Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

This felt way too easy. I almost suspected a trap. Or … Miki, have you been directed to reply to every query with a yes? No, Consultant Rin, Miki said, and added, amusement sigil 376 = smile. 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.

Don Abene grabbed Miki’s arms at one point and smiled into its camera. I was glad I hadn’t made any attempt to control Miki’s movements, because my recoil was so immediate and instinctive I whacked my head against the wall of my storage space.

(Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realized this was a perk until now.)

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

I had to withdraw back to my dark cubicle. I was having an emotion again. An angry one. Before Dr. Mensah bought me, I could count the number of times I sat on a human chair and it was never in front of clients. I don’t even know why I was reacting this way. Was I jealous of a human-form bot? I didn’t want to be a pet robot, that’s why I’d left Dr. Mensah and the others. (Not that Mensah had said she wanted a pet SecUnit. I don’t think she wanted a SecUnit at all.) What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted. And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.

Is there a way to counter it? You’ve already countered it. It doesn’t know you have a SecUnit with you. For a human, that would be a hormone-fueled ego talking. For a SecUnit, it’s just a fact. Like I told Tlacey before I killed her, I’m just telling you what I’m going to do.

Telling the truth was sort of working out for me.

(That’s how SecUnits are taught to fight: throw your body at the target and kill the shit out of it, and hope they can fix you in a repair cubicle. Yes, I’m aware I didn’t have armor or access to a repair cubicle anymore, very aware, but old habits die hard.)

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

[Objective: We will tear you apart.] I blocked the channel. I breathed out, slowly, so as not to draw attention from the humans. Miki sent me a glyph of distress. I said, It’s okay, which was a complete lie. I reminded myself a combat bot wasn’t a human, it wasn’t a villain from one of my shows. It was a bot, and it wasn’t threatening us. It was just telling us what it was going to do.

This was the first time I’d heard Miki sound even minimally annoyed. I was vaguely encouraged by that, for some reason. Acknowledged, just checking. Miki sent me a smile glyph. It’s good to check on our friends. Well, I’d asked for that.

“No telling what goes on in bot brains,” Wilken said, then threw a glance at me. I stared straight ahead. If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn’t wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

We reached the hatch junction and Wilken stopped. She said, “Good luck.” Yeah, fuck you, I thought, and kept walking.

Well, shit. I do make mistakes (I keep a running tally in a special file) and it looked like I had made a big one. I had interpreted all of Wilken’s behavior as being about me, about the discomfort and paranoia associated with a SecUnit suddenly appearing out of nowhere, supposedly sent by another security consultant whose existence implied that the clients didn’t trust her and Gerth. (I know, the “it’s all about me” bit is usually a human thing.) But now it seemed she had been uneasy for a whole other reason.

She touched Hirune’s face, then looked up at me. “Oh thank you, thank you.” It’s nice to be thanked. “Miki, damage report.” “I am at eighty-six percent functional capacity.” It held up its arm stump. “It’s only a flesh wound.” For fuck’s sake. Abene turned toward it, shocked. “Miki, your poor hand!” Oh good, another Abene/Miki lovefest.