Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

I was off the company’s inventory, but this was still the Corporation Rim, and I was still property.

The rest of the story was about how the company and DeltFall, plus Preservation and three other non-corporate political entities who had had citizens in DeltFall’s habitat, were ganging up on GrayCris. There was also a multi-cornered solicitor-fight going on in which some of the entities who were allies in the investigation were fighting each other over financial responsibility, jurisdiction, and bond guarantees.

When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

but the truth was I did look more 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.

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

Two were female, and one was tercera, which was a gender signifier used in the group of non-corporate political entities known as the Divarti Cluster.

They were trying to figure out where it had come from, and speculating, with a lot of profanity, that the installation had been bombed with malware. One tech said she was going to notify the supervisor, that they needed to sequester SecSystem, and the conversation ended there, in mid-word.

“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.