In which Murderbot investigates its mysterious past

More Murderbot! Yesterday I made my way through Artificial Condition, the second novella in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, in which our favorite paranoid android has snuck off from its new human “guardian” and gone to investigate its own mysterious past. In order to get to the remote outpost known as RaviHyral, where the murdering incident took place, Murderbot needs a work permit, which is how it ends up hiring itself out as an augmented human “security consultant” to some nice young techies whose research has been stolen by their former employer. Murderbot also needs a lift out to RaviHyral, which is how it ends up teaming up with an annoyingly intelligent bot pilot for a research vessel, whom Murderbot christens ART. With two jobs to do now–retrieve its clients’ research, and investigate the Ganaka Pit incident–ART proves a valuable ally (among other things, it helps Murderbot identify that the incident it’s trying to investigate happened at Ganaka Pit, which is sort of important).

What Murderbot finds at Ganaka Pit is certainly important, but solving the mystery is somewhat secondary to what Murderbot learns about other people–whether those other people are bots, humans, or other constructs–and, despite its best efforts not to have or talk about its feelings, what it learns about itself. Despite all the murder attempts and spying it’s all very wholesome, saved from being saccharine mostly by the fact that Murderbot hates wholesome and finds it very discombobulating, which is reliably funny.

Spy games in space

Next up: Rogue Protocol, otherwise known as “the one where Murderbot does corporate espionage on GrayCris even though nobody asked it to.” After digging into its own background during the events of Artificial Condition, Murderbot sees a newsburst indicating that a new company has picked up where GrayCris supposedly left off at a terraforming facility that it had abandoned. Rumors were abounding that GrayCris had actually been mining the planet in question for illegal synthetics and not actually terraforming at all, which meant that the company that had bought it was now well positioned to discover if something was off about this “terraforming” facility. This is where Murderbot comes in, sneaking its way onto the facility to look for evidence of GrayCris’ malfeasance, and portraying itself as a secret extra security person when it is discovered.

In this book, Murderbot’s journey of self-discovery is largely helped along by a friendly little bot called Miki, who is basically the human researchers’ pet robot. Murderbot doesn’t want to be a pet robot but is nonetheless subjected to having many emotions about the degree to which Miki and the humans seem to actually care about each other. Murderbot’s journey of corporate malfeasance discovery and data retrieval is also helped along by Miki, who talks the humans into trusting Murderbot for long enough to let it help, and even tries to fight the combat units that GrayCris left behind to cause trouble. The action sequences are thrilling and cinematic and all that stuff you want out of a space opera about cyborgs doing corporate espionage in space. Since this is my second read I know that Murderbot has now basically made the rounds meeting people enough that further books will involve in going “home” in various ways (i.e. running into them again) so I don’t even have to be too critical of the sad lack of ART in this one, especially since ART clearly lives on in spirit under Murderbot’s skin basically all the time.