All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, #1)

by Martha Wells

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

They were saying things like I didn’t even know it had a face.

murderbot + actual human = awkwardness.

Now they knew their murderbot didn’t want to be around them any more than they wanted to be around

I’d given a tiny piece of myself away.

have too much to hide, and letting one piece go means the rest...

I don’t actually know where we are.

Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.

was so appreciative I gave her my real opinion,

So when Mensah opened the feed again to tell me they were going, I told her security protocols suggested that I should go, too.

Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings.

had cycled out of horrified that they wanted to talk to me about my feelings into grateful that she had ordered them not to.

That was when I realized they weren’t ignoring the possibility of sabotage.

humans had been looking at me and I had just wanted to get out of there.

have a trick where I make HubSystem think I received it and then just put it in external storage.

I’d go through the update and apply the parts I wanted and delete the rest.

when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

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

“But surely . . . It’s clear you have feelings—”

I flinched. I couldn’t help

I did, but I didn’t get a vote.

But all I had was the feeling.

so I went into standby, and buried myself in the downloads I’d stored away.

I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans.

But I wanted to kill them.

It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.

This is how we fight: throw ourselves at each other and see whose parts give out first.

Not good, Murderbot, not good.

It was confusing and I wanted to scream. Maybe this was how murderbots died. You lose function, go offline, but parts of you keep working, organic pieces kept alive by the fading energy in your power cells.

fought back panic, and got a few more flashes of sensation.

I waited to get some kind of function back, frantic, disoriented, terrified, wondering why they hadn’t blown a hole in my chest.

functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. “Kill the humans” isn’t a complex order.

They were talking, but I couldn’t catch it. I sat up and said, “Mensah, you need to shut me down now.”

“The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.”

presumably she wanted to keep me. “You have to kill me.”

grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

I shouldn’t be waking up. I hoped they hadn’t been stupid about it, too soft-hearted to kill me.

My clients are the best clients.

“This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”

had a moment to feel betrayed, which was stupid.

What I told you before, about how I hacked my governor module but didn’t become a mass murderer? That was only sort of true. I was already a mass murderer.

And it makes a better story that way. I watch enough serials to know how a story like that should go.

“Yet here I sit, alive.”

“SecUnit, do you have a name?” I wasn’t sure what she wanted. “No.”

“It calls itself ‘Murderbot,’”

knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”

“It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.”

He underestimated me.

It wants you to stop trusting me because I’m trying to keep you alive.”

She’s a really good commander. I’m going to hack her file and put that in.