Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

I didn’t stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me.

Transports don’t talk in words, even through the feed. They use images and strings of data to alert you to problems, but they’re not designed for conversation. I was okay with that, because I wasn’t designed for conversation, either.

In some of the worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes have sex with the human characters. This was weirdly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated.

But there weren’t any depictions of SecUnits in books, either. 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 liked protecting people and things. I liked figuring out smart ways to protect people and things. I liked being right.

For my entire existence, at least the parts I could remember, I had done nothing but accept the inevitable. I was tired of it.

Did I really care what an asshole research transport thought about me? I shouldn’t have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn’t let it.

It will be simple, ART insisted. I’ll assist you. Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn’t be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You’d be wrong.

Part of my job as a SecUnit was to give clients advice when they asked for it, as I was theoretically the one with all the information on security. Not that a lot of them had asked for it, or had listened to me. Not that I’m bitter about that, or anything.

ShuttleSecSys tried to analyze ART and almost got itself deleted.

This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn’t help.

I sighed again. I was having a lot of opportunities to do it and I think I was getting good at it.

I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case.

Now that I knew something was hacking the security cameras to watch me, I could use countermeasures. I probably should have been doing that from the beginning, but you may have noticed that for a terrifying murderbot I fuck up a lot.