Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

(Thiago, while violating the security protocol everyone agreed to IN ADVANCE, had walked out to the observation deck to greet the strangers on their stupid boat. I followed and pulled him back from the edge, and so Potential Target Leader shot me instead of him. Got me right in the shoulder. I managed to fall off the observation deck and miss the water intake. Yes, I was pissed off. “SecUnit, SecUnit, are you there—” Overse, in the facility’s command center, had shouted at me over the comm interface. Yes, I’m fine, I’d sent her over the feed. It’s a good thing I don’t bleed like a human because hostile marine fauna was about all this situation needed. I’ve got everything under fucking control, okay. “No, it says it’s fine,” I heard her relaying to the others on our comm. “Well, yes, it’s furious.”)

Nobody fucking listens to me.

The stupid hatch (I hate this boat) was slow and all six targets had turned toward me by the time it opened. My drones struck just as I dove out onto the deck. I hit one target with an energy burst from my right arm, kneecapped the second, two dropped from drone strikes and the last one went down flailing, hand closing convulsively on his weapon’s trigger and shooting me right in the chest. For fuck’s sake.

“Why does it look like a person?” I said, “I ask myself that sometimes.”

But we’d been lucky, and I hate luck.

(Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me.) (Another significant percentage came from clients who had just wanted to shoot something when I happened to be standing there.)

“No hugging,” I warned her. It was in our contract. “Do you need emotional support? Do you want me to call someone?”

His face did the thing humans do when they’re trying not to show how annoyed they are. (Mission accomplished.) He said, “I made a mistake. But I had no reason to assume those people were hostile.” I had reason. I could have thrown together a quick excerpt of my Threat Assessment Report of the approaching boat and why it had been 72 percent likely to attack. I could have pointed out that THEY HAD SHOT ME FIRST when for all they knew I was just another unarmed human. But I didn’t have to answer to him. He didn’t like me, I didn’t like him, and that was fine. It was absolutely fine.

I was me, Murderbot.

So, on the night when Potential Target invited Amena to come back to his semi-isolated camp house with him to “meet some friends,” I decided to come along. He led her into the darkened house, and she stumbled on a low table. She giggled and he laughed. Sounding way more intoxicated than he actually was, he said, “Wait, I got it,” and tapped the house’s feed to turn on the lights. And I was standing in the middle of the room. He screamed. (Yes, it was hilarious.)

Just clients. And if anyone or anything tried to hurt them, I would rip its intestines out.

It’s always nice when a human looks relieved to see you.

I said, “Just take it slow,” and managed to sound like we had all the time we needed. (We did not.)

(Right, I should probably mention that I find 99.9 percent of human parts physically disgusting. I’m also less than thrilled with my own human parts.)

Bad news: what the fuck?

(I knew of forty-seven ways that ART could kill a human, augmented human, or bot intruder, and the only reason I didn’t know more is because I got bored and stopped counting.)

(Impulse control; I should try to write a code patch for that.)

That wasn’t the intel I needed. But it was the intel I wanted.

Target Two’s gray face went surprised, then furious. It was kind of funny. This was a point where if I was a human (ick) I might have laughed. I decided to go with my first inclination and kill the shit out of some ass-faced hostiles instead. I told the Targets, “Angry, then afraid, then dead. Is that the right order?”

I hoped it was sentient enough to hurt when I killed it.

Ugh, emotions.

I lowered my voice and I sounded absolutely normal and not like I was upset at all. “I am trying to keep you alive.”

In the Corporation Rim, it would have meant the survey had rented me from an owner, the same way you’d rent your habitat or your terrain vehicle, except humans usually had warm feelings toward their habitats and terrain vehicles.

(Corporations didn’t actually invent space and planets, despite the patents the company had tried to file.)

I wanted to find a bunch more algae-smelling gray snotty assholes and kill the shit out of every single one.

That was annoying. If a system won’t communicate with me, I can’t get inside it. And apparently targetControlSystem was operating as a single system. Stations and installations use multiple systems that work with each other as a safety feature. (Safety is relative.) I usually went in through a security system function and used it to get to all the others. (Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.)

As I went down the corridor, Amena said, Why is the vid so jumpy? Is it from a drone? It’s from my eyes. Oh.

I wanted to pick it up and have an emotion over it like a stupid human.

With all the flailing and screaming going on (Target Five, not me) Target Six couldn’t get a clear shot.

Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t.

Trusted friend? “Oh, fuck you.” That still counts as speaking.

I thumped my head back against the wall. I was sitting on the counter next to the sink and running episode 237 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background so I could pretend to be watching it during the 400+ times ART had pinged me.

I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.)

I said, “No. It’s not like that. Not like it is between humans.” Ratthi was still skeptical. “Is it? The Transport seems to think differently.” I said, “The Transport doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it’s mean.” A minute, undetectable in the range of human eyesight, fluctuation in the lights told me ART had heard that. “Why do you call it ART?” Amena asked. “It said its name was Perihelion.” I told her, “It’s an anagram. It stands for Asshole Research Transport.” Amena blinked. “That’s not an anagram.” “Whatever.” Human words, there’s too many of them, and I don’t care.

Arada pressed both hands to her face. “Maybe you should go back in the bathroom and think about this a little more.” “I’m done thinking,” I said. ART said, That’s obvious. I know, I walked into that one, which oddly enough, did not make me any less mad.

ART said, I want an apology. I made an obscene gesture at the ceiling with both hands. (I know ART isn’t the ceiling but the humans kept looking up there like it was.) ART said, That was unnecessary. In a low voice, Ratthi commented to Overse, “Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

asked her, “Is it talking to you on a private channel?” Amena winced. “Yes, but—” I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!”

Apology accepted, ART said. I felt its attention shift in the feed. (Imagine it staring meaningfully at me.) (It could stare all it wanted, I’m not apologizing.)

Overse slumped in her chair, frustrated. “Right, that’s true.” She looked tired. I suspected it was a bad idea to have a meeting when all the humans were running out of brain capacity.

And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done. It had tricked its captors into taking it to me not because it had some kind of grand strategy but because it needed me. I hate emotions. On the private channel between ART and me, I said, I apologize for calling you a fucker. It said, I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients. Amena was watching me, her brows drawn together. “Are you two talking?” “Yes.” I had to look at the wall now. Amena was still worried. “Are you fighting again or are you making up? Because it looks exactly the same from the outside.” We’re making up, ART told her. “Good.” Amena looked relieved. “Good, right. What’s next on our list?”

(She really needed to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Arada about it so I put Humans need to take rest periods on the general action list. Up in the central corridor, Ratthi saw it and muttered, “Please, yes, soon.”)

Amena came up to the hatch and leaned inside to look around. “If you need me to do anything, I can do it.” I pinged her feed to acknowledge. She watched me search for seven minutes and forty seconds, then said, “Can I ask you a question?” I never know how to answer this. Should I go with my first impulse, which is always “no” or just give in to the inevitable? I said, “Is it contract-relevant?”

ART must be recovering because it had to butt in with, Tell her you care about her. Use those words, don’t tell her you’ll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her. ART, fuck off. The thing ART has in common with human adolescents is that it doesn’t like to hear the word “no,” either. It persisted, Tell her. It’s true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers. I’m not a caretaker, I told ART. I finished the log conversion and checked my drone view of Amena. She was leaning in the hatchway, her head propped on the seal buffer. (That isn’t a good place to put your head, just FYI.) From her expression, she was either falling asleep or deep in thought. Or possibly both. I said, “You need to sleep.” She yawned. “Okay, third mom.”

Arada finally ordered the others to take a rest period, though it took her a while to really understand that ART and I would still be active and there was no reason for the humans to take shifts. (I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.)

Amena tried to just lie down on the bare bunk and pillow her head on the sealed bedding pack but I made her get up and unfold it and do it right. (“You’re mean,” she groaned.)

who at the moment was an inert pile of limbs under a blanket with a pillow jammed into her face. (Humans do everything weird, including rest.)

Can you tell if there’s anyone aboard?” I assume so. ART was dry. They are attempting comm contact. “Don’t answer it,” I told ART. “That’s probably how you got into this situation in the first place.” Ratthi waved his drink bottle in what he thought was ART’s direction. “Yes, please be careful. There was a terrible virus on a company ship and we all nearly died and SecUnit’s brain was compromised.” SecUnit’s brain is always compromised, ART said. And I was not breached via the comm. My comm system is filtered to prevent viral attacks and I have engaged extra protections. “That’s probably what you said right before it happened,” I told it. But ART insulting my intelligence was a good sign. It sounded almost normal again. Amena sighed and wiped crumbs off her mouth. “Hey, you two, it’s too early for fighting.”

She said to Leonide, “Would you be willing to come aboard and speak about it in person?” (I had a camera view of the lower part of the control deck where the drone was now sterilizing the area where Targets One and Three had died. It started working faster.)

(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.) (Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

You don’t have to thank me for doing my stupid job. But it is nice.