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.

the station I had thought of as The Station, the location of the company offices and the deployment center where I was usually stored, was actually called Port FreeCommerce.

I had been a free agent among humans for less than seven cycles, including time spent alone on a cargo transport, and I already needed a vacation.

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

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.

How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean?

lol

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.

me when my favorite character dies in a show lol

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.

that's kinda deep ngl

“I left without permission. She offered me a home with her on Preservation, but she doesn’t need me there. They don’t need SecUnits there. And I … didn’t know what I wanted, if I wanted to go to Preservation or not. If I want a human guardian, which is just a different word for owner. I knew it would be easier to escape from the station than it would from a planet. So I left.

“I left to get off Port FreeCommerce, away from the company.” It waited. “After I had a chance to think, I decided to go to RaviHyral. I need to research something, and that’s the best place to do it.”

Yeah, well, fuck you, too, I thought, and initiated a shutdown sequence.

i wish i could avoid my problems like this

“At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.”

“I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.”

Are all constructs so illogical? said the Asshole Research Transport with the immense processing capability whose metaphorical hand I had had to hold because it had become emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial.

Records across several archived newsfeeds indicate the site of the incident was likely a small installation called Ganaka Pit. The information originates in a source from Kalidon, a political entity on the Corporation Rim, where the company funding Ganaka Pit was based. There were fifty-seven fatalities. The cause is listed as “equipment failure.”

human. 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.

Interacting meant talking, and eye contact. I could already feel my performance capacity dropping.

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

I put on my best neutral expression, the one I used when the extra download activity had been detected and the deployment center’s supervisor was blaming the human techs for it.

lol

Strange synthetics were elements left behind by alien civilizations. Telling the difference between them and naturally occurring elements that were previously unidentified was a problem in mining.

I checked the security camera to see what I looked like, and decided I looked bored. That wasn’t unusual, because I almost always looked bored while I was doing my job,

me

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

There had been a code download from another mining installation for the ComfortUnits, supposedly a patch purchased from a third party ComfortUnit supplier. The ComfortUnits had all flagged it as non-standard and needing review by SecSystem and the human systems analyst, but the techs who had downloaded it ordered them to apply it. It turned out to be well-disguised malware. It hadn’t affected the ComfortUnits, but had used their feeds to jump to SecSystem and infect it. SecSystem had infected the SecUnits, bots, and drones, and everything capable of independent motion in the installation had lost its mind.

“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.”

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. This is what my crew tells me and my own observations seem to confirm it.

I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media?

“I don’t want to abandon you,” she said. “You’re only involved in this because of us.” That hit home so hard my insides clenched. I had to lean over and pretend to look through my bag to hide my expression.

Tapan was making me think of Mensah, yelling

that she wouldn’t leave me.

awww

A combat override module contains code that will take over my system, overriding the

governor module and the company factory-set protocols, and placing me under the direct verbal or comm control of whoever the module designates. This was how GrayCris took over DeltFall’s SecUnits, and tried to take over me.

“I don’t make threats, I’m just telling you what I’m going to do.”

I didn’t sound like her idea of a SecUnit, rogue or otherwise, I guess. Humans should really do more research. There were operating manuals that would have warned her not to fuck with us.

I hadn’t broken its governor module for its sake. I did it for the four ComfortUnits at Ganaka Pit who had no orders and no directive to act and had voluntarily walked into the meat grinder to try to save me and everyone else left alive in the installation.