“Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.”

By the time I reached Exit Strategy, I had started noticing a pattern in The Murderbot Diaries. The books are often discussed in terms of artificial intelligence, autonomy and personhood, and those themes are certainly present. But as I moved through the series, I increasingly felt that Martha Wells was asking a simpler question. Once freedom arrives, what do you do with it?

That question has been sitting in the background since All Systems Red. Murderbot hacks its governor module, gains autonomy and escapes the status of corporate property. In most science fiction stories, that moment would become the destination. Freedom would mean escape. The newly liberated protagonist would disappear into the wider world, finally beyond the reach of those who once controlled it. For a while, Murderbot appears interested in exactly that future. It talks constantly about being left alone. Given the choice, it would happily spend its time consuming entertainment feeds and avoiding complicated conversations.

And yet it keeps coming back.

Murderbot has collected evidence from Milu, though nobody asked it to. And now he wants to give that evidence against GrayCris to Dr. Mensah. However, once he has access to newsfeeds, he realizes with increasing alarm that Dr. Menah has been kidnapped and is on TranRollinHyfa. It is not GrayCris territory, so that’s a good news, but when he arrives on TRH he realizes that there is enough security hired by GrayCris to make it their territory. And then the book is a rescue mission.

But why does it come back? Why does it go to Milu to collect evidence against GrayCris?

After he has located the others from PreservationAux, he speaks with Pin Lee. The sharpest among her, Ratthi and Gurathin according to Murderbot. And she says – You left. And he says – Mensah said I could learn to do anything I wanted. I learned to leave.

And then,

“That was the whole point of leaving. ‘Either I’m Mensah’s property, and I work for her, or I’m a free agent and I work for myself.’

Glare intensifying. ‘Okay, so what did you hire yourself to do?’  “

Murderbot is free to do anything it wants. There are plenty of places beyond the corporate rim that he can go to and have the kind of life it says it wants. Watch content. But he doesn’t do that. He keeps coming back to “his humans”.

Loyalty, a longing for friendship, or training. Or, all three. When he speaks in terms of his humans, you feel a certain loyalty within him. When he says – SecUnits after my client, no one can walk away from that, that is also loyalty. And also a sense of pride in his abilities. He doesn’t have a governor module anymore and in reality there are no clients unless he chose them.

Friendship, and you really want there to be friendship. Murderbot and the PreservationAux humans are almost there. They don’t treat him as equipment, and hey trust him to do the right thing. And now that Murderbot has seen Miki, he knows that he can choose to have that kind of life. But he struggles through the entire novella on making this choice.

His most comfortable state is actually when he is in mission mode. And that is the training. He is uncomfortable with human behaviour. But put him on a mission and give him some humans to protect, and he gets to be in his element. And he defines his element as –

“The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.”

As all the previous ones, this one is fast paced and fun to read. We have SecUnit vs SecUnit, SecUnit vs Combat Bot (and they are really killing machines), a Gun ship battle without projectiles but with malicious code. And in the end, our rogue SecUnit makes the choice that we were hoping he would make.

After finishing the book, I found myself returning to the question that has been running through the series from the beginning. What do you do once you are free? Murderbot finally possesses the thing it wanted in All Systems Red. It owns itself, it can leave. It can disappear into a galaxy large enough to lose itself forever. Instead, every time the people it cares about need help, it returns.

What makes this work is that Murderbot never becomes sentimental. Martha Wells wisely avoids turning it into a conventionally heroic figure. It remains sarcastic, socially awkward and perpetually irritated by human behaviour. Much of the humour of the series still comes from the gap between what Murderbot says and what it does. Internally, it complains about people with remarkable consistency. Externally, it continues saving them. The contradiction never really disappears. If anything, it becomes funnier as the series progresses because everyone around Murderbot seems to understand what is happening long before Murderbot does.

Relationships are often discussed in terms of feelings, but many of them are ultimately expressed through choices. People answer the phone. They make the trip. They stay longer than they intended. And they return when leaving would be easier. Murderbot repeatedly finds itself making exactly those decisions. The construct that once wanted nothing more than privacy now spends a remarkable amount of energy protecting specific people. It still complains about the inconvenience, of course. Some habits never disappear.

At the end of this four book arc, what remains is the image of Murderbot doing something that, from a purely rational perspective, often makes very little sense. The galaxy remains enormous. Freedom remains available. Escape remains possible. And yet he goes to his humans.