All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)

by Martha Wells

As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

murderbot + actual human = awkwardness.

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

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

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.

I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other.

Nobody was touching my humans.

I knew she wouldn’t have time to fix me. I knew I could kill everyone on the hopper, even with a blown hip joint and one working arm. So I grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

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.

Dead clients were terrible for business.

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 was also planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

Granted, 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.

“You shut the fuck up. We’re not leaving you.”