Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

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.

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.”)

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

She had meant to ship me home to Preservation, where she would have, I don’t know, civilized me, or educated me, or something. I was vague on the details.

In some entertainment media I had seen, they were used to portray the evil rogue SecUnits who menaced the main characters. Not that I was annoyed by that or anything. It was actually good, because then humans who had never worked with SecUnits expected us to look like human-form bots, and not what we actually looked like. I wasn’t annoyed at all. Not one bit. I had to run back the drone’s camera feed to catch up, I had been so busy conquering that burst of non-annoyance.

I had the horrible feeling it was serious. 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.)

I had to withdraw back to my dark cubicle. I was having an emotion again. An angry one.

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

(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.”

[Query: SecUnit has subordinate unit.] It sounded implacable, and amused. [Query: pet bot.] I almost had it.

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.

I turned to Wilken. It was the hair-grabbing thing that bothered me. Along with the snide “it’s not personal.”

Priority is to protect my friends. Priority change, Abene sent. Priority is to protect yourself.

deliver a canned warning and a handy set of directions. Why yes, I did want to

trying to see how Miki was damaged, when I froze. Something looked wrong because Miki’s chest was crushed, its processor, memory, everything that made it Miki squeezed to nothing in one flex of the combat bot’s hand.

What I did know was that Abene really had loved Miki. That hurt in all kinds of ways. Miki could never be my friend, but it had been her friend, and more importantly, she had been its friend. Her gut reaction in a moment of crisis was to tell Miki to save itself.

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