Ideas to consider while cooking up a Murderbot Meta 🧑🍳 🍳
✏️ Murderbot Meta May Week 3: Outside In ✏️ expanding the setting via speculative additions
Murderbot is famously sparse on worldbuilding details: it only explicitly describes things that are immediately relevant or interesting to it. For week 3 we’d love to see your ideas and speculations about Murderbot’s world.
Any ideas about how SecUnit physiology works? Where does Murderbots energy or internal consumable materials come from? What does its maintenance schedule look like? Is it missing anything crucial? How does sleep (or its lack) work for the neural tissue in its brain? What’s up with the governor module?
How are machine intelligences developed, and how do they compare/contrast to different forms of “AI” that we know in the modern day? Where does the line develop between “advanced” MIs and more simple ones?
Pick a background bot type and explore its implications. Hauler bots? Agriculture bots? Combat bots? Human-form bots?
How do wormholes work? How do wormhole-capable ships work? How does space travel throughout the habited universe work?
Compare/contrast potential cultural elements between Preservation and the Corporate Rim, or other freehold planets. Relationship structures (what was going on with Ratthi and Tarik anyway?), social mores and politeness standards, clothing, religion, media/entertainment.
Preservation was seeded by a ship that had its passengers in transit for hundreds of years. How does that square with the much faster wormhole travel of the “current” setting?
What kind of exports might different systems (CR, Preservation) have, if any? What purposes do mining and extractive activities serve? What are they mining for? How does trade function within and without the Corporate Rim?
What languages are spoken in the space future? How has language evolved? What did Murderbot mean by “Standard Lexicon” (mentioned in book 1). How does translation technology work, and what are its limitations?
Why are alien remnants Like That? What kind of aliens left behind those remnants and strange synthetics? Was it all the same spacefaring species, or different ones that are now mysteriously missing? Where did they go?
How might terraformation and human settlement interact with a planet that already has native life?
How common is alien life, and how do people treat it? With respect? As a nuisance? A novelty? Taken for granted?
What were the PreservationAux survey team really studying in All Systems Red, and why did they have biologists on their team?
May is coming up in just a couple weeks! How exciting. Remember to tag #MurderMetaMay 2026 when posting to tumblr or our AO3 collection!
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