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Murderbot has a complex relationship with names.
- “Murderbot”: Murderbot’s own name is “private,” and the forced reveal of it to PreservationAux by Gurathin (among other indignities) left it with a persistent grudge against Gurathin. It was also alarmed when Murderbot 2.0 freely shared its private name with Amena and SecUnit 3.
- “The company”: throughout the series, Murderbot refers to the company that owned it only as “the company.” In HelpMe.file Excerpt 2, during a conversation with Murderbot, Dr. Bharadwaj observes that, “whenever the company is mentioned you edit out the company and change it to the company… In fact, you’ve just done it now.” (Network Effect.)
- “Tellus” and “Jollybaby,” bots of Preservation: Murderbot seems to have a disdainful opinion of the way the Preservation bots give themselves names. Example quotes from Fugitive Telemetry:
- “(The bot’s name is Tellus. They name themselves and hearing about it is exhausting.)”
- “Its name is not JollyBaby.” Tell me its name is not JollyBaby. It was five meters tall sitting in a crouch and looked like the mobile version of something you used to dig mining shafts.
JollyBaby broadcast to the feed: ID=JollyBaby. The other cargo bots and everything in the bay with a processing capability larger than a drone all immediately pinged it back, and added amusement sigils, like it was a stupid private joke.
I said, “You have to be shitting me.”
This meta will focus on the ways in which Murderbot refers to other bots in the series — which is often not by their names.
Something interesting to note is that with few exceptions, Murderbot refers to other bots in the series using stand-in descriptive designations or nicknames.
Miscellaneous bots and constructs:
- “The ComfortUnit,” which Murderbot refers to as “the sexbot” (Artificial Condition) until late in the book.
- “The combat bot.” (Rogue Protocol.)
- “Hauler bot.” (Exit Strategy.)
- “Primary Target,” “Hostile One,” “Hostile Two,” “Hostile Three.” (Exit Strategy.)
- “Ag-bots.” (Network Effect, System Collapse.)
Systems and disembodied software:
- “The Attacker” (capital A), who attacked the gunship. “It wasn’t just a code sequence like malware or killware. It was a conscious bot, moving through the feed like I did, like ART, but with no physical structure to go back to; that was why it was so fast. It was like a disembodied combat bot.” (Exit Strategy.)
- “TargetControlSystem.” (Network Effect.)
- “Murderbot 2.0.” (Network Effect.)
- “Central” (capital C), “the Pre-CR central system,” (Network Effect) infected by alien contamination. In System Collapse it was referred to as “AdaCol1.”
- “AdaCol2” who self-identified itself as such: “It sent, Connection: ID: AdaCol2.” (System Collapse.) Murderbot consistently used the designation “AdaCol2” when referring to it.
So, in general, Murderbot uses descriptive names rather than conversational human-style or human-facing names. In the above cases, it may well be that the bots do not possess human-style names at all.
Bot-pilots:
- The ship who grants Murderbot passage from Port FreeCommerce in exchange for media is described as a “bot-driven cargo transport.” (All Systems Red.)
- The ship Murderbot takes to RaviHyral is first described as a “long-range research vessel… bot driven,” then “research transport.” (Artificial Condition.) Once this ship reveals its personality, it is upgraded to “Asshole Research Transport,” which is the moniker that Murderbot continues to use for the rest of the series. Or at least as of System Collapse.
- The shuttle from the transit ring to the RaviHyral installation was a “bot-pilot… a limited function model, not nearly as complex as even a standard transport driver bot.” (Artificial Condition.)
- The ship that carries Murderbot from RaviHyral to HaveRatton is described as “bot-driven, no crew, but it carried passengers.” (Rogue Protocol.) Thereafter it is referred to as “Transport” (capital T) in the narration. Apparently “Transport decided … it could use me as onboard security and started alerting me to problems among the passengers.” This suggests a certain level of intelligence and social interfacing.
- The ship that Murderbot rides from HaveRatton to Milu is described as a “supply ship” with a “bot pilot” who is a “lower-level bot.” (Rogue Protocol.) It is referred to as “Ship” (capital S) in the narration.
- The company gunship is referred to as “the bot pilot” or “Bot pilot,” and takes an active part in strategizing with Murderbot on fighting the adaptive killware: “Bot pilot said that it wanted to destroy the ship and crew.” (Exit Strategy.)
- The ship that was the scene of the murder in Fugitive Telemetry is described thusly: “the transport was a lower level automated crewless cargo hauler with booked passengers on the side.” (Fugitive Telemetry.) Murderbot refers to it as “Transport” (capital T) and “the confused transport.”
- The ship holding the BreharWallHan refugees prisoner was described as “a limited bot pilot, just there to steer and dock the ship and guide it through wormholes. It was startled to be accessed, even though I was spoofing a Port Authority ID. It’s usually easy to make friends with low-level bot pilots, but this one had been coded to be adversarial, directed to operate in stealth mode, and was wary of incursion attempts. It tried to alert its onboard SecSystem…” (Fugitive Telemetry.)
- The Barish-Estranza supply ship had a bot-pilot who “accepted [Murderbot] as a priority contact.” (Network Effect.)
- Holism, a ship from ART’s university. (System Collapse.)
Something worth noting: in (nearly) all these instances, Murderbot uses descriptors such as “Transport,” “Asshole Research Transport,” “Ship,” “Bot pilot.” Only in a couple cases (Perihelion and Holism ) does it even mention the official designation “name” of the ship.
I propose these ships might have been named, for the convenience of human interfacing, and perhaps for cultural/historical reasons. Some hypothetical ship names: The Space Mary Ellen Carter, The Space Edmund Fitzgerald, USS Business Venture . (USS here stands for Ultimate Space Ship.)
It is possible that these ships don’t have names. However, we know that Asshole Research Transport does have the official designation of “Perihelion,” and that Murderbot recognized this designation in Network Effect . However, it never brought up the name “Perihelion” during the entirety of Artificial Condition , and it only uses “Perihelion” in Network Effect when the situation necessitates it communicate the designation with humans. It doesn’t use “Perihelion” when addressing ART directly, nor when referring to ART in its narration.
This suggests that there is a strong possibility that (at least some) bot-piloted ships have official designations that Murderbot doesn’t bother to refer to in its diaries. Doylistically, this may be Martha Wells deciding to peace out from bothering to name things. Watsonianly, it might be an insight into how Murderbot feels about names given to bots, or how these names are used as a point of interface between bots and humans. Given its irritation when it encounters named bots on Preservation, I think the latter is probable.
Murderbot itself goes by “SecUnit” to outsiders, after all: another name that’s just a description of what it is. Using similar styles of names for bots and bot pilots may be a gesture of that kind of professional distance and professional respect: for what it is, not what humans call it, nor having the audacity to ask for or expect to use any private name it has for itself.
Another interesting observation: the Lalow. The Lalow is one of the only ships in the series (the other being Holism) that Murderbot refers to by its designation. Intriguingly, the Lalow also has no bot-pilot: “I tried a ping but only got a response from the ship’s transit ring–assigned marker, which had its docking number and the Lalow registry name. This meant no bot pilot that I could get information from. That was depressing.” (Fugitive Telemetry.)
Perhaps Murderbot does not use designations for bot-piloted ships because it feels negatively about the use of names that were given to these bots without their input, purely for human convenience. Perhaps it has observed demeaning names a la Stabby The Roomba. Perhaps it has even been subjected to being nicknamed by humans itself, back when it was owned by the company and had no avenue to protest. Objects can be called whatever silly name according to a human whim.
(Side note: this is a very neat fic in which catalogs various instances where Murderbot’s past clients gave it nicknames.)
Also, as a bot itself, Murderbot has no need for human names when interfacing with bots: it can communicate directly to the bots in machine language, using their feed addresses.
In Network Effect, when Murderbot is trying to figure out whether ART is alive and could be resuscitated, names and modes of address are the clue and the passcode key to restarting ART. Excerpt: “Eden, the clip had been directed to Eden, a fake name I’d used for human clients, a name ART had never called me. My name, my real name, is private, but the name ART called me wasn’t something humans could say or even access. It was my local feed address, hardcoded into the interfaces laced through my brain.” (Network Effect.) “Eden” was not a name that ART had ever used for Murderbot. Murderbot’s “real name” was private. (Which seems to imply that at this point in the story that ART did not know the name “Murderbot.” Side note: interesting that it considers “Murderbot” to be its “real name.”) “The name ART called me,” meanwhile, is a machine address. In machine-to-machine communication, the feed address is the only name that is needed. Perhaps the human-facing designations such as Perihelion are not as salient as identifiers. And perhaps handles like “Transport” and “Ship” are only needed because of the human language text medium that Murderbot’s Diaries are written in.
For humans, feed addresses may not scan as “names” to them in the same way. Hence the use of text-style names that are pronounceable with human mouths: “Miki,” “Peri,” “Balin.”
Which brings us to other bots in the series who do have names. As already mentioned, Murderbot expressed distaste at the names Tellus and especially JollyBaby. But it does use these names to refer to them in its narration. These are names that the bots apparently self-identify as and choose for themselves. Even if Murderbot is judgemental of this, it respects the usage of the names.
However, earlier in the series Murderbot interacts a great deal with a bot who has a human-facing designation. It does not efface the name or comment negatively on it.
The bot Miki is introduced by Don Abene, who says, “This is my colleague Hirune, and our assistant Miki.” Murderbot narrates Wilkin’s reaction to this: “Wilken flicked a glance at the bot, which was apparently called Miki… It was unusual for a human to introduce a bot, and that’s putting it mildly.” (Rogue Protocol.)
There is definitely something crunchy going on here. Murderbot goes on to grumble about Miki, calling it a “stupid pet bot.” (There’s a whole meta one could write about Murderbot and its reactions/relationship with Miki. Explorations of bot-human relationships, and whether they can in fact be equal and respectful.)
But as far as names go, my impression is that Murderbot was using the name “Miki” in its narration because it would have been clumsy to avoid, what with the humans using it frequently. Also, the fact that Don Abene went out of her way to introduce Miki to Wilken and Gerth immediately after introducing Hirune in a similar way, gives the name “Miki” a sense of respectability and equality on par with human names such as “Hirune.” Especially considering it is “unusual” for a human to introduce a bot to another human, by name.
In the climactic scene of Rogue Protocol , “Abene had tried to change Miki’s priority to saving its own life, and it had refused her. Which meant she had allowed its programming that option, that ability to use its own judgment in a crisis situation. It had decided its priority was to save its humans, and maybe to save me, too…” Murderbot concludes, based on this, “Amene really had loved Miki.” (Rogue Protocol.)
All this amounts to: Murderbot’s reaction to and the use of the name “Miki” is basically the same as its reaction to and use of human names.
I’ve said a lot about names at this point. I’m tempted to go off on a whole tangent about how name use is cultural, with different cultures having different standards for names: how for Chinese people names can be more fluid and fitted to the situation or life stage, how for some Native American people names are not so freely given as they are in USAmerican culture. And the way USAmerican culture assumes that each person has one Real name that is the foremost identifier. But that’s somewhat outside the scope of this particular meta.
Or maybe I can bring that tangent in for a landing.
When Murderbot is revealed to PreservationAux as having a non-functioning governor module, the team is arguing over whether this is indicative of sabotage by the company. (Gurathin is of the opinion that a rogue SecUnit is a sign that the company is trying to kill them, and reveals that according to Murderbot’s logs, it has previously killed 57 clients. Murderbot argues that if the company did want to kill the team, it could do it far more straightforwardly than with a rogue unit.)
Shortly after Dr. Bharadwaj makes the point that the rogue SecUnit saved her life, “Mensah said quietly, ‘SecUnit, do you have a name?’” Murderbot, uncertain of what she is asking, responds, “No.” And then Dr. Gurathin drops the news: “It calls itself ‘Murderbot.’”
Murderbot’s reaction to this is fraught: “I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, ‘That was private.’”
There are a few things going on here. First: my read of the scene is that Mensah asked for Murderbot’s name as a gesture of recognition of personhood. “SecUnit, do you have a name?” In USAian culture terms, an exchanging of names is usually one of the first overtures of goodwill and friendship, and it seems this is what she is going for here. Mensah was attempting to make a bridge-building gesture, asking Murderbot for its name. Especially if, as speculated above, a lot of the systems not considered by humans to be people don't have names, and bots on Preservation do, it's a gesture of respect. By asking its name, she is saying, “I see you as a person and an individual, not an interchangeable SecUnit.”
I expect Muderbot, being unused to being recognized as a social equal, did not quite understand the gesture. And its name—private, and a flippant descriptor rather than something that a human would go by, (indeed at this point in the story it has both used “murderbot” (lowercase m) in its logs as a generic term in addition to a self identifier “Murderbot” (capital M))— may not have felt appropriate or comfortable to share with Mensah.
And then of course, Gurathin outs its name. Upon reflection this misstep is a bit tragic. Murderbot was robbed of this self-identifying privacy, and of the chance to choose to share itself and its name freely. The way the Preservation bots choose and share their names with humans and with each other.
It is interesting that Murderbot does seem to think of its name as its true identifier and true name: it referred to its private name as its “real name” in Network Effect. One might have expected that as a bot, with a feed address, with a preference for being referred to by the professional descriptor “SecUnit” in public, Murderbot might have a more fluid idea of what a name is, how it is used, and whether a name is an identity or simply a social tool for persons who exist among other people. But we see this self-conception as "Murderbot" goes beyond just one appellation—that's its truest name. Most personal, most closely guarded, and to it, most real.
Names are an important theme throughout the series, and Murderbot’s use of names (or avoidance of name usage) imply interesting things about how it sees the world, and itself.