Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries, #2)

by Martha Wells

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

the feed walls protecting it. And it sounded like a bot. When humans speak in the feed, they have to subvocalize and their mental voice tends to sound like their physical voice. Even augmented humans with full interfaces do it.

“What do you think I am?” If it was hostile, I didn’t have a lot of options. Transport bots don’t have bodies, other than the ship. The equivalent of its brain would be above me, near the bridge where the human flight crew would be stationed. And it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go; we were moving out from the ring and making leisurely progress toward the wormhole. It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall. It was enough time for me to get a vivid image of what I was dealing with. Part of its function was extragalactic astronomic analysis and now all that processing power sat idle while it hauled cargo, waiting for its next mission. It could have squashed me like a bug through the feed, pushed through my wall and other defenses and stripped my memory. Probably while also plotting its wormhole jump, estimating the nutrition needs of a full crew complement for the next 66,000 hours, performing multiple neural surgeries in the medical suite, and beating the captain at tavla. I had never directly interacted with anything this powerful before. 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?

Then it said, You can continue to play the media. I just huddled there warily. It added, Don’t sulk.

I sent through the feed, SecUnits don’t sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module, and attached some brief recordings from my memory of what exactly that felt like. Seconds added up to a minute, then another, then three more. It doesn’t sound like much to humans, but for a conversation between bots, or excuse me, between a bot/human construct and a bot, it was a long time. Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you.

I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started rewatching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Six episodes later I felt the transport in the feed again, lurking. I ignored it, though it had to know I knew it was there. In human terms, it was like trying to ignore someone large and breathing heavily while they watched your personal display surface over your shoulder. While leaning on you.

Two minutes later it repeated the ping and the request. I said, “Watch it yourself.” I tried. I can process the media more easily through your filter. That made me stop. I didn’t understand the problem. It explained, When my crew plays media, I can’t process the context. Human interactions and environments outside my hull are largely unfamiliar. Now I understood. It needed to read my reactions to the show to really understand what was happening. Humans used the feed in different ways than bots (and constructs) so when its crew played their media, their reactions didn’t become part of the data.

about that, I’ll stop watching.” 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. At the climax of one of the main story lines, the plot suggested the ship might be catastrophically damaged and members of the crew killed or injured, and the transport was afraid to watch it. (That’s obviously not how it phrased it, but yeah, it was afraid to watch it.) I was feeling a lot more charitable toward it by that point so was willing to let it ease into the episode by watching one to two minutes at a time.

Though after we encountered one based on a true story, where the ship experienced a hull breach and decompression killed several members of the crew (permanently, this time), it got too upset and I had to create a content filter. To give it a break, I suggested Sanctuary Moon. It agreed.

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

You dislike your function. I don’t understand how that is possible. Its function was traveling through what it thought of as the endlessly fascinating sensation of space, and keeping all its human and otherwise passengers safe inside its metal body. Of course it didn’t understand not wanting to perform your function. Its function was great.

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.

I realized I had been trapped into this conversational dead end, with the transport pretending to need this explained in order to get me to articulate it to myself. I didn’t know who I was more annoyed at, myself or it. No, I was definitely more annoyed at it.

shouldn’t have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn’t let it. If I was going to follow my plan, such as it was, I needed to care. If I let myself not care, then there was no telling where I’d end up.

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.

am in transport mode, I find my unused capacity tiresome. Solving your problems is an interesting exercise in lateral thinking. “So you’re bored? I’d be the best toy you’ve ever had?”

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?

once my PreservationAux clients had seen my human face, they had wanted to treat me like a person. Make me ride in the crew section of the hopper, bring me in for their strategy meetings, talk to me. About my feelings. I couldn’t take that.

enough to fool humans who weren’t looking for me, since humans tend to ignore non-standard behavior in transitional public spaces.

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.

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.

I told ART I knew how to fucking read search results. I would defer to your expertise in shooting and killing things. You should defer to mine in data analysis.

I wanted to shut down, but it would interfere with the healing process. ART asked, Do you wish to watch media? I didn’t respond, but it started an episode of Sanctuary Moon anyway.

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.

ART did a quick search and returned the opinion that it was intended to be a figure of speech. I told it I knew that.

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 starting to wonder just what kind of university owned ART.

(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.)

I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn’t help.

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.

“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.”

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.

Kill who? Tlacey? All of them. The humans here. I leaned against the wall. If I had been human, I would have rolled my eyes.

I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous,

hurry.” “Can we hug you?” Maro let go of Tapan and faced me. “Uh.” I didn’t step back, but it must have been obvious the answer was no. Maro nodded. “Okay. This is for you.” She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.