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!
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The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 2
I think the “pass” decision is exactly as you first reacted to it, invoking the need of someone seen as less than human to present an identity that allows them access to the larger society.
Given that Murderbot is basically neurodivergent-coded, I wonder if “masking” might be a better term for it. Although Murderbot isn’t trying to be accepted socially, just to avoid attracting attention, so it’s not really the same thing.
Wells didn’t use the word “mask,” she used the word “pass” and I have confidence she knew exactly the history she was invoking.
And “accepted socially” for passing often meant simply being allowed to move in white-coded public spaces without being hassled, exactly what MB is aiming for.
I’m not arguing against the use of “passing;” I shouldn’t have said “better,” since that’s misleading. I’m just wondering if the analogy from autism is applicable too. Outsiders trying to fit into conventional norms is a theme that has many variations, and I’m suggesting intersectionality, not competition.
I think the second reading is better supported by the test. MB’s body mods are more about rejecting the standardized traits imposed on it by the dominant culture than of adopting traits which suggest membership in a higher status caste.
MB wants to pass as an augmented human, absolutely a higher status caste.
Even before its body mods, it can pass for an augmented human. It only changes the traits which mark it as a SecUnit. I’m pretty sure it expresses a desire to remove the Company’s branding completely but can’t do it without replace many of its inorganic component.
The point is that changing oneself to “pass” often has connotations of being less authentic than one could be. Since MB’s body shape is literally a mark of corporate ownership—IRRC it’s implied the standard body shape is for more reasons than simplifying production—it becomes more authentically itself by modifying its body. Which can be seen in the additions that it rejects.
Oh, interesting. So you’re suggesting it’s more a transition narrative than a passing narrative.
I wouldn’t say it wants to, per se — more that it grudgingly accepts the necessity. Being more human is the last thing Murderbot would want, given its druthers.
It’s a combination of both, which is something rhat I really identity with as a neurodivergent trans person. In corporate space, it needs to pass as not a rogue SecUnit. In Preservation/Mihira & New Tideland, it refuses any human identifiers, because as you note, it considers being human a downgrade, and would never want that.
This is also the only book where Murderbot succeeds in passing for a Human to it’s clients. The Collective that hires Murderbot never realize that Security Consultant Rin was anything other then an augmented human.
This is not because Murderbot is better at being a human in this book, its that the Collective is the most Inexperienced, Naive, and adorably cute young humans in the entire setting. They also try harder to get themselves killed then anyone else.
The only reason they don’t die is that they luck into hiring top of the line security for the equivalent of a dollar.
They bought a robo-cop for a dollar? How appropriate.