Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

There was a field in the passenger form for occupation and in a moment of weakness, I told it I was a security consultant. Transport decided that meant it could use me as onboard security and started alerting me to problems among the passengers. I was an idiot and started responding. No, I don’t know why, either. Maybe because it was what I was constructed to do and it must be written into the DNA that controls my organic parts. (There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”)

That didn’t work, they still had to tell me about what had caused the latest fight. (I don’t remember what it was, I deleted it from memory as soon as I could get out of the room.) They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

The reason why they were trying to kill, maim, etc., each other wasn’t the SecUnit’s problem, it was for the humans’ supervisor to deal with. (Or to willfully ignore until the whole project devolved into a giant clusterfuck and your SecUnit prayed for the sweet relief of a massive accidental explosive decompression, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.)

(I know. Ratthi had said using constructs was slavery but at least I hadn’t had to pay the company for my repair, maintenance, ammo, and armor. Of course, nobody had asked me if I wanted to be a SecUnit, but that’s a whole different metaphor.) (Note to self: look up definition of metaphor.)

At first, I had needed to move fast and put as much distance between myself and its transit station as possible. (See above, murdered humans.)

I thought I’d managed to anticipate most of the questions and had my answers ready. It said, But why not? I tell Don Abene everything. She’s my friend. When I’d called it a pet robot, I honestly thought I was exaggerating. This was going to be even more annoying than I had anticipated, and I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance, maybe as high as 85 percent. Now I was looking at 90 percent, possibly 95 percent.

Miki said, Okay, I will do that, Consultant Rin. That sounds scary, but I want to make sure no one hurts my friends. 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.

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

Brais said, “I don’t care if it’s easy or hard, at least we’re moving! Miki was probably getting tired of playing Mus with us.” “I like games. I would play games all the time if we could,” Miki said. 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.

Hirune was asking Abene, “What do you think of our security team so far?” Abene said, “I’m pleased, actually. They don’t seem to know much about terraforming facilities, but that shouldn’t matter.” It might, I thought. But SecUnit education modules were crap and all I knew about terraforming was what I had managed to absorb while completely not caring about it, so maybe I wasn’t the best authority.

I would have evaluated the facility (i.e., made sure there weren’t any unwanted visitors, by walking around as bait waiting for something to attack me) and only then brought the humans in. But don’t mind me, it’s not like I know what I’m doing or anything.

I couldn’t pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. 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.)

I kept my gaze on Abene because I was a SecUnit and that was what a SecUnit would do. You talk to the client and leave the people holding the guns to decide if they should feel threatened by what you said or not. (They should, they should feel really threatened.)

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

I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.)

(You can’t space people off a transit ring; security looks for that kind of thing and gets very agitated about it.) “With Gerth at the ship, we have a hostage situation.” I hate hostage situations. Even when I’m the one with the hostages. Miki said, “That’s not good.” See, that? That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.

They hadn’t spoken to each other much at all, which was maybe suspicious in itself. (I know, hindsight is awesome.)

The core cutter had powered up and accessed my feed to deliver a canned warning and a handy set of directions. Why yes, I did want to disengage the safety protocols, thanks for asking.

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