bibliogramma | Martha Wells: All Systems Red (Reply)

Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries is the story of a cybernetic Security Unit that has hacked into its own programming, rendering it capable of autonomous thought and decision-making, although it has most definitely not entertained the notion of letting its employers know about that.

It’s designed to be a killing machine, and we see just how good it is at its function in the opening sequence, in which it saves teo human scientists from something large and nasty that attacks them. But what it really enjoys is consuming entertainment media - films, books, music.

It’s current contract is to provide security for a group of scientists surveying an uninhabited planet. As contracts go, it’s not a bad one. The scientists are a reasonably compatible group who have worked together before, and after sll, it’s not as if they want to socislise with their SecUnit - and their SecUnit definitely does not want to socialise with them. But after the incident with the large and aggressive lifeform, the SecUnit and the survey team have a serious problem. There’s no mention of the lifeform in the official papers on the planet - and closer inspection shows that those documents have been altered. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

This could have been your standard semi-milsf mystery thriller, and it certainly has all the elements necessary for that, but the unique voice of the narrator transforms it into something rather more interesting, a speculation on the nature of choice, responsibility and autonomy. The self-named “murderbot” has free will, and is not particularly fond of human beings. Yet it risks itself to save its employers, repeatedly. A sense of duty? The need to hide its ability to make decisions, a sort if ironic self-preservation? A sense of right snd wrong?

All Systems Red is entertaining as an action-adventure style sf story, but it’s also an interesting turn on the classic AI examination. What is self-awareness? What is free will? What does an autonomous being that has none of the human drives do when it’s left to its own choices? Wells has more stories in the Murderbot series planned, and I’ll be interesting in seeing where she takes this.