Someone asked about rogues in The Murderbot Diaries and I thought I’d start with All Systems Red:
In All Systems Red there are [15] uses of the word “rogue”.
[1] Page 69 “Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.”
Theoretical rogue SecUnit
Other adjectives: angry, malfunctioning, “trying to kill them [PresAux]”. This is Murderbot’s nightmare rogue; where it got this image of a rogue from we don’t know. The logical assumption (given how it’s been spending the last 35,000 hours) would be media portrayals.
[2&3] Page 76 “Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.
But I wanted to kill them.”
These are now apparent rogue Units and MB does acknowledge possible mitigation, but still wants to kill them, even if this isn’t the smart thing to do.
[4] Page 78 “Even these two rogues wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore the creaks if I took the quick route and walked over to their position.
(They were not the sharpest murderbots, having cleaned the floor of the between-habitat corridor to cover the prints they had left when staging that body. It would have fooled somebody who hadn’t noticed all the other floors were covered with tracked-in dust.)”
Suggestion they’re dumb, not the sharpest.
[5] Page 86 “Blood ran down my torn suit skin and I reached up to my neck. I expected to feel a gaping hole, but there was something stuck there. “Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don’t know—”
By this point Murderbot honestly doesn’t know how many rogue units there are. It’s having a bad time. Also note lack of capital letter—no idea if it’s significant.
[6] Page 87 “The DeltFall SecUnits hadn’t been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. “Kill the humans” isn’t a complex order.”
Revelation time! So, ignore all those previous references to the DeltFall units as rogues—they weren’t.
Murderbot is very clear that SecUnit with override module does not equal rogue. It clearly has a firm internal definition of a rogue.
It’s interesting that it sees them as acting like everyone expects rogues to, killing the humans.
[7] Page 88 “The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.”
Here using “turned rogue” though it has already said they weren’t actually rogue: but it’s talking to humans who it reasonably expects to see combat overridden behaviour as rogue behaviour.
[8] Page 92 “Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, “There’s no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.”
Rogue code—as in code that could have turned Murderbot rogue! Ha! (Not really rogue, obviously)
[9] Page 92 ‘He gestured to me. “This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”’
Oh Gurathin, my beloved: Murderbot fails to appreciate that Gurathin is using the same definition of a rogue as it does: a hacked governor module. I guess it was distracted.
[10] Page 123 “I could leave them to cope on their own, I guess. I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist. I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.”
Imaginary rogues here, figments of Murderbot’s imagination—which are either not really rogue units but overridden ones; or it’s just defaulting to its own personal horror tropes?
[11] Page 127 ‘“They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won’t look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can’t make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn’t care about them. Does DeltFall’s care? Does yours?”
That made them all stare at me, for some reason.’
Again, these SecUnits were not the Murderbot definition of rogue, but again it’s talking to humans.
[12] Page 137 “We didn’t know who EvilSurvey was, who we were dealing with. But I bet that they didn’t either. Mensah’s status was only in the Security info packet, stored on SecSystem, which they had never gotten access to. The dueling investigations if something happened to us were bound to be thorough, as the company would be desperate for something to blame it on and the beneficiaries would be desperate to blame it on the company. Neither would be fooled long by the rogue SecUnit setup.”
Murderbot here acknowledges that even the human investigators would be likely fooled for long by the pretend rogues—so again: as far as Murderbot is concerned a combat-override module controlled SecUnit isn’t an actual rogue.
[13{ Page 140 “He said, “Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?”
It wasn’t completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It’s one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.”
Here Murderbot refers to itself as a rogue, a rogue murderbot at that, and acknowledges Gurathin knows it’s a rogue and is poking it. Oh these two…
[14&15] Page 154 ‘That was still annoying, even though I knew we had allowed plenty of time for this part. “You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues. If you think a real rogue SecUnit still has to answer your questions, the next few minutes are going to be an education for you.”’
Here Murderbot is talking to evil survey, aka GrayCris. The DeltFall units didn’t really behave like rogues, not at all. We have one actual rogue (by the Murderbot definition) and it doesn’t behave like that. Though it does think a SecUnit might if it had been mistreated? Again, it’s talking to humans, and sort of “speaking their language”, but even here it is keen to draw a distinction between a SecUnit with a combat override and a “real rogue SecUnit”.
Themes are: a SecUnit with an override module isn’t (as far as Murderbot, our narrator, is concerned anyway) a REAL rogue: it’s just acting how people (humans and Murderbot) expect a rogue to act. Murderbot thinks a real rogue could have reasons to act like that, but its overwhelming (apparently, even stopping it doing the smart thing) sort of automatic urge is to kill rogues (as it sees them as a very real threat to its humans). Of course, in All Systems Red there is exactly one rogue SecUnit (by Murderbot’s definition) and it doesn’t act anything like it and everyone else seem primed to expect (though Murderbot doesn’t think the investigators would be fooled by the fake rogue SecUnits either?).
It’s me so there has to be extra Gurathin content: Gurathin sees a rogue as a SecUnit which has hacked its governor module. He is remarkable in that he doesn’t seem to have bought into the media (news? corporate propaganda?) portrayal of rogue SecUnits
