Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

At various points in our relationship, ART had threatened to kill me, watched my favorite shows with me, given me a body configuration change, provided excellent tactical support, talked me into pretending to be an augmented human security consultant, saved my clients’ lives, and had cleaned up after me when I had to murder some humans. (They were bad humans.) I really missed ART.

(There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”)

I didn’t want to say goodbye. I couldn’t save this many humans from where they were going, where they thought they wanted to go, but I didn’t have to watch it, either.

I hadn’t expected a bot on ART’s level, but holy shit. Had the humans actually coded it to be childlike, or petlike, I guess? Or had its code developed that way on its own, responding to the way they treated it?

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.

(Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.)

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

[Objective: We will tear you apart.]

In my feed, Miki said, I never talked to a bot like me before. I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me.

Miki told her, Priority is to protect my friends. Priority change, Abene sent. Priority is to protect yourself. That priority change is rejected, Miki told her.

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.

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.