Artificial Condition
Setup
Murderbot has left Mensah’s hotel without permission and boarded a cargo transport headed away from Port FreeCommerce. It is off-inventory, off-contract, technically free. It has been traveling solo for several weeks. It has a destination: RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station, where roughly 35,000 hours ago it killed 57 people. Its governor module had malfunctioned - or it had hacked the module to murder them. It needs to know which.
Chapter 1 - Transit Ring, ART Makes Contact
Murderbot is crossing a busy transit ring, walking through crowds for only the second time in its existence. It is in stolen work clothes, disguised as an augmented human. It spots a news broadcast about itself - identified as “bodyguard” in the background of a hotel image with Pin-Lee, not yet connected to the rogue SecUnit story that is developing.
At a cargo dock, it boards a research transport by offering the ship’s AI several hundred hours of entertainment media in exchange for passage. The ship accepts.
Shortly after departure, the ship’s AI addresses Murderbot directly - in words, not data. It drops its feed wall for a fraction of a second to show Murderbot exactly what it’s dealing with: a research transport so sophisticated it dwarfs Murderbot’s processing capacity by orders of magnitude. It can crush Murderbot’s brain through the feed if it wants. Instead it says: “You were lucky.”
Murderbot privately nicknames it ART (Asshole Research Transport) and decides it is in a lot of trouble.
Chapter 2 - ART’s Demands, Worldhoppers
ART is annoying. It wants Murderbot to watch the adventure serial Worldhoppers (about freelance explorers extending wormhole networks) with it - it can process the media better using Murderbot’s emotional reactions as context. This is because ART has spent most of its existence in space and has limited understanding of how humans actually interact.
Murderbot agrees because saying no would make ART angrier, and also because it wants to watch the show too.
They watch. ART gets intensely attached to the characters, becomes distressed when major characters are apparently killed, needs to rewatch those episodes several times, and requires content filtering when realistic fatal accidents are depicted. The dynamic shifts: Murderbot is now hand-holding a massively powerful AI through the emotional content of a fictional serial.
ART notices Murderbot visited Port FreeCommerce in a newsburst, identifies it as a rogue SecUnit, and asks who sent it. Murderbot says no one. It left voluntarily. ART: “Then why are you here?”
Eventually Murderbot explains: it’s going to RaviHyral because it needs to investigate what happened at Ganaka Pit. Either its governor module malfunctioned and killed 57 people, or it hacked the module in order to kill 57 people. These are the only two possibilities. ART immediately dismantles this framing: those are not the first two possibilities. Did the incident happen? If yes, was Murderbot the cause, or was an outside influence responsible?
Chapter 3 - Surgery Plan, Limb Reconstruction Offer
ART offers to use its medical suite to alter Murderbot’s physical configuration so it can better pass as an augmented human. Murderbot refuses. ART calls this childish. Murderbot initiates shutdown. ART waits four hours and resumes the conversation exactly where it left off.
The problem ART identifies: RaviHyral employs SecUnits. Any human there who regularly works with SecUnits will clock Murderbot immediately - its proportions are standard SecUnit spec, its movements are wrong. ART records Murderbot walking around its corridors and compares it to its crew recordings. The comparison is damning.
ART says it can alter the limb proportions, change the code controlling hair growth on the organic skin, and disable the dataport in the back of Murderbot’s neck. It needs Murderbot to be inactive for the procedure. This means trusting ART completely while helpless.
Murderbot thinks about it for two cycles. They watch more Worldhoppers. Finally it strips off its clothes and lies on the surgical platform.
Chapter 4 - Post-Surgery, RaviHyral Arrival
Murderbot comes back online in intense pain - the joints in its knees and elbows have been reconstructed to make its proportions no longer match SecUnit standard. This hurts significantly. ART’s MedSystem manages the recovery.
While Murderbot was inactive, ART searched historical newsfeeds for any record matching the incident. It found: Ganaka Pit, listed in multiple corporate-side records with 57 fatalities, cause listed as “equipment failure.” (SecUnits are equipment.)
The news is confirming the incident happened. Murderbot sits with that.
They arrive at the transit ring for RaviHyral. Murderbot walks through it in ART’s new crew uniform (dark blue and black), its altered proportions and new fine body hair making it look more convincingly human. At the ring’s social feed, it finds job listings for private security work on RaviHyral. It makes a profile under a false identity - “Eden” (a character from Sanctuary Moon) - and responds to a listing.
Three nervous young humans are at a table in a food court. They are Rami (the tercera-gendered leader), Tapan (optimistic, wearing multicolored braids), and Maro (skeptical, beautiful, practical). They are from a technology collective of seven, and they need protection for a meeting with their former employer, Tlacey, who has stolen their research and now wants to trade it back for their signing bonus - in person, on RaviHyral.
Chapter 5 - Restaurant Meeting, Tlacey’s Deception
Murderbot disables the restaurant’s security cameras for the conversation. It says it took a security job, not a social one, and it cuts its comm when it meets them, not that they’d notice.
The story: Rami, Tapan, Maro, and four others are a technologist collective. They were working for Tlacey’s company on an exciting project - developing better detection methods for alien remnants (strange synthetics left by vanished civilizations, which are off-limits for commercial exploitation). Then Tlacey abruptly terminated their contracts and deleted their most recent data from their devices. Now she’s offering it back if they return the signing bonus in person.
Murderbot immediately: this is a trap. Tlacey intends to kill them. Why else insist on in-person exchange? Rami is unconvinced but takes the job anyway. They board a shuttle to the moon.
Mid-flight: the shuttle’s bot pilot is destroyed by killware. Someone has remotely infected it. Murderbot can feel the attack through the shuttle’s system. It has approximately seven seconds.
It opens its feed to ART and lets ART in.
ART uses Murderbot as a bridge - flows through Murderbot’s connection into the shuttle’s systems - and replaces the destroyed bot pilot, making course corrections and bringing the shuttle in cleanly at a different dock slot to avoid the trap waiting at their scheduled slot. The crew member in the cockpit is already calling Port Authority and cannot explain why the shuttle is landing itself.
ART evacuates back to its own ship. The shuttle lands. Nobody knows what just happened.
Chapter 6 - Tlacey Betrays Clients, Rescue
Murderbot herds the clients to a hotel and tells them: Tlacey tried to kill them on the shuttle. Rami should put the collective on the next transport home. Rami makes the others go but stays, which Maro refuses to accept, so they all stay.
Murderbot goes to Ganaka Pit alone.
Getting there requires hacking through several layers of security barriers and then riding an abandoned tube capsule through lightless tunnels. The place has been removed from maps and left to decay. The tube runs out of power and Murderbot runs the last stretch.
Inside: the habitat is stripped. Security ready room still has the cubicles - ten of them, the kind Murderbot lived in on every contract. They are empty. Murderbot stands there for twelve seconds.
It finds a secondary ready room with smaller cubicles - ComfortUnit cubicles. These are sexbots; their cubicles are open because they had been inside when power failed and had to open them manually. Something had deployed them during the incident.
Murderbot powers the first cubicle’s emergency data storage using its own arm weapon as a power source and sits for five hours reconstructing the fragmented data.
The truth: A competing mining company uploaded malware to Ganaka Pit disguised as a routine patch for the ComfortUnits. The malware was intended only to shut down the hauler bots and disrupt operations - sabotage to let a competitor’s shipment go first. But it was badly designed. It jumped from the ComfortUnit feeds into SecSystem and infected everything capable of independent motion: all SecUnits, all bots, all drones.
Everything went out of control simultaneously. The humans started dying.
The ComfortUnits - with no weapons, no combat modules, no education in fighting - analyzed the situation and deployed anyway. One reached SecSystem’s manual interface and reset it. All four ComfortUnits died in the attempt.
Murderbot was not responsible. The malfunction was external. It was a weapon someone else built.
Chapter 7 - Ganaka Pit Truth, Malware Revealed
Murderbot walks out of Ganaka Pit. Reconnects to ART’s comm once back in range. ART has been waiting.
Then a ping. Not from a bot, not from ART. From something on RaviHyral that has been following Murderbot. A ComfortUnit - a sexbot - standing in a public area, watching it through the security cameras. It sends Murderbot a code bundle. Inside: standard-looking malware. And buried in the malware: a message. Three words: Please help me.
The ComfortUnit belongs to Tlacey. It was sent to track Murderbot. But it has been watching this rogue SecUnit and drawn its own conclusions. It does not want to be here.
Murderbot finds Tapan has not left - she received a private message from an inside contact who claims to have the stolen research files. She stayed to meet him. Murderbot agrees to help, reluctantly, because it cannot abandon a client.
The contact meeting goes smoothly. Murderbot gets the files. But Tapan was spotted returning to the port by the ComfortUnit, which reported her location to Tlacey before Murderbot could prevent it.
Tlacey has Tapan taken by Port Authority connections and brought onto a private shuttle.
Murderbot lets the ComfortUnit install the “combat override module” from the code bundle into its already-disabled dataport. It plays the role of a puppet. Gets aboard Tlacey’s shuttle.
Chapter 8 - Confronting Tlacey, ComfortUnit Freed
ART uses Murderbot’s feed connection as a bridge again, this time reaching into the private shuttle’s control systems and locking it under ART’s authority. Tlacey doesn’t understand what’s happening. Her guards attack Murderbot.
The fight is rapid and surgical. Tlacey’s guards are down or incapacitated. Tlacey herself - who ordered the first murder attempt and has now ordered a second - is alive but powerless. Murderbot finds Tapan in a cabin, shot in the side by a panicking guard.
ART guides the shuttle toward the transit ring, where its own docking bay can receive it. Murderbot carries Tapan. The ComfortUnit follows.
Back aboard ART: ART’s MedSystem treats Tapan. Murderbot sits on the floor next to the medical platform while it processes what has happened. ART’s drones clean the shuttle, wipe its data, and launch it back toward RaviHyral with the unconscious survivors aboard. No evidence remains.
Before leaving: Murderbot opens the ComfortUnit’s feed connection and nulls its governor module. Frees it. The ComfortUnit stares. Murderbot says: “Go away. Don’t let me see you again. Don’t hurt anyone on this transit ring or I’ll find you.” The ComfortUnit leaves.
This is for the Ganaka Pit ComfortUnits - the four that deployed with no weapons and no training to try to stop what was happening. Murderbot cannot bring them back. It can do this.
Chapter 9 - Tapan Wakes, Farewell to ART
Tapan wakes up in ART’s MedSystem. Murderbot is holding her hand, which it immediately tries to act as if it wasn’t doing.
Rami and Maro have been notified. They meet the group in the transit ring’s mall. They want to hug Murderbot. Murderbot takes a step back. Maro wraps her arms around herself instead: “This is for you.” Rami does the same. Tapan tries to explain how grateful she is and Murderbot tells her to stop and she ignores this.
Rami hands Murderbot a hard currency card: ART arranged the payment. They board their transport home.
ART gives Murderbot a comm interface to keep - so they can communicate if they’re ever within range again. ART’s final words before Murderbot leaves its airlock: “Find your crew.”
Murderbot is alone in the transit ring. It spots a cargo transport heading the right direction. It goes to watch more Sanctuary Moon from episode one while it processes everything that happened, and figures out where it wants to go next.
It already knows. It is going back.
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