After surviving the horrors of humans and robots corrupted by alien ruins in Network Effect Murderbot is more than ready to take it's humans back to Preservation where they belong. Sadly it's humans, along with ART's humans, are determined to save the colonists from the greedy corporation trying to lock them into labor contracts in return for resettling them on a safer planet. Translation: the corp is trying to lock them into slavery and get them out of the way so it can exploit the planet's resources and sell the illegal alien material on the black market without disclosing the horrible corruption of bots and humans it causes. If only the idiotic colonists weren't still determined to disagree with anything another faction wants. At least they've quit killing each other so now it's only the remaining corrupted bots that Murderbot has to fight until the idiotic colonists finally remember that there might be another settlement hidden on the planet in yet another potentially infected pre-corporate bunker. Somehow life continues to live down to Murderbot's expectations.

System Collapse has everything you expect and like about the Murderbot series. After successfully freeing the SecUnit now calling itself Three, Murderbot continues to transmit it's technique for disabling the Governing Module despite the fear that one of the SecUnits will alert the humans. Other than that it's mostly a paranoid Murderbot trying to save both it's humans and ART's although ART is present via an exploration drone. But being ART, it mostly criticizes Murderbot's choices and grudgingly reveals more of what it can do. The corporate humans are cunning, backstabbing, and better armed than our lot. The University and Preservation humans attempt an appeal to everyone's better nature. It actually works better than you might expect but the colonists don't really know what to think of either side. Generally, the humans simply complicate scenarios that Murderbot feels could be solved by shouting "Everybody run!".

Yet another satisfying sarcastic pessimistic anti-corporate look at the distant future.