Archive of Our Own

The Murderbot Diaries can be read many different ways. On the surface, it's a darkly fun story of emerging personhood and found family for an antisocial security unit who goes on adventures and saves people a lot. The Corporation Rim lives in the background, constituting the shadows that allow our hero and its friends to shine in contrast. We get glimpses and allusions to the horrors, but Murderbot breezes past them without lingering, encouraging the reader to do the same.

But if you actually look? Sheesh. It's really dark back there.

Some things Murderbot relates as having happened to it in canon in the four years it can remember:

• AC: I've been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I've been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc.
• FT: (And also, I'd rather be disassembled while conscious, again.)

It doesn't mention much about sexual trauma. But on the other hand, we're talking about a unit who fast forwards through sex scenes and was physically repelled by Ratthi mentioning he'd had a sexual discussion with Tarik. Meaning, I don't think Murderbot would mention sexual trauma if it had happened to it. However, there are a lot of signs and at least one outright statement:

• RP: (After thousands of hours spent analyzing and deleting video of humans eating, having sex, performing hygiene, and eliminating excess bodily fluids, it was a relief, but still.)

Being forced to view sexual materials constitutes sexual assault for a human being. Purely by canon information, by human standards, Murderbot is a sexual assault survivor. But I think there's more.

Let's look at that:

• "You don't need to look at me. I'm not a sexbot." Why would a security unit with minimal contact with ComfortUnits say this? It sounds defensive. It sounds like Murderbot has been looked at before and the next step was it was treated as a sexbot.

• ASR: He said, "Why don't you want us to look at you?" My jaw was so tight it triggered a performance reliability alert in my feed. I said, "You don't need to look at me. I'm not a sexbot."

• It can partition its lung if it needs to swallow stuff. How would it know that unless it had done it? It has no desire or need to eat and drink through its mouth, so why would it have been required to swallow material? (in case it's not clear, I'm alluding to oral rape)

• ES: I can [pretend to eat or drink something] if I have to, but only for a limited time. I don't have anything like a digestive system so I have to segregate a section of my lung to store it until I can expel it. Yes, it's just as awful as it sounds.

• Martha Wells said in a recent interview that Murderbot's visceral disrespect of ComfortUnits was because it wanted to keep or create a firm delineation between itself (as a security unit) and ComfortUnits, because it felt that could so easily be it, used that way, with that being its life, and it was repelled by the idea. Murderbot isn't concerned about being made to pick up food wrappers or move cargo, even though it doesn't like these jobs. There is something uniquely about sex and being used for sex that upsets it.

• Friction NO.20: Martha Wells (via Tumblr user autismaton): "...(Murderbot) is actively repelled by sex and the parts of human bodies associated with it. ... Also, it was very aware of the fact that it could have been created as a Comfort Unit instead of a SecUnit. Its fear of that possibility, the fear of being forced to have sex with humans, caused it to have a displaced contempt for comfort units."

• The only time in the entire series that Murderbot makes an explicit moral judgment is on Tlacy for using a ComfortUnit to do a SecUnit's job. So I have to wonder about Murderbot's thoughts on the reverse, and if perhaps its feelings about a ComfortUnit doing a SecUnit's job is because it has experienced a SecUnit being required to do a ComfortUnit's job.

• AC: Sending a ComfortUnit into this situation was morally irresponsible and a clear violation of contract.

• I have known people to fuck couches, holes in the wall, pipes, hairbrushes, interesting-looking sticks, etc. and heard of much stranger target objects. SecUnits look like humans. They are required to follow client orders. We know from Murderbot's comments that it has suffered a range of client-inflicted damage. We know also SecUnits can be repaired from extreme damage in short periods in their cubicles. I think that without any hormonal regulation or chemical suppression, a certain percentage of humans will be horny. The expectation they wouldn't take advantage of the nearby human-shaped, compliant construct, when we know they're willing to do much more destructive things to those units, seems unreasonable. As such, Murderbot doesn't want to look human and has reservations about being easily mistaken for one (a subject that overlaps with personhood issues but both are problems when you're trying not to be seen as a sexual target).

• NE: Target Leader didn't seem to believe him. "Why does it look like a person?" I said, "I ask myself that sometimes."
• ASR, in explanation and resistance to Mensah's request that it not opaque the helmet: “It’s usually better if humans think of me as a robot,” I said.
• AC, after ART performs the configuration change: I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.

• We know Murderbot is a) an unreliable narrator, b) knows how to tell a story and what makes for a good story, and is not above manipulating details, and c) leaves out big swaths of things it doesn't want to talk about (or if alexathymic, that it doesn't register/recognize), especially when that relates to feelings. See the situation with Miki's death, with its desire to protect PresAux and doing so while not admitting it felt anything toward them, with the impact of visiting Ganaka Pit, with its feelings toward Mensah and potentially leaving her to be with ART at the end of Network Effect. We have many canon examples where it has intense feelings that are downplayed or not mentioned at all in the narrative. It seems reasonable that a deeper trauma like sexual abuse, would not be mentioned at all but only hinted at in how it reacts to sexual matters.

• NE: (If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn't have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

• There is little canon evidence that humans are routinely terrified of the scary SecUnit as Murderbot often asserts. Three doesn't report human fear. Mensah doesn't in her POV fic. Serrat, pinned to the fucking wall, isn't afraid of Murderbot until he suspects it isn't controlled. (The BreharWallHan refugees are the only ones we see who show fear and reflexive antagonism toward SecUnits.) We see the actions of humans through Murderbot's eyes, and they are generally trusting or dismissive, not frightened. However, Murderbot obsesses on how much it thinks humans fear it. System Collapse has two moments showing it has discovered the meaning of 'projection' and reflects if it's doing that. I think it's projecting that fear all the time, or it was when it not free.

• AC: The whole idea of constructs is that we look human, so we don't make the clients uncomfortable with our appearance.

• Murderbot could agree to ART shortening its limbs, giving it hair, tinkering with the data port - cool, whatever, the data port was even Murderbot's idea. But the idea of genitals? Useless bits of flesh that would enhance its disguise while costing it nothing? Hard NO from Murderbot on that one.

• AC: ART had an alternate, more drastic plan that included giving me sex-related parts, and I told it that was absolutely not an option. I didn't have any parts related to sex and I liked it that way. I had seen humans have sex on the entertainment feed and on my contracts, when I had been required to record everything the clients said and did. No, thank you, no. No.

• Then there's that moment when Tapan lying quietly next to Murderbot put it on alert so bad that ART, from a distance, was telling it to chill. This could be touch aversion. I don't think it's anything programmed (like a directive to minimize contact with humans) because it voluntarily touches people at other points – taking Tapan's hand, taking Mensah's, enjoying the feel of holding Don Abene, etc. It could also be a trauma response to being sexually (and otherwise) abused.

• AC: … the fact that I had frozen in place wasn't obvious. I had never had a human touch me, or almost touch me, like this before and it was deeply, deeply weird.
• Calm down, ART said, not helpfully. I was too frozen to respond. After three seconds, ART added, She's frightened. You are a reassuring presence.
• I was still too frozen to answer ART, but I upped my body heat.

• It being trigger-y on certain concepts of intimacy. Canon shows Murderbot understands that ART loves its crew (using the word 'love') and that Murderbot not only loves Mensah, but admits such to Amena. It knows it has a relationship with ART and says so in narration. It cares about it. It misses it and wants to be with it. It doesn't freak out about having a relationship to Mensah. The time it does get upset is when Ratthi tries to say it has an emotionally reciprocal friendship or relationship to a bot while the humans are there and after it was feeling ART had betrayed it. It was an emotionally fraught situation. I don't know how to put it into words, but the 'these things are okay because they're a fact of life, but these others are upsetting because I'm allowed to make choices and that's terrifying because making choices in those situations is linked to trauma for me' seems very real.

• AC: At various points in our relationship, ART had… I really missed ART.
• NE: ART loved its crew, like, a lot. It would do anything to help them.
• NE: Then Amena said, "Do you love my second mother? Thiago thinks so." I should have known this was going to turn into an interrogation. I said, "Not the way he thinks."
• NE: [Farai] added, "I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is." Uh. In the Corporation Rim, Mensah was my owner. On Preservation, she was my guardian.
• NE: It still sounded disgusting. "Do you have to call it a relationship?"

• Murderbot's dislike of touch follows the same lines as above – it seems strongly correlated to whether it has control or choice in the contact. It initiates non-violent touch many times in the series and occasionally tolerates touch in turn without negative reaction. It may be that once it has some time having boundaries honored that it will harden them up in the 'no, I don't want to be touched' district. Or maybe it will loosen them. Or be conditional. That's the great thing about freedom and learning who you are. However, the way it dislikes touch in canon matches up with someone who hasn't been allowed boundaries before. Given what we know of the Corporation Rim, there's no reason why they would have.
  
  
• One last thing - the bit in ASR where it says it has to do what it's told and not tell. It sounds like if someone did tell it to endure sexual use, it would have to, and it wouldn't be able to do anything about it. With that in mind, it is almost physically painful to me that its reaction was to move away and stare in the corner, distancing itself as much as possible. Its options for refusal are so limited. A governed SecUnit wouldn't even have been able to do that.

• ASR: I’m supposed to let the clients do and say whatever they want to me and with an intact governor module I wouldn’t have a choice. I’m also not supposed to snitch on clients to anybody ... I slid out of the seat and went to the back of the hopper, as far away as I could get, facing the supply lockers and the head. It was a mistake; it wasn’t a normal thing for a SecUnit with an intact governor module to do, but they didn’t notice.

Put all the above together and I think Murderbot has been sexually abused (in addition to the violation of having to watch explicit materials against its will). It's possible it only witnessed the abuse of another unit (I say 'only' but I know witnessing abuse, especially while being powerless to stop it, can be more traumatizing than enduring it yourself). It may have been abused and told itself or altered its own memory to say it happened to a different unit. Or it may have simply reviewed the reality of its life as a security unit and realized it could be misused that way at any time, and has lived its life in fear and crawling revulsion over the possibility of something happening that has never in actuality happened to it. Sort of like how a few off-hand jokes about lynching or dragging someone to death behind a car have profound impacts on people who obviously have not personally experienced that. You don't have to be directly subjected to a thing to be directly fucked up by the omnipresent fear and concern about being subjected to it.

Any of these would be awful. I doubt any of this will ever be confirmed in canon, even if it's in Martha Wells' head as part of its backstory. That's private. It belongs to Murderbot. And it doesn't need to be part of the diary it puts out.