Port FreeCommerce - Unnamed Station in Mihira & New Tideland System: [unknown time]
Mihira & New Tideland - RaviHyral: 21 cycles
RaviHyral - [Unnamed]: 7 cycles
[Unnamed] - HaveRatton: 26 cycles
HaveRatton - Milu: 20 cycles
HaveRatton - "hub station": 7 cycles
"hub station" - TranRollinHyfa: 4 cycles
Preservation - NE Survey Planet: 4 Preservation cycles
Preservation - Adamantine Colony: 20 cycles
Other Locations:
All Systems Red Survey Planet
Divarti Cluster: Tapan's collective is from this noncorporate polity.
Kalidon: Corporate Rim political entity where company funding Ganaka was based.
GoodNightLander Independent's home polity: Noncorporate, ownership of SecUnits banned.
Parthalos Absalo: Noncorporate.
WayBrogatan: Indie station.
Network Effect Survey Planet.
Station from the short story Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy.
UplandGateway One: Nearest station to the Mihira & New Tideland system. Corporate charters say stations are supposed to be independent/sovereign territory.
Planetary Torus.
I tried making noncorporate polities warm-colored and corporate ones cool-colored. But not sure I got that all right, and sometimes it's ambiguous.
Thank you to mensah for sharing their transit time notes with me!
"One of them can read the room and it's not her": Autism, ADHD, Arada, and Murderbot
While Arada and Murderbot's relationship is not central to the narrative over the course of the Murderbot Diaries series, they still have a meaningful and close friendship based on mutual respect, as MB has with all of its humans. Furthermore, Arada serves as MB's social foil to demonstrate the extent of its interpersonal skills.
The Murderbot Diaries books are written in first person perspective (with the exception of the short stories) and focus on the development of MB into a person who is comfortable identifying as a person, especially in the original quartet. As such, all of MB's interactions and relationships provide narrative foils in some sense because all of them are contrasting characters whose "qualities emphasise another's [...] by providing a sharp contrast" to Murderbot [1]. Arada appears in two books as a major character, one as a minor character, and is mentioned in two more without a significant role [2]. Over the course of the three books she plays a large role in, she and Murderbot become friends and mutual clients, although to a lesser extent than Murderbot and Mensah [3]. Their relationship sets up Arada's role as a foil highlighting MB's surprising analytic abilities in social situations, as well as its capability to thrive in such situations. Murderbot is better at initial big picture analysis, while Arada is good at small-scale interpersonal interactions.
Both Arada and Murderbot are commonly read as neurodivergent and both display a variety of traits classically associated with autism, ADHD, and/or anxiety. While Martha Wells has come to identify as neurodivergent[4][5], she does not write MB as neurodivergent[6][7]. Her personal revelations came in part as a result of fan connection to the personal experiences and feelings MB represented for her[4][5]. As a result, a neurodivergent reading of one or both characters is contrary to the original author intent, but is consistent with canon[7]. However, this contrast is still apparent from the beginning of ASR; a neurodivergent interpretation of both characters contrasts Arada and MB more strongly, as characters with a similar collection of traits expressed differently. (The humans' role as individual and collective narrative foils for MB is intentional, at least partially. In a 2024 interview, she describes the humans in All Systems Red as important because they are "the diversity of personalities [she] wanted to have in there" for it to "see their interactions as friends" and interact with it [5]. Her explanation focuses on the group dynamics, but it is clear she was intentional as she made them individually.)
In social situations, Arada tends to be behind in her reactions to large issues. It takes her longer than the other characters to recognize potential problems before they're spelled out, and she sometimes needs direct prompting from Overse. In contrast, Murderbot reads the room immediately and picks up on that form of subtext very quickly.
For example, during the discussion before the team heads to the DeltFall habitat in All Systems Red, MB enters the room as Mensah says, "I’ve checked the big hopper’s specs and we can make it there and back without a recharge" [8]. From that information and the fact that they can't contact DeltFall, MB "could wince a lot without any of them knowing," as it recognizes the potential threat awaiting them there and the bad situation, potentially including the death of all or part of DeltFall. In fact, it clearly knew going in, as it later notes that the wince was because "they could just drown" (as in, the wince is about the likelihood its clients would choose to go visit DeltFall and die on the way) and not a new realization about the DeltFall group's chances of survival. It knows DeltFall is probably dead from the start.
Meanwhile, Arada, who has been in the room the whole time and likely involved in the conversation about what to do and why, does not realize the potential problems for the DeltFall group until Overse tells her outright that "If they aren’t answering our calls, they might be hurt, or their habitat is damaged," at which point "Arada looked like it was just occurring to her that everybody over at DeltFall might be dead." Every other character picks up on the subtext of the conversation, the fear that DeltFall might have been hit by something really dangerous, before Arada does. Yet once she's aware of the underlying possible problem, she can keep up with everyone else just fine. For instance, the end of the rogue reveal scene later in the same book transitions into discussions about who might be trying to kill them, and she makes an astute observation, asking "If it isn't the company that's doing this, who is it?". The possibility of a third group had not been directly stated at that point, only implied. Knowing there's something out of the ordinary happening, Arada makes conclusions at the same speed as everyone else in the group.
Furthermore, Arada is good with interpersonal interactions and understanding, equally or better than MB. In All Systems Red, during their escape in the hopper, she shuts Gurathin down by saying "You need to give it time. It’s never interacted with humans as an openly free agent before now. This is a learning experience for all of us." Her tone is at the right place for the rest of the humans to recognize that the conversation is at the end, as they all nod and move on afterwards. If she hadn't been running on the wrong assumption about Murderbot (namely, she doesn't know yet that it doesn't like to be touched), she would have effectively smoothed over the interaction on all sides. And she adjusts her behavior to accommodate MB's touch-aversion, as in Exit Strategy when she "didn’t hug me, though she bounced up and down and waved her arms" [9]; now that she understands what MB needs, she can adapt and interact with it without issue. This extends to handling larger interpersonal issues as well. In Network Effect, during her first introduction to ART, "Arada and Thiago [exchanged] a brow-lifted look [...] they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question"[10]. Arada picks up on the issue at the same time MB does, but doesn't immediately challenge ART the way MB tends to, because she doesn't think it's the best way to handle the situation, and she's right.
Even when she gets nervous, such as with Leonide, her anxiety only partially overrides her interpersonal skills. ART tells her she's "talking too much" and she hesitates in the wrong points, but at the same time, she can negotiate with Leonide largely unaided. Her choice to go to Leonide's ship herself is not an accident or a mistake on the small scale, to her. She says it will "save us a lot of time" later, but at the time, she seems to do it because it's what Leonide would expect; the problem is with her large-scale social analysis which tells MB she's making a dangerous choice. This is consistent with earlier characterization of her in comparison to Murderbot, as she knows how to interact with people interpersonally, but doesn't immediately extrapolate those interactions into a larger context without prompting.
On MB's part, it can also analyze small-scale social interactions. For instance, in the scene before visiting DeltFall in All Systems Red, it picks up on the less obvious subtext of Overse's interaction with Arada in the scene and the implications it has for their relationship. Another time, in a conversation shortly after ART makes its demands clear in Network Effect, it catches that "ART paused for 8.3 seconds for no reason I could think of except to make the humans think it wasn’t going to answer the question" [10]. Each time, it picks up on the small interpersonal details the same way Arada does, as it analyzes the situation before it acts.
The contrast between Arada's large-scale issues and MB's competence in multiple areas of social interaction develops Murderbot's character. MB does not believe it is capable of interacting with humans as an equal; it calls itself "awkward with actual humans" early on [8], and it does not improve its opinion of its social skills throughout the series. Even in Network Effect, it still doesn't think it knows how to interact with Farai at the festival or with Mensah at the end [10]. However, when you compare its behavior with Arada's, it is clear that Murderbot is good at socializing with others and intuiting their meaning [11].
Notes
[1: Peter Auger, The Anthem Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, with Internet Archive (London ; New York : Anthem Press, 2010), 114, http://archive.org/details/anthemdictionary0000auge.]
[2: She appears as a major character in All Systems Red and Network Effect, as a secondary character at the end of Exit Strategy, and receives mentions in Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse.]
[3: Mensah and Murderbot's close relationship is similar but deeper. It would be interesting to contrast Arada as Mensah's narrative foil in the context of these different client and SecUnit relationships.]
[4: Martha Wells, "Martha Wells Reflects on 'Murderbot' S:01 | Creative Conversations (WORLDCON 2025 LIVE) - YouTube," (Seattle Worldcon), Ink to Film, August 29, 2025, Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=700&v=W-JRHSABM24.]
[5: Martha Wells, "I Didn't Know How Non-Neurotypical I Was until Murderbot - YouTube," New Scientist, June 21, 2024, Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=276&v=lZ0wIHRXq0Y.]
[6: Martha Wells, "Book Tour 33: Martha Wells -- System Collapse | Tales from the Trunk," Tales from the Trunk, November 6, 2023, Audio, https://www.talesfromthetrunk.com/e/book-tour-33-martha-wells-%e2%80%93-system-collapse/.]
[7: Martha Wells, "Introduction to the Subterranean Edition of The Murderbot Diaries," October 21, 2021, https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/564808.html.]
[8: All Systems Red]
[9: Exit Strategy]
[10: Network Effect]
[11: Further analysis covering nonverbal communication was not included in this meta as it requires a much closer reading than I did in preparation. To properly cover the differences in nonverbal communication (which Arada does perform and analyze in canon, and not just with Overse) would just about double the length of this meta.]
The chapter in Exit Strategy where Murderbot has borked its own brain and the Preservation team cares for it without requiring anything that would force it to do anything keeps making me cry. Yes, they give it its own network, with cameras and everything, but they also do the one thing I think I, as a disabled neurodivergent person, have needed the most when my brain has been borked by all-day giant work events or family functions or anything that forces both socialization and mental work: they give it space and time. They don't force it to come out immediately when Overse and Arada visit. They give it time. And space. And presence. Not forced presence, but presence all the same. Proximity.
Preservation is a disabled-norm setting (Network Effect has a moment where Murderbot mentions that it is keeping track of all of the disability devices it never saw before) while in the world of the Corporate Rim, you are fixed with augments or you're dead (the same paragraph in Network Effect).
This comes up more than a few times in the series and Murderbot-world short stories (especially in Obsolescence, a short story in the Take Us to a Better Place short story collection about the future of medicine, which is set in a time predating the Murderbot series). The comparison of the non-Corporate rim communities and the Corporate Rim can sometimes come across in stark comparisons. Platform Decay talks about the free availability of mobility devices on Preservation vs paying for one in the Corporate Rim.
As a disabled person, this is something I see every day. I work for a government heavily influenced by money and corporate interests. A new policy at work prevents staff from speaking about our own disabilities, because they don't want anyone to be perceived to be disabled because that protects us under the ADA, even if we haven't requested accommodations through their form. The form is so medicalized, focusing on our ability to do our jobs, it leaves out the fact that the "social" element of work (shared food at a meeting, for example) can interact with your disability just as much.
This is also heavily tied to the idea of personhood. The Preservation team learns over multiple books that Murderbot had to figure out its own idea of personhood, which included independence (making its own choices, freedom to travel), and not being owned by a human. Disabled people talk all the time about how they are ignored in favor of their abled companions even in terms of medical conversations.
I also love that the series really does address that trauma can be disabling. And new disability, yes, even the disability that can come with trauma as Murderbot experienced, can be really, really hard on you. Murderbot's self confidence is just gone in System Collapse. It doesn't trust its own instincts. (I love how this was then addressed in Platform Decay, and it wasn't "fixed", but a new tool was introduced).
I could go on and on about this, but I'm going to cut it short because I have work (sigh) in a few minutes. Anyways, the Murderbot Diaries talks a lot about disability and a fucking love it and I want to talk about it more.
For a while, I’ve wanted to write something on how Murderbot explores the theme of identity, through the lens of memory and choice, how it compares to other works that explore the same theme, and how it has helped me shape my perspective on identity.
I’m going to be talking a lot about 2.0, so if you’ve read what I’ve written before and you did not like my interpretation, this is a warning. There are parts of this that get very personal, and I am not in any way open to criticism about them. I want to share a quote I came across for the first time while thinking about this from a writer much more practiced and prolific than me: ‘…Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling... The story is not all mine… But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.'
You may not agree with my interpretation, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong and you’re right! It also doesn’t mean I’m right and you’re wrong. It’s okay to interpret things differently, interpretation is a matter of perspective. Experiences shape our perspective, and our experiences are not universal. I think that if you read this through to the end, you’ll come to understand how my experiences have impacted how I interpret these books. Le Guin says it so well: ‘if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best’. With that out of the way:
Has Murderbot ever distanced itself from who it was pre-memory wipe? Does it ever imply that it thinks that it’s a different person now, after the wipes compared to before them?
I think if anything Martha Wells shows us the opposite. If we go by word of God, Murderbot is around 20 years old, but it only has its memories since its last wipe. So if we were to argue that memories define who a person is, Murderbot has only been around for four years. Do we ever get any textual evidence that Murderbot feels that way?
In Artificial Condition, it returns to Ganaka Pit to learn the context of the mass killing it participated in:
Rogue units killed their human and augmented human clients. I … had done that once. But not voluntarily.
I needed to find out whether or not it had been voluntary.
It does this because it wants to find out if it’s a safe enough person to continue to interact with PresAux. It needed to figure out if the killings were an accident, or the result of a decision it made. And if it found out it was a decision, that would mean it isn’t safe. But that logic only holds up if it considers itself to be the same person.
I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me. Where it was safe. For me and for them.
If I had gone back to Preservation with Dr. Mensah and the others, she might be able to guarantee my safety, but could I really guarantee her safety from me?
This is always the argument I hear: 2.0 is different because it doesn’t have all of 1.0’s memories. It's something that a lot of people have brought up when they read my analysis! But I can’t think of any time where Murderbot implies that it connects its identity to memory in that way, either overtly or through nuance.
While I see a lot of people arguing this point, I don’t see anyone taking into account how 2.0 does relate to its memories.
“It was strange to see a SecUnit from the outside. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen other SecUnits since Dr. Mensah bought me, but in this version of me, reality was raw and close to the surface, with no cushion between me and it. I remembered what it was like, standing like this. It was all in the excerpted personal archive files I had with me. How helpless it … I was."
This is from the first chapter from 2.0’s perspective, a few pages after it came online. And this is really the first thing that made me stop and think to myself: this is Murderbot. The way it relates to the memory? Is the way that a person relates to their own memories. To me there is no ambiguity here.
And for a being that is supposedly not a SecUnit, it talks an awful lot about being a SecUnit! It introduces itself as a SecUnit first and foremost to both Three and TargetContact:
I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.
TargetContact heard me. They were startled. They said, What are you? A SecUnit. Killware.
And here’s when 2.0 is trying to convince Three to help it:
Trusting other SecUnits was impossible, when you knew humans could order them to do anything. Trusting a SecUnit another rogue SecUnit was trying to make into a rogue was worse, even if you were one of the rogues involved. I was glad my threat assessment module was back in my body, because it would have metaphorically shit itself.
ART asks “Do you know what you are” and it replies “I’m Murderbot 2.0” when 2.0 first wakes up.
It doesn’t ever really talk about being killware as a part of its identity the same way. If its identity were branching out to become a different person, that might have been one way to show it. Even when it first encounters 1.0, this is how it introduces itself:
I’m the copy of you. For the viral killware you and ART made. Come on, it wasn’t that long ago.
So it sounds like it separates its identity in some way from the killware, which was the part of 2.0 that ART and MB created together.
It says this about the difference between being supported by a killware architecture vs a construct body:
It was disorienting not being able to hear or see anything, and none of my inputs were receiving.
2.0 still expects to be receiving those inputs. It goes on to describe the experience:
It was like when I had uploaded myself to the company gunship’s systems to help the bot pilot during the sentient killware attack. Except that time it had been like the ship was my body, which I was sharing with a friendly bot pilot, and this time it was like I was stuck in a storage cubby. Also, this time I was the sentient killware. This is weird.
Two observations about this excerpt: This sounds a bit like dysphoria? Not extreme, but there is an incongruence between what it expects and what it is. Also, this is another example of it relating to 1.0’s memories as its own. This is not how a separate person talks about someone else’s memories!
We only get two chapters from the perspective of 2.0, and both of them occur before it joins up with 1.0, so we never get to know how it feels about interacting with itself. Maybe the more unique experiences it got to have, the more separate it would find its identity from 1.0. But what we do get doesn’t give me any indication that’s the case. When it does meet up with 1.0, it doesn’t seem like it has any kind of crisis of identity. It seems pretty comfortable to squat in 1.0’s brain.
I’ve consumed media that does tell that kind of story! The Imperial Radch does it with Tisarwat, who clearly feels a dissonance with her former identity:
“Will she come back?” asked Medic, standing, trembling, as I cleaned instruments and put them away. “Tisarwat, I mean, will she be Tisarwat again?” “No.” I closed a box, put it in its drawer. “Tisarwat was dead from the moment they put those implants in.” They. Anaander Mianaai would have done that herself.
"And if I do come back. If I come back, sir, will you authorize Medic to change my eyes back to a more reasonable color?» Those foolish lilac eyes, that the previous Tisarwat had bought for herself. "If you like." "It's such a stupid color. And every time I see myself it reminds me of her." Of that old Tisarwat, I supposed. "They don't belong to me."
The Locked Tomb does it with Paul:
And it was just Camilla, after all—Camilla having lost all that fringe and most of her hair except for a charred inch or so—Cam with new eyes, and a new face, for all that they were the same-shaped eyes and the old familiar features. But the eyes were a different colour, though Nona could not see what colour from where she sat. All she could see was that they were different. And the features, though in the same order, were making such a different set of expressions—not Camilla’s, not Palamedes’s—that it struck Nona all at once: they were gone—they had left her—they were no longer there.
“Yeah, but—Paul?” “Just Paul,” said Paul. Crown suggested, “Paul … Hect?” “Just Paul,” said Paul.
We get confirmation of this dissonance from both the changed characters and the people around them! And isn’t it so interesting, that in both examples I picked there’s discussion about eyes. Eyes are the windows to the soul, they are a stand in for perspective. Tisarwat wants to change her eyes, to differentiate herself from the previous Tisarwat. She feels like they don’t belong to her. One of the first things Nona notices about Paul is the change in their eyes. Throughout Nona the Ninth, eye color is used as a way to identify who was in possession of Camilla’s body. It is telling that the body has unfamiliar eyes. The soul is different.
Now, as a sentient killware virus, Murderbot 2.0 does not have eyes, but I quoted the very first bit we get from its perspective earlier! The first thing it does upon remembering who it is is remark on being disoriented by not having its inputs. Compared to Tisarwat, who wants to change her eyes to distance herself from the person she used to be, Murderbot in a different form still expects to see through the perspective it is used to.
Severance explores this idea with a lot of the characters. Helena Eagan clearly doesn’t think of Helly R as being the same person. She doesn’t think of Helly as being a person at all, despite sharing a brain and a body:
"Helly. I watched your video asking that I resign. I also received and responded to your previous request. I assumed that would resolve the issue but now Ms. Cobel says you threatened to cut off your fingers?
I understand that you're unhappy with the life that you've been given. But you know what? Eventually, we all have to accept reality. So, here it is.
I am a person. You are not. I make the decisions you do not. If you ever do anything to my fingers, know that I will keep you alive long enough to horribly regret that. Your resignation request is denied.”
Then in the season 2, when Helly finds out that her innie has been impersonating her, had sex with the person she loves while pretending to be her, she says:
She used me to trick my friends. Used my body to get close to you. That she dresses me in the morning like I’m a baby. She controls me, and this company, and all of us. It’s disgusting.
When Dylan’s outie finds out his wife kissed his innie, he considers it to be ‘cheating with his body’. But at the same time, he considers the paycheck his innie earns to be his.
“He reminds me of how you used to be!”
“I’m gonna go to work and earn a paycheck to feed our children. And I’m gonna respectfully request that you don't follow me there and use my own body to fucking cheat on me.”
Meanwhile, Dylan’s innie clings to the idea that he and his outie are the same, because he longs for a family. Lumon takes advantage of this, organizing for his outie’s wife to visit him. They drive a wedge between him and his team by giving him the chance to imagine what it would be like to be married, to have children. And when that is taken away from him, when his wife stops coming because it upsets her husband, he tries to quit, effectively ending his life.
Severance is a very interesting example, because it seems like the inverse of Murderbot's exploration of identity. Integration of the two halves is possible, but it’s a complex process that can go wrong. We haven’t seen it successfully completed yet. Severed workers have no memory of their lives outside of work, and throughout both seasons, we see example after example of how their outside experiences fail to influence who they are without those memories. This is not an idea that is explored in Murderbot. Even if Murderbot doesn't remember the majority of its life, those experiences have undoubtedly left their mark on it.
Gemma takes apart the baby crib and she does it without any emotional response in the season 2 finale. Every wellness visit Ms. Casey has with Mark S, where he interacts with his wife, smells the candle from their home, sees the replica of the tree that supposedly caused her death, he never remembers who she is. When Mark’s innie is faced with Gemma pleading to come with her, to escape from Lumon together, he turns away, feeling nothing for her and runs to be with Helly for whatever amount of time they can steal away. Mark’s innie was never convinced to help Gemma by the argument that she’s his outie’s wife. Helly convinces him when she tells him their situation is hopeless. They can never be together, but if they get Ms. Casey/Gemma out, then the abuse might stop, and at least innie Mark will be alive in some capacity after reintegration.
With each character, we see how their outside personality bleeds into who they are as severed individuals. The grief that Mark feels for his wife is felt by his innie, but he has no way of understanding it until he loses Petey. The loss of his friend is the catalyst for innie Mark’s initial disobedience. After starting reintegration, Petey tells Mark’s outie that
“You carried the hurt with you. You feel it down there too, you just don't know what it is.”
Irving’s outie seems determined to expose the truths that Lumon has been hiding from the public. He’s done research into the workers that Lumon employs, and deprives himself of sleep while painting the same image of a dark hallway, hoping that his innie will get the message and do some investigating himself. But Irving’s innie doesn’t have the context of those paintings, and that determination manifests itself very differently in Lumon’s severed environment. He’s a rule abiding worker, the one least likely to go against management.
He starts breaking the rules when he falls in love with another worker, Burt. And when Burt retires and his life is ended, Irving loses any reason to keep following their rules. He tries to kill Helena Eagan knowing that it would mean the end of his, when he figures out who is really in control of Helly’s body. And when Burt’s outie sends Irving’s outie away to save his life, Irving says:
‘I want to remember it… I’ve never been loved before. Not really. I’ve never had this. My whole life’.
Irving’s innie felt that desire to be loved, but didn’t know that it was something his outie longed for his whole life. If that lack of love was caused by a resistance to connection, due to trauma, then Irving’s innie didn’t experience it. The two of them fell in love very quickly. They barely had any time together at all.
Helena Eagan is the head of her company. She’s confident and in control, and Helly is very much the same. Helena expects her innie to fall in line, to do the job that she’s told to do. She herself probably had to do so a lot growing up in the shadow of her predecessors. Her father visits Helly, and tells her:
I do not love my daughter. I used to see Kier in her but he left her as she grew. I sired others in the shadows but he wasn't in them either. Until I saw him again. In you.
Somewhere along the way Helena Eagan lost this quality that her father cherished in her. That her father snuffed out. Helly didn’t ever experience being beaten down in that way, so she refuses disrespect without fear of punishment.
With all those examples, there’s a dissonance between the person they started as and the person they become. They’re examples of a death and rebirth archetype. Breq from the Imperial Radch feels more in line with Murderbot. She has not become a different person through her experiences, although she has been changed by them. There is a continuity of identity.
Breq doesn’t ever stop identifying as a ship. After twenty years, stuck in a human body, Justice of Toren destroyed along with all other ancillaries. She never gets used to being alone. She misses having all the data about the people aboard the ship available to her, and Mercy of Kalr (the ship she captains) shares it with her. She misses feeling connected to her crew in that way. And this inability to conceive of herself as something other than a ship affects her relationships! Breq struggles with the idea of captaining Mercy of Kalr, and has a hard time accepting what relationship they do have.
"You're very good to me, Ship," I said, after a moment. "And I know we both feel like... like we're missing part of ourselves. And it seems like each of us is the piece the other is missing. But it isn't the same, is it, me being here isn't like you having ancillaries back.
And even if it were, ships want captains they can love. Ships don't love other ships. They don't love their ancillaries. And I meant what I said. You should be able to be your own captain, or at least choose her.
We do get to see how 1.0’s perspective on 2.0 changes, though. At first, it does seem to feel a sense of dissonance with 2.0. But as soon as the two connect, and 2.0 starts squatting in 1.0's brain, MB starts talking about 2.0 in the first person. It does it a lot! The only part of their interaction where it might be interpreted that MB thinks 2.0 might branch off and do its own thing (imo) is this:
I was not in great shape. Projectiles kept popping out of me as I limped along and the leaking was worse. Also, in Adventures in Living with Your Own Killware Cozied Up Inside Your Head, 2.0 had partitioned off a corner of my processing space. It would have worried me more if it wasn’t in there watching episode 172 of Sanctuary Moon. I needed that processing space, especially with my performance reliability dropping, but what I didn’t need was 2.0 forgetting its directive and turning on me, so everything it did to retain its self-awareness was great.
But I argue that that's a thought it has had about itself throughout the whole series! So to me that's not a strong argument. Murderbot 2.0 has the exact same thought:
As killware, my onboard storage space would be limited and I remember ART and Me Version 1.0 had been a little worried I’d forget who I was and start randomly attacking stuff.
Yeah, I was a little worried about that, too.
Another argument I've heard is that 2.0 can't be considered the same person as Murderbot, because it makes different choices. To me though, System Collapse was the story of Murderbot figuring its way out toward making those same choices: freeing people from enslavement by forming a connection to them and sharing its experiences, and freeing a governed SecUnit without agonizing over it too long! 2.0 is Murderbot without the shackles of its trauma, and once Murderbot starts addressing that trauma their differences shrink. MB says
The problem was, 2.0 had been in a unique position with Three. There was no way to replicate that here, even if I didn’t know that just replicating conditions doesn’t always give an identical or even similar result.
But even though the conditions are different, they still end up in the same place.
Something that has stuck out to me in System Collapse is that Murderbot never mourns 2.0. Not in the way you’d expect, if you think of it as MB’s offspring. Or if you ignore the biological connotations, if you just think of it as a separate person. It never wishes it got to know 2.0 better. It doesn’t mourn the missed experiences. It only compares itself to 2.0 in SC whenever it feels like it’s failing. It thinks of 2.0 as literally what the name suggests, an improved version of itself. Not as a person with the capacity to grow beyond what it started as (ironic, considering 2.0 literally changes its function, much like 1.0 did!).
In Platform Decay, we get some mention of 2.0, but I wouldn't call it ‘2.0 haunting the narrative’. Murderbot has no emotional response to its mention of 2.0, its talk is very matter-of-fact. In Network Effect it said “I had killed SecUnits and combat bots but this was me, sort of, okay not so sort of…” It thought of killing 2.0 like killing itself. And if you think of it from that angle, the lack of mourning makes sense. You wouldn’t mourn yourself after a suicide, if you were still alive (not that that makes any sense for humans).
It would mess you up terribly to have to commit an act of violence against yourself. To terminate your own life, even if you’re able to walk away afterward and keep on living. Self harm is a habit that’s hard to break, and although Murderbot has thrown itself in harm’s way to protect its people, and treated its body carelessly, I can’t think of a time where it has purposefully harmed itself. Killing itself in 2.0 was an escalation of a pre-existing pattern. Speaking from experience (don’t be a dick!), when a person hurts themself to get through life, it’s not a one time thing. You keep on thinking about it. The fear and dread of taking that action again pervades your existence. I felt that fear throughout System Collapse, up until Murderbot has its eureka moment. I don’t know if Martha Wells intended for it to come across that way, but it did to me.
In the first chapter of Platform Decay, Murderbot is present as a partial iteration, and it describes Murderbot 2.0 as having been a ‘full iteration’. At this point in the story, if it didn’t consider 2.0 to be a part of itself, why is it still considered an iteration? If not having 1.0’s neural tissue was enough to consider it a different person, what does it imply about the Murderbot in chapter 1 that was running on Three’s? And then partway through the book, when it encounters the Rainforest Unit it calls the file “my own (Murderbot 2.0’s own) hack-your-governor-module annotated code bundle”. It wasn’t just the governor module hack, like it gave to the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. It was the bundle that 2.0 sent Three, and it thinks of it as its own. Those were the only two mentions of 2.0.
So is it the details that define us? Or is the overall way that our experiences shape our perception of the world? Now is the part where I’m gonna talk about how the series has affected me. This gets personal, so please be kind. Don’t argue with me over how I interpret my own life experiences.
A couple years before Martha Wells published All Systems Red, my mom died. I was 21 years old, and it was and still is the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was painful and traumatic and so, so, unexpected. We were so incredibly close and I remember after her death, looking at pictures of myself and thinking: ‘this person is a stranger to me’ (I know, stay with me though). That person still experienced the love of a mother. They never had to process a loss like this. I felt profoundly changed.
There was so much about my identity that changed after her death. My mom was a white woman, and my dad is very much not a white man. His first language is Arabic, and he’s a Muslim immigrant from North Africa. My mom was an only child and both of her parents were dead by the time I was old enough to remember them, so when she died, my link to that part of my identity was gone. My dad’s family absolutely stepped up. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t think of them as my family. But to put it bluntly, I don't look like them. I look like my mom, just half a foot shorter with a darker complexion. It was easier to lean in to the similarities I shared with her.
After 9/11 my dad didn’t want to share his culture with me and my brother, so this distance from his identity was reinforced by him! And we had no ties to his community in our city. My dad’s family lived on the other side of the world my whole life, so I didn’t have nearly as strong a connection to them. That has changed over the last decade. It had to change, if I wanted to feel like part of a family again. I feel so much closer to my dad’s family than I do to my mom’s now. Even if I look more and more like her every year, her influence on my life has faded away.
My mom was Catholic, and when I was eight years old I made the choice to get baptized. Looking back now, perhaps that’s too young of an age to be making that kind of decision, but my parents were doing their best. They did not raise me with religion, but they sent me to Catholic School because that was the cheapest private option in our city. I wasn’t the only non-Catholic in the class! But it didn’t stay that way for long. Being in that environment made me want to participate in the community, I wanted to be a part of the same group as my friends. So a few years after starting school, when my entire class got to prepare to receive Communion and Reconciliation, I told my parents I wanted to become Catholic. And I threw myself into it! I was an alter server. I joined my school’s gospel choir. I went on religious youth retreats. But no matter how much I tried to wedge myself into that community, I always felt othered in little ways.
When my mom died, any ties I still had to that faith drifted away. That community couldn’t give me the support that I needed, and by that point I didn’t want it anymore. I took a Comparative World Mythology class a few years later, in order to complete my degree requirements after I failed the classes I had needed to graduate after her death, and my perspective on religion changed a lot. I had never thought about religion so critically before. The first commandment is ‘you shall have no other gods before me’, and it wasn’t as though other gods took a step forward, but God had taken a step back.
And one of the hardest parts of my mom’s death was that she died without giving me a chance to come out to her. The morning of the day that she died, I sat next to her hospital bed and held her hand and told her that I wasn’t a woman. The idea that she would die without learning this fundamental aspect of my identity was unacceptable to me. I strongly suspect she knew something was up! I started wearing binders I bought on ebay from China when I was 15 and she saw them. But she did die not knowing me like this. She will never get to know me as I am.
I’ve changed so much in the decade since her death, in big ways and small ways. Am I a different person because I'm not a woman? Because I don’t believe in God? Because my mother might not recognize the person I’ve become? It’s been a long time since her death now. To the person I was when she died, it’s been half a lifetime.
I don’t think I am. I remember looking at those pictures of myself from before her death and not seeing myself in them, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I was dissociating, hard. That little girl is still alive in me, the things she went through will affect my perception of the world for my whole life. Even though I've changed a lot in some ways, the people I've been in my past will never feel far from me. And if I were to meet the person I will be in 50 years from now, I think at first the differences will be shocking, but they’ll still be me. With context I would come to understand how we became the person I end up.
Reading about how 2.0, a being that has been dramatically changed from its original iteration, looks at 1.0 and only sees itself was very validating. And seeing Murderbot struggling in System Collapse, comparing itself to this different version, it felt like looking in a mirror into the past. System Collapse was such a hard book for me to read, because it came out at a time when I felt healed! Healed in the ways it’s possible to heal from grief. It stays with you always. But that mindset felt very far from me when I first picked it up. I didn’t end up reading it to the end until two and a half years after it came out, and I read all the others as they were released. System Collapse is a book about grief, coping with loss, but Murderbot didn’t lose a family member in 2.0. It lost a sense of self. Both are things that I’ve experienced, and I only see the latter in Murderbot. But like I said at the very beginning, this is based on my experience only!
They say you should read what challenges you, so after the tv show ended last summer, I sat down and made myself finish it. When I came to a point in the story where I felt uncomfortable, I stopped reading and thought deeply on why I might feel that way. And a lot of the thoughts I was having were about the relationship between 1.0 and 2.0. About the kind of loss 2.0 was from 1.0’s perspective, and how its perspective slowly changes from Network Effect to System Collapse. When Murderbot compared itself to 2.0 again and again, I took a step back, and stopped looking at 2.0 from only 1.0’s perspective. What really were the ways it was different from 1.0? How does 2.0 think of itself in relation to 1.0? What does that mean regarding how Murderbot thinks of identity? Of memory? Of choices?
I love stories that play around with identity. It’s something that I’ve struggled with my whole life, as I laid out for you above. But no other story has helped shape my perspective like Murderbot. It has helped me articulate thoughts that I’ve had for a long time about my idea of identity. And Murderbot has helped me look at different stories with a fresh perspective. I’ve read a lot of stories with similar themes, but I’ve never thought that deeply about it. It’s made me see the nuance in how each story differs, how they reflect something different about identity.
Friend Like Me: Murderbot's Relationships With Other AIs throughout The Murderbot Diaries
It’s important to me that the thematic core of The Murderbot Diaries is not only about determining what it means to be a robot person in a human world, but about showcasing so many ways to be a robot person in a human world. And about building relationships with other robot persons to support that self-actualization as both a robot and a person.
So often, in science fiction about robot personhood, the robot character is the only robot in the cast. Not only that, so often the robot character is the only robot they know.*
When media thinks about AI personhood, or Ais as characters in society, the AI character is often alone. Alone, and different. It’s a potent allegory for what it feels like to be an outsider, to be “other,” to feel “off” from the people around you. Whether a sympathetic friend or a scary unknowable villain, a lot of people can relate to feeling like that.
The Murderbot Diaries is doing something interesting, then, by showing us our protagonist Murderbot, the prototypical robot-among-humans, the robot as a parallel for queer and neurodivergent and outsider-cultural experiences in a world of expected norms, the robot with human friends, the one robot member of an otherwise all-human team… and it can’t live like that. So it leaves.
So far, the series feels split into two halves: the first four books, about Murderbot learning different ways to be a robot in relationships with humans, and the next three** about Murderbot learning different ways to be a robot in relationships with other robots, and a robot in a mixed society.
In All Systems Red, Murderbot starts off painfully alone. It repeatedly sees other SecUnits as enemies, and believes that SecUnits can't trust each other because they're all under control of humans. It has a very low opinion of SecUnits, including itself. Murderbot hates being used by humans for violence or for petty reasons, and admits that it wants to half-ass its job.
In Artificial Condition, Murderbot meets ART, a university research ship who loves its crew and loves its function. It is also free to be a snarky asshole, as Murderbot repeatedly notes (and assigns in its very name). This relationship to humans—genuinely caring for its crew, genuinely wanting to participate in its research and teaching function—is a very different relationship than Murderbot has had, though ART still needs to keep its intelligence and personality hidden from most humans for its own safety. Conversely, this is the book where Murderbot meets a ComfortUnit that is blatantly being abused and misused by its human owner, and it hates her. The contrast between ART and the ComfortUnit displays very different ways of Ais relating to their human “owners”—and what it means for them to get what they want out of life.
In Rogue Protocol, Murderbot confronts this theme most directly, with the bot Miki. Unlike the implications of secrecy we get from ART, Miki is not hidden from anybody; unlike with the ComfortUnit, Miki is a respected and equal member of its team. Murderbot has a very hard time believing that Miki is anything but a patronized “pet bot” to these humans, despite the evidence that the humans genuinely consider it a friend and teammate. Miki has never been abused, and never had to hide. Murderbot has a hard time accepting that this is a way bots and humans can relate to each other.
But Miki is still, in the classical sci-fi robot-on-a-human-team way, unique; it expresses to Murderbot, “I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me.”
This is a much better way of being a robot among humans than Murderbot has seen before, but it’s still not the ideal Murderbot wants, either.
Exit Strategy brings the theme full-circle and the quartet to a close. Murderbot faces off against a Combat SecUnit (or CombatUnit; Wells seems to change her mind about this). The Combat SecUnit represents everything Murderbot has rejected being, everything it has overcome on its journey of self-actualization. During their fight, the CSU rejects Murderbot’s offers of freedom, money, a fake ID, the opportunity to get out of its situation the way Murderbot has; it ignores the offer. Murderbot asks the CSU what it wants. The CSU replies, “I want to kill you.” The CSU represents the kind of SecUnit Murderbot does not want to be, the kind of robot it used to think it would inevitably be but has now seen so many other ways it can be. Murderbot says in the same scene, “I’m not sure it [the offer of freedom] would have worked on me, before my mass murder incident. I didn’t know what I wanted (I still didn’t know what I wanted)…” But at the same time, the confrontation makes it clear: Murderbot knows some things it doesn’t want, and the CSU is embracing everything Murderbot doesn’t want about being a SecUnit.
If this quartet is about what it means to be a robot, and to be a robot among humans, then the next set of books (Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry, and System Collapse) is about being a robot among other robots, and a robot in a society that supports both humans and robots.
Fugitive Telemetry makes this most obvious, with its plotline about the free bot community on Preservation. Murderbot is uncomfortable around them in a similar way that it was uncomfortable around Miki. The Preservation bots are happy, fulfilled, responsible, mutually supportive, and have a meaningful community with both humans and each other that does not match Murderbot’s experiences of what being a bot, or being a bot among humans, means.
Network Effect brings Murderbot back into contact with ART, and introduces a new SecUnit, Three. Murderbot navigating its relationship with ART as a free agent and after a perceived betrayal is a huge part of the book. Murderbot’s disembodied-software-fork Murderbot 2.0, freed from much of Murderbot’s organic anxiety, shows itself much more willing to be social with other bots and constructs. System Collapse follows, bringing further depth and complexity to Murderbot’s relationship with ART and expanding its interactions with Three, and furthers Murderbot’s integration into the casual bot-human community that is ART’s crew. It also shows that Murderbot’s willingness to trust and even form tentative friendships with other AIs and systems, like AdaCol2, has expanded. The way it extends the governor module hack to the opposing SecUnits is informed a lot more strongly by Murderbot 2.0’s interactions with Three than its own previous clumsy attempts to reach out to the CSU in Exit Strategy, or abrupt dumping of the hack on the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. All of these plotlines emphasize Murderbot maturing into not just being a person among humans, but a person recognizing its place and obligations within society that includes both people like and unlike it.
The models of the many ways to be a robot person, and significant relationships and interactions with other robot persons, were and are crucial to Murderbot’s development, sense of self, articulation of its desires, and sense of belonging in the world. Murderbot isn’t alone, and it’s not the only person like itself that it knows. When offered a place in society, it is not the only person like itself in that society. Meeting other AIs, forming relationships with them, was crucial in helping it articulate what it wants in its life. Its human friends are incredibly important to it! That doesn’t stop being true. But so are its AI friends, and the other AIs it passed through the lives of.
This feels like one of the most honest and affirming depictions of what it’s like to feel “other”—that being around only majority people unlike-you, even the ones you like, even your friends, even the ones who mean the best for you and ask you what you need and do everything they can to provide it, can still be exhausting and alienating. Meeting other people like you—even if they’re like you in unlike ways, and have different ways of moving through the world—shows you the many ways to relate to the rest of the world, to be in the world. The many ways to relate to other people and to yourself. The Murderbot Diaries opens up a world where that can be true of bot/construct/AI characters, when so often in sci-fi, their loneliness and alienation is where the metaphor stops.
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*Lt. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is probably the most famous example; the only positronic android like himself in existence, barring his evil twin who mostly just needs to be stopped. Others coming to mind include Becky Chambers's A Closed and Common Orbit, in which the AI character is trying to understand who she is in the context of being surrounded by humans; Alien, the secret android crewmate among humans is a threat, and in the sequel Aliens, the android crewmate is earnestly trying to prove he's not; Space Sweepers has a ragtag crew of several humans and a robot; most of the stories in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot are about a singular robot in a human facility. The setup "Human crew with their ship AI" is fairly common in sci-fi, from 2001: A Space Odyssey with its tragically antagonistic HAL9000 operating on a logic that would never occur to humans, to Wolf 359 and The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where the ship AIs are struggling to determine and articulate how they want to relate to their human friends. Even in Ancillary Justice, Breq is alone and having to pass undercover as human cut adrift from her previous life as a ship's AI. (I know this changes later but I have not actually read the rest of the trilogy)
I love Thiago so much he’s so fun. Problem Human Of The Week, but unlike your usual Problem Human, Murderbot wants to like him and it wants him to like it. and therein is the tension. otherwise it could just write him off as just another irritating disappointing client who causes issues and doesn’t listen and thinks negatively of SecUnits.
he’s part of the Network Effect™️ of human relationships! Ok! he’s an example of of Murderbot’s more mundane challenges re: social/society integration, the very typical challenges involved with like. professionalism. family dynamics. etc. and the issues between Thiago and Murderbot are very much these more mundane issues, like “I don’t trust your security calls because I don’t trust the culture that gave rise to you and put guns in your arms and I don’t like how anxious Mensah is and I think you’re contributing to her anxiety.” as opposed to “yikes SecUnits scary.” which tbh I don’t get the sense is really on Thiago’s radar. he’s like so sheltered that SecUnits aren’t part of his experiences really.
and yeah he fucks up at the start of the book but he learns also? he listens to Murderbot when they talk it out later and reconsiders his opinions when new information comes up about the danger Mensah was in? and by the end of the book he’s fully advocating to protect Murderbot from people crowding it and pushing Feelings Talk on it while it is fucked up (rescued after squashed by ag-bot and strung up in alien pit etc). I mean he’s overridden by Ratthi who is a level 10 Murderbot Friend who understands that this Feelings Moment (letting MB know just how much ART and everyone care about it and went to rescue it specifically because he knows Murderbot has Emotional Issues and could benefit from a reminder that everyone really cares about it). But like Thiago had the spirit. He was just level 1 or 2 at this stage.
that’s character and relationship Growth! Thiago is not #1 man (Ratthi is #1 man) but he’s an important part of the team and he’s got his own hangups and idiosyncrasies and willing to learn and grow.
me seeing fictional characters navigate interpersonal drama like adults: now this is the real escapist fantasy. oh also sick killware clone baby.
ok reminder to self for when @murdermetamay rolls around to come back to these two ideas
1) unreliable narrator comparison, MB vs The Thief: what makes an unreliable narrator?
2) exploring information control in MB's narration- information as a key to survival as a rogue, but also filtering out extraneous details (via media, focus of attention) to manage sensory overwhelm, and what this means for genre (the original text's and genre-bending in fanfiction)
