Network Effect

As Murderbot pieces together what has happened to ART and its crew, the revelations in Chapters 5-8 of Network Effect deepening both the plot and Murderbot’s characterization. After the violent reclamation of ART’s ship, Murderbot finally confronts the complexity of its bond with the transport that once served as its unlikely friend. Murderbot’s struggle to save ART becomes a mirror of its struggle to define autonomy and attachment.

Wells literalizes The Struggle for Autonomy through the motif of neural implants. When Murderbot investigates Eletra’s body and discovers an implant triggered by remote command, the procedure to remove it becomes an act of liberation that mirrors Murderbot’s earlier removal of its own governor module. The implant represents the Barish-Estranza corporation’s total control over its employees, a power that extends to their minds as well as their bodies. That Murderbot, a construct once controlled by its own governor module, performs the extraction underscores how far it has traveled—from object to agent. Hacking, once a survival tactic, now functions as an assertion of autonomy. Every time Murderbot rewrites a line of code, it destabilizes hierarchies: between corporate authority and free agent, between creator and creation. In a world where control is coded into the infrastructure of existence, hacking becomes a way to rewrite the laws that dictate who can think and who must obey.

At the same time, Wells complicates this autonomy by placing it in conversation with intimacy. The relationship between Murderbot and ART explores what family means in post-human conditions. When ART’s hidden message appears—“a communication method only someone who knew [Murderbot] would choose” (122)—Murderbot’s decision to play the clip demonstrates grief, anger, and trust. Murderbot’s deep bond with ART highlights the theme of Kinship and Loyalty as Choices: Through numerous missions together, the two have become a kind of family, developing a mutual trust forged in part from their shared status as machines built to be exploited. However, ART’s eventual confession, “I sent them to kidnap you” (131), embodies the vulnerability that comes with chosen loyalty. It manipulated events to ensure Murderbot’s arrival, violating its friend’s trust to guarantee its own survival. That increased intimacy creates increased opportunity for betrayal is a paradox that Wells uses to challenge easy definitions of love and betrayal. Loyalty, the novel suggests, is messy, and chosen families can wound as profoundly as they save.

Murderbot’s oscillation between fury and attachment also reveals The Lasting Psychological Impact of Trauma. Murderbot’s narrative tone becomes even more sardonic than usual after learning of ART’s deception. After years of corporate enslavement, ART’s manipulation feels too familiar to be entirely surprising. Yet this moment also catalyzes growth. Unlike Murderbot’s former controllers, ART acknowledges what it has done and seeks reconciliation through honesty. Murderbot’s anger, then, becomes a source of progress, framing trauma as something that requires continuous renegotiation. Wells’s use of pacing and imagery supports these emotional arcs. The ship’s reboot sequence mirrors rebirth: “Lights flicker… displays flash reinitialization graphics… and ART’s voice returns” (130). Meanwhile, the constant toggling between physical repair and emotional reckoning blurs the divide between body and system. The effect reinforces Wells’s broader project of dismantling the binary between human and machine—in this case, by treating both as networks of emotion.

Meanwhile, humor continues to mediate the machines’ emotional expression. When ART remarks, “You’re leaking on my deck” (131), Wells uses understatement to downplay a moment that could veer into melodrama; the pair restore their intimacy through dry wit instead of sentiment or vulnerability. This discomfort with emotional display is recognizably “human,” yet it occurs within the context of ART and Murderbot’s evolution beyond their original programming—a problem distinct to machines, at least in its most literal sense. Through this tonal strategy, Wells thus humanizes the characters without anthropomorphizing them. 

Murderbot’s storming out of the bridge signals the rupture of this newly restored bond, precipitated by the collapse of trust. Yet even this moment of estrangement signals evolution, as the capacity to rage is itself evidence of care. Wells thus reframes emotional intensity as proof of humanity, suggesting that anger and attachment are not opposites but parallel expressions of survival.