Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

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.

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

“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.”

Tapan wasn’t afraid of me. I had no reason to be afraid of her. Maybe it was being here again, seeing Ganaka Pit again. Some part of my organic systems remembered what had happened there. In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped.

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 asked her if she liked media and she said yes, so I sent some files to the display surface in the room, and we watched the first three episodes of Worldhoppers. ART was pleased, and I could feel it sitting in my feed, comparing Tapan’s reactions to the show to mine.

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.

I was only 97 percent certain this meeting was a trap.