A heartless killing machine with moral dilemmas

[bloodygranuaile]

 This week I read the third installment of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, Rogue Protocol. In this one, Murderbot, in their guise of augmented human Security Consultant Rin, sneaks along to a planet that’s somehow tied up in the case against the evil-even-by-corporation-standards GrayCris, a supposedly botched terraforming case that has now been bought out by another company. However, since we are all now suspicious that GrayCris wasn’t actually terraforming at all but was instead illegally mining for alien artifacts, the research party for the company that bought the planet is probably about to be in trouble, hence their need for a secret and dubiously human security consultant. 

 

Murderbot first makes friends with the human party’s happy, trusting, and well-treated pet robot Miki, who, having been well-treated all its little robot life, is perfectly sweet and nice in a way that causes Murderbot to have to periodically bow out of the feed and go have Feelings by themselves, since therapy isn’t an option on this planetary outpost (or at all). There is a sufficiently exciting plot involving saving the humans from the various threats that GrayCris has left on the planet to exterminate them and destroy the evidence of their illegal alien artifact mining, much of which is theatrically staged under the large, transparent observation dome of the geohub while static-interference-inducing electric storm clouds rage picturesquely outside (everything from Tor.com these days seems deliberately written in the hopes that it will someday be translated into a visual medium, which I believe is intended primarily to torment visually-minded readers like me personally). It is very cool and contains many good dunks on how bad everybody else is at security work, spiced up with self-deprecating commentary on Murderbot’s own fuckups, such as that they have yoinked far too many of their plays from soapy serials like Sanctuary Moon. 

 

While occasionally the combination of “depressed” + “thinks a lot about threat modeling” makes these books not quite as escapist as I would like right now, I’m still enjoying them very much, will be on to the next volume today.