All Systems Red

All Systems Red is a science fiction novella by the American author Martha Wells, published by Tor.com in 2017 and the first in the Murderbot Diaries series. The series follows a cyborg designed to protect humans on research missions, and it is written in the first person because the narrator keeps a private log, which is why it calls itself Murderbot.

The security unit assigned to a survey team on an unexplored planet has hacked its own governor module, which means it does not have to obey anyone and could walk away at any time. Instead it downloads soap operas and pretends to be a normal, compliant SecUnit, because talking to humans about anything real is worse than being property. The expedition goes wrong when a giant native creature attacks one of its members, who is only saved by the unit's intervention.

Then the neighbouring expedition stops answering, the map stops making sense, and the thing the unit is best at becomes necessary again. As it spends more time with a team that treats it as something other than equipment, it starts developing reactions that make it uncomfortable. It narrates its own story, and it would prefer not to discuss how it feels about the humans it is being paid to protect.

The novella is the first of a long series of instalments, several of which are short novels rather than novellas. It establishes the unit, its hacked module and the humans who become its responsibility, and the later books continue with the same narrator and the same reluctance to be treated as a person.