All Systems Red characters

Also known as SecUnit

Appears from the start

The narrator: a SecUnit, a security construct built from cloned human tissue over a machine frame, leased out with the equipment package the corporation rents to survey teams. It has quietly hacked the governor module that lets its owners control and punish it, so it is free to disobey, but it keeps that secret and spends most of the freedom downloading entertainment serials, which it watches while on duty. It dislikes being looked at, prefers an opaque helmet, and finds direct contact with humans excruciating even while protecting them competently. It privately calls itself Murderbot.

Appears from the start

The leader of the PreservationAux survey team and a planetary administrator from Preservation Alliance, an independent polity outside the corporate system where people are not property. Steady and patient, she is willing to ask the security construct assigned to her group what it thinks and then take the answer seriously, which nobody in its experience has done before.

Appears from the start

A member of the survey team, talkative and friendly and inclined to treat the unit guarding them as a colleague rather than as equipment. He is out in the field collecting samples when a hostile creature attacks.

Appears from the start

A member of the survey team who is dragged into a burrow by a large predatory animal during a routine sample collection and badly injured before the SecUnit gets her free. Her injuries and slow recovery shape how cautious the group is for the rest of the contract.

First appears in chapter 2

An augmented human on the survey team, with implants that let him work directly inside the feed and inside systems. Quiet and hard to read, he is the member least willing to take the SecUnit at face value and the most likely to check what it is actually doing.

First appears in chapter 2

The team's lawyer and contract specialist, blunt and quick-tempered on the group's behalf. She handles the fine print of the agreement that supplied the expedition's habitat, its equipment and its security.

First appears in chapter 2

A member of the survey team, enthusiastic about the work and openly uneasy about being assigned a security construct that had no say in the matter. She is partnered with Overse.

First appears in chapter 2

A member of the survey team, practical and technically capable, who keeps much of the group's equipment and systems working. She is partnered with Arada.