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.

I could hack a transport if I tried, but I really preferred not to. Spending that much time with something that didn’t want you there, or that you had hacked to make it think it wanted you there, just seemed creepy.

And honestly, my image in the newsburst had rattled me and I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn’t exist.

There were a lot of things I was going to have to get over.

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

The tension that had kept me down to 96 percent capacity eased; a murderbot’s life is stressful in general, but it would be a long time before I got used to moving through human spaces with no armor, no way to hide my face.

I chose a new serial that looked interesting (the tags promised extragalactic exploration, action, and mysteries) and started the first episode.

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’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

(It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.)

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.

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 was unnecessarily childish. “What do you know about children?” I was even more angry now because it was right. The shutdown and the time I had spent inert would have driven off or distracted a human; the transport had just waited to resume the argument.

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.

“My survival isn’t at stake if I continue to ride unoccupied transports.” And learn to avoid the asshole ones that want to threaten me and question all my choices and try to talk me into getting into the medical suite so they could do experimental surgery on me.

I tried to think about why I didn’t want to change my configuration, even to help protect myself. Maybe because it was something humans did to sexbots. I was a murderbot, I had to have higher standards?

I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me. Where it was safe. For me and for them.

It was the logical choice, it was the obvious choice, and I would still rather peel my human skin off than do it. I was going to have to do it.

Then ART said we also needed to change the code controlling my organic parts, so they could grow hair. My first reaction to that was no fucking way.

(I could have told the company that the fact that SecUnits are terrifying killing machines does, in fact, make humans nervous regardless of what we look like, but nobody listens to me.)

ART had an alternate, more drastic plan that included giving me sex-related parts, and I told it that was absolutely not an option. I didn’t have any parts related to sex and I liked it that way. I had seen humans have sex on the entertainment feed and on my contracts, when I had been required to record everything the clients said and did. No, thank you, no. No.

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 hit the station entertainment feeds for new downloads to try to calm down.

“We arranged to meet. I’m Eden, the security consultant.” Right, so, it was the name of one of the characters in Sanctuary Moon. You probably aren’t surprised by that.

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.

I was used to having something useful to do, taking care of something, even if it was only a contractually obligated group of humans who if I was lucky treated me like a tool and not a toy.

I got back to ART and huddled in my favorite chair and we watched episodes for the next three hours while I calmed down.

I was looking at a sexbot. That is not the official designation, ART said. The official designation is ComfortUnit but everybody knows what that means.

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

My human parts were experiencing a cold prickling that wasn’t comfortable. This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn’t help.

(Armor doesn’t have pockets, so score one for ordinary human clothing.)

I felt this would be the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.

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

It might just be inherent rogue-SecUnit-on-the-run paranoia.

“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.”

In my feed, ART turned down the soundtrack to say, 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 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 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.

I was just as shit at being a security consultant as any human.