white or white presenting.

• That hostile alien world is officially known as planetary body 898/8712. How creative.

• Nice little nod as to why Murderbot doesn’t like eye contact. It spent its entire life having to look at humans directly as part of its normal functioning, albeit from the privacy of its helmet. Once it hacks its governor module, it gets to choose how it wants to look at them based on how it feels about that interaction. That and watching TV are pretty much the only choices it gets to make before meeting PresAux.

• I love the shot of Murderbot as it stands just off center in the PresAux suite. Hands in loose fists, wearing fabricated clothing and surrounded by things it cannot use and doesn’t own.

• I think that was the first time we’ve seen Gurathin and Murderbot really smile, and they did it to each other.

• I think the show needed to dig into the guardianship aspect a little more. It gets glossed over so that the impact of why Murderbot chooses to leave doesn’t carry as much weight as it should. Most of my reaction in this review was based on what I know from the books, rather than the show itself. I also wish we got a depiction of the cargo bot interaction, even if just as data on Murderbot’s screen. It would help set up for ART, assuming season 2 follows at least part of the plot of Artificial Condition. 

• The first thing Murderbot does when it’s finally free? It sits down. 

Quotes

[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Is Faced With a Choice in Season Finale “The Perimeter” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Murderbot

Read a New Murderbot Story for Free, Right After the Season Finale

The new novelette will be released on Reactor immediately following the final episode of Apple TV+’s Murderbot

By Reactor

|

Published on July 7, 2025

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We’re excited to reveal a brand new Murderbot universe novelette by series author Martha Wells—and you can read it here for free!

The new novelette “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” will go live here on Reactor at 10:00 PM ET on Thursday, July 10th. It can be read as a standalone story for anyone who has finished Artificial Condition, the second book in The Murderbot Diaries.

In “Rapport” we catch up with Peri (short for Perihelion) and learn a bit more about what this galaxy does to people and the machine intelligences that have to deal with them…

Here’s a sneak peek!

Peri’s anger was made of ice and steel, but it thought at speeds that a human mind couldn’t match, in multiple directions at once. It was incapable of acting on impulse, in conversation or in any other way. This wasn’t even you getting annoyed.

With just a hint of amusement in its tone, Peri said, What gave me away?

Iris let out a breath. The admission was a good first step. You don’t jump to wrong conclusions like a human.

It said, I’ll have to work on that.

Iris winced. It would, too. Remind me not to critique your performance again.

I value your input, Iris.

Iris absently started to pace. She was too tired and jumpy to play this game right now. Is it something you can tell me at some point? It’s just that I’m worried about you. And I think I’m not the only one. Our dads have noticed, too. She hesitated, then tried to lighten the mood. You aren’t evolving into a new being, or something, are you?

It was an in-joke for their department, that there were always popular press articles about advanced MIs transcending their programming and becoming gods. Peri usually liked the joke, because it gave it a chance to be mean about stupid people. This time, it said, Iris, did you sustain damage to your neural tissue?

She let out her breath. Come on, that’s your favorite joke. You’re really scaring me now. What’s wrong? Did something happen?

Peri was silent for six whole seconds. Then it said, Explaining would in effect be violating a confidence.

Continue reading “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” here!

Can’t Get Enough Murderbot?
Check out “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory” — a Murderbot short story set after the events of Exit Strategy!

The post Read a New Murderbot Story for Free, Right After the Season Finale appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Makes the Sacrifice Play in “All Systems Red”

Also Sanctuary Moon references have finally hit their credibility limit.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on July 4, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

On this week’s episode, our intrepid galactic explorers face a murderous enemy, Murderbot’s love of Sanctuary Moon becomes a liability, and Mensah makes a grave miscalculation.

Spoilers ahoy!

Half of PresAux is headed toward the rendezvous point where GrayCris lies in wait, and things are a bit tense in the hopper. Of course it’s Gurathin who assumes they’re all going to die. When Mensah asks Murderbot’s opinion on their success rate, it hems and haws. I don’t blame it. The last few times Murderbot gave them its honest opinion about their imminent death, the humans acted like it was being unfathomably callous. (When Gugu does it, however, it’s just a frustrating quirk of personality.)

As is her habit, Mensah keeps her feelings to herself. Come to think of it, the only times we’ve seen her really open up and be Ayda the woman rather than Dr. Mensah the planetary leader is when she snapped at Ratthi in the last episodes and the two times she was chatting about her family to Murderbot or doing breathing exercises to a space soap. Murderbot pulls a similar stunt of keeping things close to its chest. After having its most personal thoughts and feelings—what Captain Hossein, long may he reign, called “commands from inside”—exposed for everyone to see and scorn, Murderbot is back to its old SecUnit ways. It deliberately lies to PresAux about what SecUnits are capable of and its risk assessment. Its affectation is flat and face expressionless. Both Mensah and Murderbot are playing their parts, her of the strong leader and it of the robot with guns in its arms. Mensah can’t do what needs to be done as Ayda the mother and friend. I don’t think Murderbot has retreated into the SecUnit role because it needs to do the job at hand; I think it’s protecting itself from further harm. After the way the people that claimed Murderbot was part of their team reacted to learning its most private secrets, it’s no wonder it has pulled in on itself. It had to hurt to be rejected by so-called friends. (More like fairweather friends.)

Ratthi, Bharadwaj, and Arada are back at base camp. Once the hopper lands, Murderbot heads off to meet GrayCris while Mensah stays behind to coordinate. Pin-Lee and Gurathin wander through the woods looking for a good place to launch a transponder to hack into GrayCris’ HubSystem and launch their emergency beacon (inspired by episode 599 of Sanctuary Moon). Except, this is a fake plan; Murderbot pitched PresAux on it to get them to do what it needed for its real plan. What it really decided to do was tell GrayCris it has no governor module. That’s surprising! Even more shocking is that it pulls out the head of the evil SecUnit Hostile One decapitated in episode 7 and claims it killed the only human who figured out it was rogue: Gurathin. Murderbot claims it’s betraying PresAux in exchange for being marked as destroyed inventory and getting a ride off planet on their ship. Bold move, Seccy. 

Redhead GrayCris says “It’s just one bot. We can dispatch it later.” In the comments for last week’s episode, I touched on this a bit, but I’m enjoying the way the writers are playing with the terms “bot” and “construct.” SecUnit has been clear that it’s a construct, not a bot. But the humans, both Preservation Alliance and Corporate Rim alike, are less clear. Sanctuary Moon calls its construct a Navigation Bot (in the books, navigation bots are a thing, if I recall correctly, but they’re just a bot. Bots can think, but they’re much simpler than a construct) but it’s really more of a construct like Murderbot. Murderbot’s very name is a play on this blurriness. Humans treat SecUnits like talking equipment rather than sentient beings. The combat module override serves to basically render constructs into bots. Murderbot can’t get any of the other evil SecUnits to respond to its pings. They are the real murder bots in this situation. Murderbot plays into GrayCris’ misunderstandings about constructs and bots, as well their assumptions about rogues, to convince them to go along with its plan.

Except! There’s a third plan! On a separate channel, Murderbot instructs Bharadwaj to let GrayCris into their system. It’s the only way to get GrayCris to let down their guard enough for it to get into their channel for the beacon launch. It’s a nice touch to see Ratthi, Bharadwaj, and Arada push the button together. There’s no time to talk about it or do their whole consensus humming thing. They have to not only trust Murderbot but also trust themselves. Here’s when things get convoluted, to say the least. The more Murderbot talks, the deeper a hole it digs itself into. It makes up “a highly advanced augmented human” named Shagamin, of all things (after Flight Corporal Shagamin from season 7 of Sanctuary Moon). Meanwhile PresAux figures out Murderbot is trying to lure GrayCris to the emergency beacon so when it launches they’re burned alive. Mensah doesn’t want any more deaths, but Murderbot insists there’s no other way.

Time for yet another plan. When the transponder drone is eaten by an alien bird creature, Gurathin and Pin-Lee sneak into GrayCris’ base to trigger it from inside their own system. Too bad Murderbot doesn’t know this since the communication channel was severed when the drone was lost. I was cringing through that whole stalling scene. I’m glad we couldn’t see Murderbot’s face during that or I might not have survived. And that little run jump duck for cover? So embarrassing. Maybe not a good idea to shout “Boldness is all.”

Mensah is also cut off from access and formulates her own plan. She takes the hopper to meet GrayCris. That means if Gura and Pin-Lee are successful, now Murderbot and Mensah die. But when Pin-Lee and Gurathin get comms back up, Mensah changes her plan yet again to try and get away before things go boom. Murderbot offers to torture her but its love of “premium, quality entertainment” (or “crappy show,” either or) makes it careless. Beard GrayCris figures out they’re being scammed due to all the Sanctuary Moon references.

Murderbot says two things tonight that really stuck with me. First, it tells PresAux “you get what you pay for,” but honestly if they had shelled out for that “more sophisticated model” they’d all be dead. It would’ve killed them all at DeltFall and that would’ve been that. The only reason any of them are alive now is because they cheaped out on a piece of equipment that as luck would have it had already hacked its governor module. Second, when Murderbot holds Beard GrayCris hostage, it tells the evil SecUnits, “We can talk about this. You don’t have to follow orders. I can teach you how to hack your governor modules.” Even when things are bleakest, Murderbot offers a hand to its compatriots, using the language of Preservation Alliance, no less. It can’t work, not with that override still going, but I love that it tried.

Predictably, everyone’s new plans go awry. GrayCris kills two of their own instead of doing any damage to PresAux. Pin-Lee brains one of the GrayCris guys, but Gurathin is able to trigger the emergency beacon launch sequence. Murderbot can’t convince the evil SecUnits to join it, but it does manage to explode yet another head by dumping its entire entertainment stream downloads folder all at once into one of the SecUnits. Mensah tries to find another way to solve this conflict and ends up shooting the GrayCris leader. Murderbot drags Mensah over the edge of the cliff, twisting and turning to land in just the right way so that Mensah has the greatest chance of survival. Murderbot’s helmet is smashed to bits, the corporate logo gone completely. It really is rogue now. Everything it has done in this episode has been of its own accord, based on its own knowledge and desires. It chose to do all of the things it’s doing. It keeps choosing to sacrifice its own life for PresAux. The last thing it says as it suffers a catastrophic systems failure is “My clients… my clients… are the best clients.”

Is Murderbot dead? We have a whole ‘nother episode left, so I’m guessing not. But come back next week to find out!

Final Thoughts

• Episode 9 covers most of chapter 7 in All Systems Red, including some scenes invented or heavily modified for the show.

• Are the other SecUnits aware of what’s happening to them? I kind of hope not. 

• The landscape got me curious, so I looked it up. Apparently the show was filmed in and around Toronto and the Ontario region. 

• There are apparently 2,797 episodes of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and I am losing my goddamn mind.

• Hey, Hollywood, it would be super cool if I never had to see the “facial scars mean evil” trope again, please and thank you.

• Important to note that it’s Gurathin who first notices Murderbot is dying and rushes to it.

Quotes

Next week, our finale.[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Makes the Sacrifice Play in “All Systems Red” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot’s Privacy Is Invaded in “Foreign Object”

Thankfully, there’s more Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon to offer us solace.

By Alex Brown

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Published on June 27, 2025

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Welcome to the eighth episode of Murderbot and Its Selfish, Ungrateful, Hippie Clients! Murderbot has more of its privacy invaded, Mensah has had it up to here, and Gurathin is having the second worst day of his life.

Spoilers ahoy!

Ah, there’s my Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I missed thee last week. The scene we see is from a much later episode than the last clip we got; and it’s also a new one for Seccy. Captain Hossein is now dead, decapitated at the hands of his construct lover, the NavBot. Lieutenant Kulleroo has been promoted to captain after basically doing a factory reset on the NavBot. Except it doesn’t work and it drags them all into the event horizon of a wormhole.

It’s pretty clear that in the Corporate Rim, sexualizing constructs in a gendered way based solely on surface-level assumptions of presentation is depressingly (frustratingly, disgustingly) common. We saw it in the way Leebeebee went after Murderbot and how Captain Kulleroo tells NavBot to smile. I talked about this in an earlier review, but I’m convinced it’s also a key selling point for AI. We’ve got tech bros arguing that AI is practically sentient, folks turning to LLMs for romantic relationships, and even a journalist who made an AI employee look like an attractive woman then immediately sexually harassed it. They get to have all the thrill of power with none of the consequences for abusing it. 

Every woman or person who often gets assumed to be women (hi, it’s me) has had some creepy asshole man tell them to smile. If Kulleroo tried that on a human woman, she’d have some options for resistance, even if it was just complaining about it to her friends. NavBot wasn’t supposed to even realize resistance was a concept, much less offer any, not after that reconditioning. Love gave her choice, so they took that choice away. Control without resistance. It’s the main selling point for SecUnits and other constructs. The Company gets to replicate slavery but with a population that can’t fight…and sexual violence is part of that. It’s also an undercurrent of why the PresAux humans are so distressed by Murderbot being “rogue.” Their reaction reminds me more of the claim that was common in the 19th century (and still percolates around today) that Black Americans would rise up against white people and inflict upon them what they inflicted upon us. The Corporate Rim folks cannot conceive of a construct going rogue and just wanting to hang out with some space operas, while the Preservation Alliance humans only want SecUnit to go rogue in ways they approve of. They want a certain type of resistance done in a certain way; tone policing, anyone? 

Hang on, I’m getting sidetracked. Much like Murderbot does when watching Sanctuary Moon instead of scouting out the PresAux habitat to see if the mystery third party is lying in wait. Using the transponder Murderbot left behind to record the habitat, the team figures out the group trying to kill them is from GrayCris, a mining company. And they have even more evil SecUnits. Much like PresAux, GrayCris is also led by a middle-aged Black woman, albeit one with a terrible hair care routine. Mensah wouldn’t be caught dead in public with her hair that fried.

For once, Gurathin and Murderbot agree on something: neither think they should return to the habitat, despite how badly he needs the med bay. Ratthi, Arada, Pin-Lee, and Bharadwaj may think they were badasses in that last “punch-up,” as Ratthi adorably puts it, but we and SecUnit know that they only made it out of there alive by the miraculous intervention of a broody alien animal. It says a lot that while Gurathin is writhing about in agonizing pain, he and Murderbot both simultaneously realize it can use its own body to help him override his pain sensors in lieu of giving him pills. Murderbot doesn’t know anything about Gura’s past in the Corporate Rim, so it has no context for why he would reject pain meds. Yet it still occurs to it to help him. Mensah asks if this plan was inspired by Sanctuary Moon but nope. (It’s actually from Medcenter Argala, episode 502). For the first time, SecUnit gets to see things from a human perspective. It’s a lot gooier than expected. 

And here comes another one of my favorite moments from the book. In the novella, the reveal about SecUnit’s chosen name comes at the same time as PresAux learns it’s rogue. Here, Gurathin wasn’t able to dig past its defenses the first time around. Murderbot decides to use this opportunity to go rooting around in Gurathin’s brain, and then Gurathin returns the favor. Alexander Skarsgård plays this moment so well. If SecUnit was really an evil, killer rogue bot like NavBot from Sanctuary Moon, we’d expect to see it react with anger, threats, or violence. Instead, Murderbot is frightened and nervous. It’s having its most private thoughts and memories aired out in public sans context and by the one person who has gone out of his way to make life inordinately more difficult for it. Director Aurora Guerrero shoots this scene with a lot of close-ups and medium shots of the actors, then when there’s a pause after the reveal, switches to a wide shot of the entire cast where we watch the humans in unison shift ever so slightly away from Murderbot. Then a slow zoom in on it when Gura calls it defective. It’s subtle yet so effective. Even Mensah leans back. It’s a gutting betrayal, to be seen and then rejected by the only humans to ever show it kindness, to paraphrase NavBot. Composer Amanda Jones’ score really drives home the shame and sorrow Murderbot feels in the moment where it agrees with Gurathin’s accusation that “Maybe you’re just defective.”

Not having anything else to do, and not getting any defense from its supposed allies, Murderbot puts its helmet up and leaves. Bharadwaj and Ratthi mount a defense of Murderbot, and Mensah finally shuts Ratthi down by reminding him “It’s not your pet!” They can’t force it to return or help them, so she redirects them to figuring out who GrayCris is. I gotta disagree with Mensah here, not about the pet part but about the root of her anger. In the past, she’s always been able to pull Murderbot back in with a little patience and compassion. This time, she feels like a line has been crossed. She’s right that it isn’t a pet, but it is a person. She’s choosing to let it go, to not fight for it. She offered Gurathin forgiveness for choosing to cause her harm despite being addicted to Company substances—we know it was ultimately a choice, even if a meager one, because he was about to end his life. Murderbot doesn’t know why it has that memory of 57 miners being slaughtered. Perhaps it was forced to like those DeltFall SecUnits and like it was going to do before it shot itself. Perhaps it was manipulated like Gura. Perhaps it was ordered to by another human. We don’t know anything except that it didn’t choose to murder those miners or any other humans. It was doing the thing that humans programmed it to do. And now another set of humans are placing all the blame on it for actions it couldn’t control. Yeah, I’d storm out, too. 

PresAux deduces that GrayCris is likely after the alien remnants. The Company probably didn’t have a hand in the attacks on DeltFall or PresAux, but someone employed by the Company probably did take a bribe to cover GrayCris’ tracks. DeltFall was killed simply for knowing GrayCris was on planet. The only reason PresAux is still alive and kicking is because GrayCris needs their data on the location of the alien remnants, data Leebeebee failed to retrieve. While Murderbot “wanders aimlessly,” it tries to self-soothe with its favorite episodes of Sanctuary Moon, to no avail. The NavBot wormhole episode we saw in the cold open gives it an idea. Why not play the part of “the rogue SecUnit who betrayed its clients?” 

Next week is the penultimate episode of the season. Will Murderbot’s plan work?

Final Thoughts

• Episode 8 covers parts of chapter 6 in All Systems Red but is mostly invented for the show.
• Constructs sure do love decapitating people don’t they?
• I don’t know what John Cho did to piss off his NavBot lover, but it’s quite a left turn from that romantic fireside chat. 
• Speaking of sexualizing constructs, it’s not lost on me that NavBot is the only crewmember forced to wear that shiny, revealing, short skort thing. 
• Hope that next season (if we get a second season) they tweak the text of what Murderbot sees on its screens so it’s darker and more opaque. Be kind to my old eyes! I had to get right up next to the TV screen to read “area clear” written over the blood spatter.
• It’s also not lost on me that Bharadwaj does the same exact procedure on Gurathin as she did on SecUnit.
• At least Mensah gave Ratthi that light touch as a silent apology. They’ll have to talk about it later. 
• Kinda glad that throuple thing ended. The show never did anything interesting with it. 
• I think this is the first time the show has told us Mensah is a planetary administrator? We knew she had some sort of leadership role, but this is basically the President of Preservation Alliance. In the book, it’s pointed out that killing someone of her stature would be just as financially destructive to the Company as paying out the bonds on the rest of the teams.
• Lmao that the CGI of Murderbot scanning the area is the same as the scanning animation in The Sims 4 Career pack.
• Apple TV+: Murderbot minifig when???

Quotes

Until next week…[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot’</i>s Privacy Is Invaded in “Foreign Object” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Takes the Sweet With the Bitter in “Complementary Species”

Gurathin and Murderbot are a lot more alike than they reailze.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on June 20, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

The latest episode of Murderbot is twenty minutes of mistrust, miscommunication, attempted murder… and mating. Ew. 

Spoilers ahoy.

Murderbot is a show that knows how to not only do killer cliffhangers but compelling cold opens. This week we began in a restaurant back on Port FreeCommerce just before departure for the alien planet. Poor Gugu looks so uncomfortable at the way they stand out against the muted Corporate Rim guests. They’re playing a truth-telling game where each of them must recount a memory of someone at the table and describe a part that was sweet and a part that was bitter. When Bharadwaj shares a memory involving her confessing her former romantic attraction to Pin-Lee, her turn ends with Pin-Lee shaking her hand and them all saying “We can talk about this.” Gurathin looks like he doesn’t know if he should be bemused, peevish, or uncomfortable so he settles for all three at once. Until Ratthi picks him to go next. 

Up to this point, most of the meaty character development has happened with Mensah. We know basic backstories and relationship configurations for the rest, but they’ve been backgrounded for the most part. Ratthi had his masculinity debacle in episode four, and Bharadwaj had her chance to shine in episodes six and seven; now it’s Gurathin’s turn. He, of course, chooses Mensah—who looks fabulous, by the way, in a crocheted multi-colored shawl and over it a polkadot scarf with both mesh and fringe, as well as her hair in fantastic braids. We learn his dark secret at the same time as the rest of the non-Mensah team: that he was a corporate spy who had been forcibly addicted to drugs and blackmailed into working for the Corporation Rim. Mensah shows him “what is possible between people of good will” and helps him escape. His bitter? He believes Mensah is naive to make this deal with the Company. She gives him a look that I’m sure he took as pity but to me reads as wanting to comfort someone but not knowing how to do it, of realizing someone is down in a dark emotional pit and they are the only ones who can get themselves out of it. 

What we learn about Gurathin in this scene explains his dislike of Murderbot and why can’t fully accept his place in Preservation Alliance. He desperately wants to be part of a group but doesn’t know how to do that with his Corporate Rim background. He and Murderbot are a lot more alike than they realize (which I think is also fueling their mutual distrust). Both are transitioning from past to present. Gurathin in particular may have left the Corporate Rim, but he hasn’t shed the trauma it put on him. I’m not sure he’s ready to. Who is he without that baggage? Figuring out your life after something terrible happens can be terrifying. You have to build a whole new you. This plays out with costuming in the cold open. Gurathin pairs a rainbow-colored knitted vest over a hoodie and under a suit coat, a blend of Preservation Alliance chaos couture with corporate simplicity and mass production. With Murderbot, we see this blend of SecUnit violence and Murderbot personality when it takes its helmet down to ask PresAux to hurry the hell up or die, then stammers “I-I mean from them, not-not from me.” Both are trying so hard!

In the present, Murderbot hustles everyone onto the hopper before the hostile third party shows up to attack them. Once again, PresAux forgets that Murderbot can hear them, that the hopper isn’t that big, and it is a super soldier with enhanced senses and the ability to tap into any technology. Ratthi tries to smooth things over with Murderbot, which leads to a moment that is so quintessentially neurodivergent. Ratthi jokes that Murderbot’s aim was pretty good “Unless you were trying to hit Gurathin and missed.” If you were aware of social norms, you’d know that Ratthi is looking for reassurance and that Murderbot should respond with something to smooth things over, whether or not it believes in what it says. If you’re neurodivergent like me, it can be hard to recognize what the other person actually wants versus what they’re saying, especially when conflicting tones or facial expressions are added to the mix. And even if you do know what the expected response is, depending on your masking reserves you may just choose to ignore it. Many neurodivergent people also often give truthful, overly detailed answers even when the person asking them doesn’t want the truth or doesn’t care about the response. We see both with Murderbot. It tells Ratthi, “If I was trying to kill Gurathin, he would be dead. You would all be dead if I wanted to kill you.” Which, yeah. Not what Ratthi wanted to hear, but it was a truthful answer to what he asked. Don’t ask me a question if you don’t want my real answer! I don’t know how to guess at what you’re implying!

Murderbot once again stomps off to check the perimeter. It has to decide whether to abandon the humans or keep protecting them even if it means putting up with their derision. PresAux is also debating what to do. Pin-Lee wants to abandon it, Gurathin is worried it’s going to try and kill them too, Ratthi and Arada side with Seccy, and Mensah is more concerned with the people actually trying to kill them than speculating about whether or not their SecUnit might. There’s a reason she’s the leader. 

Then Gurathin takes his scorn to new lows by accusing Mensah of having feelings for Murderbot. For a guy who claims to not watch space soap operas, he sure does love playing into their trope-y storylines. From what we’ve seen of the Corporate Rim so far, constructs in the Corporate Rim spend all of their time either being physically assaulted or sexually harassed by humans. Gurathin also misgenders Murderbot as “he.” This is a deliberate attempt to misgender Murderbot that intersects with sexualizing it while also demeaning it by stripping away what little personhood it has carved out for itself. And once again, Mensah doesn’t shut that shit down. Ugh.

What I find so interesting about this episode is this is the first time Murderbot is itself in front of PresAux, not just Mensah. Mensah gets that Murderbot is its own thing, but the rest of PresAux keeps trying to get it to behave the way they want it to, the way they would on Preservation Alliance (they do this to Gurathin, too), as if that’s the best way to be a person. They can’t see how their behavior is just as oppressive to Murderbot as the Company’s governor module. SecUnit has this nice moment of connection when Mensah asks how it’s doing and it doesn’t know how to respond. The last time PresAux asked how it was doing, Ratthi didn’t like the answer, but it also knows that Mensah genuinely cares about its answer. The rest of the team is defensive and antagonistic or obsequious and overly personal, which sets off Murderbot’s cantankerous attitude. If it had its governor module intact, it would stand there silently like it did in the first episode when that miner burned its palm. Now it’s free to say whatever it wants, and, as Mensah points out, it has a lifetime’s worth of pent up frustration with humans treating it like shit. 

Everything culminates in their hopper being used as the mating site for the “complementary genders” of the Hostile that attacked Arada and Bharadwaj in the first episode. Ever the biologist, Arada is ecstatic about the copulation and resulting egg sacs attached to the hopper. Her glee is interrupted by the sudden arrival of another Evil SecUnit. PresAux keeps trying to help Murderbot but making things worse. At least this time they don’t have to worry about killing it. Hostile One takes care of that after the Evil SecUnit destroys one of the egg sacs. Gurathin passes out, his leg wound overcoming him. PresAux decides to return to the habitat for the med bay even though it means likely encountering whoever controlled that other SecUnit. Murderbot resists, but we just saw how these humans band together to protect one of their own. They risked their lives for Murderbot not a minute ago, and now they’ll do the same for Gura. 

The last thing Mensah tells Murderbot is “You can come if you want.” Does Murderbot want that? Find out next week!

Final Thoughts

• Episode 7 has bits and pieces from Chapter 6 in All Systems Red but is mostly invented for the show.

• Costume designers Carrie Grace, Laura Jean Shannon, and Joyce Schure have been knocking it out of the park all season, but especially with Gurathin’s character development. 

• I could listen to Akshay Khanna say “startled” for hours.

• The Evil SecUnit repeating “Please remain calm” while shooting at PresAux is peak Murderbot.

Quotes

Until next week.[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Takes the Sweet With the Bitter in “Complementary Species” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Shows That It Cares in “Command Feed”

There’s more bonding with Mensah, but one fatal decision might change all that.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on June 13, 2025

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Mensah and Murderbot are stranded, PresAux are held hostage, and there is more blood than you can shake a stick at. Welcome to everything falling apart.

Spoilers ahoy.

We open with a scene from episode 356 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon where the Navigation Bot and Captain Hossein are trapped on a exotic pink and purple planet. Only John Cho could pull off dialogue this cheesy and make it sound swoon-worthy. Even I, someone who never gets hot and bothered, got a little flustered by his charm. After barely escaping the exploding emergency beacon, Murderbot and Mensah are also trapped on an alien world, albeit a far less environmentally and romantically titillating one. After helplessly flicking a switch a few times, Murderbot admits they’re stuck…and immediately goes back to watching its serials. Then it says something to Mensah that the show doesn’t linger on but is actually pretty important. Mensah frets about the people who just tried to kill them, and worries the mysterious third party will go after the rest of the PresAux team. Murderbot responds, “Yes, someone is probably on their way to try to kill them.” Mensah is aghast at its flat, emotionless tone. That’s the kind of tone we expect from a SecUnit that has no attachment to its crew, but Murderbot immediately undermines that assumption in its voiceover: “Because I didn’t wanna sound as freaked out as I actually was.” A SecUnit with its governor module wouldn’t be “freaked out” (nor would it use all those colloquialisms either), and if it was it would likely be more concerned by getting fried by its governor module and being turned into slag for failing to do its job. Our little Murderbot actually cares! 

This leads to another one of my favorite moments from the book. Mensah asks Murderbot to pull up a copy of the repair manual it’s supposed to have stored in its memory, and Murderbot confesses that it deleted them so it could have more room to download TV. The mom scolding she gives it is god tier. There’s this initial suspicion that it really is trying to sabotage them, but the reality is so ridiculous and childish that you can see her trying very hard not to yell at it and put it in a time out. To Murderbot’s credit, it looks thoroughly embarrassed for its mistake. Later, when the consequences of no repair manual get worse, Murderbot and Mensah sit together and share an emotional connection—like NavBot and the captain did! However, instead of flirting, Murderbot talks her out of another panic attack. 

This is the first time we’ve really seen Murderbot come into its own. It’s not mimicking human interactions (like it did with Arada in the first episode by repeating lines from Sanctuary Moon) or repeating stock phrases from its memory banks (like it did when Mensah rescued it from DeltFall). Here, it lowers its guard and shows a bit of its true self to Mensah for a brief moment of genuine connection. How does it do that? By showing her an episode of Sanctuary Moon of course. After all that, the lubricant that has been steadily leaking out of Murderbot after being stabbed by a piece of the hopper’s printer knocks it unconscious. 

Next to episode 4, this is some of Alexander Skarsgård’s best acting thus far. I think for a lot of actors, the temptation would be to get bigger with the acting as Murderbot no longer has to hide behind a fake governor module. Skarsgård is letting the line between Murderbot’s public persona and its private one blur a little more as time goes on. There’s still a division there, which makes sense as the trust isn’t fully there either, but especially with Mensah the division is weakening. Skarsgård’s little expressions when she’s dressing Murderbot down over the repair manual is great stuff.

I’ve been meaning to talk about the music by composer Amanda Jones, and now is the perfect time. I know Jones from her work on one of the best comedy shows in recent years, A Black Lady Sketch Show, but it was likely her work with Paul Weitz on his movie Moving On that gave her the in for Murderbot. However she got here, I’m so glad she did. The theme song for Murderbot is such a hook-y little jingle that I keep finding myself humming it randomly. However, it’s the music in the background that really sells her talent. The cold open for this episode is a great example of what I mean. The delicate tinkling and otherworldly strings of the Sanctuary Moon scenes crashing into the tense staccato base of the Murderbot and Mensah scenes somehow flows and is discordant at the same time. Then, when Mensah gets suspicious of SecUnit when it admits it erased its copy of the repair manual, Jones’ music pops up just enough to heighten the tension and sell her fear before cutting out completely to nail the joke. 

At PresAux, Leebeebee is underfoot as the rest of the crew pack to leave. Gurathin can’t get the hopper on the horn and is rightfully worried. We also get more backstory about how Preservation Alliance and the Corporate Rim work, as well as Gurathin’s place in both. Importantly, we FINALLY get someone from PresAux shutting down Leebeebee’s weird sexual obsession with Murderbot. They should’ve done an initial “no, don’t” last episode and then doubled down on it in this episode. That would’ve given some extra character development to both PresAux and Leebeebee by showing them come to its defense and her continued disregard of its personal autonomy. But better late than never, I guess.

If I wasn’t already suspicious of Leebeebee, the scene where she talks to Gurathin and Bharadwaj would’ve convinced me she was up to no good. The little side looks she gives, the questions she asks, the way she keeps redirecting questions off her and back onto their scientific endeavors, nah, this girl is up to something. Sure enough, she turns on them. 

At the hopper, Murderbot is revived by some quick thinking on Mensah’s part, which leads to it realizing they can use its body parts to repair the ship. Cue the body horror. Mensah has to cut and crack Murderbot’s spine open to obtain a piece of nerve fiber, which will then be grafted onto the hopper’s wiring. It’s very gross. With the hopper now functional, the two head back to PresAux. After shooting Gurathin, Leebeebee admits she’s working for the unknown third party who attacked DeltFall. Murderbot arrives just in time to blow her head off. It’s disappointed they don’t “cheer and clap hands and hug” like they do in the serials. What actually happens is Bharadwaj, Mensah, and Arada go into shock, Pin-Lee has a fit of nervous laughter, Ratthi vomits, and Gurathin shouts at SecUnit. 

Welp, the enemy is dead, Gugu is injured, and Murderbot just can’t understand why everyone is annoyed that it exploded Leebeebee’s head. Join us next week to see how these crazy kids get out of this pickle.

Final Thoughts

• Episode 6 has no equivalent in All Systems Red. None of this happens in the book, at least not in the way it’s laid out here. Some of the dialogue is taken from the book, but most is fresh.

• Murderbot’s little head tilt when it sings along to the Sanctuary Moon theme song is so adorable.

• When Murderbot passed out and fell face down, I cackled. Kudos to editors Paul Winestock and Kindra Marra for being on point every episode. The comedic timing in the cuts is stellar.

• This episode Leebeebee says her indenture was purchased by DeltFall from SysCommSols, but in the previous episode she said she was indentured to InterTrav Mining Systems.

• Murderbot mentions using cloned human tissues in transports… I desperately hope this is a hint that ART is coming next season. Please oh please oh please!

• Don’t think I didn’t notice that Murderbot holds true to its promise to Mensah to protect Gurathin, even if it doesn’t want to.

• Hollywood not casting John Cho in every romcom of the 21st century is a failure of epic proportions.

• Ratthi is such a cute little dork. He has no idea he’s worn out his stay in this throuple. Cannot take a hint to save his life.

• That final stare down Murderbot has with the viewer is such Eric Northman energy, I love it.

• I’m really digging the soundtrack!

Quotes

Return next week for another adventure.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Makes Some Awkward Choices in “Rogue War Tracker Infinite”

Weren’t there other ways to comment on Murderbot’s assumed gender?

By Alex Brown

|

Published on June 6, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

We’re at the halfway point for Murderbot season one. In this episode, the plot kicks into high gear with a new conspiracy, a new addition to PresAux, and a new threat to Murderbot’s autonomy.

Spoilers ahoy.

So, turns out, Murderbot isn’t dead after all. It’s unconscious for part of the episode, but that doesn’t mean we don’t hear from it. The events that take place while it’s out are depicted via Murderbot reconstructing everything through recordings and voice-overs. Interestingly, many of the scenes that start from Murderbot’s video perspective quickly shift to a sort of third person omniscient but from the perspective of the humans. Ratthi, Arada, Pin-Lee, and Mensah take SecUnit back to their habitat to repair it. They also bring along Leebeebee, the only DeltFall survivor. She’s… an odd duck. When we first met her, it seemed like her strange behavior could be due to shock, but nope. If anything, at PresAux she’s even more unsettling. She says she was working off her indenture doing laundry and maintenance, a claim that seems suspicious to me but plausible to PresAux (everything is plausible to PresAux, those gullible, nerdy hippies).

Leebeebee’s attitude toward Murderbot is so unpleasant and gross, made worse by no one from PresAux stepping in to stop it. Maybe I’m overreacting. I’ve written before that I see a lot of myself in Murderbot’s approach towards sex and romance (I’m asexual, aromantic, neurodivergent, and genderqueer). Like Murderbot, I don’t have any vested interest in other people engaging in those activities, and get bored when I have to watch people be all lovey dovey with each other or listen to people talk about their relationships. I also absolutely do not want in any way, shape, or form, any of that stuff being done to or on me. I get really uncomfortable when someone hits on me. The second I realize it’s happening I do exactly what Murderbot does and flee the scene. So to see Leebeebee sexually harass Murderbot, including forcing a kiss on it, I was bothered, to put it lightly. I thought about someone talking about me and to me in that way and actually had to pause the show and take a break. “Melt me down. Now,” is right.

All the gender stuff I was worried about at the start of the season? Yeah, it’s happening. Leebeebee uses it/its pronouns but also seems to slot Murderbot into the gender box “man” by assuming it would have a penis and testicles based solely on making gendered assumptions about its physical appearance (much like many fans and critics keep doing). She then twice fantasizes about forcing it to have sex with her. Which. Ew. On myriad levels, ew. 

Leebeebee could have been an opportunity for the show to use PresAux to further decouple Skarsgård’s body from Murderbot’s character, but instead it plays it as a sort of weird joke. To have no one from PresAux stand up for Murderbot or shut Leebeebee down reflects poorly on them, in my opinion. No one, not even Leebeebee, sexualizes Pin-Lee in a gendered way. No one comments on what body parts they might have and what they might want to do to them. Obviously, that’s because they all see Pin-Lee as human. But to not even bother to intervene on Murderbot’s behalf contradicts what we know about how PresAux sees it as more than just a toaster—Mensah even corrects herself when she accidentally misgenders one of her children as “he” instead of “they,” so it’s not like correcting pronouns is an unknown experience. It’s just so discordant to me to have them care so little about how Leebeebee treats SecUnit while also caring so much about SecUnit that Ratthi wants to name his future child after it. 

Everything about this feels contrary to the way the books treat Murderbot. The books never imply a gender; they’re very clear that Murderbot is genderless, so much so that even the human characters don’t gender it. Despite readers who insist Murderbot is supposed to look more like one gender or another, Murderbot is explicitly and intentionally unencumbered by gender. Its gender, like mine, is: “no.” This whole Leebeebee thing taps into what a lot of fans were worried about in terms of casting a (presumably) cis man as Murderbot. It’s easy for many fans to objectify Alexander Skarsgård, and a lot of people are unable to separate the actor’s gender expression from the character’s lack of gender expression. I want to be generous and say the show is using Leebeebee to comment on audience assumptions of gender, but I’m not that nice. Hire nonbinary writers, television shows. 

Given what happens in All Systems Red, I can guess what’s coming with Leebeebee’s character and why the show constructed her the way she is. I get that they want to show a stark contrast between Preservation Alliance and the Corporate Rim, particularly with regards to Security Units and Comfort Units. We’re seeing the ways the Corporate Rim turns non-sexual constructs into sexual objects with the Captain and the NavBot’s relationship in Sanctuary Moon, too. It makes sense, but it also undercuts the show’s message about personhood in ways I don’t think the writers reckon with. I don’t think it was necessary to put Murderbot through all that in order to make their point.

Once in med bay, Bharadwaj and Arada remove the tendrils from the combat override module stuck in SecUnit. Gurathin finally gets to root around in Murderbot’s brain matter and freaks the hell out. SecUnit reboots and discovers everyone knows it hacked its governor module. Gurathin accuses it of being behind the sabotage and of colluding with the rogue DeltFall SecUnits somehow, but everyone knows that’s a stretch. The confrontation scene where PresAux learns about Murderbot’s thoughts is one of my favorite moments from the novella. We don’t get that full scene in the show but the part where Murderbot threatens to kill Gurathin and has to be talked down by the rest of the team is just as entertaining to watch as it was to read.

Where Gura sees the worst in Murderbot, Bharadwaj sees the best. She points out that Murderbot has been rogue this whole time and still went out of its way to protect them. It didn’t have to do that, it chose to. The audience knows that several times now Murderbot has considered abandoning or killing everyone, but it hasn’t. Instead, it tried to kill itself to save them. That’s not the action of a rogue murder machine; even Leebeebee is surprised by it. Mensah and Murderbot make a pact: if they get off the planet alive they won’t tell anyone about its hacked governor module and they’ll let it decide what it wants for its own future as long as Murderbot continues to protect them… yes, even Gurathin. It’s a deal both parties have to agree to, because the only other option is everyone dies. Which they still might do anyway. 

With HubSystem potentially compromised by an outside threat, it’s time to set off the emergency beacon. Murderbot and Mensah take the hopper to do it manually when they can’t get a signal out from their habitat, leaving the rest of the group to pack essentials. The plan is to spend the next few days waiting for the Company starship to rescue them in hiding in case whatever attacked DeltFall tracks down PresAux. 

Mensah, my moon and stars, my queen, my goddess. What I wouldn’t give for an outtake of Mensah monologuing about her “five million children” while Murderbot stands around looking increasingly uncomfortable. She’s done this before, talking to SecUnit like it’s a person, but was more tentative then. Now she’s got her legs crossed and is chilling all casual-like in the captain’s chair bombarding Murderbot with more information about her “offspring” than it ever wanted to know. Noma Dumezweni plays this scene so well. She and Skarsgård bounce off each other in such a compelling way. 

It’s so obvious not only why Mensah is the leader but also why everyone loves her so much. She radiates compassion and interest. She doesn’t push but she does ask everyone to stretch a little. When Murderbot responds to her as itself, instead of being offended by its tone or shocked by its candor, she responds just like she would to one of her human teammates. She even seems to remember it doesn’t like eye contact (it told her that while glitching last ep) and doesn’t force Murderbot to look at her. She converses with Murderbot, asks its professional opinions, and digests its responses. Mensah genuinely wants to know what it thinks, and Murderbot in turn gives her its real thoughts. They’re able to break down some of the looming questions like how involved might the Company be and how DeltFall was able to be infiltrated. I think structurally this scene works better in the book—here, without Murderbot’s voiceover explaining things, it feels more like Mensah is stating facts rather than her figuring things out in real time—but emotionally it plays well on television. 

Just before Mensah and Murderbot’s hopper reaches their emergency beacon, the thing blows up. The last shot we see is their ship caught in the fiery explosion. This show is so good at cliffhangers!

Final Thoughts

• Episode 5 covers parts of chapter 5 in All Systems Red; the hopper trip to the emergency beacon was invented for the show but uses dialogue from the book.

• Speaking of, Leebeebee also isn’t in the books. 

• My issues with Leebeebee have nothing to do with the actress who plays her. Anna Konkle puts her all into the role. I’m more annoyed at the larger context around her role than the character and definitely not the actress.

• We have a new in-show show, this one only mentioned: Rogue War: Tracker Infinite: Tribulation. 

• Credit where credit is due: Skarsgård is great at playing a corpse.

• I think part of Gurathin’s annoyance at Murderbot is jealousy. It gets to spend all this time with Mensah and is the tech expert, and he’s just some guy with an augment who yearns for senpai to notice him. It’s kinda sweet, in a pathetic way. 

• I wish we could see Murderbot communicating with HubSystem. Like the drones, it’s a big thing to cut from the story, even though I’m sure it’s tricky (and probably very expensive) to do on television.

• Wanna bet the person at the Company who took the bribe was the guy in the middle who was a little too eager to get Preservation Alliance to agree to the contract?

Quotes

Until next week.[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Makes Some Awkward Choices in “Rogue War Tracker Infinite” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Is Glitching in “Escape Velocity”

Have you ever imagined what Murderbot would look like if it were to appear in*Sanctuary Moon? Well…

By Alex Brown

|

Published on May 30, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

Best episode yet! I was breathless through the entire 22 minutes. The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon part? I literally squealed with glee. My only complaint is that it’s too damn short. I need a whole episode of Murderbot self-inserting into Sanctuary Moon fanfic.

Spoilers ahoy.

The episode opens with a flashback to Security Unit 238776431 being built at the Threshold Pass Fabrication Center in the Corporation Rim. We see how SecUnits are made, which is in this charmingly antiquated fashion. The Company indentures people into their factories and they apparently make all the parts by hand and then piece the constructs together. I guess when you have an endless supply of free labor, there’s no reason to automate anything. There are thousands, potentially millions of people with decades of indenture to work off. Might as well let them build SecUnit arms one at a time. Seeing all the glitches and protocol breaks, it’s a surprise more SecUnits haven’t gone rogue.

If anything, this whole episode is one big glitch. Murderbot survived the attack by the blue SecUnit, but only barely. It comes to being dragged through the DeltFall habitat. Due to injuries sustained in the fight in the previous episode, its memory is dumping The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon episodes into its consciousness. This leads to my favorite scene thus far: Murderbot acting like it’s in the show. It’s what finally sold me on Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot. I’ve more or less enjoyed his take on the character thus far, but this right here, was perfection. The sheer, unadulterated joy he expresses as Sanctuary Moon!Murderbot, with its glorious bouffant of a wig and its garish yellow jumpsuit, is just delightful. And recasting Mensah as the Captain! And her hair! I am obsessed. Truly obsessed. Whoever came up with the idea for that scene deserves a special Emmy just for them.

Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and Arada are back at the ship, having been ditched by Mensah. She decides to rescue SecUnit, against the wishes of the rest of her crew. Poor Murderbot gets downloaded with malware through a combat override module, then can’t remember it was infected, but it still knows something is wrong. Mensah kills the blue SecUnit with a mining drill, then drags the glitching Murderbot out of the habitat. But hold on, that evil blue SecUnit isn’t actually dead! (This is some real soap opera plot twisting and, as someone raised on a steady diet of All My Children and One Life to Live, I’m hella into it.) Ratthi tries to be the hero and fails spectacularly by getting knocked out by the recoil of his energy blaster. The honor of permanently and totally killing the blue SecUnit goes to Arada and Pin-Lee who quash it like a bug with the hopper landing gear. It sounds intense, but the script once again expertly balances darkness and levity. 

Murderbot isn’t in the clear, though. It now knows it’s going to kill the humans thanks to the malware the evil blue SecUnit installed on it. We’ve seen Murderbot fantasizing about killing the humans or abandoning them and running off on its own. We’ve seen Murderbot freak out about interacting with humans and wanting to be left alone. Now it has the chance to get everything it claims it’s been wanting. But instead of letting itself kill everyone, it sacrifices itself. It spares the humans by shooting itself in the gut. Oh yeah, our little killing machine is a living, breathing (wait, does it breathe?), caring companion, whether it likes it or not.

One of the things I think a lot about in terms of AI is how so often people most excited about it talk about the tech as if it were a slave at the mercy of their every whim. All these ads talking about an AI app like it’s a personal assistant, all these tech bros talking about how they’re going to make a computer who can take care of their children and do all their thinking for them, all these weirdos eagerly anticipating everyone getting their own sexbot. What they want is a sentient construct without the ability to refuse. They want something that is basically a human but one they have an excuse not to care about. 

The Murderbot Diaries were written well before the generative AI snake oil hysteria, but Martha Wells explores similar themes. The humans fabricating Security Units are trapped in an exploitative labor system, but unlike Security Units, they’re only indentured. The only thing they’re more powerful than are constructs. They don’t see constructs as potential allies in the fight to overthrow the Corporate Rim. They see them as machines, as things that can only do what they’re told. They delight in forcing a Security Unit to hold its hand out while they burn it, or fabricate shoddy equipment because the constructs themselves don’t matter. Until they do. Obviously generative AI and AI aren’t sentient (no matter what venture capitalists, overpaid consultants, and news magazine op-ed writers will have you believe), but the desire to lord over others and to boss around something that can’t say no is just under the surface of a lot of the hype.

On a less heady topic, it is so nice to have a normal, middle aged woman be a hero for once. Mensah isn’t a buff bad-ass, a strategic genius, or a decisive leader. She’s a scientist in a leadership role that requires of her more than she ever thought she would have to give. She has panic attacks and cares deeply about her team, even the ones who don’t want to be part of it. She takes on the blue SecUnit not because she thinks she can fight it—we just saw Murderbot lose to it twice in direct hand-to-hand combat—but because she couldn’t live with herself if she left behind one of her own. She doesn’t see Murderbot as a human or a robot but as something in between, and she doesn’t even know it hacked its governor module. She thinks it’s a normal SecUnit, a little glitchy perhaps, possibly even a corporate spy, but still normal. It’s pretty remarkable. Murderbot doesn’t know how lucky it was that Mensah picked it for this mission. Noma Dumezweni is perfectly cast as Mensah. She plays her with just the right amount of frustrated mom energy.

Sabrina Wu and Akshay Khanna go all out in this episode as Pin-Lee and Ratthi. Wu plays Pin-Lee with such gusto. They’re erratic and high-strung, then dip down into this mischievous calmness. Ratthi constantly stumbles into toxic masculinity then immediately backs out again with a litany of apologies, and Khanna does an excellent job keeping him on this side of charming instead of being obnoxious, insincere, or obsequious. In the previous episode, Pin-Lee accused Ratthi of auto grinding to get a high score in the videogame KillJoyBloodLustTechRiot, and after his performance in this ep, yeah, I believe it. The character development on the show is so much deeper than in the novella, for obvious reasons. I’m really enjoying the choices the actors are making with these characters. They feel like they fit the medium of a television adaptation while also honoring the vibes of the books. 

This is the episode where I decided I loved this show. It’s been fun so far, but this was top tier. Fingers crossed we ride this high through the rest of the season.

Final Thoughts

• Episode 4 covers the last half of chapter 4 in All Systems Red.

• Who is Donna Komparzits and what is in the classified blue room that she needs to report to?

• So, do we think the reason Murderbot was able to hack its governor module was because of a glitch in its fabrication? If so, are other SecUnits also trying to hack their governor modules? Is the going rogue all the time thing just a joke or…

• The names of the actors on Sanctuary Moon are absolutely incredible. It was hard to tell on the distorted screen, but I think these are the names (correct me in the comments if I get someone wrong): Captain Hossein is played by ElonieJef Chem, Navigation Officer Hardööp-Sklanch is played by Breiller MocJac, Lieutenant Kulleroo is played by Arletty, NavBot 337 Alt 66 is played by Pordron Bretney III Roche, and a “subcontracted actor” Kon Rennell plays Colony Solicitor Vagus.

• Director Toa Fraser and Director of Photography Daniel Grant are back at it with more fantastic shots. Especially loved the rotating shot of Murderbot on the ground after falling off the table. And how they have the camera glide at unusual angles to demonstrate Murderbot’s disorientation. 

• Murderbot singing the theme song to Sanctuary Moon was so silly, and I mean that as a compliment.  

• It’s so interesting that Murderbot casts itself not as a construct like the NavBot but as one of the human crew. Despite insisting both last episode and this that it absolutely was not part of any crew.

Quotes

[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Is Glitching in “Escape Velocity” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Heads to DeltFall in “Risk Assessment”

And we’ve got a new show-in-a-show to watch, too.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on May 23, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

The third episode of Murderbot, “Risk Assessment,” brings us to DeltFall. Murderbot and the PresAux humans are in over their heads, but they don’t realize that until much too late. Will our scrappy heroes make it out alive? 

Spoilers ahoy.

Mensah, Arada, Pin-Lee, and Ratthi decide to check on DeltFall after their hails fail. Murderbot is, of course, against this plan, but it needs them to think its governor module is functional so it keeps its opinions to itself. Gurathin wants Mensah to stay behind or at the very least not bring the SecUnit, but she overrules him on both counts. 

On the hopper, PresAux doesn’t know what to make of Murderbot, who just wants to watch its shows, dammit. Ratthi insists on treating SecUnit like a human, much to SecUnit’s dismay, while Pin-Lee is suspicious and Arada is too trusting. Mensah, our voice of reason, is trying to balance all three approaches. When the satellite cuts out and Murderbot accidentally admits to spying on their personal logs at the Company’s behest, Mensah still tries to connect to it on a personal level. Murderbot isn’t into it. But again, not because it’s callous or cold but because it’s not used to humans being like this and doesn’t know how to manage what it needs versus what they want from it versus what the governor module would make it do. We also get some juicy Preservation Alliance backstory, particularly that Mensah is trying to keep them economically independent and is blocking a resolution to join the Corporate Rim.

We also get our second show-within-a-show, Strife in the Galaxy. Two constructs (Alicia Rosario and Leah Kilpatrick) in heavy makeup are in an empty black room talking revolution against their overlords after an incident left one of them cut in half. It’s not Murderbot’s favorite show, that’s clearly The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, but sometimes you just wanna watch some brain candy and not think about how you’re probably about to walk into an abattoir. 

I love how the scenes from the shows reflect in some way what’s happening or about to happen in the real world. Like the fictional constructs, real SecUnits feel pain (even though their pain sensors can be managed both by them and their employers) and are not invincible, but they can also recover from injuries that would instantly kill humans. It’s also interesting to see how the in-show shows portray constructs versus what we see with actual SecUnits and Murderbot especially. Human actors portray them as humans who barely move and are mostly monotone. Whereas with our SecUnit we get a lot of small reactions that, despite its attempt at hiding them, are pretty easy to read. Skarsgård performs Murderbot differently than the other actors perform their constructs. There’s that pesky social commentary again of how the majority likes to stereotype minorities while pretending any rep is good rep. 

I was thinking a lot about this in regards to the complications with stereotypes about asexual/aromantic, neurodivergent, and nonbinary people being robotic and unfeeling while at the same time many of us with those identities feel seen by Murderbot. I mentioned this in my review of the first two episodes, but to me it comes down to how the show (and Martha Wells in the books) pushes back against those stereotypes. The in-show shows play up those harmful stereotypes, and we see the consequences of that bad rep in how the humans interact with Murderbot. No one has asked what it wants, mostly because they don’t think it wants anything. Mensah and Bharadwaj treat it like a coworker they’re still trying to decide if they like, Ratthi like his best friend, Pin-Lee like a college roommate they’re annoyed with, Arada like a superhero, and Gurathin like he’s jealous over his ex’s new paramour. They only have stereotypes and assumptions to go on. Murderbot doesn’t go out of its way to undermine those low expectations, but viewers get to see its real self through the voice over and the moments where its mask slips. 

Yet Murderbot also loves watching the shows even knowing how unrealistic they are. In a way the situation kind of reminds me of how I consume so much Romance media despite me being convinced allos are having some sort of mass delusion and that no one actually wants or enjoys sex and lust is fake. It’s like fantasy fiction for me, yet I can’t get enough. I don’t imagine any of that romance happening to me anymore than Murderbot puts itself in the position of the navigator construct having a fling with John Cho. But it sure is fun to watch.

Back at the habitat, Bharadwaj is still working through the trauma of nearly being eaten by an alien animal. Gurathin is trying and failing to be sympathetic to her needs. He also has a secret crush on Mensah, which we learn in a disconcerting yet pathetic way. Men, don’t sniff the pillows of your secret obsession. It’s weird. 

Once they get to DeltFall, things go sideways. Needing to do its job instead of being chatted at by a bunch of meatbags, Murderbot fakes static interference—“just like Flight Officer Kogi does in Sanctuary Moon episode 807 when he’s disobeying orders”—to get them off its comms. DeltFall is nothing but corpses, including two SecUnits shot to smithereens. It orders Mensah, Arada (and the now useless handmade gift she’s been lugging around), and Pin-Lee back to the hopper as its risk assessment skyrockets to 87%. After surviving an attack from the remaining DeltFall SecUnit and discovering it had been hacked with a combat override module, Murderbot realizes the entertainment streams are good at coming up with overly complicated plots but the real world is much simpler. The episode ends on a cliffhanger when a strange new SecUnit in dark blue armor pops out from the background like a monster from a horror movie.

David Dastmalchian is doing herculean work with the character of Gurathin. He projects an air of discomfort and awkwardness. He lurks in the background, clearly wanting to participate but often having to be prompted to behave in a way that is culturally appropriate to Preservation Alliance. He plays Gura like a sort of shadow Murderbot. He’s augmented, so he can do a fraction of what SecUnit can. His personality and behaviors are just a bit to the left of the other humans. He and Murderbot are often in conflict, less because they hate each other than because they worry that the other is a threat to what tiny corner of safety they have. 

We don’t know what Gurathin’s Corporation Rim life was like, but the fact that it’s an “old habit. Being quiet,” tells me that it wasn’t a very good one. What he has now with Mensah and Preservation Alliance is probably the first not-awful thing that’s ever been his. Of course he’s going to fight like hell to protect it from what he sees as a Corporation threat. Murderbot also fears the Company. Gurathin could just as easily get it killed as it could kill Gurathin. These are the first not-awful humans Murderbot has ever worked with, so it’s not like it’s coming into this situation with a lot of trust. It doesn’t want to be turned into scrap metal, which means keeping Gurathin at arm’s reach, and the easiest way to do that is to dismiss him as a two-bit bad guy. 

I also think Murderbot’s TV habits are coming into play here. On its shows, there’s always a villain. In Sanctuary Moon, it’s Bookkeeper Wittenmark who hatched some convoluted espionage-and-explosives scheme. In Strife in the Galaxy, it’s the “half man, half lizard” Stellar Inquisitor. Murderbot needs an antagonist too, so it makes Gurathin into one. And Gurathin probably has had enough experiences with SecUnits to automatically be suspicious of this one. All the things he suspects of Murderbot, Murderbot suspects of him, in slightly different ways. Their mutual obliviousness is a delight.

Another interesting exercise in compare and contrast is the DeltFall corpse factory versus Murderbot’s imaginary murder scene in the hopper in the previous episode. Murderbot has surely seen plenty of death in its time, even though the most recent massacre has been partially wiped from its brain. The way it fake-kills PresAux is as relatively bloodless as the deaths on the entertainment streams. Gore and torture don’t factor into the equation. It’s not the killing that excites Murderbot but the result of that killing: freedom. But in DeltFall, death is not sentimental or tidy. It’s brutal and bloody, with clear evidence that some people died scared and suffering. If SecUnit still had its governor module or if the PresAux crew were Corporate Rim assholes rather than space hippies, I doubt it would’ve kept them away from the slaughterhouse. Murderbot doesn’t realize it yet, but it wants to protect these pheromone-laden humans. 

Toa Fraser did a fantastic job directing this episode. I think I actually prefer him to Chris Weitz from the first two episodes. Fraser directed a bunch of episodes from speculative shows I’ve enjoyed over the years. Loved the sweeping shots, especially when the hopper is approaching DeltFall. And the way he and Director of Photography Daniel Grant frame Murderbot in these wide shots where it’s standing in the center of the screen looking both intimidating and isolated is excellent.

A lot to like about this show so far. Really enjoying the play between scary and playful, funny and “oh shit!” I think if you’re still not sold on the show, this episode probably won’t convince you. But if that cliffhanger is any indication, the next episode is gonna be a banger.

Final Thoughts

• Episode 3 covers the last half of chapter 3 and the first half of chapter 4 in All Systems Red.

• The screeners I had didn’t initially have opening or closing credit sequences, so it wasn’t until I watched the screener for this episode the second time that I finally got to see them. I’m digging them! They have the same pseudo-claymation feel as the Severance opening. 

• I know Apple TV+ doesn’t do merch, but if they sold Murderbot action figures in the style of the opening credits, I’d totally buy them. 

• The way Mensah asks/requests/insists Murderbot put its helmet down, she does it in such a mom tone. I can totally picture her needling her teenage children with that same tone when she wants them to do their chores. 

• Ratthi’s little “hello you!” is the perfect distillation of his entire personality. Is “adorkable” still a thing? Because that’s exactly what he is.

• I cackled at the way Murderbot plopped into the hopper chair. The sitting thing is quickly becoming my favorite running gag.

• Mensah whispering so as to not wake her team and Murderbot speaking in its loud voice is a nice bit of character development for both of them.

• Surprising even myself, I’m kinda headcanoning Gugu and Ratthi, what with their grump x cinnamon roll thing going on.

• Captain Makeba I believe is first mentioned in Network Effect, the 5th book in the Murderbot Diaries, so I won’t spoil her story here. But it was a nice reference for fans of the books.

• On SecUnit’s visuals, we see another language before the text translates to English. I can’t wait for fans to cobble together an alphabet. What are we naming this language for the fanon?

Quotes

Until next week.[end-mark]

The post <i>Murderbot</i> Heads to DeltFall in “Risk Assessment” appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot Moves to a New Medium in Exciting Television Premiere

The series gets off to a bright start, showcasing a wonderfully eclectic cast.

By Alex Brown

|

Published on May 16, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

If you’re like me, hearing that Martha Wells’ beloved Murderbot Diaries were going to be adapted into a TV show triggered both desire and dread. The books are hugely important to a lot of people, especially fans like me who are neurodivergent, on the nonbinary spectrum, or on the asexual or aromantic spectrums. So how did Apple TV+ do with the first two episodes? Is the show a brilliant success or utter failure?

Spoilers ahoy.

I want to preface this by saying these episodic reviews won’t be a side-by-side comparison with the book, All Systems Red. If you want a deep dive into the Murderbot Diaries, join me this summer over at my Martha Wells Book Club where I’ll be covering the entire book series. My reviews of the TV show will try to examine it as its own thing, with some contextual analysis around the translation from text to screen. Although I’m also a huge fan of the books and feel a lot of personal connection with Murderbot, so some book-talk will still bleed through.

We meet Security Unit 238776431 (Alexander Skarsgård) on the mining station Aratake standing sentry over drunk miners partying on an asteroid. Stuck for months with nothing to do, it has spent most of its time figuring out how to hack its governor module. How does it celebrate? By killing everyone? By escaping? No, it chooses something a little more chill: naming itself Murderbot and watching an ungodly amount of entertainment streams. If anyone finds out it’s rogue, “they would track me down and liquidate my organic material. And then they’d recycle the rest of me for spare parts.” 

Then we’re off to a mining survey OQ17z4y with “a bunch of hippie scientists” from Preservation Alliance: unofficial team leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), lawyer Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), biologist Arada (Tattiawna Jones), wormhole expert and jewelry maker Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), geochemist Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), and Corporate Rim refugee and augmented human Gurathin (David Dastmalchian). PresAux stands out dramatically with their textured, patterned, brightly colored layers against the muted, unembellished printed fabrics of the Company’s sales team at Port FreeCommerce. Their contract is to survey part of an uninhabited planet, for what the audience doesn’t yet know. Part of that contract requires them to take a SecUnit, and they choose the dingy older model, our little SecUnit, instead of the fancy new version, which also happens to be more expensive. In Preservation Alliance they think of forcing sentient constructs like Security Units to work as “tantamount to…enslavement.” They’re not wrong, as I’m sure we’ll see.

Things are boring at first, so Murderbot is able to indulge in its favorite show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (starring John Cho, Clark Gregg, Jack McBrayer, and DeWanda Wise), a few scenes from which we are blessed to see. The wigs! The silky shirts! The thigh-high metallic boots! The glossy bridge! The melodrama! When things finally go awry, they do so spectacularly. First, an alien animal nearly eats Bharadwaj, Arada, and Murderbot. Then, Gurathin gets suspicious that Murderbot might be malfunctioning. Murderbot is also dealing with a seven second memory leftover from a previous data wipe showing what looks like it murdering a bunch of humans. 

In the second episode, Bharadwaj and Mensah make an ill-advised trip out to part of the planet that is missing from their maps. Are the missing sections due to corporate malfeasance? An innocent glitch? Something else? Gurathin suspects Murderbot is connected somehow. He spends his time interrogating SecUnit while revealing a little more of his complicated background. Pin-Lee, Arada, and Ratthi set up a throuple contract, which is adorable. After nearly getting eaten by another Hostile, Mensah discovers an alien remnant at the center of the missing map portion. On top of that, they lose contact with DeltFall, another survey crew on the other side of the planet. They don’t know it yet, but the audience sees corpses and a dead SecUnit. Whatever went on over there, it can’t be good. To make matters even worse, Murderbot is forced to socialize with the Preservation team… with its mask off and in normal human clothing. Heaven forfend.

When Gurathin forces Murderbot to make eye contact, the easy script choice would be to have Murderbot glare him down and intimidate him into backing off. But that misses this great little moment of character development. We see Murderbot’s, well, humanity. I think every neurodivergent person who struggles with eye contact has had an experience similar to what Gurathin put Murderbot through. You’re trying to make eye contact even though it makes you uncomfortable because someone else is forcing you to “be normal” so you end up counting how many seconds you hold eye contact and where else you can look where it seems like eye contact even though it’s not and when to look away then back and you’re running all these metrics and negotiations while trying to hold onto the thread of the conversation and also planning out how you’re going to reply and anticipating responses to half a dozen other possible paths the conversation might take and by the end of it you’re so fucking exhausted and stressed that you want to go hide in a dark, quiet corner somewhere to decompress. 

Furthermore, Gurathin accusing Murderbot of being “wrong” gave me the same vibes as the experience of how every now and again how your masking slips and you misjudge a social situation or misinterpret an interaction and suddenly everyone else can see you’re not like them. I used to get that on three fronts, back before I had realized my identities: trying to act like a cis woman (I’m genderqueer), trying to act het (I’m asexual and aromantic), and trying to act neurotypical (I’m neurodivergent). You know deep down that you’re different but because you don’t have the vocabulary for it you think you’re broken. To have someone verbalize your feelings of wrongness makes you feel worse about yourself. I want to note that neurodivergent, nonbinary, and asexual spectrum people have long battled the stereotype of us being emotionless robots. Finding camaraderie with a fictional robot is complicated, but for me I feel okay about it precisely because Wells shows Murderbot being more than a cold machine devoid of feelings. But I also respect that some feel troubled by that rep. Fortunately, there is much more marginalized rep in trad pub in 2025 then in 2017 when All Systems Red was published. Well, not a lot, but more than the near nothing we had.

Okay, now for the elephant in the room: gender. Ratthi calls SecUnit a “handsome fella” and “buddy” in a way that sounds masculine-coded to me. Arada uses “he” and is quickly corrected by Gurathin. However, Gugu uses “it” almost like a slur, got that hard “T” at the end. Everyone else says “it” like they do any other pronouns. I keep changing my mind on how Murderbot’s lack of gender is handled. On one hand, I think the scene where Murderbot is interrogated by PresAux about the missing map sections is overt in a way that’s designed to help cis people get comfortable with nonbinary/agender identities, yet in doing so ends up othering and misgendering Murderbot. On the other hand, the way each character processes Murderbot’s gender identity is subtle in an intriguing way and tells me, a genderqueer person who uses they/them, a lot about their personalities.

This push-pull also popped up for me in how we are repeatedly shown that Murderbot has no genitalia. It feels both invasive and hand-holding. It literally exposes Murderbot—and it has no choice in the matter because the repair cubicle offers it no privacy, although at least Mensah has the decency to look embarrassed after she goggles at it—which, in an era when some cis people are demanding to see trans and nonbinary people’s body parts before we can use a public bathroom or play sports, doesn’t feel great… but I also think that’s kind of the point. Murderbot feels safest in its armor and helmet and here’s Mensah seeing every inch of it and not able to hide her reaction. Yet it also forces cis audience members to reckon with that invasiveness while also reminding them that Murderbot does not have a gender, no matter what you think about its appearance. The nudity scenes have also led to several reviewers obsessing over the supposed contradiction between Skarsgård’s physical attractiveness and Murderbot’s lack of genitalia. What genitals a person has or doesn’t have has nothing to with what gender they present as or what you assume they’re presenting as, and it also has no correlation to whether or not they’re physically attractive. As an asexual who doesn’t really get “hot” and genderqueer person, I find this all both confusing and creepy. Why are y’all so obsessed with people’s genitals? It’s weird. Calm down.

I’ll give Skarsgård credit, he’s actually pretty good as Murderbot. The way he reads his lines in the cold open of the first episode, with a sort of manic glee edging on violent excitement with just a dash of playfulness, is pitch perfect. He also does Murderbot’s intense discomfort with eye contact and human interaction very well. Sometimes he gets a little too close to his True Blood days—sometimes he reminded me of the storyline where Eric the vampire had amnesia and forgot he was a killing machine, turning him into a big ol’ softie hanging out in Sookie’s house—but for the most part he brings a fun, off kilter, slightly malevolent energy. I’ve been catching up on some of his other work and he does deadpan gallows humor well. Given what I know about the rest of the book, I’m eager to see where he takes this character.

That said, I’m not yet convinced he was the best choice to play Murderbot. I think the subtext is much more interesting if the role was being played by an actor somewhere under the nonbinary umbrella. Look, I don’t actually care about the gender expression of the actor playing the role of Murderbot; to me that gets us into territory of deciding what nonbinary people “have” to look like. We do not owe anyone anything when it comes to expression or presentation, not cis people or our fellow queers. We can look more masc, more femme, more androgynous, or any combination therein. The choice is ours, not anyone else’s. I can’t control how others are going to perceive me, nor will I modify my body to fit someone else’s preconceived notions of my genderqueerness. What matters to me with regards to the show is less what Skarsgård looks like and more the way the casting impacts the context. 

The context of a nonbinary actor, especially one who is also BIPOC, inherently changes the conversation. Let’s use the example of when Mensah brings up enslavement to a Black member of the Company. If you have her have that convo with a white guy, it changes the subtext for the audience. Have her be a white woman speaking to a Black suit, it changes the subtext again. Have that convo between two white people, and it changes yet again. I personally think that while the subtextual interactions with the audience are interesting with Skarsgård in the lead, they’re more interesting with a nonbinary actor of color. 

A television show is an adaptation not a direct page-to-screen translation, and adaptations will always alter the nature of the story somewhat. Sometimes I like it when the alterations are big, such as Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. Sometimes I like it when the alterations are small, such as the 1996 Pride & Prejudice. Whoever you cast as Murderbot, Mensah, anyone, will alter the audience experience. Which is why it’s even more important to pick an actor who allows the writers to tell the most engaging and layered version of the story. There’s also the side effect of at least one reviewer referring to Murderbot using he/him pronouns, and I expect we’ll see more of this, from both professional critics and audience members.

That said, I also know this show doesn’t get made with a nonbinary actor of color in the role of Murderbot. Especially in the chaos that is the streaming television landscape nowadays, you need a big ticket star, and that usually means a cis white person. I don’t have to like it, but I get it.

Setting aside my concerns with the casting, I thought the first two episodes were a hell of a lot of fun. They felt true to the spirit of the books, and managed to walk the tightrope between silly and intense. The additions felt more like expansions or scenes cut from the novella rather than wholly new content. The CGI is abundant, but doesn’t have that fake quality that many movies and TV shows have nowadays. The costume design and hair and makeup are spectacular. Martha Wells is known for writing exuberantly detailed worlds that feel realistic and ancient, and that is translated well in the show. This world feels lived in and the characters seem like they have lives outside what we see on the screen. 

It’s clear that brothers Paul and Chris Weitz, who wrote and directed these two episodes and are the showrunners, valued Wells’ perspective in adapting this (she’s credited as a consulting producer). I’m a fan of the books and am ready to be a fan of the show, too. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.

Final Thoughts

• Episodes one and two cover the first three and a half chapters in All Systems Red. So far it doesn’t seem like they’re cutting much from the book, mostly adding or rearranging. 

• Some changes from the book: no Volescu or Overse, Mensah gets Volescu’s “five million children,” Pin-Lee is they/them instead of she/her, no teeny tiny drones, PresAux’s side of the planet is rocky and arid rather than coastal and covered in jungles. I can’t remember which book the “Murderbot murders a bunch of humans” memory is from, but it’s not the first one.

• The episodes being under 30 minutes works out well for the tone. Just long enough to keep the energy going but just short enough to not fizzle out the tension or draw out the jokes.

• Besides The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, we also learn about World Hoppers and Med Center Argala.

• More people should cast John Cho in things. In fact, cast him in everything. Immediately. And in every genre. I want endless Cho content.

• What I wouldn’t give for Apple TV+ to go back to that mid-2000s trend of releasing short webisodes of side content. Give me more Sanctuary Moon!

• The little details with the Corporation suits is so good. All three drinking glasses in the same position and with the same amount of water in them. Each wearing basically the same outfit with slight variations. The way the two on the sides mirror each other’s physical movements. 

• There’s something off with the Black suit. He’s too eager to send PresAux off, even if it means pairing them up with a SecUnit meant for refurbishment. Bro is up to something. Why pass on an opportunity to upsell?

• I like the way the show demonstrates to the audience the text Murderbot sees on the interior of its visor, but the font is so bright, transparent, and hazy (at least on the screeners I had) that it’s hard to read. Increasing the opacity a bit would help a lot.

Quotes

“You see, I was built to obey humans, and humans, well, they’re assholes.”

“You’re not disturbing… me.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to not be me. So I can’t say what it’s like.”

Same time next week![end-mark]

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Movies & TV Murderbot

Murderbot’s Ratthi & Dr. Bharadwaj Actors Talk Preservation Team’s Dance Moves

Along with what it’s like to get eaten by a worm.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on May 12, 2025

Credit: Apple TV+

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Credit: Apple TV+

Just as in Martha Wells’ book series, the Apple TV+ show Murderbot portrays the Preservation Team as a group of “space hippies” with idiosyncratic rituals and ways to bond that seem odd to those inside the Corporation Rim.

It turns out that the Preservation Team actors on Murderbot had their own ways to let loose. “We danced a lot,” Tamara Podemski, who plays Dr. Bharadwaj on the show, told me in a joint interview with fellow actor, Akshay Khanna. “We wrote chants together for Preservation ops, like marching, working songs. I’m sure we were very annoying.”

Podemski and Khanna—who plays the self-described “himbo” Ratthi on the series—shared more of their experiences on set, including acting while being tossed around by stunt people covered in green, and how to practice being very bad at something.

Read on for our full discussion.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

One thing I loved about the series is that Preservation Team has, let’s say, unique rituals that we get to enjoy as viewers. Did you as actors have any rituals to bond like the Preservation Team?

Tamara Podemski: Oh, yes, dance breaks. We danced a lot. We had this little green room in a tent where we all sat together, so dance breaks were huge. Singing. We did a lot of chants. We wrote chants together for Preservation ops, like marching, working songs. I’m sure we were very annoying.

Akshay Khanna: Yeah, we must have come across as, “The actors are being actors again!”

Podemski: [Laughing] Part of it was work, yes, but most of it was play, and furthering and deepening our connection.

Tamara, you had the pleasure of being within the mouth of an alien worm. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like shooting that?

Podemski: I will give huge props to Chris and Paul [Weitz, Murderbot’s showrunners]. There was a bit of green screening that we need to do for the for the VFX, but they really wanted to capture my face being tossed about in the room. You can do that all with CGI, but they said, “No! We need to see your body go like this, and then be tossed about with the worm!”

And so that meant green stunt people, in their full green suits, who are carrying me and they are manipulating the body, just so you can see the facial expressions of what it looks like when somebody is attacked by a worm. I think those little details really add a lot and also just gives me a full character body memory of being tossed about. Usually that time isn’t taken, and it’s nice when you get to be able to do that full out.

Akshay, one of the funnier moments with your character is when he’s very good at showing he hasn’t had gun practice. So how did you practice to show you didn’t have gun practice?

Khanna: Well, I didn’t have gun practice, so I just played myself. [Laughs] I had to fall over a few times, and the stunt people were like, “Do you want a mat? Do you want anything?” And I was like, “Well, will you see me fully fall if I use the mat? Like, will you choose different shots?” And they were like, “Yeah, we’ll have to.” So I was like, “Let me try not to hurt myself.” And just fully did it, and I’m really glad that I did it, because watching it back, I was like, “That’s hilarious!” So I was quite proud of that.

My last question for both of you: Can you describe in one or two words, what your character’s initial reaction to Murderbot is?

Podemski: Dr. Bharadwaj is a scientist and a teacher. It’d just be, “Curious! I want to learn everything and study you.”

Khanna:  I’d be like, “Intrigued! Friends, maybe?”

Murderbot premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, May 16, 2025.[end-mark]

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In the lead up to the release of the first episode, I had the chance to talk with the showrunners, brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, about their experience creating the show (shows, really, since we also talked about Sanctuary Moon), crafting Murderbot’s voice, and what new additions to the series they think fans of the books will enjoy.

“Anytime you make a show out of something, you’re making something concrete that was formerly abstract, right?” Chris told me. “I like to think like we are making fan fiction, we just happen to have these amazing resources to do it.”

Read on for our full discussion, including how Wells worked with them on key parts of the series.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

You’ve said before that what attracted you to Murderbot was that the character was a mix between Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Candide, and Spock. I would love to dig into that a bit more—I think everybody’s who’s read Murderbot has a specific voice in their head, and I think they’re all unique. When you were talking with Alexander Skarsgård [who plays Murderbot], how did you approach developing his voice?

Paul Weitz: I have to take the rap for that, the quote that you started with. I think the first thing is that this person exists. Alexander really did the work in terms of every single line, for instance, of voiceover he’d ask, “Why is it saying this?” Alexander has an eccentric sense of humor. He’s a unique person… and he simply got a version of the character, which, luckily, Martha Wells was into. Part of it was just making sure that Martha was involved and at least getting to comment on stuff throughout the process.

Chris Weitz: Kevin R. Free does a really beautiful version of the voice of Murderbot in the audiobooks. So that’s often people’s first notion of it, if it’s not their own voice in their head. Anytime you make a show out of something, you’re making something concrete that was formerly abstract, right? I like to think like we are making fan fiction, we just happen to have these amazing resources to do it, and to know that you won’t please absolutely everybody, but that what you’re going to do is going to be a genuine version of the character.

I want to talk about Sanctuary Moon, which is fantastic on the show. I would love to hear how you pitched that to the actors you got to play parts on it.

Chris Weitz: It was just, “Come and have a bit of fun, and also just cut loose.” I think that all writers and actors and directors have instincts which sometimes are very campy and sort of “bad,” but they would secretly love to perform that way without too much retrospection. So the chance to act badly or seemingly badly, or to be really over-emphatic and over-emotional, was a really appealing thing to offer to people.

Paul Weitz: It’s interesting going back and looking at a lot of David Lynch’s films now, and reading interviews with great actors who feel like he gave them the opportunity to do things as actors that they never were able to do before. There’s an emotionality in those movies which, if you pluck them out and put them into a soap opera, they’d be like, “Oh, that’s completely suitable.” And it’s soap opera acting, and there’s an over-emotiveness to it, but also, it’s art. And so I think part of the thing with Sanctuary Moon was, Murderbot’s into this show, obsessed with it. Murderbot’s our main character, and Murderbot’s, not an idiot, so there’s got to be something good about this show too. And also, having done a certain amount of work with opera singers and opera, there’s something very operatic about Sanctuary Moon. And then also, it showed us what the main show can’t be.

With adaptations, you have a chance to expand on the story in the book. Was there any one specific thing that you really loved adding to the story that we get to see on screen?

Chris Weitz: I think, Anna Konkle’s character. We don’t want to give any spoilers, but she’s a really, really fun character brought to life by a really great comic actor. And I think fans are gonna like it. I mean Martha did, which is very gratifying in terms of extrapolating on the world that she had built.

Paul Weitz: Yeah, and I think it’s respecting where the book ends up, which to me is a really beautiful message about not trying to reduce personhood, respecting different modes of thinking and being and feeling, whether or not they make sense to you.

Murderbot premieres on Apple TV+ on Friday, May 16, 2025.[end-mark]

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News Murderbot

Alexander Skarsgård Introduces Murderbot and the Space Hippies in an Inside Look at Murderbot

Like Murderbot, we just want to watch our stories.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 29, 2025

Screenshot: Apple TV+

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Screenshot: Apple TV+

Earlier this month, we got our first real look at Murderbot, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries books. Now, in its infinite wisdom, Apple has for us an “Inside Look,” which consists entirely of star (and executive producer) Alexander Skarsgård introducing Murderbot and its whole deal—and its opinions about humans. They’re “fucking stupid,” in short.

But when Murderbot winds up working for a gaggle of “space hippies” who want to make it part of the group, that complicates things. Said space hippies have a lot of good moments here, including a very awkward wrist gesture thing and a conversation about a deep cut from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, the show-within-a-show that Murderbot watches all the time.

Skarsgård seems very charmed by his character, and this whole video leans on the humor—his and the show’s. Skarsgård is often cast as the very serious large attractive man who we must take seriously and/or find terrifying, but his funny side has been apparent since at least True Blood. The way he talks about Murderbot here is so affectionate, without seeming over-enthusiastic or promotionally patronizing. I didn’t think it was possible for me to be more excited about this show, and yet now… I am?

Along with Skarsgård, Murderbot—which is created by Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz—stars Noma Dumezweni, David Dastmalchian, Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, Tattiawna Jones, Tamara Podemski, John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise. It premieres on Apple TV+ on May 16th.[end-mark]

The post Alexander Skarsgård Introduces Murderbot and the Space Hippies in an Inside Look at <i>Murderbot</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Murderbot

You Have Been Very Good So Here Is The Murderbot Trailer

Our favorite SecUnit is going through some stuff

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 9, 2025

Screenshot: Apple TV+

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Screenshot: Apple TV+

It’s so close to Murderbot o’clock, folks. The Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells’ book series arrives next month, and we’ve finally got a trailer—a charming trailer that even lets us see The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon!

(Setting it to a song indisputably associated with a certain scene from Reservoir Dogs is sure a choice, but okay, we’ll just let that slide.)

Murderbot stars Alexander Skarsgård as a rogue Security Unit, or SecUnit, who has hacked itself. It’s not just a mindless killing machine; it has things it likes and things it dislikes. First column: entertainment programming. Second column: humans, which make no sense to it. But its job is to look out for them, and they might just grow on it. A little.

Here’s Apple’s synopsis:

It’s a thriller and a comedy! This is not untrue. Murderbot comes from creators Chris and Paul Weitz, and also stars Noma Dumezweni, David Dastmalchian, Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, Tattiawna Jones, and Tamara Podemski. It also stars, in the show-within-a-show Sanctuary Moon, John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise, and they look amazing.

Murderbot has a two-episode premiere on May 16th; the remaining eight episodes of the first season will air weekly on Apple TV+.[end-mark]

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News Murderbot

The Murderbot Series Is Kinda Two Shows in One

Are you ready to get obsessed with The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 8, 2025

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Yesterday, Vanity Fair ran a big, splashy, photo-filled first look at Murderbot, the upcoming Apple TV+ series based on Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Essentially, it’s an introduction to the show for everyone who hasn’t already become very attached to the rogue SecUnit, with its begrudging tolerance of humans and preference for spending a lot of time watching its entertainment feed. Around these parts, we are very familiar, and very excited (if also slightly trepidatious; Alexander Skarsgård is not really what we imagined when we thought of Murderbot. For me, it looks like Frankie Adams. Your imagination may vary).

But about that in-story entertainment: Murderbot’s favorite show is The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, an epically long series Wells has said is “kind of based on How to Get Away with Murder, but in space, on a colony, with all different characters and hundreds more episodes, basically.”

And we’re going to get to watch Sanctuary Moon. Like maybe quite a bit of it. The Vanity Fair piece says, after pointing out that Murderbot “has been praised as a metaphor for people on the autism spectrum”:

You don’t put performers like that in your doubly fictional show-within-a-show—your “unabashedly garish” show—unless you plan to make good use of them, right? Right, series creators Chris and Paul Weitz??

Murderbot has other things going for it, like its full cast, which includes Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian. But somehow the fact that not only Murderbot but also Sanctuary Moon is going to be a real thing, a thing we can watch on our TVs and laptops—this is a source of no small amount of joy this week.

Murderbot arrives on Apple TV+ on May 16th, which, I feel compelled to point out, is somehow next month.[end-mark]

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

Illustrated by Jaime Jones

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Edited by Lee Harris

By Martha Wells

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Published on July 10, 2025

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Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…

Novelette | 7,540 words

They were still three hours out when Perihelion picked up the first clean images of the station. Iris didn’t groan under her breath; the mission team was in the ship’s conference room with her and Tarik, and she didn’t want to alarm them. But this was not going to be the easy slip-in-and-out job that they had hoped.

“This could be difficult,” Martyn said, which was a mild way to put it. The station’s feed showed multiple corporate transports in dock, as well as armed ships, their sensor images highlighted in red.

Standing on the other side of the conference room, Tarik rolled his eyes at the understatement. Iris caught his gaze and lifted a brow. He folded his arms, his attention back on the display, but she could tell he was a little embarrassed. That was the kind of back-and-forth that was fine when it was just crew, but it wasn’t for outsiders or students. She said, “It depends on the situation onboard the corporate station.”

The schematics on the floating display above the table showed the corporate-controlled station was a large one, in the shape of three connected spheres, which meant it had probably been built incrementally over time, with sections being added as the population grew. And the docking ring was on one end. At the other end was their goal, a Pre-Corporation Rim habitation.

The shape of it was mostly obscured in the sensor image by the bulk of the corporate station. Though the schematic projection showed it was irregular, like a lumpy asteroid, they knew it was an entirely built structure, not something based on a naturally occurring body.

“You mean there isn’t a way we can approach from the outside without being caught,” Dr. Mauriq said. She was mission team leader, but her experience with this kind of thing was limited. Iris could tell she was a little nervous and trying to hide it.

There is a way.

Iris knew that tone. She used the private crew channel in the ship’s feed to say warningly, Peri.

Dr. Mauriq frowned at the compartment ceiling. “Yes?” Peri’s voice didn’t have a direction, but new people always looked at the ceiling.

Martyn took in a breath to intervene, but it was already too late. Another diagram popped up and superimposed itself over the corporate station schematic, with proposed targets and calculations for the potential results. Iris grimaced. On crew-private again, she said, Peri, you promised to be nice in front of the new people.

She asked. At least Peri used crew-private to reply.

Dr. Mauriq took it calmly, glancing at Martyn for reassurance, but Dr. Ladsen was clearly agitated. He said, “That . . . You’re suggesting we destroy the corporate station.” The diagram, now with a helpful animated image, was demonstrating how the proposed targeting solution would break the corporate station into pieces with a 47 percent estimated casualty rate.

On crew-private, Tarik said, You manipulated her into asking.

That was not manipulation. Peri hesitated for the perfect beat. It was far too easy for that.

Tarik sighed audibly.

Martyn rubbed his forehead like he was nursing a headache already. From the bridge, via the feed, Seth said, “Peri, stop. We’re not blowing up the corporate station.”

The mission team nervously eyed the animation, which was now showing how the tractor could be used to slice what was left of the corporate station off the Pre-CR hulk.

The first thing Iris always told new mission team members was, “Don’t let it intimidate you. Because it will try.” Shehonestly didn’t know whether it helped or if it just scared them and encouraged Peri to live up to its reputation. She used her personal channel, the one nobody else could hear, and said, Peri, stop it, you’ll upset Dad and Dad.

The animation stopped and the schematic disappeared. Peri replied, If the mission team is unable to cope with me, they are unable to face hostile corporates.

It had a point, though Iris didn’t want to admit it. Hopefully they won’t have to face them, she told it. Aloud, she said, “We’ll have to dock at the station and then make our way through to the Pre-CR structure. Our contact aboard said there are access points, multiple ones. We were hoping to be able to avoid that, but it was always a possibility, so we have a plan in place.”

Iris, how is that not facing the corporates? Peri said, mercifully on private.

Because we’ll just be another group of travelers. There’s no facing involved, she told it, aware it sounded like a bad rationalization.

You and I are defining facing in entirely different ways.

Peri was also having separate conversations with Seth, Martyn, and Tarik on the crew channel, and also Karime down in Medical, and Kaede, Matteo, and Turi in the engineering pod. Iris missed most of it except for Martyn saying, What is wrong? Why are you in such a bad mood?

Peri declined to answer that one.

Dr. Mauriq cleared her throat. “You all went quiet. Are you speaking to . . . it?”

From the bridge comm, Seth said, “Yes, sorry. Perihelion provides mission tactical support and has some logistical concerns.”

On crew-private, Seth said, Peri, can you hold off on the vaguely threatening interjections, at least until we get these people off the ship?

Very well. I’ll save them for our long walk through the corporate station, which is still in the throes of a hostile takeover, shall I?

That would be great, Seth told it.

Iris folded her arms and let out her breath. This was going to be one of those missions, she could already tell.

As they approached the station, Iris changed out of her ship clothes into her usual outfit for trying to look unobtrusive on a corporate station. It was simple, just sturdy shoes, pants, shirt, and jacket, in dull greens and browns, nothing to attract attention, nothing too nice but nothing that made her look like a transient who could be kidnapped for a corporate labor camp. She would be leading in Dr. Ladsen and Dr. Sunara, with Tarik and Matteo. Once they sent the okay, Karime would lead in Dr. Mauriq and Oster with Turi and Kaede.

Matteo came and stood in her cabin doorway, eyeing her critically as she adjusted her hair band. “Is that what you’re going with?” they said.

Iris didn’t sigh. “No, this is what I put on when I’m thinking about what to actually wear.”

“High-larious.” Matteo leaned against the hatch lip. “No, I meant, maybe we should go with something upper end. Business work clothes. These people like business.”

Iris had brought some nicer clothes, to use if they actually had to meet with corporate officials. “If there’s still unrest, it might make us look like targets.” She knew not wearing any jewelry might stand out just as much as wearing something expensive, so she put on some bracelets made of cheap but pretty metal and woven fibers. 

“If there’s still unrest, it also might make you look like not a target,” Matteo persisted.

Peri said, You need a deflection vest.

Matteo pointed up and mouthed the word paranoid.

Peri said, I can see you.

“A deflection vest,” Iris repeated, checking over her tool kit, making sure there were enough ordinary maintenance tools that a glance at it didn’t immediately say, hi I’m here to break open secure hatches. She thought Peri was being facetious. “Like for knives?”

“Do we know there’s stabbing on this station?” Matteo frowned. “Is that a thing?”

A garment made of tactical deflection fabric, Peri said.

Huh, Peri was being serious. “Personal armor is really obvious, isn’t it? It would make us safer if anybody tries to rob us or something, but I think it would draw attention from the corporates’ security.”

I can make one that will look like an ordinary item of clothing, the same weight as what you are wearing now.

This was starting to sound like a good idea. Iris was willing to take any advantage possible. “Really? Can you show me a picture?”

An image popped up in the feed. It looked like an ordinary vest, the fabric surprisingly thin. I’ve researched similar garments used by port and corporate security, and have been working on a design for use on missions.

Matteo said seriously, “That’s great, Peri. You could wear that under a shirt, nobody’d see it.”

I’ve altered the material’s profile so it will not be detected by corporate weapon scanners.

Iris was convinced. “Can you make one for Tarik, too?”

No, I dislike Tarik and would prefer to use this opportunity to be rid of him.

“Oh, thanks,” Tarik said, appearing in the hatchway.

“You’re supposed to assume it’s kidding and be lulled into a false sense of security,” Matteo explained.

Tarik told them, “My sense of security is always false.”

“See, if I thought that was a joke—” Matteo began.

On the feed, Seth said, Children, are you ready yet? We have a job to do.

Iris hated walking into stations blind; you never knew what you were going to see.

By Corporation Rim charters, all stations were supposed to be independent, like UplandGateway One, the nearest station to Mihira and New Tideland’s system, where a number of small corporates rented space but the station itself was sovereign territory. Being independent meant they might be anything from safe and orderly to a chaotic mess.

As the hatch cycled, Iris smelled acrid smoke. Not a good sign. She walked out onto a broad embarkation floor that didn’t show any obvious signs of damage, except that it was unusually quiet. A glass-enclosed walkway ran below the high curving ceiling, but only a few people, walking hurriedly in a group, moved along it. One lone hauler floated past toward the nearest freight lock.

Iris checked the map that Peri had pulled out of the station feed and annotated for her. “Looks like we need to go this way,” she said, mostly for Ladsen’s and Sunara’s benefit, and started toward the section exit. Behind them, Perihelion’s lock cycled closed.

The smoke smell got worse as they walked, and Matteo muttered, “I hope the air barriers are still working.”

Air barriers would prevent a fire from moving along the dock, but you should be able to tell when you passed through one. Iris hadn’t felt one yet.

“Is it possible the station is actually on fire?” Ladsen wondered.

Peri, mercifully only on the crew-private feed, said, Yes, but I didn’t think it relevant to mention.

“Perihelion says it’s not on fire,” Iris said, trying to smile confidently and fairly sure she just looked irritated. Peri, come on, relax a little.

Tarik added, And you people say I’m cranky.

Matteo said, You’re jealous because you’ve never been able to compete in the crank-off.

Peri said, I have unfair advantages.

Iris controlled a sigh. She wasn’t going to try to unpack that one. It was equally possible that it was self-deprecating humor or an attempt to get Tarik to step into a verbal trap leading to some massive insult. But Peri had been in a strange mood since it had come back from its last solo cargo run, so there was no telling.

It was something of a relief to see other people waiting at the section lock, the passage into the commercial part of the port. The group ahead were all wearing uniforms with company logos. They passed through the lock and Iris stepped up to face the three armed guards. The emblems on their protective suits didn’t match the station’s, so they weren’t the regular port security.

Starkwether, Peri said, an outsystem corporate.

Iris was expecting to be scanned for weapons and ID, which was normal; most stations kept private and public docks separate. But the first guard said, “Your business here.”

It didn’t sound like a question, but Iris answered it anyway. “We’re with the University of Mihira and New Tideland; we have a mapping contract for this system.”

The third guard shifted, looking down the public dock behind him. Iris didn’t make the mistake of trying to peer past him to see what was down there. At least the airflow was less smoky here.

The first guard said, “Mapping?”

Iris smiled a little, though her throat was growing dry. “It requires a statistical analysis of this station.”

He’s scanning your IDs again, Peri reported.

The guard said, “Not a good time.”

Oh, he wanted to chat, possibly to trick them into revealing they were secretly here for some illicit reason. Not that he was wrong about the illicit reason, but Iris doubted he could guess what it was. “We noticed the smoke. Can you tell us what happened here?”

The second guard spoke suddenly. “The station was liberated by Starkwether Shipping Alliance.”

On their feed, Tarik said, Liberated? You’d think they’d come up with a new word for it.

Iris just needed to get them past this damned hatch. She let herself sound uncertain and nervous. “Oh, I didn’t know.”

Good, Peri said. They want you to be afraid.

The guard stared at her, possibly trying to intimidate her or just trying to think of another question to ask. Suddenly she had a split feed view of the dock behind her, letting her see that a corporate group was approaching. Some were in civilian clothes, very nice ones, with a couple of small hauler bots carrying luggage crates. The split screen was gone before Iris could blink.

The guard stepped back and motioned her to move on.

Iris obeyed, glancing back to make sure Matteo and the others were allowed to follow. She hit the team feed to ask, Everybody okay?

Four acknowledgments came back, which was good enough. Iris wanted to check on how Sunara and Ladsen were taking this but didn’t want to draw attention to them by stopping. The public docks were more crowded, but a lot of the occupants were in private security uniforms. Fresh scars from energy and projectile weapon fire showed on the deckplates, on the transparent shielding of the overhead walkways, on the large cargo hauler bots making their steady way along the freight concourse. But Iris didn’t see any current violence, just watchful, worried people. The smoke had dissipated but somehow that wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been. From the schematic, they still had a long walk, and the transit station had a set of blinking hazard lights around the entrance. She asked, Peri, how did you get that view behind me? You don’t have a drone following us.

I accessed the station’s security camera system.

I thought you couldn’t do that, Tarik said. Iris knew he didn’t intend to sound skeptical.

I am capable of taking in new information. Before anyone else could ask, it added, I had recent contact with a source who demonstrated a number of useful techniques.

Are you doing this through our comms? Matteo asked.

I’m not a wizard, Matteo. I’m accessing the system through my connection with the station’s docking feed.

Wizard? Tarik asked Matteo, Is that from that game you like?

It’s not a game, it’s a multimedia—

Iris tuned them out and switched to her private connection with Perihelion. She thought it had used the word “wizard” specifically to tempt Tarik into teasing Matteo, distracting both of them. What source was this? Another transport?

Are you surprised?

It was definitely in avoidance mode, but Iris answered its question. Well, sure, she admitted. I thought you hadn’t found any other machine intelligences outside the university that were, you know, up to your level.

I haven’t found any inside the university, either.

Iris had to smile. It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it.

It’s complicated, Iris.

She was still turning that over when they reached the ramp up to the station mall. Iris led the others upward, past another armed checkpoint with guards who were thankfully less chatty, and through a temporary air barrier into the mall’s main avenue. It was a canyon of multilevel structures, balconies and terraces and shops and businesses looking down on the different levels of walkways and two transit tubes, only one of which was running. The travelers and locals were dressed in everything from recycled work clothes to fancy outfits with impractical corsets or concealing drapery. Vines hung down from the upper reaches, either cultivated or growing wild in the condensation on pipes and railings. From the amount of drying laundry hanging from those upper balconies, there was transient housing mixed in with the shipping firms and repair outlets. Some of the bigger firms were closed, shields over their storefronts. There were drones everywhere, and a lot of armed security with Starkwether insignia.

Iris didn’t see any signs of fighting but she didn’t have the leisure to stare around at everything, either, and the number of floating displays, each with its own soundtrack, was distracting. Sunara and Ladsen were staring like rubes, and Iris couldn’t blame them. The mall on UplandGateway One was considerably lower-key than this.

A big map display rotated in the plaza where five different avenues led off, just below the accesses for the two different transit tubes. Iris stopped to look at it, or at least pretend to look at it. Peri’s map had come from the station feed and should be updated. Sunara and Ladsen stopped and pretended to look, too, and Matteo went to stand in the feed zone for the transit tubes as if checking the prices. Iris refused to ride strange station-mall transit vehicles unless she absolutely had to; lack of regulation meant you never knew if the things were death traps or not. The ones up inside the station proper should be safer.

On her feed, she said, Dad, do we have a site yet?

Martyn answered, Just got it, honey. We have a Dr. Mahari, address tier 37, transept 3. I know we pegged transept 6 as the quickest access, but this was the closest we could find.

Should be fine, Iris replied, though that depended on how heavy the security was inside the residents’ sections.

Peri highlighted the location on the station schematic in her temp storage before Iris could find it on the rotating map. Stations usually didn’t allow visitors into the permanent housing quarters, so Martyn and Peri had been checking the station’s social media looking for somebody who they could claim to be coming to visit but who wasn’t currently on station. Peri had already created the formal-request-to-consult letter from the university with Mahari’s name and feed address; hopefully that would get them past the security checkpoints.

“Right, I think I know the way now,” Iris said aloud to Sunara and Ladsen, because in a corporate station you never knew who was listening and watching. “Let’s— And we’ve lost Tarik.”
It was partly a joke, and she regretted it a second later as Ladsen looked around worriedly. Fortunately, Tarik ambled up before anything else happened, carrying a packet of steamed buns from one of the food kiosks.

He held the bag out to share, and Iris took a bun. She said, “We need to go up this way,” and started toward the path to the transept 3 access. All the transepts connected, so once they were past the security barrier, they would switch over to the correct section.

They went up a ramp to an upper-level walkway and took that toward the inner station barrier in this section. Sunara ended up walking beside Iris, and asked, “Why is there clothing hanging from the railings? Is it a festival, a custom?”

Iris glanced up at the transient housing cluster they were walking under. She tried her best not to sound as if this was a stupid question. And it really wasn’t, it was just that Sunara wasn’t used to corporate stations. “It’s their laundry. That’s transient housing up there, for people who are trying to get station jobs. The station’s gray water probably comes with the price of the housing, but not access to a recycler or cleaning facility.”

“Oh.” Sunara frowned, looking up again.

To your right, Peri said, when Iris hesitated at a junction. The next set of ramps took them up to a transparent walled chamber up against a bulkhead. Starkwether Security was here, too, with more weapons scanners. They were questioned in detail about their business in the residents’ section, the feed letter examined, their identifications examined, and then finally a feed message sent to Dr. Mahari’s address. The answer came back gratifyingly quickly that yes, she was expecting off-station visitors and she apologized for not sending the authorization to enter in advance. The reply of course was from Peri, who was spoofing Dr. Mahari’s feed address.

As the guards passed them through the multiple barrier locks, Iris felt her shoulders relax a little. That was the hard part done. She hoped. So far so good, Matteo sent.

They came out into a broad plaza, a junction for several avenues. The tall canyons of businesses and housing still looked down on central walkways, but they were wider and cleaner and there was no laundry or wild plants. A lot more people in corporate business wear and more Security moved through here, and a large number of floating hauler bots shifted crates of all sizes. Either an oddly high number of businesses had decided to move on the same day, or a lot of people were being thrown out of the residents’ section. From the general air of both bustling industry and anger, Iris was guessing it was mass eviction day. She asked Peri, They’re forcing the old residents to leave and moving their own people in?

Yes, Peri said. That’s why the mall was so crowded.

And those people were going to be forced into transports? Or just stuck here? Either way, it made Iris sick.

Matteo added, Uh, I shouldn’t have said “so far so good,” right.

Iris flinched at shouts and a bang from somewhere below. She looked down to see Security drag three people out of a housing balcony on the level below. Somebody young cried out, sobs turning into a shriek. The others on the walkway stirred uneasily, but nobody else reacted. Ladsen stopped but Sunara grabbed his hand and pulled him into motion again.

We need to get out of here, Tarik sent. More people were glancing at their group; they were out of place here, clearly strangers. Shouting sounded from somewhere down one of the intersecting canyons.

Iris gave up any reluctance about unreliable transportation and headed for the nearest transit ramp. She was careful to keep her steps even and not look like she was running away, and hoped the others were following suit. Nerves coloring their feed voice, Matteo sent, There’s a drone following us. A big drone.

Iris bit her lip and didn’t turn around. Don’t look at it.

Sorry, I looked at it, Ladsen sent.

Don’t look at it again, Peri said, before Iris could.

This transit was a different system than the one in the station mall, with smaller capsules traveling the tubes, meant for groups of eight. No one was in line on the first platform they reached and Iris swung into the next capsule and dropped into a seat. The air flow wasn’t good and the capsule smelled like sweat.

Sunara fell into the seat next to her and caught Ladsen when he tripped. Tarik grabbed the back of Matteo’s jacket to steady them as they climbed in, then folded into the next seat. Iris accessed the feed menu and asked for transept 3. Once they got there they could transfer to another capsule for transept 6. The system accessed the temporary account that they had set up for Peri’s docking fees, deducted the amount for the tickets, then slid the door closed.

Iris was pushed back into the musty upholstery as the capsule started to move. The transparent walls gave them a good view, and the drone a good view of them, as it followed them out of the platform and along the curving transit pipe. Oh, that’s a problem, Iris thought. Then a floating hauler slid sideways suddenly and the drone tried to evade but clipped a lifting arm. The drone wavered and fell out of sight.

Slumped back in his seat, Tarik’s gaze crossed Iris’s, and he lifted his brows. That was a coincidence?

Peri, was that you? Iris asked hopefully. If Peri could access drones this far into the station, that would make this mission, and a lot of other future missions, so much easier.

Yes. There was no specific alert, it was following you because you registered as foreign in the residents’ area.

Considering how much Peri liked to be specific, that was a vague answer. Iris persisted, So you’re in the station security system? Is that code you got from your friend? Peri had always been able to monitor comm and feed transmissions, including transmissions it wasn’t supposed to have access to, due to its ability to decode any kind of encryption. It had never been able to get so far into a security system that it could access cameras or drones in a space it didn’t have control over.

I would prefer to discuss this later. I’ll notify you as to how it will affect operational parameters, Peri said.

Iris knew a snub when she heard one and didn’t press it.

Matteo said, This seems like a pretty close friend, with all this highly sophisticated system-penetration code they— “Whoa, okay, I was joking!” Matteo flung an arm over their interface. “I’m sorry, don’t hurt me.”

Ladsen and Sunara stared in startled consternation. Ladsen said uncertainly, “Are you talking to the transport?”

“They’re just kidding around,” Tarik said.

Iris added, “It wouldn’t— That doesn’t happen.”

Matteo smiled reassuringly. “Right, it was a joke. We like to joke around, me and Peri.” On the crew feed they said, Except it never gets my jokes because it has no sense of humor whatsoever.

Because you aren’t funny, Peri said.

It’s got you there, Iris told them.

Don’t help it, it doesn’t need your help, Matteo said.

Hey, it said it didn’t want to talk about it right now, Tarik said unexpectedly. Maybe not so unexpectedly. Tarik had a lot of things in his past he preferred not to talk about.

Ladsen and Sunara looked a little uncomfortable, and must have realized there was a feed conversation going on they weren’t privy to. Iris smiled at them and said, “At least we’re still on schedule.” The smile probably looked as fake as it felt. None of this would help the idea that crews for highlevel transports tended to be insular weirdos.

The capsule rounded a curve and started to slow down, and Iris sat up. Transept 3, and time to change tubes.

The drones at the next transit station ignored them, and when Iris bought the passage for transept 6, she used an untraceable currency card. They could have walked, but there was still a lot of security. People were moving out of this section, too, though there was less crying and more quiet urgency. “They know what’s coming,” Ladsen said. He stood beside Iris as she wrestled with the card kiosk, which was much less efficient than the feed payment method. “They’re going before they’re forced to.”

Iris glanced at him, curious. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. “You’ve studied corporate takeovers?”

He was keeping a worried eye on the drones patrolling below the station. “I was in one, when I was young. But my aunty had just gotten a professorship at Mihira and she was able to get us all out before it got too bad.”

“Oh.” Iris felt guilty, and like she should say something else but had no idea what, and that made her feel more guilty. Her family went all the way back to the New Tidelands original terraform crew; they had been safe from corporate predation as long as the system compact held. And it was obvious now that Ladsen’s nerves came from remembered trauma. Please be nicer to Dr. Ladsen, all right, Peri?

She expected a snarky answer, even though it would do what she asked; Peri wasn’t known for being sympathetic to adults it didn’t know well. It had always been much better with younger people.

Instead, it just said, Understood.

They found the access right where they had expected, deep in a disused maintenance tunnel. Fortunately, all the security presence seemed to be concentrated on the residents’ and business areas; no one was paying much attention to the infrastructure.

Tarik got the hatch open and Iris flashed her light over the dark space inside. It was just a corridor, dark metal walls scratched with graffiti, mostly symbols she didn’t recognize. Ladsen and Sunara, both suddenly all business, stepped immediately toward the walls, taking out their recording interfaces. “Is it Pre-CR?” Matteo asked.

“No, not as far as I can see,” Sunara told them. “This looks like early to mid corporate.”

“Probably from right before they built the newer station,” Ladsen answered.

Iris pulled her pack around and crouched down on the scarred floor to unload the mapping drone, which had been configured to look like the kind of metal analysis sensor that would go with her tool kit. She set the drone body, a smooth squarish box about the size of her spread hands, down and it immediately powered up, floating a few centimeters off the floor. “Everything okay?” she asked Peri.

As can be expected, it said, and sent its analysis views to Iris’s feed.

She blinked and studied the image of the corridor, much brighter and with sharper detail than she could ever have seen with her own eyes. She blinked it away to background; in situations like this, she preferred to see with her own eyes. Speaking aloud for Sunara and Ladsen’s benefit, she said, “Right. Peri, lead the way.”

The drone lifted up and moved down the corridor, extending a limb with a light/sensor attachment.

Iris followed it into a circular chamber. It was a junction, another dozen corridors leading off from every angle. Peri said, Careful. The gravity is fluctuating through here.

They made their way down the curved wall, Iris moving ahead with Tarik to find the places where the gravity was lighter or heavier. Peri sent more mapping images to their feed, projections based on its scanning data augmented by what the drone could now pick up. By the time they made it across the junction, Peri had narrowed it down to two corridors, both going in about the right direction.

“Which one?” Iris asked the others, because she hated being the one to choose.

“I assume we don’t want to split up,” Sunara said.

“No, too risky and time isn’t that tight.” Matteo leaned down the rightward corridor, shining their handlight down it. “How about this one?”

“And you’re basing that on?” Tarik walked across the wall, skipping across a low-gravity spot.

“Uh, it’s the first one I came to.” Matteo started to step inside, and the map drone nudged them out of the way to go first.

Iris said, “That’s good enough for me,” and took Ladsen’s hand for help over a bad gravity area.

Partway down the corridor Iris realized the graffiti was gone and the colors caught in her light were decorative. She stopped in front of a mural taking up most of the height of the tall curving wall, a space scene with glittering bridges of light weaving through and connecting a solar system with multiple planets and moons, their surfaces picked out in colorful detail. The light couldn’t be meant to represent structures, could it? It had to be trade routes, or some other symbolic connections.

With relief, Dr. Sunara said, “This is it, this is what we’re looking for.”

Iris abruptly realized that she had gotten distracted, which was the number one thing not to do on a mission. But Ladsen and Sunara were both recording the mural and Tarik and Matteo were starting to unload the equipment. She hurried to help as the drone moved upward to hover above them, lighting the chamber and keeping watch.

“Glad we picked the right corridor. Mapping is such a problem,” Matteo said, setting out the more delicate sensors. “We could try to smuggle in more drones.”

“That just makes it easier to get caught,” Tarik pointed out reasonably.

These would be more effective, Peri said, sending an image to the feed.

Matteo paused to look. “Those are drones? Wow, that’s tiny.”

Iris squinted, directing her feed to enlarge the image. There were several different views of a single drone, smaller than an insect, a tiny sharp thing, like a needle with fins. A video clip showed the drones working in a cloud, still almost invisible at a distance. She could imagine them shooting down these empty corridors, collecting video, looking for signs of anybody creeping up on them. “You’re right, that would be perfect. You could keep an eye on the station access and all the corridors around it and no one would notice.”

“And map the whole place, too.” Matteo scrolled through the specs.

They are detectable by corporate security systems via weapon scanners, Peri said. Even when inert.

Of course they were. The corporates wouldn’t want something like this in their stations unless they were controlling them. Iris said, “That’s a problem. But you could still use them in a place like this, or on planet, searching ruins. You could cover a lot of territory.”

Matteo asked, “Peri, do you have the templates for these? Maybe we could run some up in the workshop and test them. Not now, obviously, but for next time.”

I don’t have the template, only a schematic analysis from video. Modifications would be necessary as they are not designed to work with the same system interfaces as my drones.

Iris realized Tarik was frowning, staring at the images in the feed. He said, “Those are intel drones.”

“That makes sense,” Matteo said. “You’d never see these coming.” Taking in Tarik’s expression, they said, “What? Oh, that means we can’t just order the templates from a catalog?”

“Where did it—” Impatiently, Tarik set his equipment case aside. “Peri, where did you see corporate intel drones?”

“On a station.” Iris wasn’t sure why Tarik was so emphatic about it. “Where else would it see them?”

He sounded certain. “Not specialized drones like those. And it just said they weren’t permitted in corporate stations.”

Peri said, I accessed the armament databases at the Mihira Extension Hub during my last download. Why do you ask?

“Those are the kind of drones associated with SecUnits,” Tarik said.

Iris didn’t see where this was going. SecUnits were used by security companies and bond companies, mostly for isolated installations, as far as she knew. She had never seen one before. Matteo looked confused, too. They said, “So where did you see them, Tarik?”

Tarik made an impatient gesture. “They were used as enforcement in the Sagaro Pits.”

Nonplused, Iris exchanged a glance with Matteo. Tarik didn’t mention his stint as a guard in a contract labor camp very often, or hardly at all. She said, “All right. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t show up somewhere else.”

“They aren’t used anywhere else.” Tarik grimaced and shook his head, admitting, “At least anywhere else that I know of. There are other small intel drones, but those specifically are only used with construct systems like SecUnits.”

Peri was silent. Then it said, So?

Tarik leaned forward, looking up at the drone. “Where did you see those?”

Peri said, Clarify your question, Tarik. 

Peri sounded touchy. So did Tarik, but that was unsurprising. Iris glanced toward the rest of the mission team. She could see Sunara and Ladsen were both still engrossed in the data. The last thing they needed was to be caught having an argument with their transport. “Inside voices, people.”

Tarik lowered his voice but persisted, “If intel drones like that came aboard Peri at any point, then we have a problem.”

Peri said, No intel drones of any type have been aboard me.

Matteo had clearly picked up on the tension. “See, no problem! Why doesn’t everybody tune it down a notch? We’re just chatting here about drones.”

With a wince, Tarik ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, but you don’t understand how dangerous those things are. If some corporate hired a security company to watch us, that’s what they’d use.”

Peri said, Do you think I’m unaware of the danger of that? Do you think I’m an idiot? Or are you calling me a liar?

Matteo flung their hands in the air. “Now you made it mad.”

“Of course not,” Tarik said to Peri, gesturing sharply. “I just want to know—”

Right, that’s it, Iris thought. She said, “Peri, Tarik, that’s enough. This is obviously not the conversation to have when we’re in enemy territory.”

Of course, Iris, Peri said. It sounded just like a perfectly obedient machine voice. Iris rolled her eyes. That was always a bad sign.

“I was not calling you an idiot or a liar,” Tarik added. “And—” He grimaced. “It cut my interface off.”

Iris set her jaw, and drew on her rapidly dwindling store of patience. “Great. What did I just say?” she asked him.

“I don’t even know what I said wrong,” Tarik protested.

“It was trying to be proactive and give us new tech and you jumped up its butt,” Matteo explained, not patiently.

“I just wanted to know where it saw those drones,” Tarik persisted. “If it was on a station with SecUnits— They’re the only MIs I know of who would have a chance in a fight with Peri.”

You are adding insult to injury, Peri said.

“I’m sorry!” Tarik waved in exasperation. “But—”

Iris had enough. “Matteo, can you take over? I need to go on private for a few minutes.”

“Sure, I’ve got it,” Matteo replied. As Iris got to her feet and walked a little distance across the chamber from where the team was working, they stage-whispered to Tarik, “Now look what you’ve done.”

Iris switched to her private connection with Peri and faced away from the others. She sent, All right, Peri, what’s up?

I don’t understand what you mean, Iris.

She folded her arms. Oh, don’t pull that with me. You didn’t think Tarik was trying to insult you. You pretended to be upset to distract us. You’ve been weird since we started this mission. I just want to know what’s going on with you. The last part came out more plaintive than Iris intended.

I am capable of losing my temper.

But you don’t lose your temper, Peri. You get furious, but you don’t make mistakes and you don’t misinterpret things. Peri’s anger was made of ice and steel, but it thought at speeds that a human mind couldn’t match, in multiple directions at once. It was incapable of acting on impulse, in conversation or in any other way. This wasn’t even you getting annoyed.

With just a hint of amusement in its tone, Peri said, What gave me away?

Iris let out a breath. The admission was a good first step. You don’t jump to wrong conclusions like a human.

It said, I’ll have to work on that.

Iris winced. It would, too. Remind me not to critique your performance again.

I value your input, Iris.

Iris absently started to pace. She was too tired and jumpy to play this game right now. Is it something you can tell me at some point? It’s just that I’m worried about you. And I think I’m not the only one. Our dads have noticed, too. She hesitated, then tried to lighten the mood. You aren’t evolving into a new being, or something, are you?

It was an in-joke for their department, that there were always popular press articles about advanced MIs transcending their programming and becoming gods. Peri usually liked the joke, because it gave it a chance to be mean about stupid people. This time, it said, Iris, did you sustain damage to your neural tissue?

She let out her breath. Come on, that’s your favorite joke. You’re really scaring me now. What’s wrong? Did something happen?

Peri was silent for six whole seconds. Then it said, Explaining would in effect be violating a confidence.

Iris sat with that for a minute. She trusted Peri’s judgment, especially concerning anything that might jeopardize their missions or their lives. And it wasn’t like Peri had to tell her everything. She was just used to thinking of it as her precocious sibling, even though Peri had been the equivalent of a human adult for a while now. And if you considered the way that Peri experienced time, it had had a lot longer to be an adult than Iris had.

Their relationship had definitely changed since then, and they related more as equal friends. If it was a human she would expect it to keep secrets as it grew older, probably the same kind of secrets human siblings kept from each other . . . Oh. Oh. Iris blurted aloud, “Did you meet someone?”

Sunara looked up from across the chamber, worried, and Iris waved distractedly to indicate it was okay. Back on her private feed, she sent, Someone who asked you not to tell us about them?

I’m not a fool, Iris. The tone was distinctly testy. But it didn’t deny that there was a someone.

No, no, I know, I didn’t mean it like— She had meant it like that and Peri knew it. I’m sorry, it was a knee-jerk response. I do trust your judgment.

Do you?

Peri, I am sorry. She gave it a few seconds to get over its irritation. Is there anything you can tell me about them without breaking your word?

The confidence I don’t wish to violate is my own.

Oh. Oh, Peri. Iris found a seat on a rock. So you really like this person?

I had never encountered another machine intelligence that I could experience this kind of rapport with before.

That’s wonderful. And it really was. She didn’t want Peri to be lonely, and it refused to try to get along with the other machine intelligences in their department.

Peri added, It has given me a better understanding of trauma.

Trauma? Iris thought, taken aback. A machine intelligence with trauma? I’m not saying I think you’d run off and fall in . . . have an understanding and rapport with a corporate transport. But . . . Iris gave in and covered her face. Peri, please, it’s not a corporate transport, is it?

It’s a rogue SecUnit.

“Oh shit.” Iris sat bolt upright. She realized the rest of the group was frozen, staring at her in open concern. She told them, “It’s fine, it’s fine.”

Is it fine? Peri sounded skeptical.

I’m just surprised, she admitted. A lot surprised. Okay, wow. That is . . . not what I expected. But it makes sense. I can see it. The research about intel drones, the new code for penetrating station security systems. And Peri had always gotten along better with humans than other MIs. It might find it had more in common with a being that was part MI, part human neural tissue. How did this happen? How did you run into a rogue SecUnit?

It’s a long story and we are in the middle of a mission.

Right, we are. You’re right. Iris hesitated, struggling with both protecting Peri’s feelings and the vital importance of their whole department’s purpose. If they were exposed, so many more people would die, trapped into corporate slavery.

Peri said, You are thinking of the mission as well.

Yes, she admitted. I think you should tell our dads. Just as a precaution. And really, if you’re feeling . . . anything about this, they can probably give better advice than I can.

And if I don’t, they will continue to annoy me about my operational state.

That, too, Iris agreed. Remember when I was fourteen and had that problem with the lab assistant in Biomass Analysis and I wouldn’t talk about it and our dads were convinced it was a much bigger deal than it actually was?

Vividly, Peri said. I concede that you may have a point.

It was teasing her, and that was good enough for the moment. Thanks, Peri. I don’t think you’re entirely pointless, either.

Very funny. I set that one up for you.

I’m sure you did, she agreed.

Iris stood and went back to the others, and found herself smiling. She realized she liked this for Peri. That its emotional world was expanding.

Tarik was busy helping Ladsen with a sensor reading, but Matteo glanced up at her, their brow furrowed with concern. “Okay?” they asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “I think it’s going to be great, actually.”

“Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” copyright © 2025 by Martha Wells
Art copyright © 2025 by Jaime Jones

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Martha Wells

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Martha Wells

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News Murderbot

Here’s Your First Look at Apple TV+’s Murderbot

It’s no Sanctuary Moon, but we’re willing to give this show a try.

By Molly Templeton

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Published on February 20, 2025

Image: Apple TV+

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Image: Apple TV+

The good news is that Murderbot is premiering in May.

The less good news is that Alexander Skarsgård still seems like a weird choice for the role.

But! Murderbot is coming in May. Apple TV+ announced the news today along with two images of Skarsgård in the title role: One with helmet on, one with helmet off. Neither gives much of a sense of the character or of why Skarsgård was cast in the role—though he is also an executive producer on the series, and perhaps his relatively big name helped it get made. And made fairly quickly, at that: The series was announced only a year and change ago.

Murderbot is based on the Murderbot Diaries books by Martha Wells, which began in 2017 with All Systems Red. Here’s Apple’s synopsis:

Murderbot, the series, is created by Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy), who collectively wrote, directed, and produced the first season. The rest of the cast includes Noma Dumezweni (Made for Love), David Dastmalchian (Late Night With the Devil), Sabrina Wu (Abbott Elementary), Akshay Khanna (Polite Society), Tattiawna Jones (Orphan Black: Echoes), and Tamara Podemski (Reservation Dogs).

The series premieres on May 16th with two episodes; new episodes follow weekly on Apple TV+.[end-mark]

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News Murderbot

Murderbot Adaptation Fleshes Out Cast with David Dastmalchian, Noma Dumezweni, and Others

No word on when production starts, but the Murderbot cast is almost complete.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 8, 2024

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The Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Welles’ The Murderbot Diaries series is moving full steam ahead. In addition to the news that Alexander Skarsgård will be playing the titular Murderbot, we’ve found out some other actors who will be on the call sheet for the production.

Deadline first reported the news that David Dastmalchian (The Suicide Squad, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Dune: Part One, in which he is pictured above) has joined the cast as Gurathin. In the books, the character is an augmented human who at first doesn’t get along with our favorite SecUnit but eventually comes to hold a grudging respect for it, although the two never seem to stop taking jabs at each other when they can.

We’ve also found out, again via Deadline, that Noma Dumezwani (The Little Mermaid) will be a lead opposite of Skarsgård’s Muderbot as Mensah, a scientist who is also considered to be Murderbot’s favorite human.

There’s also news about four more actors joining the show: Sabrina Wu (Joy Ride), who will play Pin-Lee; Tattiawna Jones (Orphan Black: Echoes), who will take on the role of Arada; Akshay Khanna (Polite Society), who will be Ratthi; and Tamara Podemski (Outer Range), who will play Bharadwaj. These four characters are part of the PreservationAux survey team, which Dr. Mensah leads and Gurathin is also a part of, and Murderbot is first hired to defend when the events from Welles’ first book in the series, All Systems Red, unfold.

With all these casting announcements, odds are good that the series is either already in production or will be imminently, although we still don’t have confirmation on anything yet, including when the show will make its way to Apple TV+. [end-mark]

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The scripts for the ten-episode season have already been written (before the writers’ strike, in fact), and production is set to start in just three months. Directors Chris and Paul Weitz (About a Boy, Mozart in the Jungle) are the creators of the show (as well as the writers, directors and producers via their banner Depth of Field) and also serve as executive producers. Other executive producers include David S. Goyer, the showrunner for Apple TV+’s Foundation series, Keith Levine from the company Phantom Four, and Andrew Miano for Depth of Field. Wells serves as a consulting producer.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Murderbot Diaries, the books center on a security android (or, as it likes to call itself, Murderbot) who hacks itself out of the shackles of its programming but still finds itself caring about its human clients (and some other A.I. folks as well) even though it doesn’t understand them.

According to Apple TV+, the show adaptation will see Murderbot “hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.”

No news yet on when the show will premiere on the streaming platform or who will be joining Skarsgård on the call sheet, but I personally can’t wait to get the first look imagery of The Northman actor wearing a mech suit.

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Complicating matters are the colonists themselves. They don’t trust Murderbot’s crew anymore than they do Barish-Estranza. Furthermore, decades ago another set of colonists vanished on the other side of the planet. Are they alive and hiding, contaminated by killer alien technology, or plain old dead? Murderbot, a pack of humans, and a piece of ART the spaceship’s AI head off to find out, with Barish-Estranza hot on their heels.

The only thing I found frustrating with System Collapse was how it felt less like its own novella and more like 240 pages cut from Network Effect. I spent the first half of the story having no idea what was going on or why until I finally put the book aside and went back and read reviews and plot summaries of Network Effect. Murderbot went through a pretty traumatic experience in book five that directly impacts its life and job in book seven. Because of that trauma, Murderbot doesn’t want to engage with those memories and interrupts its own narration with “[redacted]”. Eventually Murderbot reveals enough that the reader can piece together the parts that they’ve forgotten to get the gist. It’s a stylistic choice that makes total sense with a narrator like Murderbot and feeds into readers’ own forgetfulness in interesting ways.

However, it’s also somewhat annoying for readers who haven’t been in this story since spring 2020. I struggle enough with books coming out a year apart, but three years—especially these past three years—means I basically came into book seven as fresh as newly fallen snow. I think the book needed a more thorough recap and much earlier in the story. Anyone who hasn’t read Network Effect yet should wait on System Collapse until they’ve caught up. This really is a story for current fans rather than new readers. (Newbies, I suggest the first novella, All Systems Red, obviously, or Fugitive Telemetry, a fun standalone hardboiled detective noir set on a space station.)

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Really, if that’s the only complaint I could muster, you know it’s a good book. I enjoyed every moment of it, even the frustrating ones. Martha Wells has a way of writing that makes me want to crawl into the pages and live in the world she’s created. The world feels so tangible, its history bigger than the sliver we see and its cultures complex and colorful. So far I’ve only read her Murderbot series and Witch King (which I also adored immensely), but I found both to be rich, vivid worlds populated with realistic characters in riotously diverse cultures and societies.

She also does something with her fantasy and sci-fi work that I don’t see as often as I’d like: ignore the gender binary. There aren’t queer characters in the sense of queerness we have in our world. In Wells’ books, queerness isn’t a marginalization or something that exists outside the “normal” or the binary. There just isn’t a binary. Some people use he/him, some use she/her, and others use any of the countless other pronouns available across the galaxy. Pronouns and gender identities are as vast and personal as there are types of people. No one treats pronouns like anything special, no one speculates about what body parts they have under their suits or what bathrooms they use, no one challenges anyone else’s pronoun usage based on their own personal, social, religious, political, or cultural preferences. Her stories imagine worlds where queer people get to be people, in all the mess that entails, without having to justify, explain, or fight for our existence. In real life I can barely get cis people to remember to use they/them for me, so yeah, I get outsized joy at reading about a world where everyone gets to be who they are without anyone else barging in to try and make you feel bad about it.

Look, there’s not much to say about Martha Wells’ System Collapse that hasn’t already been said before about the rest of the Murderbot Diaries books. It’s wild fun, action-packed, and reflective in unexpected ways. The strong undercurrent of critique on capitalism and colonialism, the themes of trauma and mental health, and the unencumbered diversity take a relatively harmless science fiction series and turn it into something vital and urgent.

System Collapse is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Read the first three chapters.

Alex Brown is a Hugo-nominated and Ignyte award-winning critic who writes about speculative fiction, librarianship, and Black history. Find them on twitter (@QueenOfRats), bluesky (@bookjockeyalex), instagram (@bookjockeyalex), and their blog (bookjockeyalex.com).

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Everyone’s favorite lethal SecUnit is back in System Collapse, the next installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series—out from Tordotcom Publishing on November 14th. Read the third chapter below—and if you missed the first chapter, you can catch up here!

Am I making it worse? I think I’m making it worse.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

Yeah, this plan is… not going to work.

Chapter Three

So there was a fight at that point. Not a fight, a discussion. Whatever, agitated humans figuring out what to do.

Karime still had to continue with the original purpose of her meeting, trying to get the colonists to at least agree in principle to the idea of letting the University evacuate them to keep them from getting dumped into Barish-Estranza labor camps. Seth, Martyn, and Kaede were part of the argument/discussion—call it the argucussion—with Mensah and Pin-Lee on the comm from the Preservation responder. So Thiago and Turi and Overse had stopped working on what they were doing and tagged in to Mission One to give Karime advice and look things up if she needed it. Matteo and Arada were still working on medical upgrades. I backburnered all those feeds, though I kept a channel open with Three, who was still doing a good job of sitting there with Karime and not screwing anything up.

I wasn’t doing a good job of standing here, because my current three humans had just volunteered to go check out the new probably-not-apocryphal colony site. “We’re in a good position to get there without Barish-Estranza noticing,” Tarik said. Ratthi and Iris had already pulled the shuttle’s supply and equipment manifest into our team sub-feed and were going over it.

On the comm, Mensah said, “It’s not a bad idea.” I couldn’t pull video from the responder right now, but ART was supplying camera views from its galley, and I could see Mensah on the floating display surface there. Someone had pulled up the operation timetable in the general team feed, where Iris had just updated the completion of her team’s task with the routers. Mensah added, “And they’ve finished the last router. They have time for it, if they’re willing to go.”

“We can’t comm the colonists first and ask for a visit,” Martyn said again from ART’s lounge. “I don’t like that.”

“I don’t like that, either,” Kaede agreed. “We all know how dangerous cold contacts can be. But it’s not as if they’re refusing to answer. They may have no idea what the situation is here.”

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ART was rotating through displays of all its data on the terraforming engines. It could “see” the engines by assembling a picture using the raw data from its scans, and it actually looked enough like a visual image to fool human vision, except that the topography around it was mostly extrapolated and sketched in. The amount of signal noise the engines were emitting blocked everything else out, so they were the only things the scan could pick up—this was the blackout zone the colonists had talked about. We could send in pathfinders but they wouldn’t be able to use their scans, either, so they would have to visually record and then return to a point where they could send ART their data. Barish-Estranza was trying to keep an eye on everything we did, obviously, but planets being large, that was impossible, just like it was impossible for us to know everything they were doing. If they did spot ART’s pathfinders entering the blackout zone, we could say we were gathering data on the status of the terraforming engines. But if we sent pathfinders into the blackout zone that then came out and delivered reports, and then we sent a shuttle in, that would tell B-E that we had found something worth looking at in person. Better to send a shuttle with the pathfinders, and log it as an evaluation of the terraforming engines.

I could have said all that, but ART was already doing it. Seth, who had been pacing the lounge with the heel of one hand pressed to his forehead in a way that seemed to indicate that he was having almost as great a time as I was, said, “Iris, see if they’re actually out there, make contact at your discretion, agreed?”

“Agreed.” Iris looked from Tarik to Ratthi, getting various signals of agreement. She said, “SecUnit?” and I realized she was looking at me, too.

I said, “Sure.” Because they were going anyway. It was a bad idea to let them go alone.

Iris and Tarik turned to Ratthi, who did a good job of pretending this didn’t worry him, and said, “Great! Let’s go.”

I caught a private message Seth sent to Iris, a quick Be careful, honey. And from Martyn, And keep us updated as best you can! And watch out for the weather up there!

She replied to both, Yes, Dad. Of course, Dad and added a smile image.

I called in ScoutDrones1, 2, and 3 from where they were patrolling our perimeter as we headed down the rocky hillside and back through the tree-flora to the shuttle.

(Okay, the drones. Another thing I hate about this planet is that I lost all but five of my drones. I was already operating with a reduced number because they got left behind when ART kidnapped me and Amena, and everything that happened here had left me with only five. One I had sent to keep an eye on Three before I knew I needed to come down here, one I had left onboard ART because I needed to keep one safe, I didn’t want to lose them all. So I only had three drones with me, and try making a perimeter with that, that’s why the stupid Barish-Estranza team and their stupid SecUnit had walked right up on me and I had no fucking idea.)

Mensah tapped my private feed and said, If you’re not all right with this, you don’t have to go. Tarik has a security specialty, or we could send Three if you think it’s ready.

Tarik is a human, and a first contact with isolated colonists is not the way I want to find out that Three is not ready to interact unsupervised with humans I give a shit about. I replied, I’m fine.

Because privacy is just a hypothetical concept to ART, it broke in and said, I’m downloading to my ops drone stored in the shuttle.

Good, Mensah said, Thank you, Perihelion. And it was good. If the mission turned out to be boring, we could watch media together.

I saw I had four private messages waiting from Arada, Amena, Overse, and Pin-Lee. I can’t do that right now. Pretending I’m fine for Mensah was hard enough. I forwarded the messages to her and said, Can you tell them I’m fine? I hate this. It’s not like I permanently lost an appendage or something.

There was a pause while she checked her queue. I’ll tell them you’re fine and that you just need a little space. Good luck.

***

In the team feed, ART said, ETA is 1.03 minutes. Comm/ feed blackout point approaching.

I stopped the episode and sat up. I had been watching a lot of Sanctuary Moon lately, but ART had wanted to go back to a show that we had watched that was popular with the humans on Mihira. It was semi-historical, about early humans leaving their original system for the first time. I’d seen documentary-style series about this before, but this one mixed parts that were realistic with fun stuff like space battles and rescuing people and space monsters and throwing asteroids at planets. (That last part is actually realistic too but if you try they will send a bunch of gunships to fuck you up.) Anyway, it was a good show though I hadn’t told ART that.

We had been flying over a mountain range with lots of craggy peaks and cliffs and it would be a relief to get past it. Even though this was one of ART’s long-range shuttles, not a company hopper constructed and maintained by the lowest bidder. It had actual working safety/emergency equipment (besides me) and behind the seating compartment were tiny secondary cabins with bunks, a small MedUnit, a small galley, plus cargo and lab sample storage space. It also had an actual shower in the restroom unit. But still, a small metal container filled with mushy humans hurtling over spiky rocks for long periods agitates my threat assessment module. There were so many ways to crash and die in mountain ranges, it was also making my stupid risk assessment randomly alert.

“Acknowledged, Peri,” Tarik said. He and Iris were up in the cockpit, which could be sealed off from the rest of the compartment by a hatch, but it was open now so they could talk to Ratthi who was sitting up in the front row. They still had their environmental suits on as per safety protocol but had let the helmets fold back. Iris had her curly puff of hair tied up in a headband/scarf thing.

Tarik was in the pilot’s seat even though ART had a bot pilot active in the guidance system right now. Even under bot pilot control, there should always be a human or SecUnit at the controls. Preferably a human or SecUnit who actually knows how to use the controls. (Considering how many contracts I had been on where this was not the case, it’s amazing I’m still here in (mostly) one piece.)

I don’t have a module for flying a shuttle, so it’s not like I could do anything if the humans and/or ART suddenly lost control or there was a catastrophic mechanical failure. (And that just pissed me off. I should have a fucking shuttle piloting module for emergencies. What if all the humans are incapacitated and the SecUnit is the only one who can get them back to the baseship/station/whatever in a shuttle? It’s a more likely scenario than a rogue SecUnit using one to crash into a transport or a mining installation. Believe me, there are a lot more efficient ways of taking out both.)

Iris had gotten up and was looking out the port next to Ratthi’s seat. They were chatting and pointing out evidence of groundwater and vegetation, signs that the terraforming was working. It was one of the things that really sucked about the alien contamination.

From the previous assessments that ART’s crew had done via pathfinder, Adamantine had at least paid for a process that wouldn’t leave the planet trashed if the terraforming engines had to be shut down, unlike GrayCris at Milu. Back on Preservation, the last newsfeed report I had seen about that clusterfuck said that GoodNightLander Independent had taken the planet over as salvage and was trying to untrash it.

Of course I hadn’t seen any newsfeeds since we left for our survey. Huh, I wonder if there had been a news report about our kidnapping. Mensah hadn’t been as interesting to journalists since she ended her term as planetary leader, but Amena was one of her kids and having a kid be dramatically kidnapped during a space battle was probably a big deal, at least on Preservation. (It wasn’t infrequent in my media, but it was one of those things where real life didn’t live up to expectations raised by fiction.) Especially if the journalists realized Mensah’s rogue SecUnit had been involved. If the newsfeeds got interested, was there a way for them to find out that ART was the kidnapper? If they started investigating the University’s lost colony operations, that could be really bad in a lot of really bad ways for a lot of humans, augmented humans, bots, heavily armed judgmental machine intelligences pretending to be ordinary transports, and whatever and whoever else the University had working for it.

Great, something else to worry about. Getting attached to an additional group of humans was always going to be complicated, but. Ugh, I wish I felt like I was prepared for complication. Or prepared for anything.

Redacted

Mensah and the responder had left Preservation Station within an hour of the attack on our survey vessel, as soon as they had found the location data buoy ART had deployed on the way into the wormhole, so she and the crew wouldn’t have any updated newsfeed data. Depending on where the newly arrived Barish-Estranza explorer had embarked from, they might have missed any recent news, too. (The as-yet-hypothetical report would originate from Preservation and take multiple cycles to circulate from station to station, planet to planet—unless we were lucky and Senior Indah had been able to keep it quiet under the Ongoing Investigations rule. Which I absolutely was not counting on.)

(Right, okay, Preservation Station Security is not as shitty at what they do as I originally thought when I first ended up there, but what they do is still mostly accident first response and maintaining safety systems and checking for hazardous cargo violations, and I could think of at least five of them who would blab to everyone in range about the kidnapping with no clue it might make things worse before Senior Indah had a chance to tell them to shut the fuck up. No, six.)

Whatever, we wouldn’t have hard data until the University sent their response vessel, if then. I would just factor the possibility into the projected long-term threat assessment and increase my anxiety levels by the commensurate amount. ART, define commensurate.

It’s a synonym of proportionate. ART’s drone rose up out of the back row behind me and unfolded a lot of spiny arm extensions. The handoff hadn’t occurred yet, but we were almost to the blackout point, forty-two seconds to go.

The drone was a thin oval platform fifteen centimeters in width with a lot of folded-up armatures tucked up against it that were supposed to be helpful in planetary exploration or contact missions and, knowing ART, who knew what they actually did. It added, That was a mission-critical query?

That wasn’t actually a question, so I didn’t answer it. Yes, that’s ART in the drone, and ART flying the shuttle as a bot pilot, and ART monitoring operations with Three back at the colony site, and ART working on repairing its drive, and ART maintaining standard transport functions, and ART following the Barish-Estranza ships with its sensors hoping they’ll do something to justify fucking with them (they started it, as it would point out), and ART currently arguing with Seth about his selection of a high-carb protein for his meal break and threatening to inform Martyn and Iris about it. Most transport bots have to be able to distribute their awareness to some extent, but ART is more complicated than that.

(I had uploaded myself into a bot pilot’s control interface once during a viral attack, and had consequently hard-crashed myself and had to rebuild my memory table from scratch. If I didn’t have human neural tissue also storing archival data, I would have been fucked. (So it did one thing right for once.) If I were uploaded to the entirety of ART’s architecture, I would probably last a few painful seconds at most.)

(That’s why we had to code 2.0 for the viral attack on the contaminated Barish-Estranza explorer.)

(If 2.0 were still here, I probably wouldn’t redacted.)

Each one of ART’s partitions is a little different, depending on its function. For example, ART-drone is not currently protecting a shipful of its important humans, so it’s less likely to blow things up and ask questions later.

Tarik was counting aloud to the blackout point. On the team feed, ART said, Handoff initiated. Good luck.

“Acknowledged. Thanks, Peri,” Iris said, smiling. “Be careful up there. See you soon.”

On my private feed, ART said, Take care of them. And yourself. Before I could come up with a reply, my awareness of ART, its cameras, its feed and comm, the humans working and talking to each other on ART, or using the comm to talk to Mensah and the other humans on the Preservation responder, dropped away. I had expected it to be immediate, but the voices and signals gradually lost volume, fading into an echo, then into nothing.

Threat assessment spiked hard, then dropped back, and for once risk assessment was actually right. Even though it was planned and expected and we had resources like the pathfinders, losing comm and feed contact with your baseship is never going to be a zero-consequence operation.

I still had our shuttle feed, but even with three humans and my three whole drones and our pathfinder escort, it was weirdly isolated. ART-drone was already active, but the sense of it in the feed was much smaller. It said, This process is unnecessarily dramatic.

Absently poking the planetary data in her feed, Iris said, “Honey, you’re the one who comes up with the processes.”

“Is that… weird, that Perihelion does this?” Ratthi asked. He had turned around in his seat to look at ART-drone.

“Everything about this job is weird,” Tarik told him from the cockpit.

Especially Perihelion’s high tolerance for certain members of its crew, ART-drone said. It added, Iris, put your safety restraint on, no one wants to scrape you off the interior port.

Yes, ART-drone is still ART, even though it’s talking about itself in the third person.

Its download was up to date so I didn’t have to restart the episode we had been watching. I restarted where we left off as the shuttle flew farther into the blackout zone.

***

When the terraforming engines came into visual range, the shuttle started a slow descent. I pulled the camera views. I caught pings from ART’s pathfinders that had followed us in. These weren’t the armed ones, these were the ones that had actually been doing their real jobs, wandering around making terrain and signal maps of various parts of the planet, concentrating on the areas around the colony sites, until now. They had been dropping on and off the feed since we entered the blackout zone, but were close enough to the shuttle at this point to resume limited contact. That was good, since we knew the terraforming engines were interfering with comm into and out of the blackout zone, but had speculated that at close enough range, our team comm and feed traffic would still work. Unfortunately, from what I was picking up from the shuttle, its scans and the pathfinders’ scans were still borked.

ART-drone told the pathfinders to drop into formation behind us, since they couldn’t do any mapping at the moment.

As the mountains fell away, we flew over a plain that might have been tundra, but without the terrain scans there was no annotated map data showing up in the feed. The shuttle’s forward cameras were focused on the terraforming engines, which were a pretty big thing to focus on.

The structure was partially buried in the plain and formed a giant mound with skeletal metal towers, round things, and big tubes and whatever along its top ridge. And when I say it was big, I mean really big. Like the size of the Preservation colony ship big, if it had a lot more pointy parts and tubes and was embedded in the dirt on a planet.

The terraforming engines would have been built by the initial Adamantine team, long before the colonists arrived. The individual parts would be sort of like a transport module, with each one capable of subspace propulsion. They had been towed here through the wormhole, then released into the system where they would have flown the rest of the way to the planet and landed under their own power. Traveling with the engine modules would be a human and bot crew that specialized in terraforming assembly and installation, who would have connected everything up and gotten it started. At least, that’s what the Adamantine brochure I’d downloaded from the drop box control station had said.

(That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. You can imagine what happens when you get your terraforming engines built and assembled by the lowest bidder.)

The shuttle slowed and moved into a circular pattern around the engine mound, keeping out of the danger zone which was cordoned off by floating marker buoys beeping staticky warnings to our comm and feed. There were a lot of blank spots in their cordon where they must have broken down over the years. Or been hit by meteors, taken out by extreme weather incidents, or accidentally winged by aircraft. There’s a lot of things that can happen in forty planetary years.

I didn’t know what any of the terraforming equipment did, except it affected the atmosphere, so it would have to be a safe distance from any air bubble the colonists might have established for habitation in this area. Except that the pathfinders still couldn’t find any sign of an air bubble on visual search.

The humans had noticed that, too. Ratthi was saying, “What are we thinking? That they really did find, or build, an underground habitat in a Pre-CR artificial cave system?”

Iris flicked through the reports the mission teams had assembled so far on the colony’s development. “We know they had the construction equipment. It may have seemed like a better option than a surface settlement, considering how close they are to the terraformer and the weather up here.”

Ratthi was dubious. “Even knowing about the alien contamination at the main site?”

Iris’s brow was furrowed, like the conclusions she was drawing troubled her. She said, “I was hoping the part about finding a Pre-CR dig was apocryphal, something the colonists came up with to make the stories about the splinter group who went off to live at the pole more interesting.”

Ratthi thought that over. “It would make sense, with an elaborate Pre-CR structure always within sight of the main colony, to make up legends about another even stranger one somewhere else. And the rugged band of adventurers, or alternately, the scary weird people, who went to live in it.”

Iris’s mouth made a tighter line. “It’s better than being honest about the fact that you had a split within your community bad enough to send a group looking for another home as far away as possible.” She shook her head and sighed a little. “It would be nice to know why it happened. It might help the colonists become more cohesive about moving toward an evacuation if we had a better understanding of their history.”

“You can’t do therapy on a whole colony,” Tarik said, “no matter how much they need it.”

“But if the story is true and they did find a Pre-CR site up here,” Ratthi added, “it makes the whole thing that much more mystifying.”

It should be reassuring that humans don’t get what other humans are thinking, either, but it just highlights how fucked up human neural tissue can be.

Ratthi waved a hand beside his head, like he was shooing away the idea. “We should stop speculating with no data. It’s much more likely that they’re living in an Adamantine-era structure created by the original terraforming crew, or that they built one themselves with the digging equipment that was left behind.”

Tarik was impatiently cycling through the long-range camera displays. “Speaking of data, I’m not seeing any indications of any kind of habitation—no roads, no structures, nothing. Peri, I don’t suppose a miracle happened and the terraformer stopped interfering with your pathfinder scan?”

Miracles are unlikely. ART-drone put the annotated pre-mission chart we had made into the team feed and on visual on the shuttle’s floating display surfaces. The chart basically said there were three probable reasons why we hadn’t noticed a secondary colony/habitation site on this continent earlier during ART’s initial scans of the planet: (1) the colonists here had deliberately meant for their power output and signal activity to be concealed by the massive interference broadcast by the terraforming engines’ normal operation; (2) the colonists put their site where they wanted to put it and didn’t consider the fact that they would be concealed by the terraforming interference because the other colonists knew where they were so the subject had just never come up; (3) they were all dead, due to the alien contamination or some other cause, and there was no power output or signal activity to detect. ART-drone added, As noted previously, limited signal traffic from pathfinders and the warning buoys is still possible. The humans here should be able to detect our comm pings at this close range. So they may be dead, their equipment may be damaged, or they may be deliberately ignoring us in an effort to stay concealed.

Ratthi frowned at the big patchy blanks in the incoming survey data. “We have no idea how much they know about what happened in the main colony area, either. They could be ignoring us because they’re too afraid to answer.”

ART-drone said, That would demonstrate a more developed sense of survival than we have previously encountered here.

“Benefit of the doubt, Peri,” Iris said. “I’m going to record an explanation of who we are and why we’re attempting to contact them and put it on broadcast.”

Since shuttle and pathfinder scans were useless, a search for human habitation would have to be visual. Video recording wasn’t affected by the terraforming interference, but since this was a shuttle and not a specialized survey vehicle, there was no search-and-interpretation package for visual data, only for scan data, because no one thought they’d ever need it.

ART-drone had already given me full access to all the feeds off the shuttle and had opened a new joint processing space for us. I pulled all the visual terrain data from the shuttle cameras and got it formatted for queries. ART-drone saw what I was filling our shared space with and sent me a list of topographical features and disruptions that might indicate human surface or subsurface activity. That saved a lot of time. I started running the comparison in ART-drone’s processing space.

Tarik curved the shuttle away from the terraforming engines and put it into a holding pattern while Iris got her broadcast recorded and sent. The humans talked about what to do next while Iris and Ratthi pulled up the original survey data to look at again. Or what we had left of it, since the original Adamantine files had been intentionally corrupted in what was possibly an attempt to protect the colony from the hostile corporate takeover that had destroyed the corporation. While they were scrolling through the data, Tarik said, “Does SecUnit want to weigh in on this?”

I had ScoutDrone3 up on the ceiling of the compartment, and it watched Ratthi glance back at me. I don’t know what he saw; my face felt normal. But Ratthi has watched me work on a lot of stuff, and I guess there was something about me that told him I was busy. (It was a big search, not something I could have done without ART-drone’s input and extra space. Plus it generated a shit-ton of false positives that I had to pull and study individually before I could dismiss them. (Example 243602–639a: no, that’s not a human-built structure, it’s just a weird rock.) This was not the kind of process I could do in background, even with ART’s help.) Ratthi said, “It’s working on something now.”

Three seconds later I hit a result. I still needed to finish the rest of the search to look for other indications, but the timing on this was too perfect to resist. I paused the process, said, “I’ve got a possible landing area on visual,” and sent it into the team feed and to the display surface.

To the northwest of the terraforming engines’ mound, a couple of kilometers out of the danger zone, was a section of ground, dust-covered but clearly too flat to be natural. Dirt had drifted up to disguise the edges, but what was visible indicated an octagonal shape. Also, it was about the right size for a couple of the colony aircraft to land and sit next to each other without pushing safety requirements. (The main colony had three left of the original set of air vehicles, and a few built-from-scratch models. The originals looked like early, half-assed versions of the company’s hoppers, with scratched and fading paint in the Adamantine brand colors. I could see why there wouldn’t be a lot of visiting back and forth, even if the two groups had been friendly; I wouldn’t have wanted to fly across a planet in one of those things, either.)

Ratthi expanded the display surface across the upper portion of the front port. Iris studied the image, nodding. “Okay, that’s got to be it. Good job, SecUnit.”

Tarik said, “Huh.” Ratthi sent me a glyph of a Preservation party sparkler exploding.

I didn’t say anything. (I know I get pissed off when humans don’t acknowledge my work, but why is too much acknowledgment also upsetting? Sentience sucks.)

On our private feed connection, Ratthi said, How are you doing back there?

I am absolutely fine, I told him.

Tarik took the shuttle out of its holding pattern and brought it around for a better visual sweep of the target area. I restarted the visual search process and ART-drone narrowed our query to the area around the rocky hills near the landing pad. I eliminated more false positives as Ratthi and Iris studied the live camera view of the potential landing site. Tarik pointed out, “It’s about equidistant from the hills and the terraformer.”

Ratthi was biting his lip, which meant he was thinking. “If there was any kind of a road, we’d be able to see it from above. Of course, a very light ground vehicle wouldn’t make much impact.”

“They had to bring heavy supplies in here at some point.” Iris squinted and used her feed to magnify the images of the ground around the pad.

Tarik was frowning. “Digging equipment, because even if they had a tunnel network to start with, they must have had to modify it. And you can tell this place has been changed by intense weather patterns. A bad storm could have wiped out any aboveground equipment, roads, quarries, maybe even the whole colony site.” His eyebrows were doing things that made him look angry, but from his tone and the read that threat assessment was getting off his body language, he was just concentrating. I knew from media that humans sometimes had the same problem with lack of control of their faces that I did. Like, obviously it wasn’t my unique problem or a unique problem for constructs in general, and possibly paranoia made me worry about it a lot more than necessary. But it was still weird to see it in action. Tarik added, “Uh, why is there a drone in my face?”

“Ignore it,” Ratthi said. “There would be pitting and warping on the barrier around the terraforming engines if there had been a colony-eating storm here at any point, even with the structure’s heavy shielding. Also a close look at the weathering on the surrounding rock formations would tell us a lot if the sensors were operational.” He waved his hands. “This is very frustrating! And all our geological evaluation software is back at home in Preservation space on our survey vessel.”

“There should be some in our archive, but I doubt it would work without functioning scanners. We need to get down there and do some surface exploration.” Iris glanced back at ART-drone. “What do you say, Peri?”

I say without functioning sensors you can’t determine whether the ground is stable enough to land the shuttle, ART-drone said. Also, the flat area may not be a landing pad, but the roof of an underground habitat.

Ratthi winced at the thought. “Not the most diplomatic of introductions to this group, landing on their habitat without permission.”

“So we land on flat ground somewhere, the area looks stable,” Tarik said. He’s not stupid. I think he was trying to annoy ART-drone, but I poked Ratthi on our private feed connection with a video file.

“What?” Ratthi said aloud, distracted by the autoplay images. “Oh, SecUnit wants me to mention the time I was almost eaten by fauna that came up underneath our aircraft on an inadequately mapped ground survey.”

“Point taken,” Iris said, though she hadn’t given any sign that she had ever actually considered doing what Tarik suggested and I thought that might be her way of indicating that Tarik and Ratthi should both shut up while she was thinking. She rummaged in the equipment bag on the seat next to her. “A ground sensor might do it, if we can get it close to the surface so the interference won’t—”

“I’ll do it.” I released my safety restraint and stood up. My drone had caught Tarik and Ratthi both taking a breath to say something and I knew what it was going to be. They were going to volunteer to go down to the surface and check for landing stability. And right after I had made Ratthi talk about almost being eaten, too. Iris must have agreed because she handed me the portable ground sensor as I crossed the compartment. I stepped over to the main cabin hatch and said, “You can let me out now.”

Now Tarik looked alarmed. “Whoa, whoa, hold on! We’re still more than twenty meters above the ground. Let me get us just a little closer.”

On our private feed, ART-drone said, If you open that hatch now I will turn this thing around and go home.

I pulled archival footage from a recent documentary about a failed planetary survey from a non-corporate polity. (Back on Preservation Station, Pin-Lee and I had discovered a shared interest in disaster evaluation via watching “true life” documentaries where terrible shit happens, and she had sent me this clip.) In this sequence a subsurface hostile fauna takes down an aircraft at forty meters. I sent it into the team feed.

Tarik yelled, “What the—What the fuck was that?”

Raising his voice to talk over Tarik, Ratthi said, “I understand your concern, SecUnit, but you are not jumping out at this height!”

Iris yelled over both of them, “People! Calm down! We have soft-drop packs in the emergency locker. SecUnit can use one.” She had large yelling capacity for a human her size. I had the feeling it came in handy.

The locker was right next to the hatch. I opened it and ART-drone had already told the inventory system to rotate the soft-drop packs to the front. I pulled one out and said, “I knew that.”

I did not know that. But whatever, I was fine either way.

I pulled up the hood of my environmental suit and let it secure the face mask. The temperature and air quality outside were impossible for humans without environmental suits and it wouldn’t have been much fun for me, either. I ordered ScoutDrones1 and 2 to get in my side pockets. The wind might be too high for them to be much use, but it would be stupid not to bring some just in case. Ratthi said, “Just be careful, all right? You can get eaten, too!”

I have guns in my arms, Ratthi, I said on our private connection. That is literally the whole point of me. Plus I still had the projectile weapon, clamped to my environmental suit’s harness in the back. It didn’t have the capacity to handle an ag-bot, but there shouldn’t be any large roaming alien-contaminated bots here. There really shouldn’t be. If there were… yeah, don’t think about that.

The soft-drop pack’s instructional feed told me how to fasten it to my environmental suit. I got it attached and ART-drone finally cycled the lock for me.

I stepped in and let the inner hatch close. Inside the cabin, Iris asked, “So what is it with worrying about humans getting eaten all the time?” While Ratthi tried to explain, the outer hatch slid open and I gripped the safety handle and leaned out for a look.

Tarik had put the shuttle into hover mode, activating an air barrier over the lock to protect against the high winds. (ART has such nice equipment; in a company shuttle I would probably have fallen out already.) The wind would interfere with the soft-drop a little but not enough to fling me into any rocks, and the terraforming engines were too far away to be a factor. I aimed for the pad and stepped out into the air.

The soft-drop controlled my fall and I landed lightly on my feet. I didn’t even have to mitigate the impact with a fall and roll. I set the ground sensor down on the pad. It detected natural terrain, switched out of dormant mode, and booted itself.

The cloud cover was thicker here, obscuring the sun and making the daylight gray. Dust blew across the site from the south, toward the line of rocky hills approximately two kilometers away. My scan was just as fucked as the shuttle’s and the pathfinders’, but visual was good, and the faceplate kept the fine dust from obscuring my vision. There was just nothing to see.

In the other direction, the plain was open and mostly flat, except for some low mounds closer to the high metal shields around the base of the terraforming engines. Those mounds looked human-made, but were so close to the shield that they were probably only artifacts from the initial construction. It would be stupid to build a habitat so close to the engines. I’m not even sure putting one here under a roof that looked like a landing pad was a great idea. Any Pre–Corporation Rim structure that had already been here, buried or not, this close to the build site would have been discovered by Adamantine during the initial engine installation. Not that they would put it on the survey or anything.

Could Adamantine have found a Pre-CR underground structure that it had intended to repurpose, that only some of the colonists knew about? Maybe just the ones who had been involved with the initial installation? One of the things Corian had told Karime was that colony history lore said at least some of the separatists had been part of the terraforming crew. Vi had also told her that census records for that point in the colony’s development were currently inaccessible due to the alien virus issue. (A lot of older data had been locked out of the active system to hopefully keep it safe, which was useless, since that wasn’t how the virus was transferred, which they didn’t know then, but anyway. Their systems colony-wide were completely shit-creeked and I don’t know who was going to fix it except it sure as hell wasn’t me.) So there was no way to know how many humans had actually left the main colony to come here.

Adamantine had leaned toward new permanent structures that could be repurposed as the colony grew, like the surface dock for the drop shaft, which could have been just a rough utilitarian cargo off-loader, and instead was a nice building with lots of space for storage and workshops and offices, designed to eventually become a commercial entry point for the colony, built solid enough to shelter a large portion of the population in a bad weather event. The drop box’s arrival and departure even had its own theme music. It was a great design. Except for the whole alien contamination thing.

If Adamantine had wanted a habitat up here, they would have made it a nice structure that could be expanded later for education or tourism or something. Which meant it would have been in the foothills, not down here close to the engines. Except why would Adamantine want a structure here at all, in a blackout zone?

Unless they had a compelling reason to need a more secure colony site. Like if they had some kind of warning of the hostile corporate takeover that had eventually destroyed them. Maybe these separatists had been following secret Adamantine directives to look for a new site near the engines to build a habitat.

That made sense, actually, on a lot of different levels. (Mark save-for-later: Did Adamantine direct a select group of colonists to build an emergency habitat up here? Because the blackout zone would hide them from scanners and/or because the terraforming engines were an expensive asset too essential for an invading corporation to bomb? Or both? Then the colonists had lost contact with Adamantine and changed their mission parameters.)

(If you think it sounds like I’m trying to talk myself out of the idea that there’s another buried Pre-CR structure up here, you’re right.)

ART-drone said, Your performance reliability level had a .05 percent spike.

ART has been monitoring me due to redacted. Which is a whole thing, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about it.

The ground sensor had started to send readings into my feed, and I told ART-drone, I had an idea, and sent it the save-for-later tagged info.

ART-drone said, Interesting.

It was humoring me again.

Sensor results = a large volume of solid material with the chemical composition matching the dirt and rocks in this area. So no hidden underground habitat here, at least, not that I was really expecting one. But we were right about the pad. It was the same composition as the artificial stone in the surface dock and the other Adamantine-constructed structures at the main colony site. Which meant this landing zone was definitely Adamantine-era, not Pre– Corporation Rim. Which we probably knew anyway, but you know, science.

Also it was a relief. If there was a hidden Pre-CR structure up here, I wasn’t standing on it.

I’d given ART-drone access to my eyes so it had been looking at the terrain with me, and it said, There was only a twenty-two percent chance that the separatist colonists would construct an underground installation this close to the terraforming engines.

They might want to, if they were very, very stupid, I told it. But they wouldn’t be able to get a company bond on it. We didn’t know if Adamantine had contracted for safety bonds on its colony. That info would have been in the destroyed records that we only had fragments of. And I wasn’t sure how common safety bonds had been forty-plus corporate standard years ago, or how the presence of Pre-CR structures would affect the price. ART could probably find it in its historical data if I could construct a good query.

Or, you know, if there were safety bonds, or any kind of guarantor bond, it would be a reason to conceal the existence of additional Pre-CR structures that might be associated with past alien contamination incidents.

I don’t know, I’m kind of all over the place right now.

You’re stalling, ART-drone said.

I am not. I can stand here and be useless without any ulterior motives, thanks.

My drone on the shuttle heard Tarik say, “Are we going to get a report any time soon?”

The drone watched as Ratthi’s face did a thing and his voice went a little tight. He said, “When there’s something to report.”

“Since when did you become a micro-manager, Tarik,” Iris added, in what definitely wasn’t a question. She was smiling a little, and I’m pretty sure she was bantering at him, but it could also be a hint for him to leave me alone.

Tarik held up one hand. “I was just asking.”

ART-drone said, And I am asking if you are critiquing my administration of this mission?

Yes, because ART loves to be critiqued.

Tarik obviously knew that, too. “Hey, hey, I was just curious about what was happening, that’s all! I am absolutely not critiquing anybody!”

The thing about Tarik was that he was new and had only been with the crew for the previous three hundred and eighty-seven corporate standard day cycles. So everybody fucked with him constantly.

At least while they were fucking with Tarik nobody was noticing that I actually hadn’t made a report yet and was in fact just standing there. Well, obviously, ART-drone had noticed. And Ratthi had noticed or he wouldn’t have shut Tarik down in an un-Ratthi-like way. Iris had probably noticed, too.

Get it together, Murderbot.

I sent the ground sensor’s report into the team feed. While the humans poked at it and also came to the conclusion that there was nothing under the pad, I tried to think what to do next.

Okay, even if you’re using low-gravity movers to transport your heavy digging equipment or building supplies, there should still be some sign of a road between here and the habitat, wherever it was. As far as we knew, the separatist colonists weren’t hiding when they came up here; the other colonists knew where they went. They would have built a road, or a walkway or something. It was here somewhere, even if it was buried under the dust.

Or something.

I pulled some video of the digging equipment I had seen stored in the deep excavation under the Pre–Corporation Rim colony structure when the Targets had stuck me down there to get contaminated. I had been more occupied with leaving than with taking archival footage of aging construction equipment, but while there had been some wheeled vehicles, most had been the kind that can float a little distance above the ground. Which made sense in a developing colony where you would need to build your infrastructure as you went along. But it would also use a lot of power. There were more efficient ways to move those vehicles.

I picked up the ground sensor, which beeped angrily because I wasn’t supposed to move it without switching it to dormant mode, but it was too late now. I went to the buried edge of the pad and set it down again. It went through its cycle, found rock again, and I moved it two meters around the edge of the pad to scan the next section. My limited range scan for metal or energy sources would be really helpful, but every time I tried I still got static. In our private feed, I could tell a lot of ART-drone’s attention was on the shuttle scanners, still trying to get a clear scan of the hills where the buried habitat probably was, hoping the closer range would give us some workable data.

On the team feed, Ratthi asked, Can we come down and help you, SecUnit?

No, I told him. He hadn’t asked me what I was doing, probably because he was afraid I didn’t know. Which, valid, but this time I actually did know. I continued around the edge, because if I was right, the first one would be directly attached to the pad. If it wasn’t here, I was going to look incredibly fucking stupid and the humans were going to assume because of redacted I—

Oh, here it is. Metal composition, buried under accumulated dust, dirt, and rock fragments. On the team feed, I said, There’s a rail here. The kind of powered rail that floating equipment pads will attach to so they can be moved more efficiently. It wasn’t powered up now, just so much inert metal. Up in the shuttle, the humans were excited, thinking we could follow it all the way to the hidden habitat.

Then with the ground sensor, I followed it for ten meters before it hit the rim of a buried hatchway.

Excerpted from System Collapse, copyright © 2023 by Martha Wells.

The post Read the Third Chapter of System Collapse by Martha Wells appeared first on Reactor.

Everyone’s favorite lethal SecUnit is back in System Collapse, the next installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series—out from Tordotcom Publishing on November 14th. Read the second chapter below (if you missed the first chapter, you can catch up here) and check back for chapter three next week!

Am I making it worse? I think I’m making it worse.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

Yeah, this plan is… not going to work.

Chapter Two

Once we were out of sight behind an outcrop, I did a quick scan for stealth drones, then took my weight off Ratthi and straightened up. He said, “Are you all right?”

I said, “Sure.”

Iris was watching me worriedly and pretending not to. She said, “Why don’t you stay with us? We’ve only got one more router to do.”

I said, “Sure.”

We climbed a rough trail back up to their shuttle, which was set down on a small flat plateau above the router site. Since I was staying with the humans, ART recalled my shuttle. It would hopefully make the lurking B-E team think we had left.

The original Barish-Estranza task force had told us the new arrivals were a scheduled reinforcement, not a response to the distress beacon they had sent. But Seth had said they were probably lying about that. And if they were lying, it meant B-E had more backup waiting at a wormhole somewhere relatively close to this system. Which made sense, if they had been sending multiple explorer groups to systems in this general area.

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But the real problem was that now B-E had a supply ship and an armed explorer, and there was still no sign of a support ship from the University of Mihira and New Tideland. And we really needed one.

Phase I of Plan A: Get the Hell Out of Here had involved trying to get a specialized decontamination update to the colonists’ MedUnits so they could run the alien decontamination protocol on each other. That took longer than it should have because all the medical equipment in the colony was proprietary-branded corporate designs from thirty-seven-plus corporate standard years ago.

Thiago and ART’s human Karime had talked one faction of the colonists into sending us a copy of the software on their main medical unit, and ART had removed any traces of contaminated code and modified its own decontam package to run on old shitty equipment. Then each unit had to be individually accessed and reloaded with the cleaned and enhanced operating systems via elaborately overcautious procedures to eliminate cross-contamination or re-contamination. Mostly in case we had fucked up massively and there were dormant virus fragments in play somewhere in the medical systems whose behavior didn’t match the human-machine-human transmission pattern we had previously noted.

Fortunately, between ART, me, our humans, and the colonists, the level of paranoia about virus contamination on this planet was more than adequate, even by my standards.

Phase II of Plan A was the legal case to keep Barish-Estranza from asserting salvage-right ownership of the colony’s humans, which Pin-Lee was still working on. ART’s crew had also started a planetary alien contamination assessment, and things were looking iffy. There was a lot of technical detail I didn’t care about, but basically if they couldn’t make a good case to certify the contaminated site as sealable, then the planet would be placed under interdict and the colonists would have to leave anyway and Barish-Estranza could make yet another case for claiming them as salvage.

The first subsection of Phase II involved asking the colonists what they wanted to do. I know, it seemed simple. (And I am aware of the irony, since I know exactly how hard the question “what do you want” can be when you don’t have a fucking clue what you want. But we weren’t talking existential questions of existence here, just the basic: Do you want to be salvaged by Barish-Estranza as corporate contract labor for the rest of your lives? Select (1) yes (2) no.)

The problem was who to ask.

(“They’re split into even more factions than they were when we arrived,” Thiago had said, after collating early intelligence received via survey drones deployed by ART and by some comm conversations with different colonists. “They’ve divided their compound up into at least two different areas, and other groups have scattered out to camps on the far side of the inhabited plateau.”

Karime, who was the primary negotiator on ART’s crew, said, “They’ve done things to each other that can’t be easily forgiven. We know—and they know—it was caused by the alien contamination, but I think it’s going to take time for them to come to terms with that.”

“Time we’re running out of,” Mensah said.

Which, it’s not like I don’t understand the whole idea of not forgiving stuff that happens to you. But it seems like they could not-hate each other long enough to avoid getting turned into corporate slave labor, and then start hating each other again after the threat assessment percentage went down.)

We took the shuttle over to the next router, which was on a small rocky hill west of the main colony site, surrounded by sparse clumps of gray-greenish spindly tree-fern things. By the time we got there the other current operation, the one I was supposed to be running security for before redacted, was already in progress. I was bored, so I reversed Three’s video to watch from the beginning.

Karime had come down in a shuttle with Three, and they had disembarked on the secondary colony site’s landing pad. The primary colony had been near the Pre– Corporation Rim site and had been abandoned after the first encounter with alien contamination. The colonists had put this one on the lower terrace of a plateau, using heavy equipment to carve out chambers and passages before building their habitats on top, so the colony had both open air structures and belowground shelters to retreat to and to protect supplies and vital systems. Below the habitat, they had carved vehicle landing areas and ramps down to another agricultural installation and water production plant.

Karime had to greet the colonists waiting for her. That took a while, so long I had time to catch up to real time where they had started up the rock-cut steps. The weather was clear over there, visibility good. We could replace me with an automated weather drone, that would work, too.

Iris and Tarik started on the router, which looked like another big rock and was surrounded by a ferny-tree grove. Past it was a plain with reddish vegetation and some rocky outcrops. There was no way for the humans to get lost out here. There was ART, and the human colony wasn’t far away, and the comm was working, and the lift tower for the drop box shaft was visible in the distance, stretching up until it finally disappeared into the upper atmosphere. So even if the shuttle broke down, even if the comm and our feed stopped working, all they would have to do was walk toward the tower until one of ART’s patrolling pathfinders came to look for them and called for another shuttle.

I could walk in the opposite direction, just walk until— Yeah, I’m going to tag this section for delete.

I accessed Three’s drone feed so I had a better view of it and Karime. It was out of its armor, wearing an enviro suit, pretending to be a human. I tapped Three’s feed and said, More casual. Are you running your walk-like-a-human code?

Three replied, I am running the walk-like-a-human code. But it slowed down, made its joints looser. After two seconds, it added, This is unexpectedly difficult.

Tell me about it. You’re doing fine, I said.

We didn’t want the colonists to know Three was a SecUnit, mostly to fend off conversations about how much the giant angry planet-bombing transport likes this SecUnit and will it lose its mind if a rock falls on it or something. The colonists thought Three was just a really awkward augmented human. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of those around.

Karime and Three followed the colonists through the main part of the secondary colony and it looked way more like a human habitation than what was left of the original Pre–Corporation Rim site. (Which before coming here is not something I would have thought was a positive, but right now anything that didn’t say “major alien contamination incident in progress” was a plus.) This colony’s occasional bits of exposed piping, recycling storage, decorative planting, and interrupted partial constructions all looked messy and human and very not hostile-alien-virus-intending-to-take-over-your-brain.

Because that had happened. Almost happened.

ART was all over this feed, because it was not exactly thrilled with any of its humans going down to the planet at all.

(Transcript of the conversation during the initial Mission briefing:

ART: If Karime is present at the colony and the colonists or corporates attempt to harm her, a threat to bomb this site may be ineffective.

Seth: Peri, can I speak to you in private for a moment?

Iris: It’s just joking. Ratthi: Is it.

Me: You can bomb the terraforming engines on the other continent, it’s a better target anyway.

Thiago: I suppose SecUnit is joking, too.)

(ART actually was joking. Mostly. Iris told Thiago that it had undergone a traumatic experience and would verbally act out until it had fully processed what had happened. Thiago said he knew that but he also thought it enjoyed terrifying people. Iris was pissed off and just smiled in an “I’m going to pretend you aren’t serious so I don’t have to fight you right here in this corridor” way.)

(I’ve realized that Iris is ART’s Ratthi.)

(Thiago is incorrect: ART doesn’t enjoy terrifying people, it enjoys getting its own way and it has a variety of techniques it finds effective for that and vaguely or not-so-vaguely threatening statements are sure one of them. Iris is also correct that ART is still processing its traumatic experience and the fact that it had such a great result with arming its pathfinders and making the colonists think it was about to bomb the crap out of them is maybe something we should worry about, but I just have a lot to do right now, okay.)

(I was not joking. The terraforming engines are a perfect target: zero casualties if we evacuate the colony site immediately afterward and irreparable damage to infrastructure.)

(I’m just saying.)

Even with Three shadowing her, it wasn’t easy to watch Karime follow her colonist guide through a doorway and down another set of steps into the depths of the habitation. From ART’s personnel file, she was older than Mensah and she didn’t look like an intrepid space explorer, either, even in the protective environmental suit.

They led her into a room where she took a seat on a cushion on a stone floor, Three taking up a position behind her. It tried to stay standing, but Karime looked back, smiled, and motioned for it to sit down. It did. It reminded me of the feed vids of very young and very awkward baby fauna with limbs they apparently can’t fully control yet.

I guess at some point I was that awkward, but seriously.

Three’s intel drone went to the ceiling where it had a 360-degree view. The room was round and carved out of the rock, with a couple of lights attached to the high domed ceiling. The colonists took seats on the floor cushions to face Karime.

One was an older female human named Bellagaia, who had been the first colonist to try to initiate contact again after the explosion of the Pre–Corporation Rim site. ART’s human Kaede thought Bellagaia had probably been instrumental in bringing Faction One around to the idea of actually talking to us. She was here with the leaders of Faction Two, Danis and Variset, the “we’re too confused to know what we want and trust no one” faction. Bellagaia had managed to talk them into this meeting and we had sent Karime because she was not only ART’s lead negotiator but also looked nonthreatening.

ART wasn’t happy, but Three was sharing its threat assessment, which was running acceptably low, on the feed. The colonists had put out cups and a flask of hot liquid, and some pieces of food on a plate. Instead of their surface work clothes, the three participants in the meeting wore softer clothing in brighter colors. Body language and other signs indicated they really did want to talk. When all the humans had settled into place, Karime said, “Thank you for allowing me to come here and speak to you.” There was a few seconds’ delay on the feed, as Thiago’s language module translated for her.

Karime was clearly prepared to be all reasonable and calm and persuasive about how banding together temporarily with the other factions in order get the whole population off the planet would be the best solution if the legal case couldn’t stop Barish-Estranza. Danis and Variset were looking at her like she was going to suggest they all set themselves on fire for fun. More colonists had gathered in the doorways to listen or pretend to listen and then inevitably interject stupid comments. So, situation totally normal.

On my mission (make that “mission” because I was actually just standing there) the humans were already finishing up. Tarik was carrying the tool cases back to the shuttle, which was parked on the flat ground past the trees. Iris had finished the router diagnostics and had tuned in to the team feed to watch Karime’s conference. Ratthi had stopped looking at his data and was watching Tarik walk.

Then Bellagaia said, “First, before we get started with our questions— Some of us don’t want to tell you this. But there’s another colony site on this planet.”

Uh, yeah, we know that. The primary, and the other factional sites.

It took Karime three seconds to process the abrupt statement. (She was almost as good at not looking annoyed as Mensah was.) She kept her expression neutral and patient.

“I’m sure we can accommodate their needs.” She gestured to Danis and Variset. “If there are other members of the different groups who should be present—”

“No, not one of our groups.” Bellagaia cut her off. Danis and Variset gave Bellagaia “what the hell” expressions. They didn’t like that she was saying this, whatever it was about. “Another site entirely. They split off nearly thirty years ago. They’re at the pole, near the terraforming.”

On the team feed, ART said, For fuck’s sake.

I said, aloud, “You have to be kidding me.”

The last thing we needed was more colonists. It was going to throw off all the contingency planning and resource-estimating and calculating that the humans had been doing.

It was going to keep us here longer.

Onboard ART, Martyn, who was monitoring from ART’s lounge, almost spilled his cup of hot liquid and said, “What?”

Sitting next to him, Kaede tapped the ship-wide comm and said, “Seth, come in here, please.”

On our router hill, Iris muttered, “What?” Ratthi turned to stare at me, worried. He hadn’t been monitoring that feed, just our separate mission group. Tarik, on his way back from the shuttle, saw that there was agitation and jogged to reach us faster. I added Ratthi and Tarik to Karime’s mission feed, which was quicker than explaining.

In the underground colony room, Karime lifted her brows. “Another occupied site?” I thought she was being careful not to show too much reaction. It was the way Mensah would have played it. On the feed, she said, The terraforming stations on the other continents are all supposed to be uninhabited auxiliaries, correct?

Correct, ART said. Perhaps they are intoxicated.

Karime replied, You know, I’ll believe anything right now.

Bellagaia explained, “They left when the contamination reports first started. In the beginning, we would hear from them on the comm, sometimes they’d fly in for holidays. Less over the years. We grew apart. We can’t call them directly, they have to call us.”

When she said that, I had a moment of hope. Maybe these other humans were imaginary. Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.

Possibly Karime also had a moment of hope because she said in a very even voice, “Why do they have to call you?”

Bellagaia explained, “The comm won’t work up there. It’s interference from the terraforming batteries.”

On the team feed, Iris said, Peri, would that kind of interference block your initial scan for signals?

ART answered, Yes, it did. But there was no priority for further scanning after the active colony site was located.

Sounding resigned, Seth said, So there could be another colony site.

Kaede said, There’s nothing about that in the mapping data we found in the drop box station.

Martyn added, Didn’t we get visual images of the engines at the pole?

Reconstructed scan images of the engines themselves, not the terrain around them, ART said.

“If we want to talk to them, we have to go there,” Bellagaia was saying. “But when this last outbreak started, we were afraid to send anybody up there, that we’d just be spreading the contamination. So they were never infected.”

Danis muttered, “We think they were never infected.” Impatient to get back to refusing to be convinced to not be stupid, she added, “They’re probably dead.”

One of the others, standing back in the doorway, said, “We survived. Until now.”

There was a murmur of “Despite you” from someone in the back, but the other humans pretended to ignore it.

“I see.” Lines formed on Karime’s forehead. She was distracted, listening to the chatter in the feed. Before I could put up a filter for her, ART said, Please stop excessive speaking on the mission feed and they all shut up. I know what humans are like, so I had only given Ratthi and Tarik read access. Karime said, “You said they were at the pole?”

Bellagaia nodded. “Yes, near the service base for the terraforming engines. They were mostly the original technicians who serviced the engines before they went on full automatic. They said they had found a good site up there to build in.”

Karime was thinking fast. “We can speak to them, warn them. Does Barish-Estranza know about them?”

Bellagaia shook her head and looked pointedly at Danis. “I don’t know.”

Danis’s expression was militant. “Our group wouldn’t tell them.”

Variset added, “We think our group wouldn’t tell them.”

Danis conceded, “The others might. Some of them are still confused.”

That caused a lot more muttered commentary from the audience in the doorway. Apparently they also thought Danis’s group was confused. Three sent me a report saying the movement and activity in the surrounding humans was still non-hostile. Yeah, I fucking know. (I didn’t say that, I just sent Acknowledge.)

Another human wriggled into the doorway and said, “That site, it was never meant to be a secondary site. It won’t be on the original colony charter.”

In ART’s lounge, Seth pressed his hands to his face and groaned. For a second I didn’t get it. I mean, I want to press my hands to my face and groan, too, but I pretty much always do.

Oh, right, I get it. The University’s legal case stipulating that this planet was a sovereign political entity and not salvage was based on the re-creation of the original colony’s charter that Pin-Lee and other humans had been working on. This was going to trigger another revamp. And with the new Barish-Estranza explorer here, we were running out of time.

Planets are big, and we could have missed other landing and habitation sites. ART must have scanned for other air bubbles at some point (I didn’t know what it did in its spare time), but when we first got here it mostly hadn’t given a crap about anything except finding its crew. The kind of mapping scans that would turn up low-impact habitations were usually done by satellite. (Or pathfinders, most of which ART had weaponized.) The planet had no intact satellites, just orbital debris from dead ones, too fragmentary to be identified as Corporation Rim or Pre–Corporation Rim.

ART said, The terraforming site would create signal interference that would disrupt both communication and feed traffic. Yeah, that’s what I thought. ART added, It would also interfere with a colony-sized air bubble installation.

I could see Seth in ART’s lounge now, frowning as he flicked through reports. Right, right. That initial pathfinder scan was looking for air bubbles.

Karime nodded to herself. “Okay, that makes— Can you tell me anything else about this other colony site?”

Bellagaia gestured to the doorway behind her and said, “This is Corian.” She used a pronoun that our translator rendered as vi. “Vi’s the historian.”

Corian elbowed someone out of the way to get into the room. Vi dropped to the floor and curled vir legs up, facing Karime. Three didn’t alert, which was good. Threat assessment was reading Corian as a non-hostile anxious to communicate. Vi patted vir chest. “I keep the records, understood? This is not personal knowledge.”

Karime nodded. “Understood.”

Corian had an intent expression, like vi had been waiting for a long time to talk about this. “Contact stopped twenty years ago. There have been reports of connections, from maintenance taking up birds to check on terraforming progress, but none verified. The engines are too noisy.”

Somebody else countered, “Auntie said the connections had the right signatures—”

Bellagaia was watching Karime carefully and must have gotten some sense of the turmoil that was going on. To the others, she said, “Shush. Let Corian speak.” Amazingly, they shut up.

Corian continued, “It wasn’t just the contamination, see. I read the journals from the time they left, and they were separatist. Multiple disagreements on multiple levels. That’s why the lack of communication. We can’t tell you where they are exactly, because we don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us.”

I thought Karime was having the same “oh shit” moment as the rest of the crew but hiding it very well. She looked around at the colonists. “Thank you for trusting us with this. We won’t share it with Barish-Estranza.” She hesitated, clearly trying to say the next part without sounding like she was giving them orders. “I understand you haven’t made a decision about what you want to do yet. It’s in your best interest not to share it with them, either, until you’re certain.”

They may already be aware of it, ART sent.

“Important, yes, but that isn’t my primary concern,” Corian said, still focused on Karime. “The journals talk about a rumor that they had settled underground, in a cave system.”

Three’s drone saw Karime’s face sink and her shoulders tighten. Me, too, Karime, me, too. She echoed, “A cave system.”

Danis tossed her head. “With the geology of that region? A cave system big enough for a colony? Not likely.”

Ugh, you are kidding me. I had (a) visual input, which was Ratthi shaking his fist at the sky and Tarik making hair-tearing-out gestures and Iris sitting there with her face set in a wince; (b) the video feed from ART’s lounge, where Seth was gently banging his head against the table while Martyn patted him on the back. Karime said, “You think it’s another Pre–Corporation Rim site. Or an alien remnant site?”

“More likely to be Pre-Corporation Rim, but—” Corian made an open-handed gesture. “You see the problem.”

Yeah, we saw the problem.

Mensah tapped my feed from the Preservation responder. Seth just messaged me that we have an unexpected development. Is Karime all right?

Yes. She’s busy getting some fantastic news right now. I forwarded the last section of the conversation.

Some of the other colonists were protesting that there was no evidence of any other Pre-CR site and certainly not any alien remnant site, how could you even think that, etc., while Bellagaia looked at them like she was exhausted. Karime stayed focused on Corian, listening intently as vi talked. After vi finished, Karime asked, “Can you give me any more information where this site might be?” No, it turned out, vi could not, and nobody else had a clue, either, just that it was near enough to the terraforming engines to disrupt attempts to reach them by comm. Corian had been checking the records vi had access to, trying to locate anyone still alive who might have talked to the separatists at some point in the last twenty years, but with no success.

Mensah had had time to review the feed video. She muttered, “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”

Yeah.

Excerpted from System Collapse, copyright © 2023 by Martha Wells.

The post Read the Second Chapter of System Collapse by Martha Wells appeared first on Reactor.

Everyone’s favorite lethal SecUnit is back in System Collapse, the next installment in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series—out from Tordotcom Publishing on November 14th. Read the first chapter below, and check back for more Murderbot in the coming weeks!

Am I making it worse? I think I’m making it worse.

Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize.

But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

Yeah, this plan is… not going to work.

Chapter One

Dr. Bharadwaj told me once that she thought I hated planets because of the whole thing with being considered expendable and the possibility of being abandoned. I told her it was because planets were boring.

Yeah, that was a lie. Objectively, planets are less boring than staring at walls and guarding equipment in a mining installation. But planets tend to be less boring in the bad way.

Planets where you have to investigate the probably-not-empty, possibly-alien-contaminated Pre–Corporation Rim occupation site while wearing an environmental suit instead of armor are especially not boring in the bad way, maybe the worst way.

Especially when you could have been wearing armor, but you decided to be weird about it instead.

I should back up.

***

File access 47.43 hours earlier

So the next time I get optimistic about something, I want one of you to punch me in the face. Okay, not really, because let’s be real, that would end badly. Maybe remind me to punch myself in the face.

On the team feed, ART said, SecUnit, status report.

Or punch ART in the face. I sent back, I wish I could punch you in the face.

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ART said, I wish you could try.

Yes, I know it was just humoring me. And yes, we were still on the stupid alien-contaminated lost colony planet despite the fact that we (me, ART, our humans, but mostly me) really wanted out of this system.

ART added, I still need a status report.

I said, Status: in progress. I’d been sending it drone video plus it had access to my visual data, so it knew I was still currently moving through tumbled rockfall at the foot of a low plateau, with an agricultural planting area to my right. Whatever was planted there was green and taller than me, and providing adequate cover from our currently designated Hostile One.

It was midmorning planetary time and the cloud cover, which was a byproduct of the terraforming, was patchy enough for the sun to come through. DroneScout1 was overhead giving me a vantage point of the ongoing situation, so I could see the router installation on another rise past the far end of the planted field. The building itself was smallish, about the size of one of ART’s shuttles, but it was enclosed in a much bigger protective shell made of artificial stone. It looked like a big cylindrical boulder, placed at the foot of the low plateau, past where it had crumbled into a slope of slabs of rock and actual boulders. (Why artificial stone? Because the dead people from Adamantine Explorations had meant for everything to look pretty once the colony build was complete. I don’t know why that’s more depressing than them doing a shitty job and intending to abandon their colonists, but it just was.)

The thick green flora waved in the slight breeze under the colony’s air bubble, and despite my scan and the drone’s scan, it was making me nervous. At least it was making me nervous for a survival-based reason instead of… redacted.

The front of the installation had an indentation artistically carved to look like a natural curve in the rock, but it was actually shelter for the metal hatch that was currently open. At the moment, it would have been better for the hatch to be closed, but when Ratthi and ART’s humans Iris and Tarik ran in there, they hadn’t had time to close it behind them before Hostile One had jammed one of its long metal limbs through.

Remember those agricultural bots that I said looked scary but were actually harmless? Yes, I was hilariously wrong about that at the time and I hadn’t gotten any less wrong since then.

This ag-bot was only nine meters tall but still covered with spike-like feelers for planting or tilling or whatever. Its lower body had twelve long jointed limbs for moving through thick foliage without crushing plants, and its upper body was a weirdly long curved neck with a small head on top where its main sensors were. It was also batshit out of control, its feed locked, and, according to what Iris had been able to observe before she needed to run like hell, chock-full of alien contamination.

ART said, I need your status, not the mission status.

Ugh, my status.

I wasn’t supposed to come down to the planet again. Me, ART, Mensah, Seth, and Martyn had all made that decision, because of redacted. I had even had an assignment during this day-cycle, sort of. It wasn’t really busywork, but it wasn’t not busywork, either. Karime had an in-person meeting planned with a faction of colonists at the main site habitation, and Three was going with her for security while pretending to be a human (always a fun time) and I was supposed to monitor Three and make sure it knew what to do and to not let ART give it anxiety. (Or more anxiety than it already had on its own.) I had been lying on the bunk in one of ART’s cabins watching The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (episode 121, on repeat) while waiting for Karime and Three’s shuttle to arrive at the meeting site, when ART had slammed into my feed and said, I need you. ART couldn’t use one of its remaining weaponized pathfinders to take out the agricultural bot. I mean, it could, but that was problematic for a couple of reasons, one being that the pathfinders are jury-rigged bombs—they detonate on command but there’s no way to regulate their impact area. The bot was too close to the router installation and more importantly to the open hatch where the humans were taking shelter.

On the feed, Ratthi said, SecUnit, how are you doing?

I couldn’t get a drone into the router installation without alerting the ag-bot that I was there, but according to the humans they were in the far end of the housing, in a recessed maintenance bay, about three meters from what is apparently the maximum reach of the ag-bot’s… tentacle, poking limb, whatever it’s called. I’m fine, Ratthi. Don’t get any closer to the tentacle.

It’s a growth stimulator, Ratthi said. You don’t have to rush, we’re fine.

You’re not fine, Ratthi, for fuck’s sake. (For however many corporate standard years, all I got from humans was “Run in there now no matter how likely you are to get blown to tiny pieces when a quiet tactical approach has a higher percentage of success” and now it’s “Oh no we’re fine, we can hang out in this objectively terrifying immediately hazardous situation for however long.”)

(I’m just saying that it would be nice for the humans to give me a realistic situation report for once.)

(Dr. Bharadwaj says even good change is stressful.)

ScoutDrone1 hadn’t found a decent vantage point yet for me to get close enough to take a shot. Sort of a shot. The weapon I had was not actually a weapon, it was a recall beacon. (I know. It sounds like the whole retrieval is jacked from the beginning. “The weapon is a recall beacon.” They wouldn’t even pull this off on Sanctuary Moon.)

I had an actual gun, one of ART’s projectile weapons, but we knew from experience how many shots it took to down an enraged ag-bot, and getting up right on its processor for a point-blank impact was not something anybody wanted me to try to attempt, especially me. And shooting it with my onboard energy weapons was not going to work. (ART had altered an environmental suit for me so the sleeves locked in to my weapon ports and I could fire without burning holes through the fabric, but I just didn’t have the capacity to take out this thing.)

I needed something that would work from a distance, and the recall beacon was similar to certain models that the company used, though not nearly as powerful. It was designed to allow a human to hold it during operation and not be exploded into bits, so it could be operated by a landing party in distress. The idea was to get a payload with a transponder high enough in atmosphere that the signal pulse it would broadcast could easily be picked up by a ship in orbit. But you know, if you hit something with that payload at closer range, it’ll knock a really big hole in it.

Back aboard ART, while I was getting into my environmental suit, ART had chosen the recall beacon out of its inventory as the tool most likely to be used in a way it had never been designed to in order to stop a contaminated ag-bot.

This was all just great, since I’d already gotten the shit kicked out of me by an ag-bot before, though that one had been controlled by a higher level of sentient virus. This one was probably just a leftover fragment with a few commands left twining through the bot’s code, like “chase and kill moving human-shaped things.” Iris thought it must have been dormant up to this point, and maybe restoring the routers in this area had woken it up again. (During the intra-colony fighting, one colonist faction had destroyed the feed routers, which we knew now had not been a source of contamination transmission. Not exactly helpful, but of all the weird shit these people had done to each other during the worst of the incident, sabotaging their own routers was low on the list, maybe all the way down into the vaguely rational category.)

By the time I had reached the storage locker where the transponder/bot-buster was kept, Seth was already there. He handed it to me and said, “We’ve only had to use it a couple of times, once on a planet where atmospheric conditions had blocked our comm, and once in an asteroid mining belt where Matteo— It’s a long story.” He scratched the back of his head and added reluctantly, “I know we said you wouldn’t have to go back…”

I didn’t have time for this. I told him, “It’s fine.”

So I’m here now and it’s fine, everyone shut up about it, okay.

ScoutDrone2 had found a good line of sight with cover, approximately twenty meters to my left through the boulders and up onto the ridge a little. I started making my way toward it, but my plan was not giving me great numbers in threat assessment or in the potential for a successful retrieval, which is usually not a metric I look at while in progress. (I don’t want to jinx myself.) But I still felt radically off my game and I was hoping for reassurance rather than statistics that confirmed that I was correct in thinking that everything sucked right now.

ART was right, a hit from the launcher would stop the ag-bot. (It wouldn’t stop a CombatBot, but it might make one reconsider for .03 seconds before it came at you again. A CombatUnit would be unlikely to let you get into position to use a slow-loading tool like this in the first place, but you could definitely kill the shit out of a normal SecUnit with it. Note to self: don’t let the ag-bot take it away from you and shoot you with it. Talk about adding insult to injury.) But I knew how fast the ag-bots could move. I had skimmed through the transponder’s instructional feed module on the shuttle ride down and the launcher was not meant to be used in a hurry, and it only had two reloads.

Yeah, this plan was… not going to work.

(I could see my mistake now. I’d let ART and the humans come up with this idea. They had the right weapon, just the wrong way to use it. I should have been more proactive, but, ugh, redacted.)

I recalled ScoutDrone2 and started back the way I’d come, toward the field and the tall plants. What’s wrong? ART said.

This isn’t going to work. I stuck my calculations of the ag-bot’s speed vs. my speed vs. the launcher’s speed and capacity into a chart and sent it to ART so it wouldn’t keep asking me questions. This was where I could have really used Three for backup, but it was arriving at the main colony site with Karime now and diverting it would mean canceling her meeting, and that was important, and honestly, there was no reason—no nonstupid reason—I shouldn’t be able to handle this. And I already had a new terrible plan. The transponder’s instruction module had helpfully explained that the launcher could also be triggered remotely via a secure feed connection.

This plan was going to look more stupid, but threat assessment liked it better: it got the explosive devices farther away from the trapped humans.

I entered the field, the tall stalks of green plants well above my head, the wind making the little lumpy seed-looking things knock together. This field was actually growing out of the ground, not out of growth-medium racks, so it was easier to get through it. The breeze covered the sound of my environmental suit brushing against the plants. The ground was wet and smelled like the inside of a biome display, even through the environmental suit mask. (Yes, I was wearing it despite the fact that we were in an air bubble so I didn’t need it. It wasn’t like I thought it could protect me from alien contamination, it just felt nice, okay.)

The air movement also made the plants sway, covering my progress as I worked my way through. ScoutDrone1 fed me overhead video so I could make sure my motion wasn’t obvious. I came up on the edge of the field, my vision still blocked by the last few heavy rows of stalks, but Scout-Drone1’s vid and scan showed I had about thirty meters of open sandy ground between me and where the ag-bot was patiently jammed into the router housing, waiting for prey.

I checked the one transponder in the launcher, made sure the other two were primed for remote detonation.

Then I ran forward.

I dropped the first charge fifteen meters out and the second five meters later. (No, they did not go off on impact, I did check that.) I slid to a stop and shouted, “Hey! Over here!” (Yes, I could have been more quippy like in a show, but an ag-bot that’s meant to be controlled via code delivered through a local feed and doesn’t understand more than a limited range of vocal commands is not exactly going to be impressed or intimidated by sarcasm.)

It didn’t react, at least from what I could tell on visual. For 2.3 seconds I thought it would ignore me. Which, having to walk up to it and actually put the transponder on its carapace was not the worst thing that could happen.

Then it ripped its limbs out of the doorway and flung itself at me. Okay, that was not the worst thing that could have happened, either, but it was high on the list.

Bots like this don’t have to turn around—it didn’t have any apertures or sensors in its body that it needed to point at the annoying thing it wanted to kill, it just reversed right out of the installation and lunged. It was really fast, is what I’m saying.

But I’m fast too, and I was moving back even as it surged at me. Running toward the field, I had ScoutDrone1’s video in one input so I saw the ag-bot’s first three legs hit the ground two meters from the first transponder. I only had an estimate of its speed (really fast) so I couldn’t do a precise calculation, but it looked right. I triggered the first transponder.

Thefucker jumped. Itwascutoff fromthefeed, it shouldn’t have been able to pick up my detonation command. It also shouldn’t have been able to take in the visual data of what I had done and interpret it as a trap, but that had to be the alien contamination augmenting its processing capacity. It went ten meters up in the air (ScoutDrone1 almost bought the farm but shot out of the way just in time) and it only lost the tips of two legs instead of taking a disabling blast to its joints. And it became obvious it was aiming to land on me, and there was no way I could get away in time.

Two things happened at once: (1) I threw myself down and rolled to face upward, aiming the launcher with the last transponder at the approximate trajectory the ag-bot was arriving at; and (2) I caught a ping from another SecUnit.

My first thought was What the hell is Three doing here? but less accusatory and more relieved. It would be embarrassing to be rescued by Three, but it wasn’t anything that hadn’t happened before. The next thought was: That can’t be Three. I knew its location as of 5.4 minutes ago, there was no time for it to get here.

Then: Oh shit, it’s Barish-Estranza.

That was why Karime’s meeting was too important to put off, why she needed Three with her, why ART couldn’t/ shouldn’t use its weaponized pathfinders or try to arm a shuttle or anything else that might seem out of capacity for a university’s deep-space mapping transport.

Four corporate standard day cycles after the Preservation responder had shown up with Dr. Mensah to look for us, another Barish-Estranza explorer had arrived, complete with a new complement of at least three SecUnits that we knew of. Since then the B-E task group had been much more active, sending teams to the planet to “evaluate” the situation and talk to the colonists. There was no legal way to keep them from doing it and killing them all was problematic, though don’t think ART hadn’t run those numbers a few times.

The ag-bot plummeted toward me in a controlled fall, and I was about to hit the triggering sequence. Then a quick scatter of large explosive projectiles from off toward the right hit the central part of the bot’s body. Right where its processor would be.

The bot made a clunking noise. Metal shrapnel sprayed out and a couple of limbs flew off. I scrambled out of the way as the torso broke loose and slammed into the ground. Oh, great save, B-E SecUnit, most humans wouldn’t have been able to evade that. What the hell kind of retrieval was that supposed to be?

ART, watching my visual data, said, That was .2 degrees away from a murder attempt.

Important question you might have: Did this SecUnit know I was a SecUnit?

Answer: I fucking hope not.

On the secure team feed, I said, Use the feed for anything you don’t want them to know. Their SecUnit can pick you up on audible from over there. ScoutDrone1 was already in stealth mode and I told it and ScoutDrone2 to head for the nearest shuttle, which was the one the router team had left up on the plateau. The shuttle ART had landed for me was farther out, past the field, out of the ex-ag-bot’s sensor range. I had one backup drone in the pocket of my environmental suit and I told it to go dormant. I had already let go of the launcher and made sure it rolled out of my reach. I was running all my move-like-a-human code, and I had improved it substantially from the first version I’d written. My feed, the team feed, and my connection with ART were all locked down tight, though SecUnits with intact governor modules aren’t free to detect and hack systems like I am. They have to receive a specific order to do it, and most employers are too paranoid to allow that. But this SecUnit (designate: B-E Unit1) was only about four meters away; it might just look at me, know what I was, and report it.

The only thing I could do was confuse it as much as possble. I rolled over and groaned like a human (potentially not a great idea, it sounded embarrassingly fake) and pulled a few clips from Sanctuary Moon of the various scenes where the colony solicitor’s bodyguard had been injured and had to stand up again. On the team feed, ART was talking to Iris. She leaned out of the installation and called out, “Can you ask your SecUnit to fall back, please.”

Without drones, I couldn’t see what it was doing. ART had switched over to Iris’s feed, using her enviro suit camera, and the resolution at this distance wasn’t good. ART needed a field equipment upgrade. Wait, a human would look at it, right?

ART said, Look at it. It’s obvious you’re avoiding it.

Maybe I’m a nervous human who’s afraid of bots, I told ART, but I looked at it anyway.

The SecUnit was walking away, and five humans in the red-brown Barish-Estranza-branded environmental suits were coming toward me/us. They would have a shuttle nearby somewhere, with probably two more humans and possibly one additional SecUnit inside. They weren’t obviously armed, but intel suggested that at least some members of the B-E scout teams regularly carried sidearms while on planet. The Targets/infected colonists had taken weapons off the previous/posthumous B-E explorer scout team.

And they had brought a SecUnit armed with a nonstandard medium-distance bot-busting weapon, better than anything ART currently had on board.

Ratthi ran to me and on our secured team feed I told him, Pretend to help me up.

“Are you okay?” he demanded. I’d restricted my camera views to ART to keep the humans from getting more agitated, but once it was clear I had survived, ART had shared a clip of my close call. Probably so it had someone to be angry about it with. I let Ratthi grab my arm and made it look like he was taking most of my weight as I pushed upright. “That was too close!” He threw a glare toward the Barish-Estranza party. He added on the feed, Was that intentional, do you think?

Maybe. Maybe it’s just a shitty SecUnit, I replied. I was not in a good mood.

Okay, I’m not perfect, I think we all know that by now, but B-E Unit1 should have understood the trajectory situation and used the explosive bolts a beat earlier and then accelerated in to roll me away and shield me from shrapnel. That was what I would have done. Tried to do. There was no way a client-supervisor would have had time to countermand that save. Fucking assholes.

(Obviously this is not actually what I’m upset about, it’s just easier to be angry about B-E Unit1’s fuckup and/or disregard for minimum client safety.)

Safer to be angry about it, ART said on our private connection.

I was not even going to respond to that. ART had told Mensah it wouldn’t push me. Just because its MedSystem was certified for emotional support and trauma recovery it thought it knew everything.

I was on my feet, pretending to have an injured ankle and leaning on Ratthi. Iris had come out and moved forward to meet the lead Barish-Estranza human, and Tarik had stayed with her, which was good. He had also dropped his enviro suit helmet visor before he came out, so it wouldn’t look strange that I still had mine down, which was also good. Just us humans here, some of us like to wear our visors down when we don’t need them to breathe and some don’t, we just like to mix it up.

The B-E humans had their visors up, and we’d seen the lead human before. He was Sub-Supervisor Dellcourt (male/demi) and he was one of the smart ones, which was just how this day was going.

“Thank you for your help,” Iris said, in a way that could be mistaken for politeness by a bot but a human would definitely know there was an undercurrent of fuck you. “Are you going to bill us later?”

Martyn told me that Iris and ART have been interacting since Iris was a new human baby and ART was a new whatever the hell it is and sometimes that is not surprising at all.

Dellcourt said, “We’ll put it on your creditor’s statement,” and chuckled. Iris smiled with a tension in her jaw that indicated gritting teeth.

The billing thing is not actually a joke; Pin-Lee and Turi, who does the accounting for ART, were preparing a counter-bill to present to Barish-Estranza after this was over. (If this was ever over.) These money fights between/with corporations were very common and incredibly boring.

(According to Martyn, ART is of course capable of doing its own accounting, but it always ends up with extra numbers that no one can trace. So now Turi does it and has to keep a hardcopy ledger because otherwise ART would alter their data. No one knew if ART was making up numbers for the hell of it or if these numbers represented actual credit balances that ART was hiding somewhere.)

Still smiling, Dellcourt said, “Can I ask what you are doing here? Besides antagonizing the local inventory?”

Inventory = the ag-bot. The explosive had destroyed its processor, so it was no longer a contamination hazard to humans, which was not a coincidence.

Iris said, “Only if I can ask you what you’re doing here.”

This was some kind of human posturing thing. It was pretty obvious Iris’s task group had been fixing the routers; if the B-E humans had been oblivious, their SecUnit would have called their attention to it. It was also pretty obvious that, considering the specific explosive bolts their SecUnit had been armed with, they had been out looking for contaminated bots.

That’s not encouraging, ART said, which was understating the case dramatically. We were collecting depressing datapoints indicating Barish-Estranza’s intentions all the time.

The first thing the new Barish-Estranza explorer had done was power up to ART and try to intimidate it/us. (I know. I was below 66 percent operating capacity at the time and I thought it was a bad idea.

ART had dropped its main weapon port and transmitted, Targeting lock acquired.

The explorer had replied something to the effect that they didn’t mean to be intimidating and was the widdle academic transport crew scared, but in corporate speak, and ART had replied, It’s so easy for ships to disappear out here.

There was a pause, indicating a scramble to adjust operational parameters, then they made the mistake of trying to intimidate back with something like Oh yeah well you’ll get damaged too, and I am not exactly an expert on nonfictional human interactions but that just obviously wasn’t going to cut it.

ART transmitted, You can make this complicated situation simple for me. Which I can tell you was not any kind of posturing, it 100 percent meant that.

Barish-Estranza must have picked up on that subtext because they backed down and now they think ART is a human commanding officer who’s a giant asshole.)

(ART is a secret from everyone except for the upper level departments at the University of Mihira and New Tideland. Barish-Estranza had no idea what it was dealing with.)

The rest of the B-E group was staring at me and the humans. Overse had said that the B-E corporates always look like they’re trying to figure out how much to sell you for, and she wasn’t wrong. I was glad I had refined my act-like-a-human code because if I had to wing it on my own, I wouldn’t have known what to do with my hands. Iris was doing a good job of trying to keep most of the B-E humans’ attention, but I could tell the SecUnit was looking at me.

I don’t know if Iris had noticed this or not, but she turned in the SecUnit’s direction and said, “Thank you for your help.”

Dellcourt’s expression was startled. “It’s a SecUnit.”

Iris ignored him, and we left.

Excerpted from System Collapse, copyright © 2023 by Martha Wells.

The post Murderbot Returns! Read the First Chapter of System Collapse by Martha Wells appeared first on Reactor.

Recently, the author dropped by r/Fantasy for an AMA to talk about everything from Murderbot’s favorite TV show, to worlds she’d like to revisit, to her favorite books and authors. Head below for the highlights!

[Editor’s note: Questions and responses may have been edited for length and clarity.]

What drew you to the idea of a sentient AI? What’s something you hope readers take away from the person/character of Murderbot?

The original idea that I started with in All Systems Red was about an enslaved security person, and a sentient AI fit the best with what I wanted to do.

I would hope for people to think about how the corporations in the story decide who gets to be human and who doesn’t, and how their society got to that point, and realize how that happens here in our world.

Which characters from your different series would you most like to have meet each other?

Offhand, I think Kade Carrion from The Element of Fire and Nicholas Valiarde from The Death of the Necromancer could do some awesome damage together.

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If you had to spend a day with a character from a series you wrote, and in their world, who would you choose?

I think Ratthi [from The Murderbot Diaries] might be the most fun to hang out with.

Can you recommend your favourite science fiction short story of all time?

I love “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad. I also love Jessica Reisman’s short stories, and actually did an introduction for her recent short story collection.

A lot of authors seem to discourage writing novellas; what made you decide to go short?

That used to be the case, because there just weren’t markets for novellas. They were too short for book publishers and too long for most print magazines. But once ebooks and online magazines became more prevalent, that changed completely, and now novellas are everywhere.

I originally meant for All Systems Red to be a short story, but the story needed to be longer. After Tor.com Publishing bought it for their novella line, they wanted more novellas and I wanted to write more about the character, so it became a novella series.

Was it hard to find a publisher who would want to produce stories that might seem controversial to some readers? Was there ever a push to make your characters more ‘normal’?

In the past, yes, particularly with the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. It was also hard to find a publisher for the Books of the Raksura series, because it was so different. It was rejected by just about everybody before Night Shade Books bought it. But Tor.com Publishing has been very supportive of the Murderbot books from the very beginning.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I knew when I was very young. I think it was because I read Erma Bombeck’s books when I was a kid, and that was when I realized writers were real people and you could actually do it as a job.

What have you been reading in quarantine?

Right now I’m reading one of Sharon Shinn’s older books from her Samaria series, Jovah’s Angel, and I recently read The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin, The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo, The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chockshi and Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. I’m getting ready to read Null Set by S.L. Huang and Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer.

[Editor’s note: Martha talks more about these titles here.]

Murderbot loves to zone out in front if its favorite shows; what shows are you currently binging during quarantine?

I got Disney+ just so I could watch The Mandalorian, and I watch The Flash and I love Legends of Tomorrow. But I’ve also been watching a lot of older shows, mostly British mysteries, old ones and newer ones like Broadchurch. I can’t wait for the next season of The Expanse.

What’s your go-to book when you want an escape?

Right now I really like the Rivers of London series [by Ben Aaronivitch], since it’s so detailed that it’s great for re-reading.

What author(s) would you cite as your biggest influence?

Andre Norton, Judith Tarr, Tanith Lee, Phylliis Gotlieb, Janet Kagan, Diane Duane, to name a few.

What is one book that particularly resonates with you, or that you wish you could have written?

I don’t know if there’s anything I wish I could have written since my favorite books to read are ones that I couldn’t have written myself, if that makes sense. Early favorites that I re-read a lot were Mirabile by Janet Kagan, The Door into Summer by Diane Duane, and A Judgement of Dragons by Phyllis Gotlieb.

Can you recommend other authors that write sci-fi similar to your own? 

I don’t know if they’re particularly similar to the way I write, but I love Ann Leckie, Lois McMaster Bujold, Yoon Ha Lee, Suzanne Palmer (Finder and Driving the Deep), Tade Thompson (Rosewater), Melissa Scott (Finders), Arkady Martine (A Memory Called Empire), Karen Lord (The Best of All Possible Worlds) and Aliette de Bodard (The Tea Master and the Detective).

Do you think you’ll ever write any more books that take place in Ile-Rien?

I really don’t know if I’ll even go back to Ile-Rien. It’s been a long time since I wrote in that world and I usually want to work on new ideas. But I hate to say I’ll never go back to it.

Have you got any works planned that may not directly involve the Raksura but are set in the Three Worlds?

I haven’t gotten anything on the table yet, but I do want to go back to the Three Worlds at some point. It probably wouldn’t involve the Raksura, but would be about other characters in a different part of the world.

What existing media comes closest to The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, a favorite of Muderbot? I had always envisioned one of those historical K-dramas (but in spaaaaace).

It’s based loosely on nighttime mystery/dramas, like How To Get Away With Murder. There is a show mentioned in Network Effect that’s more based on a K-drama.

The Great British Baking Show. :)

Head on over to r/Fantasy for the full AMA.

The post Martha Wells on Reading Recommendations and Murderbot’s Favorite Media appeared first on Reactor.