All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)

by Martha Wells

I COULD HAVE 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.

I’m not good at guessing actual humans’ ages, even with all the visual entertainment I watch. People in the shows don’t usually look much like people in real life, at least not in the good shows.

One disadvantage in wearing the armor is that I get used to opaquing the faceplate. I’m out of practice at controlling my expression.

The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.

they were all so nice and it was just excruciating.

Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency.

If the humans see me actually doing my job, it helps keep suspicions from forming about faulty governor modules.

you may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

I had blocks of time where I wasn’t supposed to be paying attention and didn’t have to fake it.

This is why I didn’t want to come. I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It’s not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.

It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn’t look like the ones on the entertainment feed.

And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.

The problem I was going to have is that the way murderbots fight is we throw ourselves at the target and try to kill the shit out of it, knowing that 90 percent of our bodies can be regrown or replaced in a cubicle. So, finesse is not required.

It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.

I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.