Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Murderbot is doing what it does best (binging shows) when a human falls into danger. Murderbot must decide whether or not to save her and risk exposing its inert governor module.
To be clear, I’d read Muderbot’s grocery list, or an entire book of it laughing at cat videos, so I didn’t mind that this foray into a freshly-hacked Murderbot’s heart and mind was very, very, very short.
And even in its short form, it manages to be both funny and heartbreaking.
Free will, that pesky nemesis, has been doing strange things to Murderbot since the very beginning.
And it certainly doesn’t make it easy when you’re pretending to be a robot without free will.
“Nobody likes SecUnits. I am one, and even I don’t like us. […] and if we didn’t have governor modules to flashfry our brains if we refuse an order, we’d rampage and kill all the humans and augmented humans. Or maybe we’d just watch entertainment media for the rest of our hellish existence. Personally I could go either way.”
The TL;DR is that Murderbot rescues a human in a mine. Even when its not supposed to.
“Sekai made an “eep” noise. I wanted to make an “eep” noise too but I was busy.”
As always, wildly entertaining Murderbot inner monologuing and well worth the pocket change it costs.
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