Artificial Condition

“Most of my attention was on getting through the crowd while pretending to be an ordinary augmented human, and not a terrifying Murderbot. This involved not panicking when anybody accidentally made eye contact with me.”

This early quote underlines the irony at the center of Murderbot’s character. As its name would suggest, most humans view it as a brutal killing machine that they should fear. The irony is that Murderbot is just as frightened of humans as they are of it. Murderbot’s fear isn’t physical—it knows it is well equipped to handle dangerous situations—but social; the “terrifying” robot is so introverted that it panics whenever anyone even makes eye contact with it.

“I didn’t stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me. I may have lost control of my expression for a second; I was used to always wearing a helmet and keeping it opaqued whenever possible.”

Murderbot’s description of its physical reactions hints at the dark side of the relationship between humans and robots. With its previous clients, Murderbot was exposed to terrible circumstances, to the point that it is numb to horrors. The human clients didn’t view Murderbot as a person, so they didn’t care what happened to it. While Murderbot may not react outwardly, it feels the negative emotions associated with those horrors. Murderbot’s reference to its helmet highlights a shift between All Systems Red and Artificial Condition; in this second novella, Murderbot can no longer hide behind its armor; it must begin to open up to the human world.