Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4)

by Martha Wells

WHEN I GOT BACK to HaveRatton Station, a bunch of humans tried to kill me. Considering how much I’d been thinking about killing a bunch of humans, it was only fair.

(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.)

had been in crowds of humans enough times by now I shouldn’t panic anymore—I had ridden on a transport with a whole crowd of humans who thought I was an augmented human security consultant and talked at me nonstop nearly the whole time. Except there was a little panic. I should be over this by now.

When I put the new clothes on, I had a strange feeling I usually associated with finding a new show on the entertainment feed that looked good. I “liked” these clothes. Maybe I actually liked them enough to remove the quotation marks around “liked.” I don’t like things in general that can’t be downloaded via the entertainment feed.

(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.)

I’d seen similar, and better, on my shows, but seeing it in person was different. My camera angles weren’t as good, for one thing.

but I wasn’t sure. Real humans don’t act like the ones in the media.

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

“Either I’m Mensah’s property, and I work for her, or I’m a free agent and I work for myself.” Glare intensifying. “Okay, so what did you hire yourself to do?”

The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop.

I took a pod up to the room and of course there was no security feed inside because of the stupid hotel wanting to lure humans in with promises of room privacy so it could record them in the public spaces.

By tricky I meant I was getting an average of an 85 percent chance of failure and death, and it was only that low because my last diagnostic said my risk assessment module was wonky.

“I’m the security expert. You’re the humans who walk in the wrong place and get attacked by angry fauna.

This lobby was on multiple levels and had large square biozones depicting different ecologies, with furniture arranged around them. It looked nice, inviting humans to sit around and discuss proprietary information in the hotel’s choked feed so the hotel could record it and sell it to the highest bidder.

I’d just discarded Plan Actually Not All That Terrible and shifted to Plan Approaching Terrible.

(Which implies I did it intentionally, but I had been in a hurry and just slammed down everything with a signal.) (Yeah, so much for making this a stealth operation.)

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

He ignored me, but he said to Pin-Lee, “A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station.” I said, “Maybe I wanted the trail to start here.”

(I guess you could pay off the management to let you bring in a SecUnit and weapons and do a hostage exchange, but they drew the line at giving you free feed access.)

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

He hit the platform and I leaned down to give him just enough of a tap on the head to make resistance unlikely.

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 sounds all self-sacrificing and dramatic, telling it this way. And I guess it was, maybe. What I was mostly thinking was that there wasn’t going to be one dead SecUnit on this embarkation floor, there were going to be four.

Sending SecUnits after me was one thing. But they sent SecUnits after my client. No one gets to walk away from that.

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.

That’s when it dawned on me that Hostile One was a Combat SecUnit. 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.

it was hard to come up with a decent argument for free will. I’m not sure it would have worked on me, before my mass murder incident. I didn’t know what I wanted (I still didn’t know what I wanted) and when you’re told what to do every second of your existence, change is terrifying.

(“I don’t want to be a pet robot.” “I don’t think anyone wants that.” That was Gurathin. I don’t like him. “I don’t like you.” “I know.” He sounded like he thought it was funny. “That is not funny.” “I’m going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.” “Fuck you.” “Let’s make that sixty percent.”)

(The bad thing about having emotions is, you know, OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME.)

I don’t want to be human.” Dr. Mensah said, “That’s not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We tend to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal would be to become human.” “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”)

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.