My Experience with Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

The best thing about the MurderBot Diaries is that it’s a fantastic series to break up longer reads, and Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells continues this pattern.

As it becomes increasingly difficult for our beloved SecUnit to simply live out its days without human interference, MurderBot has taken an interest in gathering evidence about its former “employer’s” illegal activity. MurderBot must gain the trust of Miki, a robot companion to an assessment team on the planet it needs to visit, in order to find the evidence it needs.

Like the volume before it, how MurderBot learns to adapt to a new companion is the heart of this story. Miki is very different from his previous bot contemporary, and the AI was absolutely adorable and served as the perfect foil for MurderBot. 

This novella accelerates as quickly as the previous two installments, resulting in the SecUnit having to place its trust in another AI, Miki, that may or may not give him away. Because saying much more about the story would reveal too much of the plot, I’m left with simply saying that the ending is a real gut-punch in a way the previous two episodes weren’t.

I plan to read on, but I also hope that there’s a bit of an upheaval in the form of the storytelling so that it doesn’t become too repetitive.

If you’ve read the first two novellas in the MurderBot series, I would recommend continuing on to this one. It’s a fun read!