Compulsory (The Murderbot Diaries, #0.5)

by Martha Wells

Since I hacked my governor module, it’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans. But once I started exploring the company servers and found hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, I just thought, there’s no hurry. I can always kill the humans later, after the next series drops.

Nobody likes SecUnits. I am one, and even I don’t like us. We’re part human, part bot constructs, rented out as part of the company safety bond, and we’re creepy and we make everybody nervous and uncomfortable, and if we didn’t have governor modules to flashfry our brains if we refuse an order, we’d rampage and kill all the humans and augmented humans. Or maybe we’d just watch entertainment media for the rest of our hellish existence. Personally I could go either way.

(Imaginary humans on the entertainment feed are much nicer than real humans.)

Since I hacked my governor module, I sometimes do things and I’m not sure entirely why. (Apparently suddenly getting free will after having 93% of your behavior controlled for your entire existence will do weird things to your impulse control.)