Murderbot has really stirred up some trouble. Now Dr. Mesnah’s caught up in it and it’s time to come back and perhaps fix some things.
Like the rest, it’s a quick read with a wonderful sense of all too familiar alienness, wonderful hacking and action scenes, and a fascinating look at what it means to be a person–or not.
Worth the read, but at this point, I expect you’ll already be blowing through these.
When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.
Murderbot is out on their own! It’s an interesting change of pace from the previous story, where Muderbot was still in the role of SecUnit… On the way, it runs into ART (a spaceship AI; not it’s real name, it stands for Asshole Research Transport; three guesses who that’s from…) who turns out to be a great ally. Muderbot gets a few changes to act slightly less SecUnit and more Augmented Human, goes back to the planet where to some extend it all began, and ends up hiring out it’s services as private security–hey, do what you know.
Okay, I get what all the hype is about. Take a heavily armed cyborg/clone, designed entirely as muscle to defend the more squishy ‘traditional’ humans, have it turn off the software constraining it from killing everyone, add in a wonderfully snarky sense of humor… and see what happens.
I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.