Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4)

by Martha Wells

(I like endless historical family drama serials, but in real life, ghosts are way more annoying.)

(Humans never think to tell their bots things like, say, don’t respond to random individuals wandering the outside of the station. Bots are instructed to report and repel theft attempts, but no one ever tells them not to answer polite requests from other bots.)

(Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it’s the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.)

So now I was not only a rogue unit, I was a rogue unit carrying a weapon designed to shoot armored security. Which is just playing to the humans’ expectations, I guess.

(For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate accurately with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn’t know what the hell they were doing.)

(An obvious option was to pretend to eat or drink something, but that was tricky. I can do that if I have to, but only for a limited time. I don’t have anything like a digestive system so I have to segregate a section of my lung to store it until I can expel it. Yes, it’s just as awful as it sounds.)

(It was huge. Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?)

How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.)

I said, “We met on Port FreeCommerce.” I couldn’t resist adding, “I was the one in the transport box.”

I was having an emotion, and I hate that. I’d rather have nice safe emotions about shows on the entertainment media; having them about things real-life humans said and did just led to stupid decisions

SecUnits are never allowed to sit down or use human furniture whether on or off duty, so I sat in one of the chairs and put my feet up on the table. Then I took my feet off the table because it wasn’t comfortable.

I had been running possible scenarios, partly to drown out the sound of humans making stupid suggestions.

I was beginning to think Gurathin’s asshole expression was some congenital condition he had no control over.

Scratch that, Gurathin’s asshole expression is due to him being an asshole.

Pin-Lee said, “It’ll be all right.” (Mensah would have made it sound reassuring; Pin-Lee obviously meant it to sound reassuring and it came out like she wanted them to just shut up.)

Are you there, SecUnit? No, I left, I said, I’ve decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed.

I don’t care about your opinion, I said, and then immediately wished I’d put myself on a one-second delay so I could delete it. It made it sound like I did care. Which I didn’t.

So the plan wasn’t a clusterfuck, it was just circling the clusterfuck target zone, getting ready to come in for a landing.

I hadn’t completely decided to crush Serrat’s windpipe, I was just entertaining the idea.

Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare.

In the shows, I saw humans comfort each other all the time at moments like this. I had never wanted that and I still didn’t. (Touching while rendering assistance, shielding humans from explosions, etc., is different.) But I was the only one here, so I braced myself and made the ultimate sacrifice. “Uh, you can hug me if you need to.”

It would have been hilarious if I wasn’t about to die.

It was still a little hilarious.

For fuck’s sake, these humans are always in the way, trying to save me from stuff.

Reaction 1: oh, that’s who had hacked my code. Reaction 2: flattering that they thought I was dangerous enough to pay for the contract on a Combat SecUnit. Reaction 3: I bet PortSec did not okay that and was going to be pissed off. Reaction 4: oh shit I’m going to die.

I got drone video of Combat SecUnit turning toward my decoy drones. This was going to work! It absolutely did not work.

Nobody moved. The ship’s secured feed activity went frantic for seven minutes that felt like thirty. (And the way I experience time, that’s a lot.) (Yes, I started some media in background.)

Listening to the SecSystem’s audio, I heard a crew member in the corridor say, “I’ve never seen one out of armor. They really do look human.” I made a gesture in that direction that I had only seen in the shows that were rated high on the obscenity scale. Gurathin saw me and made a choking noise.

I’d seen ART do it. (Yes, ART’s processing capacity is much larger than mine. I’ll address that issue when it comes up, which is real soon now.)

The one good thing about having emotions was that it accelerated the repair process for my memory storage. (The bad thing about having emotions is, you know, OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME.)

“Why is this ship so old and shitty?” Ratthi objected, “Hey, it may be old, but it’s not shitty.

(And this ship is shitty. It smells like human socks.)

It was very dramatic, like something out of a historical adventure serial. Also correct in every aspect except for all the facts, like something out of a historical adventure serial.

“Why?” I asked her. “Because my owner says so?” “No, asshole,” Pin-Lee said. “Because I’m your legal counsel.”

I got my bag, found my jacket and boots and put them on, and slipped out of the suite.

WHY ARE WE LEAVING