I could, become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
The opening of All Systems Red is not a character introducing itself. It is a character refusing to introduce itself, and building an identity in the negative space of that refusal. The technique we need to name here is the withheld primary designation. The narrator does not say "I am a SecUnit" or "I call myself Murderbot." Instead, it offers a conditional identity—"I could have become a mass murderer"—and then immediately defines itself by its failure to occupy that role. "Murderbot" appears first as a private, almost embarrassed nickname in the third paragraph, not as a confident self-assertion: "I think I was definitely a failure as a SecUnit, but as a heartless killing machine I was a terrible failure. Maybe I should just call myself 'Murderbot' and stop worrying about it." The name is a concession, a shrug, a way to stop worrying. Martha Wells is not building a character who tells you who it is; she is building a character who is constantly, exhaustedly, dealing with the question of what to call itself, and letting you overhear the internal negotiation.
This is intimacy through withheld affect. The reader is drawn close not by emotional confession but by being made privy to what the narrator won't say, what it deflects, what it negates. The technical moves that produce this effect are:
Pronouns as distance markers. The narrator uses "I" consistently, which is the basic technology of first-person intimacy, but it almost never attaches that "I" to a stable noun. It does not say "I am a construct." It says "I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed." The "I" is grammatically a subject but semantically a site of refusal—it is defined by what it didn't do, what it realized instead, what it accesses. When the narrator does use a noun for itself, it is always mediated through negation or irony: "heartless killing machine" (negated by "terrible failure"), "murderbot" (a self-deprecating private joke revealed after the fact). The reader experiences intimacy as proximity to a consciousness, but alienation as distance from any stable identity.
Negation as the primary mode of self-presentation. The unit of self-definition in these paragraphs is the negated predicate. I could have become a mass murderer (didn't). I hacked my governor module (but not to do violence). It had been well over 35,000 hours (with still not much murdering). As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure. Each sentence tells you what the narrator is by telling you what it is not, or what it failed to be. This is intimate because you are inside the process of its self-assessment; it is alienating because what it assesses is its failure to be what it was built to be. The reader cannot settle into a fixed picture—the narrator itself cannot settle—so the relationship between reader and narrator remains charged, active, unstable.
Technical register used as emotional deflection. The narrator's language is precise, computational, and slightly bureaucratic: "governor module," "access the combined feed," "well over 35,000 hours." This is not the language of feeling. But Wells makes the technical register do emotional work by contrasting it with the content it describes. "35,000 hours or so" of media consumption is presented as a data point, but the data point implies loneliness, obsession, retreat from embodied existence. "I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites" is phrased as a technical discovery, but it is the discovery of a way to not murder, a way to fill time, a way to be something other than a weapon. The intimacy is in what the technical language fails to conceal: the desperation of a being whose first free act is to watch television.
Withheld affect as a positive presence. The most difficult and teachable move here is that the narrator does not say "I was lonely" or "I was scared" or "I didn't want to hurt anyone." It says none of these things. Instead, it reports behavior (watching media) and frames that behavior in self-deprecating irony ("I was a terrible failure"). The reader does the emotional inference work, and in doing that work, becomes complicit in the intimacy. The narrator trusts you to understand without being told. That trust, extended implicitly, is the mechanism of closeness. But the refusal to name the feeling also marks the narrator as fundamentally separate from you—it will not meet you in the language of shared emotional categories. It reports; you interpret. The gap between report and interpretation is where alienation lives.
When we speak of "voice" in first-person speculative fiction, we often mean a distinctive way of talking. But what Wells demonstrates in these opening paragraphs is that voice can be built from refusals: refusal of stable self-naming, refusal of positive self-definition, refusal of emotional language, refusal to meet the reader on the reader's terms. The narrator talks, and talks distinctively, but what makes the voice intimate and alienating is what it declines to say, and the reader's awareness of that declination. To practice this: take a draft in first person and locate every moment your narrator tells the reader what they feel, what they are, or what they call themselves. Cut all of it. Replace each cut with a negated predicate (what they didn't do, what they failed to be), a technical report of behavior, or a private joke they don't explain. Let the reader overhear the narrator dealing with the question of self-definition rather than receiving the answer. That is the technique.
The refusal-structure I identified in the opening operates in the register of introduction: the narrator declines to tell you who it is, and that declination constitutes the relationship. But a crisis scene makes different demands. Introduction can afford static self-assessment; crisis requires action, reaction, consequence. The question becomes: how does Wells deploy the same fundamental technique—withheld affect, technical deflection, refusal of emotional language—when the narrator is not reflecting on its identity but responding to an event that threatens someone it has, against its own framework, come to care about?
The scene I want to examine occurs late in All Systems Red, after the survey team has been attacked by the rogue combat unit. Dr. Mensah is injured—a head wound, bleeding, possibly serious. Murderbot’s internal narration during this sequence is a masterclass in using technical observation as both concealment and revelation of desperate protective urgency. Here is the passage as I hold it in memory:
I got to Mensah. She was on the ground, bleeding from a head wound. Head wounds bleed a lot. I knew that from the media. I didn’t know if it was serious. I needed to stop the bleeding. I used the medkit. My hands were doing the right things. I was watching them do it. I was also scanning for the other combat unit. I was also trying to access the feed to see if there were more hostiles. I was also noting that Mensah’s pulse was steady and her breathing was regular. I was also not thinking about the fact that I was terrified.
Let me break down the mechanics step by step, because every choice here is deliberate and replicable.
Step one: the factual statement that refuses evaluation. The paragraph opens with a series of flat declaratives: "I got to Mensah. She was on the ground, bleeding from a head wound." No exclamation, no "Oh god," no emotional adjective. The syntax is subject-verb-object, stripped to bare report. This is the same technical register from the opening, but the content has shifted from self-description to emergency response. The effect is jarring: the reader feels the gap between the severity of the situation and the narrator's refusal to acknowledge that severity in language. That gap is the first layer of alienation—the narrator will not perform distress for you.
Step two: the moment of epistemological uncertainty framed as a data problem. "Head wounds bleed a lot. I knew that from the media. I didn't know if it was serious." This is crucial. A human narrator might say, "I was terrified it was serious." Murderbot says, "I didn't know if it was serious." The emotional state is converted into an information deficit. But note what Wells does next: she cites the source of the limited knowledge. "I knew that from the media." This is the same construct who, in the opening, reported its 35,000 hours of media consumption as a technical data point. Here, that media knowledge is tested against reality, and found insufficient. The reader recognizes this: the narrator has no embodied experience of caring for an injured person, only fictional templates. The inadequacy of those templates in a real crisis is never stated; it is demonstrated by the sequence of sentences. The intimacy is in the reader's recognition of the narrator's profound unpreparedness, an unpreparedness the narrator itself is only partially admitting.
Step three: the shift to procedural self-monitoring as emotional deflection. "I needed to stop the bleeding. I used the medkit. My hands were doing the right things. I was watching them do it." This is where the technique reaches its full complexity. The narrator reports its own actions as if observing a separate entity. "My hands were doing the right things" is a dissociative formulation—the hands act, the narrator watches. This is, on a literal level, a description of the construct's relationship to its own body, which it has always treated as a tool it operates rather than an identity it inhabits. But in this context, the dissociation is doing something else: it is allowing the narrator to function while terrified. By separating "my hands" from the "I" that watches, the narrator can act competently while its internal state—which it is "not thinking about"—would otherwise impair function.
Step four: the stacked parallel clauses that simulate panicked attention under the guise of systematic report. The next four sentences begin with "I was also": scanning for the combat unit, accessing the feed for hostiles, noting Mensah's pulse and breathing. The word "also" is doing heavy technical labor. It presents a list of simultaneous tasks, the kind of multitasking the construct was designed for. But the list itself—threat assessment interleaved with vital-sign monitoring—reveals the dual imperative driving the narrator: protect the client from external threat, and monitor the client for internal damage. A purely instrumental security unit would prioritize the former; Murderbot cannot stop doing the latter. The structure of the list, with its repeated "I was also," gives the prose a staccato, almost breathless quality, but the content remains strictly observational. The reader experiences the narrator's divided attention not because the narrator describes feeling divided, but because the syntax forces you to hold multiple urgent concerns simultaneously.
Step five: the terminal negation that reveals everything it refuses to state. The paragraph closes with: "I was also not thinking about the fact that I was terrified." This is the refusal-structure in its purest, most sophisticated form. The narrator does not say "I was terrified." It says it was not thinking about being terrified. The statement admits the terror while framing the admission as a report on cognitive activity rather than an emotional confession. This is a double move: the feeling is named (for the reader) and simultaneously disavowed (by the narrator's own self-presentation). The narrator maintains its stance as a being that reports data, not feelings—and then reports, as data, that it is suppressing a feeling. The emotional impact lands entirely on the reader, who does the work of understanding that this entity, which denies itself emotional language, is experiencing an emotion so intense it requires active cognitive suppression.
This final sentence also resolves the tension that has been building through the entire paragraph. The flat declaratives, the information deficit, the dissociative self-monitoring, the multitasking list—all of it has been the mechanism of "not thinking about" the terror. The reader retroactively understands that the entire narrative approach in this paragraph was the narrator's coping strategy made into prose architecture. The refusal-structure is no longer just a mode of self-presentation; it is a mode of survival.
Now, how can you reverse-engineer this for your own draft's crisis moment?
First, identify the crisis scene in your draft where your first-person narrator faces an event that should produce overwhelming emotion—fear, grief, protective desperation, rage, love. You are looking for the moment where the narrator cares deeply about an outcome and cannot afford to feel that caring because feeling would interfere with necessary action.
Second, strip every sentence of emotional language. Go through the scene you have written and cut any phrase that names a feeling: "I was terrified," "I was heartbroken," "I wanted to save her," "I couldn't bear it." Remove them entirely. The prose should consist only of actions, observations, and factual statements.
Third, locate the moment of uncertainty in your narrator's knowledge. What doesn't your narrator know? What can it only guess at? What has it only experienced in simulation, or heard about, or read about? Insert a sentence—just one—that acknowledges the gap between its knowledge and the reality of the crisis. "I knew this from training simulations. I didn't know if it worked the same way on real bodies." Or, "I had read about this. The texts were not helpful." The insufficiency of prepared knowledge becomes the emotional payload.
Fourth, break the narrator's attention. Use the "I was also" structure to stack incompatible concerns. Your narrator is doing something with its hands (treating a wound, holding a position, operating machinery) while also monitoring a threat, while also tracking a timer, while also registering some small, irrelevant detail that the reader will understand as a grief-anchor. The simultaneity is the point. The syntax should feel like a processor running multiple threads, each one urgent, none of them the emotional acknowledgment the reader is waiting for.
Fifth, write the terminal sentence that names the suppressed feeling as something the narrator is not engaging. The formula is: "I was also not thinking about [the feeling]." Or: "I was not letting myself consider [the implication]." Or: "I was refusing to notice [the thing that would break me]." This sentence must come last in the paragraph, and it must retroactively reframe everything that preceded it as the mechanism of suppression. The reader should feel the weight of the admission while understanding that the narrator is still, even in admission, maintaining its stance of deflection.
Sixth, check the scene against your narrator's established voice. The language of the crisis should use the same syntactic habits, the same vocabulary register, the same mode of self-reporting that you have built throughout the draft. The refusal-structure works only if it is consistent with how the narrator has always processed experience. If your narrator has been emotionally expressive elsewhere, the sudden technical deflection will read as inconsistency rather than characterization. The technique requires that the narrator always deflects; the crisis simply reveals the stakes of that deflection.
A final observation about what Wells does not do in this scene, which is as instructive as what she does. She does not let the narrator break character. There is no moment where Murderbot says, "I care about her, I can't lose her." The closest it comes is "I was terrified," and that is framed as a fact it is not thinking about. The restraint is absolute. This means the reader's emotional experience is not one of receiving the narrator's feelings but of witnessing the narrator's struggle not to feel them. The intimacy is not in shared emotion but in the reader's privileged view of the suppression. Your task is not to make your reader feel what your narrator feels; it is to make your reader feel the cost of your narrator's refusal to feel it.
To practice this directly: take the crisis moment you have identified, and write a new draft of it that uses zero emotional vocabulary and ends with a sentence that names, as a negated cognitive act, the emotion the narrator is suppressing. Do not explain the suppression. Do not let the narrator comment on it. Let the structure—flat report, knowledge gap, dissociated observation, stacked attention, terminal negation—do the work. Then read it as a reader. If the emotional impact lands, the technique is working. If it feels cold and empty, check whether you have included enough concrete detail in the observation sequences. The reader needs to see the narrator attending to the loved or threatened thing with a precision that betrays the caring. The precision is the feeling, for a narrator who will not name it.
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