System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

And yes, we were still on the stupid alien-contaminated lost colony planet

“Yes,” we were “still” on the alien-contaminated planet? We are picking up the story after they’ve already been here for some time. Second read, Aug 2025: yes, chronologically, this picks up after “Network Effect.”

the dead people from Adamantine Explorations had meant for everything to look pretty once the colony build was complete. I don’t know why that’s more depressing than them doing a shitty job and intending to abandon their colonists,

A lot to unpack here. Adamantine Explorations is a corporation. They buy dead planets cheap, or simply claim them, and terraform them so as to sell real estate for shitloads of profit. Apparently, they’ve had some terraforming gear on this unnamed planet for decades or longer, but at some point, decades ago, some of the people living here —Wells calls them “colonists” — encountered some alien stuff that may have “contaminated” them … somehow. Physically? Psychologically? Definitely socially, as a bunch of them split off and moved to the North Pole because…? We don’t know. And Adamantine pulled out, fairly recently, abandoning the colonists, who are now struggling to survive. I think Murderbot’s team is here to help, to try to convince the colonists to leave, because “the corporation“ is now wanting to make another try at terraforming, and is threatening to “enslave” the people living here or something. I think.

At least it was making me nervous for a survival-based reason instead of … redacted.

??? Why redacted? Instead of … is Murderbot pissed off at the corporation for being shitty to its workers, and he’s decided not to have that anger on record?

On our private feed, ART-drone said, What the hell are you doing? Your stats are dropping. I was just thinking about alien contamination, I told it. Stop that immediately, ART-drone said. Right, good luck with that. I was thinking about it because I am currently standing in front of what is clearly a Pre–Corporation Rim site. A lot like the one where I redacted.

From the very beginning of this book, I’ve felt disoriented, like I’ve missed a big chunk of story. Such as, what are they even doing here? What are they looking for? Did I miss something? And then there’s all the “redacted” shit. Who is doing this redacting? Murderbot? ART? Wells? And why are they redacting stuff? So, maybe Wells *wants* me to feel lost and disoriented. Maybe that’s how Murderbot feels. “Off his game.” Distracted. I kind of *hope* that’s what’s going on… because hopefully Wells will explain it all in the end and I’ll go, “voila! Murderbot wins again!”

Yeah, this was where we’d started, back at the beginning of the file.

So all of this has been backstory since the first page of the book!

Iris (along with Tarik) is one of “ART’s humans,” is how Murderbot put it at the beginning of the story. So, maybe ART had stumbled across these refugees, helped them, taken them under his wing, and is now trying to get the rest of the colonists to evacuate the planet. ?

I just couldn’t talk to strange humans about important shit right now while pretending to be a human, I’d fuck it up. And fucking it up could mean Barish-Estranza hauling everybody off to be slave labor.

Oh right, the corporation trying to take over now is Barish-Estranza, not Adamantine. Either way, they’re a fucking greedy and heartless entity.

said, “You both should wait here with the vehicle. I’ll go ahead on foot.” Uh, should they wait? Or just take the vehicle back to the construction access and have the shuttle pick them up? I should know this. I used to be good at this, what the fuck happened to me. Oh right, that happened.

Yes, we have definitely missed a substantial chunk of story. Something happened to Murderbot that fucked him up. Ok, wait. The whole end of the last book was about Murderbot being shredded down to its most basic code and having to duplicate itself — remember Three being one of those duplicates, right? I probably need to ga back and pick up the end of the previous book…

If you already have a security consultant— ART-drone interrupted, He’s not a security consultant, he’s a mission specialist. He has a good knowledge of the tactics that corporates like Barish-Estranza employ. You are a security consultant. That would have been encouraging, before redacted.

Somebody keeps redacting the weird shit that happened to Murderbot at the end of the last book.

here is the thing. The redacted thing. I should tell you about it, or this isn’t going to make sense.

Finally! “The redacted “ thing!

I made myself reply, AdaCol1: offline. This time there was a pause. 2.3 seconds. It sent, query? AdaCol1 saved me. It was half eaten by an alien contaminant transferable via organic DNA into machine code and vice versa. It was held a prisoner in the dark while the humans that had rescued it from the ruin it was abandoned in were infected and driven to do terrible things to each other. It let me kill it if I promised to save its humans. How did I put that into this stupid limited language?

When did all this happen??? Was Adacol1 the 20-foot agriculture robot at the beginning of the book? No, this all happened at the end of book 3 (Network Effect?)

He turned to me. “It was a sexual discussion.” ART said in our private feed, I told you that you didn’t want to know. Oh, for fuck’s sake. I had an expression (I couldn’t help it) and involuntarily retreated two meters back down the corridor.

Lol! Uncomfortable biological life form relationship mess.

I pulled my archive of conversations with Dr. Bharadwaj, how she and Mensah had talked about the fact that they knew how constructs were made and used before they met me, but it wasn’t until they interacted directly with me that they had really understood what it meant. That’s why Bharadwaj thought it was so important for me to be in the documentary. She said I had to tell my story. Which I knew, already, sort of. It’s not just the data that has to be correct, but the way that you present it has to feel right, be right. I’d learned that the hard way, trying to convince humans to not do stupid things and get themselves killed. It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions. Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes. Bharadwaj had said that was what I’d done with Sanctuary Moon: I’d used it to reconfigure the organic part of my brain. That it could and did have similar effects on humans. I had to make media to tell a story to these humans. Not my story, and not just me talking. I had to tell their story, the story of what would happen to them if they said yes to Barish-Estranza.

Murderbot becoming a storyteller!

I was using the recordings of my conversations with and interactions between the contract laborers on the ship who had thought I was an augmented human security consultant. The clips would show their personalities, show what kind of humans they were (mostly good, trapped in a terrible situation, knowing their future sucked but trying to pretend it didn’t) to make it personal, to make other humans care about them the way I cared about the fictional humans in my shows. It was hard. I never liked watching helpless humans because I knew what happened to them, now I was having to not just watch it but create a story out of it and explain why and how it was happening.

Murderbot becoming a filmmaker.

I gained interesting insights, ART-drone said. You should stop worrying. Yeah, I’ll just code a patch to stop feeling anxiety, wow, why didn’t I think of that earlier. (That was sarcasm, I have too much organic neural tissue for that to work.) (Of course I’ve already tried it.)

So, worry and anxiety are biological, rather than intellectual?

As I rolled with her to get upright again, I checked ScoutDrone1’s video. I was right; Adelsen had fired at Leonide.

Why would Leonide’s own teammate fire at her?

This also meant Barish-Estranza, or at least this faction of this task group, planned to just take the colonists, whether they signed the contract or not. Indentured employees can’t testify against the corporation that holds their contract. (I hadn’t known that; it was in the documentary, we’d gotten it from Iris’s research archive.) There were no statistics on how common forcible indenture was, but it did happen a lot, apparently. (That was also in the documentary.)

Legal slavery, sounds like.

It occurred to me belatedly (the way most important things occur to me) that if the SecUnit found the code I put in its archive immediately, it could take out its governor module, go rogue, and attack us anyway. Well, it’s a little late to worry about that, Murderbot.

lol, I realized this, too, a few moments before Murderbot did!

All right, Leonide snapped. It is a schism. There was a small management faction that was angry at the prospect of losing bonuses because of failure to deliver on all the operational goals. I had no idea … they were this serious about it. By “operational goal” do you mean signing up the colonists for your slave labor pool? Ratthi asked. She ignored him. Humans never want to hear about that part.

Indeed. Don’t mention the “s” word.

They didn’t move immediately, and it stretched .04 seconds past the point where even a human would have reacted by now. ART-drone said, There is no time to waste, move now. And I think it added something to Iris on her private feed. Iris said, Right, let’s go. SecUnit, we’ll wait for you up top. I know they will, which is why I’m willing to die to get them up there.

No, no, no, no, noooo. I know this is supposed to be that last Murderbot book… Wells can’t really kill him, can she??

I felt HostileSecUnit1 go into shutdown mode. It wasn’t dead, it was just catastrophically damaged. (I know, who isn’t?)

lol!

“One question,” Leonide said, keeping her attention on the control interface. “Is that actually a SecUnit?” “You know,” Iris said conversationally, taking a pad out of the medical kit and wiping bloodstains off ART-drone’s carapace. “You can mind your own damn business.” “Oversensitive,” Leonide said, but she must have been too tired to hide the frustration in her voice. She was quiet for 5.3 seconds, then burst out, “Is someone actually watching entertainment in the feed right now?” Oops, I guess there was a little bleedover, probably from ART-drone’s end. Deadpan, Tarik said, “I always watch entertainment when I fly.” Leonide let out her breath in an exasperated hiss. “Fuck you all.” “Right back at you,” I said.

lol! Leonie might be a new crew member!

I wanted to send a message to Dr. Bharadwaj about it—I don’t know why, but just telling her stuff made it easier for me to figure out what I wanted to do. I had asked ART for a detailed description of what its trauma recovery treatment entailed and it had sent me the file, I just hadn’t been able to make myself open it yet.) (I’m getting there, okay.) I was ready to get out of this system. I was never going to like planets, and nothing had happened here to change that. And I had decided, for real this time, which ship I would be on when I left. Do you know where we’re going next? I asked ART.

Aaw! Murderbot and ART are real friends! ♥️