Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.)

(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.

I’d already had FacilitySys prepare a translation for me, the only sentence I figured I’d need. I said, “Make a noise, and everybody dies.”

Arada had taken a course in weapons use after the whole thing with GrayCris. I guess having a bunch of murderers chasing you around a planet so they can suppress your research by murdering you would tend to make you more cautious, even if you are a terminal optimist.

“SecUnit, you need to get to Medical!” I checked the feed again; still no alerts. “What happened in Medical?” “You happened, you got shot.” Oh, right, that.

(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?”

(I know, I know, I could have said no, I didn’t kill anybody. I could have said that even SecUnits under company protocol use minimum force necessary because the company hates paying survivor damage bonds, and also because SecUnits are not rabid murderers unless humans specifically order them to be. I could have said that I had risked his life not using kill-shots on the armed targets because I knew Arada didn’t want me to.)

I think if I had been a normal bot, or even like a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever, like the way humans would write it for the media, basically, it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot. So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.

(Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.)

(The entertainment media showed planets that weren’t all corporate slave labor, I had just never been on one.))

I wished I was ART, who was good at this kind of thing. (The thing being getting you to talk about what it wanted you to talk about but also making you think about what it wanted you to talk about in different ways.) (I wasn’t kidding when I said ART was an asshole.)

But GrayCris was not doing so hot now due to their hired security service Palisade making an extremely bad decision to punch my ex-owner bond company in the operating funds by attacking one of its gunships. (The company is paranoid and greedy and cheap but also ruthless, methodical, and intensely violent when it thinks it’s being threatened.)

(Yeah, I assumed it was about me, but humans assume everything is about them, too. It’s not an uncommon problem, okay?)

She huffed a laugh. And then I sort of blackmailed her.

Part of my problem now was that Mensah, who was way too honest about this kind of thing, had later told Amena that she had asked me to keep an eye on her, which Amena interpreted in some hormone-related human way I’m not sure I understood. Thiago, who is not an adolescent and has no excuse, interpreted it as Mensah not trusting him to take care of his niece.

(Possibly I had been too emphatic with her about Potential Target. After spending my entire existence having to gently suggest to humans that they not do things that would probably get them killed, it was nice to be able to tell them in so many words to not be so fucking stupid. But I didn’t regret doing it.)

(Data suggests family dramas bear a less than 10 percent resemblance to actual human families, which is unsurprising and also a relief, considering all the murders. In the dramas, not Mensah’s family.)

The chance of a mutiny was so low it was registering as a negative number. I’m not sure the word “mutiny” could even apply to any situation that might occur with this survey team; most of them had to be begged to complete the required self-defense certification before we left.

She and Overse had always been firmly in the “least likely to abandon a SecUnit to a lonely horrible fate” category, which was always the category I was most interested in.

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

(None of which I got to use during the one actual attack on the facility, but though it was tempting, “advance planning sucks” seems to be the wrong lesson to take from that whole incident.)

(That scenario could turn out any way from “we thought this was an easy target, let’s run away” to Rajpreet making a desperate last stand with her sidearm over the pieces of what was left of my body.)

So they had already thought of it. It was nice working with smart humans. Now if I could just keep them all alive.

(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.)

The good thing about being a construct is that I can have a dramatic emotional breakdown while still running my background search to find the drone key commands.

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?”

(You know, if you don’t want to be manually eviscerated with your own energy weapon then maybe you shouldn’t go around killing research transports and antagonizing rogue SecUnits.)

I looked down at her and made deliberate eye contact because she had almost all my attention right now and the last person/target who had done that was still dripping down the bulkhead behind me. She was too self-absorbed or brave or some combination of both to realize what she was doing was not smart.

I designated the intruder as targetControlSystem. I hoped it was sentient enough to hurt when I killed it.

I’d already identified six total Targets, with three still active (counting the messily dead ones), so the humans’ intel was useless. (Not a surprise.)

The good thing about being a construct is that you can’t reproduce and create children to argue with you.

“You look angry.” “That’s just something my face does sometimes.” This is why helmets with opaque face plates are a good idea. Amena snorted in disbelief. “Yes, when you’re angry.”

I had a confusing series of reactions to this. Not in order: (1) Exasperation, at her, at myself. (2) Habitual suspicion. On my contracts for the company, the clingy clients were the ones most likely to (a) get me shot (b) advocate loudly for abandoning the damaged SecUnit because it would take too long to load me in the transport. (And humans wonder why I have trust issues.) (3) Overwhelming urge to kill anything that even thought about threatening her.

I knew I’d been an asshole and I owed Amena an apology. I’d attribute it to the performance reliability drop, and the emotional breakdown which I am provisionally conceding as ongoing rather than an isolated event that I am totally over now, and being involuntarily shutdown and restarted, but I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80 percent range.) I

I guess Amena had never seen a SecUnit hit with an energy weapon that caused them to lose 20 percent of the body mass on their back and expose their internal structure, because she seemed really upset.

“ART,” I said aloud, because ART could silence my feed if it wanted to. “You did this. You sent those assholes to kidnap my humans.” Of course not, ART said. I sent them to kidnap you.

Tentatively, I checked my inputs. (Tentatively, because I wanted to talk to a human right now about as much as I wanted to lose a couple of limbs and have a conversation about my feelings.)

Yeah, I think they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question. (Pro tip: when bots do that, it’s not a good sign.)

“Uncle, I’m fine.” She said that in the normal human adolescent exasperated and borderline whiney tone. (That’s actually statistically normal for human adults, too.)

On the general feed and comm, audible to the whole ship, ART said, The foreign device detached from my drive and ceased to function when the invading system was deleted. Further interference is not advisable. That was definitely not menacing. Oh no, not at all. On a private feed channel to ART, I said, You set me up, you fucker.

Okay, so: (1) I had never been able to access cameras aboard ART, except through its drones. It saw the interior of the ship through its internal sensors, which provided data (heat, density, angles of motion, etc.) that didn’t translate into visual images, at least not visual images useful to humans. I thought it didn’t have cameras in most areas. This was proof it had been holding out on me AGAIN. (2) The video effects were smoother and more polished than anything I could have done and that just made me more furious. This was a vid conference link for humans trying to figure out how screwed they were, not a professional newsfeed production. ART had dissolved the edges and corrected the color just to show off. Next it would be providing theme music and a mission logo.

It was very hard to say evenly, “I am not speaking to you.” Ratthi lifted his brows. “So … how well do you two know each other?” In the control area, Arada stood up. “Uh, Ratthi, let’s take that up later. Transport, will you answer our questions now?” ART said, That depends on the questions. I said, “The humans think I’m an asshole, wait till they get to know you.” I thought you weren’t speaking to me. Ratthi muttered to Amena, “I admit I’m a little worried right now.” Amena told him, “SecUnit said bot pilots can kill people.” ART said, SecUnit exaggerates.

I am currently still in reinitialization mode and my normal-space maneuvering functions are not responding, possibly due to damage caused when the foreign device was installed on the wormhole drive. When reinitialization completes, I can begin self-repair. But I have absolutely no intention of leaving this system until I get what I want. Oh, here we go.

I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it. I was looking at the wall, watching everyone and the display with Amena’s drones. Trusted friend? “Oh, fuck you.” That still counts as speaking.

Thiago’s mouth tightened. “If any of these people had been left alive, perhaps we could have asked them.” I thought that was a shot at me, but ART apparently didn’t take it well. It said, If you’ll put that one on the medical platform, I can cut it open and see. I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?” I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.”

(You may have noticed, my processing capacity allows me to think about a lot of things and do a lot of things at the same time, more than humans, augmented humans, or lower functioning bots can. ART’s processing capacity made me look like I was moving in slow motion. This made ART capable of both enormous patience and also of becoming furious when it didn’t get what it wanted immediately. It was one of the few ways I could successfully mess with it.)

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.)

Now I was sitting with my boots on the polished counter surface. I hoped it was annoying ART.