CBR16 BINGO: Scandal, because Murderbot is seeking to uncover all sorts of illegal activities by the GrayCris Corporation
Having recently joined the ranks of the Murderbot fandom, I’m eagerly frolicking my way through the series. While the third installment, Rogue Protocol, struck my fancy less than the first two installments, it’s still a good time and I’m itching for more.
In Rogue Protocol, the construct known fondly by us readers as Murderbot and by others as SecUnit is still gathering evidence that the GrayCris Corporation murdered a bunch of human researchers to secure exclusive access to alien remnants. In the previous installment, Murderbot concludes that the evil corporation would probably have set up a huge project, like a mining operation or colony, as a cover. It decides to head to Milu, the location of an alleged terraforming facility, to check on this hunch and gather evidence.
Getting places and conducting detective work without arousing suspicion is one of Murderbot’s biggest problems. It should be THE biggest problem, but with Murderbot, that honor seems to fall to “getting involved with humans.” It encounters a small group of researchers that are accompanied by a human-form bot named Miki, which Murderbot quickly labels a “pet.” In Artificial Condition, Murderbot teamed up with ART (Asshole Research Transport), who irritated our hero to the core. Nevertheless, ART was helpful, and Murderbot got used to it by the end of the story, even kinda missing it when Rogue Protocol begins. Miki is the opposite of ART: friendly, cute, honest to a fault, and most of all, innocent. Miki is easily duped by Murderbot’s cover story of being a security consultant sent to help Miki’s researcher friends, but that advantage is quickly counterbalanced by its desire to tell those researcher friends everything. “When I’d called it a pet robot, I honestly thought I was exaggerating. This was going to be even more annoying than I’d anticipated, and I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance, maybe as high as 85 percent. Now I was looking at 90 percent, possibly 95 percent.”
Through circumstances for which Murderbot has nobody to blame but itself, it ends up in a position of having to watch out for this new group of humans. This gives it a chance to become increasingly annoyed by Miki’s preciousness, which is fun, and to explore complicated feelings of its own, which is interesting (“Was I jealous of a human-form bot? I didn’t want to be a pet robot. . . . What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted. And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.”)
As always, I enjoyed Murderbot’s inner dialogue. One memorable passage has it witnessing a security team member referring to Miki as “little bot.” Murderbot fumes, “Seriously? Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.” This strikes me as a parallel with women being treated either as a shrew or as a helpless creature.
In spite of the dynamic between Murderbot and Miki, and between Miki and the researchers, I was less hooked by this installment than the first two. There seemed to be more “action” sequences in this one, and while that may be a selling point for most people, I’m terrible at visualizing action sequences, so they become less interesting to me (even in movies, where the visualizing is done for me, I get bored by long action sequences). Additionally, while Miki is a nice contrast to Murderbot, its presence can’t help but crank things up on the saccharine scale.
Nevertheless, this series continues to be fun to read–I even recommended it to the librarian who was helping me check out the next two books in the series. And once we get the librarians onboard, what can stop this fandom?