Exit Strategy

The Murderbot Diaries is set in a future where humans have colonized space, and now live in several kinds of polities. The most powerful is the Corporation Rim, a hyper-capitalist intergalactic sprawl where corporate entities wield sovereign power. In Corporation Rim, few laws exist and almost everything, including lives, is for sale. This framework to some degree reflects historical and contemporary examples of corporate statehood. Powerful corporations, like the Company, Palisade, and GrayCris, operate their own military forces and treat interstellar territories as private assets. They can be read as updated versions of real-life entities like the Dutch East India Company, a 17th-century corporation that governed colonies, minted its own currency, and waged wars, or like Academi (formerly Blackwater) whose role in conflicts including the Iraq War illustrates how corporate actors still assume state functions with limited oversight.

Skirting the edges of the Corporation Rim are independent planets that either fall prey to corporate control or are somehow able to avoid being subsumed. The planet that Dr. Mensah and her team come from, Preservation, began as a colony settled during the early, unstable period of wormhole travel, and then was able to secure its status as an entity not subject to Corporation Rim colonization. Preservation’s governing structure stands in direct contrast to the rapacious corporate world; its economy is run on the barter system, it has a strong human rights record, and it is committed to scientific exploration rather than resource extraction for profit.

Pitted between these two worldviews, Murderbot becomes the center of the philosophical questions the series poses about personhood. In a world that commodifies sentient life, Murderbot’s legal status as property contrasts sharply with its internal experience of consciousness and free will. Murderbot’s struggle for self-determination is juxtaposed against the perspectives of different kinds of beings around it, all of whom have varying degrees of autonomy.

In the first novella of the series, All Systems Red (2017), Murderbot secretly hacks the governor module that controls all security androids, or SecUnits. The violence of its self-given name comes from memories that show Murderbot killing its clients. However, in the present, Murderbot just wants to be left alone to watch downloaded series. Nevertheless, it is drawn to the PreservationAux scientific expedition team led by Dr. Mensah, saving them from dangerous fauna, and then from the murderous GrayCris, which is illegally extracting the remnants of an alien civilization for profit. After Mensah learns that Murderbot is a rogue SecUnit, she buys it and offers it a home on Preservation. But even this nominal form of ownership is too much for Murderbot, who slips away without saying goodbye.

In Artificial Condition (2018), Murderbot decides to investigate its own past. In the process, it boards a ship with an incredibly powerful, sarcastic AI bot pilot that Murderbot nicknames ART, which modifies Murderbot to pass more easily as human. ART’s far superior cognitive skills and relative autonomy within the Corporation Rim show a different kind of existence. Posing as a security consultant, it gains access to RaviHyral, the station where it killed many people. There, it helps a hapless trio of scientists negotiate with a corporation that is about to kill them for their research, and learns that the massacre was a result of malware that infected SecUnits for the purpose of corporate sabotage. Murderbot encounters a ComfortUnit—an android designed for sex work—who explains that other ComfortUnits died trying to stop the violence. Murderbot helps the ComfortUnit hack its governor module to gain autonomy.

In Rogue Protocol (2018), Murderbot decides to follow up on something mentioned by Dr. Mensah—that GrayCris was illegally mining on the planet Milu. Pretending to be a human security consultant, Murderbot befriends a group of humans there to rescue an ally that has been kidnapped. Murderbot also meets Miki, a child-like android that is treated lovingly and sees itself as a pet of the human that owns it. Murderbot is disturbed by Miki’s point-of-view, but when Miki dies during an encounter with GrayCris combat SecUnits, Murderbot decides to make sure that this death wasn’t in vain by taking down GrayCris once and for all.

The GrayCris saga culminates in Exit Strategy. The conflict begins because GrayCris mistakenly believes Dr. Mensah dispatched Murderbot to investigate their illegal activities, an assumption premised on their inability to imagine that Murderbot is acting of its own volition. The novella thus becomes the culmination of Murderbot’s journey away from and back toward Mensah. The protagonist’s internal conflict is rooted in this complex relationship; it feels a deep loyalty to Mensah but also fiercely guards its hard-won independence. Its return is not an act of a subordinate but of an equal choosing to protect someone it cares for. As it grapples with its mission, it must also confront its fear of what re-engaging with Mensah and her team means for its identity as a “rogue unit” (90).