Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries, #3)

by Martha Wells

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

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.

It was especially annoying because I could see how the addition of a heroic SecUnit and maybe some interesting alien remnants could have turned it into a great adventure story.

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.

Rogue SecUnits are fucking dangerous, trust me on that.)

I don’t like having to navigate halls crowded with humans staring at me and making eye contact, but the opposite was oddly just as creepy.

Hirune’s face now had the blank, lip-biting expression I associated with humans trying not to show their feelings, especially the feeling that someone had said something unintentionally hilarious. (This is why it had been a struggle for me to give up armor; concealing facial expressions was hard, even for humans.)

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.

Obviously, with the access Miki had given me already, I could have taken Miki over, done what I wanted, and excised it all from its memory. I had done it to Ship, but Ship was a low-level bot and didn’t have enough self-awareness to give a shit. Doing that to Miki … But I didn’t know what I would do if it said no.

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.

I don’t know, everything was annoying right now and I had no idea why.

(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.)

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.

But don’t mind me, it’s not like I know what I’m doing or anything.

Oh, a running joke, those aren’t annoying at all.

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

I was congratulating myself (because nobody else ever does it) on an excellent save.

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.

had never had a human ask me how to give me orders before. It was an interesting novelty.

Again, I know in the telling it sounds like I was on top of this situation but really, I was still just thinking, Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

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

(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.)

traumatized humans with unsecured weapons make me nervous.

See, that? That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.

I didn’t have to obey orders anymore, but that doesn’t make them any less annoying.

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 needed help, I didn’t want anyone to touch me. These were two mutually exclusive states.

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