Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

It took place in an alt-world with magic and improbable talking weapons. (Improbable because I was a talking weapon and I knew how people felt about me.) Some twenty or so hours later, I was still deep in the show, and enjoying my human-free vacation.

Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.

The good thing about getting your security through a bond company like the one that had owned me is that for small contracts you take delivery at a company office, and for big ones it arrives in a company transport. This greatly reduces opportunities for somebody to show up pretending to be your security team when they’ve really been contracted to kill you.

I hoped that made sense (it was a line from Sanctuary Moon) and I’m sure it sounded like I was stalling. I wasn’t stalling and I didn’t need her to answer me, I just needed her distracted enough to not think about what I was doing in her feed. Your bosses are going down. Whatever they paid you, it won’t make up for a stint in prison. (Yeah, that was from Sanctuary Moon, too.)

Abene had tried to change Miki’s priority to saving its own life, and it had refused her. Which meant she had allowed its programming that option, that ability to use its own judgment in a crisis situation. It had decided its priority was to save its humans, and maybe to save me, too. Or maybe it had known it couldn’t save any of us, but it had wanted to give me the chance to try. Or it hadn’t wanted me to face the bot alone. Whatever it was, I’d never know.

What I did know was that Abene really had loved Miki. That hurt in all kinds of ways. Miki could never be my friend, but it had been her friend, and more importantly, she had been its friend. Her gut reaction in a moment of crisis was to tell Miki to save itself.