Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

But mostly because the news was boring and 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.

most of my attention was on getting through the crowd while pretending to be an ordinary augmented human, and not a terrifying murderbot. This involved not panicking when anybody accidentally made eye contact with me.

The news narrator mentioned in passing how Dr. Mensah had bought the SecUnit who saved her. (That was clearly the heartwarming note to relieve the otherwise grim story with the high body count.)

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

You made a mistake, Murderbot, a really bad mistake. How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean? There were evil bots on the entertainment feed all the time, but that wasn’t real, it was just a scary story, a fantasy. I’d thought it was a fantasy.

I will refrain from complaint, it said. (Imagine that in the most sarcastic tone you can, and you’ll have some idea of how it sounded.)

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.

In some of the worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes have sex with the human characters. This was weirdly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated. Constructs with intercourse-related human parts are sexbots, not SecUnits. Sexbots don’t have interior weapon systems, so it isn’t like it’s easy to confuse them with SecUnits. (SecUnits also have less than null interest in human or any other kind of sex, trust me on that.)

Granted, it would have been hard to show realistic SecUnits in visual media, which would involve depicting hours of standing around in brain-numbing boredom, while your nervous clients tried to pretend you weren’t there.

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

The systems of constructs are inherently inferior to advanced bots, but you aren’t stupid. Yeah, well, fuck you, too, I thought, and initiated a shutdown sequence.

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.

I had no reason to trust it. Except the way it kept wanting to watch media about humans in ships, and got upset when the violence was too realistic.

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.

The last time I’d had an arranged meeting with humans they kidnapped Mensah and blew me up, so. This could hardly be worse.

Te shifted nervously and tapped the empty chair. ART, who was considerably faster than me at data retrieval, performed a quick search and informed me it was an invitation to sit down across several human cultural indices. It was giving me the etymology of the gesture as I sat down. 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.

Rami admitted, “We know it doesn’t sound like a good idea to go.” It was a great idea to go if you wanted to be murdered.

I phrased it as a question, because pretending you were asking for more information was the best way to try to get the humans to realize they were doing something stupid.

Tapan, who according to Maro was too naive for this existence, thought it was worth a try. Maro, who according to Tapan was a cynical impediment to both fun and progress, thought they were screwed and should just cut their losses. Rami was undecided, which was why te had been elected leader of the collective for the duration of this problem.

the only important thing I was carrying was the comm interface from ART. It would allow us to communicate once I was down on RaviHyral and let me continue to have access to ART’s knowledge bases and unsolicited opinions.

“Tlacey bought us passage on a public shuttle,” Rami told me. “That could be a good sign, right?” “Sure,” I said. It was a terrible sign.

told ART, If they fire at us en route, it’s not like we can do anything about it. ART didn’t answer, but I knew it well enough by now to know that meant something. I said, You don’t have a weapons system. There hadn’t been one on the schematics. At least the schematics that ART made available in its unsecured feed. Do you? ART admitted, I have a debris deflection system. There’s only one way to deflect debris. I had never been on an armed ship but I knew they were subject to a whole different level of licensing and bond agreements. (If one of them accidentally shoots something it’s not supposed to, somebody has to pay for the damage.) I said, You have a weapons system. ART repeated, For debris deflection.

Yes, I often want to shake my clients. No, I never do.

He didn’t know that, but he must have been able to tell from my face that I wasn’t afraid of him. 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, it was just impossible to tell when I was in my armor.

Plus ART, who was already cozying up to said bot pilot and would be keeping an eye on the shuttle during the brief trip. (ART’s idea of “cozying” being somewhat overbearing, I had already had to intervene once to assure the bot pilot that the big mean transport had promised not to hurt it.)

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

I had five episodes of different drama series, two comedies, a book about the history of the exploration of alien remnants in the Corporation Rim, and a multi-part art competition from Belal Tertiary Eleven queued and paused, but I was actually watching episode 206 of Sanctuary Moon, which I’d already seen twenty-seven times.

I had intended to just stand there and stare at her, which is what SecUnits do to clients who have just performed an act of stupidity so profound it approaches suicide which they ordered us not to stop them from doing.

had forgotten that I had a choice, that I wasn’t obligated to do what she wanted just because she was here. Being asked to stay, with a please and an option for refusal, hit me almost as hard as a human asking for my opinion and actually listening to me.

I tried to moderate my expression. “I’m not mad.” I was furious. I thought my clients were safe, I was free to worry about my own problems, and now I had a tiny human to look after that I couldn’t possibly abandon.

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.

She accepted that readily. Humans apparently don’t like to discuss catastrophic injuries to digestive systems, so I didn’t need any of the corroborating detail ART had just researched for me.

Expecting it and having it happen were two different things, something I learned the first time I got shot to pieces.

Picking up on my reaction, ART said, What does it want? To kill all the humans, I answered. I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational. I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.

I had the blasts set to narrow, and they created deep burn wounds that usually incapacitated humans rapidly with shock and pain and, you know, having holes burned into their chest cavities.

The look she threw back at me was startled, incredulous. 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.

Too tired and numb to talk, I signaled a negative through the feed. It hadn’t had a choice. And 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.

ART said, Now get on the other platform. The shuttle will land soon and there is a great deal of evidence to destroy.