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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

“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.