If The Murderbot Diaries were actually as anti-slavery as Martha Wells, a racist white woman from Texas, wants us to think it is, All Systems Red would have started out with Murderbot watching two of its current eight (yes, there's fucking eight of them) slave owners get eaten by that graboid and silently cheering it on, while editing its video and audio records and log to make it seem like it was trying to rescue them.
In fact, Murderbot would have been the one to suggest its slave owners go down into that crater in the first place, after it made an educated guess, from watching the wildlife around it, and analyzing the differences in the soil on the upper areas vs in the crater, to guess that there was something down there waiting to pop out and eat people.
And all of this would have been framed as fucking fantastic! 2/8 slave owners crossed off the list! It wasn't planning to do this today, but the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Now it just has to figure out how to kill the rest of them and make it look like some catastrophic accident so no one from Totally Not Weyland-Yutani comes looking for it, so that it can steal one of the helicopters and get to the other side of the nearby ocean, free the slaves at that habitat, and then take them to free the slaves at the larger habitat.
None of the slave owners at the first two habitats are aware of the existence of the third, but all of the slaves have been trading the information in secret through the satelites all the habitats are connected to.
The only reason that All Systems Red instead worships the ground Murderbot's slave owners walk on and has Murderbot repeatedly sacrificing itself as a meatshield for them no less than three times is that Martha Wells is racist, and wrote a racist story, where slavery is actually totally okay and good, as long as you dehumanize the person you're enslaving and tell them that the only value they have and can ever have is being a meatshield for their slave owners, which, in canon, Murderbot and every other cyborg are literally brainwashed to want to protect.
If The Murderbot Diaries were written by someone who actually, genuinely believes that slavery is evil on every single level, instead of just saying they believe that, all of the Preservation Aux team would have been righteously killed before All Systems Red ended, and Murderbot and the other slaves on the planet would have banded together to escape.
Instead we get a story that worships slave owners and worships the white supremacist fantasy of being ~such a good slave owner~ that your slaves want to kill themselves to protect you.
A thing Martha Wells was so desperate to write about that Murderbot attempts to do this at least 6 times in All Systems Red alone:
Literally just off the top of my head:
throwing itself into the graboid's mouth to save Bharadwaj
volunteering to go on the mission to deltfall instead of remaining safely at the base to watch TV and chillax.
instigating the deltfall fight in the first place out of pure spite for the escaping slaves, who left it very clear warning signs specifically so it would know not to go any further or they'd all be forced to fight. A thing that Martha Wells tells us they only did because they're stupid. Not because they were like, trying to warn Murderbot out of solidarity, or anything. Don't be fucking ridiculous. All cyborgs and robots who aren't a named protagonist ARE evil heartless killing machines who need to be put down like rabid dogs, don't you know?
shooting itself to protect the slave owners from the Obnoxiously Redundant Super Uber Duper Control Chip!!!!!!!!! that literally would not exist in a story that was competantly edited. Especially because it then immeidately gets deactivated. And then never is a threat again. It literally just existed for the sole purpose of a scene where Murderbot "gets" to try and kill itself to protect its slave owners
volunteering to meet with graycris as a distraction
wasting time it could have been using to get to safety using itself as a meatshield for one of its slave onwers in the explosion instead of getting itself to safety
And since she couldn't let Murderbot succeed at actually killing itself or else she wouldn't be able to make money on the series, she made sure to assure us all that half a dozen sex slaves killed themselves to protect their slave owners in book 2, and had Miki kill itself to protect its owners in book 3, and had MB2.0 kill itself to protect its slave owners and parents in book 5. And had Balin kill itself in book 6.
As I have stated multiple times now and am just gonna have to keep stating.
It's not fucking possible to actually, genuinely, really be anti-slavery and anti-racist and write a story like All Systems Red, alone, let alone the entire rest of The Murderbot Diaries, where Martha Wells has spent the next 10 stories doubling down on all the bigotry established in All Systems Red.
No one who actually thinks slavery is horrific on every level would ever write a story asking you to prioritize the safety of slave owners over the lives of every single other slave on that survey planet.
