Wormholes

“The locations to a lot of systems were lost before wormhole stabilizing tech was developed, but researchers find them sometimes in reconstructed data troves.“ (Network Effect Chapter 5)

Wormholes are theoretical places in space where it is possible to travel to distant points without passing through the intervening space. While no wormholes have been discovered in out time, they are a relatively common feature in the universe of The Murderbot Diaries.

Wormhole travel requires a special kind of starship drive and extensive calculations for each transit, usually performed by a bot pilot. Each wormhole seems to connect only to specific points, so a long voyage may require travel through multiple wormholes. (It is also possible that a ship could theoretically travel between any two wormhole-accessible points given the right coordinates and enough power, but that economically feasible routes are more limited.) Space stations near or between known stable wormholes seem to be relatively common. Colonizing a planet that is not near a wormhole would require long voyages (e.g. hundreds of years) with colonists in cold sleep.

In the Corporation Rim, the coordinates for wormhole travel are proprietary and are sometimes lost if a corporation goes bankrupt or destroys its data archives while resisting a hostile takeover.

The common use of travel by stable wormhole seems to date from approximately the beginning of the rise of the Corporation Rim as a political entity. Wormhole stability technology and coordinates may be the chief source of scarcity making the extreme capitalism of the Corporation Rim possible.

Speculation: a high proportion of worlds encountered by humans via wormhole travel seem to contain alien remnants, suggesting that the wormhole network in use and the technology used to stabilize wormholes may have been developed from these remnants and may depend on to operate. An example is given in Network Effect of an alien remnant being used to modify a wormhole drive, enabling much faster travel than what is normally considered possible.