Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries, #4)

by Martha Wells

(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.)

My friend ART

GrayCris had done all this to acquire strange synthetics, alien remnants. Now that everybody knew that, they couldn’t sell them, or develop them, or whatever they had been planning to do with them. It meant they were desperate, too.

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

Operation Not Actually A Completely Terrible Plan.

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.”

I knew she wanted to argue the point, but I was right, so. There wasn’t much else to say about it.