Artificial Condition: the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
Murderbot returns! Having left its* new human friends behind on a station that it now learns from news programs is called “Port FreeCommerce”, it has been travelling around illegally on robotically-driven transports, trading views of the entertainment media it downloads at each new station. It has been drifting, but now it has come to a conclusion: it must journey to a particular station and investigate an event in its past, from before a memory wipe (memory-wiping a construct is difficult, because it has an organic brain that cannot be totally wiped, unlike the computer parts). There was an event in which it went berserk and killed the clients and now it is wondering: did it hack its governor module, giving itself free will, to kill all those people?
It finds a transport going to the right station, but only once they are underway does Murderbot find out that the Transport (which Murderbot names ART — the RT stands for “Research Transport”; the A stands for Murderbot’s assessment of the transport’s character) is an immensely powerful computer, fully capable of wiping out Murderbot any time it chooses to. Fortunately, though the two bots squabble like the Odd Couple, they manage to cooperate and ART takes Murderbot to its destination and helps it get through its mission.
Needing a work permit to get from the nearest station to the site, Murderbot disguises itself as an augmented human security consultant. The clients, a trio of young people representing a larger collective, need to get to the site to negotiate with a former employer who has stolen data from them. Now she says that she will sell it back to them in exchange for their entire original pay. Murderbot thinks it is a bad idea — and is quickly proven right when right off the start an effort is made to kill the clients — but goes along to get its investigation going. What it finds out, and how it interacts with its adorable clients, are fascinating.
Wells begins expanding her fictional universe with this volume and while she doesn’t take us outside the Corporate Rim, we learn a lot more about it. Descriptions are not this series’ biggest strength, but I enjoyed what we got. Characters are the strongest point: Murderbot, our first person narrator, is delightfully snarky and ART is its best possible partner. Hopefully we shall see it again as the series goes on. While we and Murderbot move on to new places and people, those we met in the first volume are not forgotten and help drive the story forward.
But, no story is perfect, and there was one thing I didn’t like; fortunately, it’s a minor one. At one point, our two heroic bots use ART’s medical facilities to alter Murderbot’s body to make it look less like a Secbot. To be specific, they remove 2 centimeters of material from Murderbot’s arms and legs (Muderbot also writes some new code to make itself move more like a human under most circumstances). Presumably that’s one centimeter from each of the upper and lower limbs. The problem is that you can’t just shorten the limbs and go happily on your way; humanoid proportions are what they are for reasons and if your arms and legs are shorter than they need to be for your torso, people will notice. Even if they don’t know how what they are seeing is wrong, they will know that something is and pay even more attention to you. And no, you can’t just shorten the torso too, because then your head will look too large. I had to just pretend that they found a magic way to make Murderbot shorter to get through or that they found some other way to change its appearance. This might not bother you the way it bothered me, of course, and I would be surprised if it’s mentioned in any future volumes, so I count it as a minor thing.
Artificial Condition is Highly Recommneded.
*While Murderbot has a part-robotic/part-organic body, it has no sexual characteristics and no interest in sex at all. In fact, it finds the whole idea a turn-off. It also has no gender and chooses to refer to itself as “it”, as do most of the constructs it deals with. It is, however, careful to properly gender all the humans it meets.
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