Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

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

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

A SecUnit’s job is to protect its clients from anything that wants to kill or hurt them, and to gently discourage them from killing, maiming, etc., each other. 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.)

If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered.

Fucking up a planet, even part of a planet, for no reason was kind of a big deal, and I was surprised they had gotten away with it. Okay, no, I wasn’t surprised.

After breaking up the latest fight in the mess, and trying to end my short-lived career as a relationship counselor for desperate humans, I went to hide in my bunkspace.

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

But I was tired of pretending to be human. I needed a break.

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.

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?

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

Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this.

pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy

“I am at eighty-six percent functional capacity.” It held up its arm stump. “It’s only a flesh wound.”

I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.)

I looked down. I was dripping onto the floor, a mix of blood and fluid. I hate it when I leak.

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