Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

I’d have to steal a ship and a bot pilot, and that would just be getting too complicated, even for me.

there’s the right kind of unrealistic and the wrong kind of unrealistic.

I didn’t want to see helpless humans. I’d rather see smart ones rescuing each other.

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.)

Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.

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

We were talking about GrayCris here, whose company motto seemed to be “profit by killing everybody and taking their stuff.”

(I hoped I could do this. I had been wondering a lot about my judgment lately.)

Why yes, I did want to disengage the safety protocols, thanks for asking.

Its calm acknowledgement felt strange, like everything was normal and nothing disastrous had happened.

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