”What is a random opportunity killing?

When a human kills another human just because they can.”

After the scale of Network Effect, Fugitive Telemetry felt surprisingly intimate. There were no sprawling rescue missions, no alien contamination threatening entire systems and no crises stretching across large sections of inhabited space. Instead, someone has been murdered on Preservation Station, and Murderbot finds itself helping investigate the crime.

The shift in scale gives it a feel of a story from Murderbot universe, rather than the usual novella.

One of the pleasures of The Murderbot Diaries is that Martha Wells is comfortable moving between very different kinds of stories. One book may revolve around corporate conspiracies and hostile environments. Another may focus almost entirely on relationships. Fugitive Telemetry slips comfortably into detective fiction. A body is discovered. Questions need answers. Murderbot looks for the evidence. And in this case it is quite difficult to find.

And as with most detective stories, the investigation gradually becomes about more than the crime itself.

While reading the novella, I kept thinking about how often detectives occupy a peculiar place in society. They belong just enough to move through it, but remain distant enough to notice things everyone else takes for granted. Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe and countless others operate this way. Their usefulness often comes from standing slightly outside ordinary life. They observe habits that have become invisible to the people around them. Reading this book reminded me of Asimov’s robot books. Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw are replaced by Indah and Murderbot respectively.

By this point in the series, Preservation is probably the closest thing Murderbot has to a home. The station is populated by people who generally treat it with respect. Unlike the Corporation Rim, Preservation recognizes constructs as people rather than property. It is, by most measures, one of the more decent societies we encounter in the series.

And yet Murderbot never fully blends into the background.

People know who it is. They know what it has done. Not to start with though. To start with, he is a security consultant who got Dr. Mensah out of TranRollinHyfa. But then, keeping in line with her character Dr. Mensah tells the security team who he is. And interestingly, there is a leak to media on who he is. And now the entire station knows that it’s the same rogue SecUnit that they heard a lot about in news recently. As a result, most simply do not know how to interact with it. Intellectually, most people on Preservation accept that Murderbot is a person. Emotionally, many still seem uncertain about what that means.

That felt remarkably realistic.

Societies often update their ideas faster than their instincts. A law changes. A policy changes. People agree with the principle involved. But everyday habits take longer to catch up. The adjustment happens gradually, often awkwardly, through countless small interactions.

Murderbot notices those interactions because it sits at the edge of them.

The investigation repeatedly places it in situations where it has to observe people carefully. It watches what they say, what they avoid saying and how they behave when they think nobody is paying attention. Much of the novella’s pleasure comes from Murderbot’s narration. It remains sarcastic, impatient and far more interested in solving the problem than participating in anyone’s emotional journey. Yet those very qualities often make its observations sharper.

What fascinated me was that Murderbot’s outsider status functions both as an advantage and a burden. It sees patterns others miss because it never entirely assumes that things are normal. There is a scene where he advises Station Security Head Indah that she should take a closer look at the port network for any vulnerabilities. She says it is very well secured and then he decides to do a demonstration.

And guess what, he plays episode 256 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon on the station security map. And to show that he has access to the network, he uses the vest camera of one of the unit members because there is no camera inside that room. Indah understands immediately. In his words – “I could have used a drone’s camera, but this way made for a  better demonstration.”

By now, we also know that if you need to move the action in the book to a level that feels worthy of Murderbot, make him face a Combat Unit. And for that Martha Wells gives as a Port Authority bot: Balin. And Balin is actually a combat unit in stealth mode with full control of the port area.

Murderbot has to team up with the Station Security to solve the murder mystery. There are trust issues on both sides, and they get only somewhat resolved by the end of the book.

It’s a fun little volume after the scale of the previous books. Chronology wise it actually sits between Exit Strategy and Network Effect. And gives a glimpse of the life that Murderbot is adapting to on Preservation Station.

(He won’t go to the planet yet, too many humans).