Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.

So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.

I sat there for a while, wanting to go back to the media, any media, rather than think about this.

And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.

Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

“Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”

“In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. You should do the things you’re afraid of.”