Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them. (That’s mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high.)

(That’s “potential” per the earlier conversation where Dr. Arada said Oh SecUnit, I wish you wouldn’t call people “targets” and Thiago had given me the look that usually means It just wants an excuse to kill someone.)

(Thiago is a marital partner of Dr. Mensah’s brother, which is why I gave a crap about his opinion.)

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.”)

Target Leader didn’t seem to believe him. “Why does it look like a person?” I said, “I ask myself that sometimes.” Over the comm loudspeaker, Dr. Ratthi said, “It is a person!” In the background, I heard Overse whisper, “Ratthi, get off the comm!”

hadn’t particularly wanted her to learn, either. (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 stopped next to Mensah and she grabbed my hand. Right, it’s usually a good idea to warn bot/human constructs who call themselves Murderbot before making grabby hands, except during a security incident when you would expect/need the human you’re trying to extract from lethal circumstances to grab you and hold on. And this read as the latter; like Mensah needed me to save her. So I didn’t react except to shift closer to her.

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.

I said, “I’m her SecUnit.” (Yes, that’s still in the buffer.) She lifted her brows. “And that means?” Backed into yet another conversational corner, I fell back on honesty. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.” She smiled. “Thank you.” (And that was that.)

I said, “If I thought he was going to hurt you, I’d be disposing of his body. I don’t fuck around, either.”

“If that was you half-assing your job, I don’t want to see what you’re like when…” The smile faded and she trailed off, then added, “But I suppose I did see you when you were doing your best.”

It’s not fair to you. We need to be apart so I can … stand on my own feet again.” I didn’t think she was wrong, but I still wasn’t used to things that were unfair to me being a major point of consideration for humans. It also sounded vaguely like the break-up part of the romance scenes on the shows I watched, most of which I usually skimmed over. I said, “It’s not me, it’s you.” She huffed a laugh. And then I sort of blackmailed her.

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

I was worried about Mensah, if everything had been okay while I was gone. I wasn’t sure exactly what “okay” would involve, but I was willing to settle for “unmurdered.”

Ratthi, of all my humans except Dr. Mensah, listens to me the most carefully. Probably it has something to do with the time he was about to step out of the hopper to retrieve some equipment and if he had, he would have been eaten by giant predatory fauna.

(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.)

I ordered my suit to clear the visor and swung around so I could see the hostile. I don’t know why—my suit wasn’t armed. I just wanted to see what was after us as something other than a sensor blot. It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do.

“That’s—” That’s ART, I almost said on the feed, like an idiot.

I wished she was Mensah, or any human I trusted to help me. Even Gurathin would have been better in this situation.

“Perihelion. Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland.” That was ART’s designation and registry. Okay, so. Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

I felt my face change. The muscles were all stiff, and not from the hit I’d taken. I’m still not great at controlling my expressions, and I had no idea what I looked like. Behind her hands, Amena whispered, “Oh shit.” “Oh, this one looks angry,” Target One said.

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.

She was too self-absorbed or brave or some combination of both to realize what she was doing was not smart. She set her jaw and said, “We have to go with them. Now.” I gently peeled her small hand off my jacket and said, “Never touch me again.” Amena blinked and pressed her lips together, then turned to Eletra and Ras. “Let’s go.”

ART was dead. I wanted to stop and lean my head against the bulkhead, but there was no time.

Ras shook his head in annoyance. “Look, I can see you’re young. I’m guessing this SecUnit was ordered to protect you but—” Amena made a derisive huff. “It doesn’t even like me.” Admittedly I am tired of the whole concept of humans at the moment, but that was unfair because she didn’t like me first.

Maybe I do watch too much media, because in the empty corridors, passing empty but recently used rooms, I had an image of finding Mensah’s family camp house like this. Empty, no humans, just their possessions left behind and no trace in the feed, no cameras, no way to find them. This was no time to be an idiot.

(If there’d been a SecUnit in the colony, there probably would have been a compelling reason why it had to stay behind on the dying planet.) (I don’t actually believe that.) (Sometimes I believe that.)

I felt something build in my chest. I pulled the recording of my conversations with ART, the way it said “my crew.” It was bad enough that ART must be dead, it wasn’t fair that the humans it had loved so much were dead, too. I wanted to find a bunch more algae-smelling gray snotty assholes and kill the shit out of every single one. A sudden 5 percent dip in performance reliability made my knees go shaky and I leaned on the cabin hatch. For twelve seconds it seemed like a good idea to slide all the way down to the deck and just stay there.

Maybe staring at space and teaching young humans to stare at space wasn’t all ART’s crew did. Maybe ART had let me think that.

“I’m familiar with the concept,” I told her. (One of the indispensable benefits of being a rogue SecUnit: not having to pretend to attentively listen to a human’s unnecessary explanations.) “I had one in my head.” “Right.” She flicked a startled look at me. I love it when humans forget that SecUnits are not just guarding and killing things voluntarily, because we think it’s fun.

You know, it’s not like I’m half-assing this, I am actually trying my best despite the fuck-ups.

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

I didn’t like that Eletra had nearly died, despite the fact that we had followed all the instructions carefully. I didn’t like that Ras had died before we could do anything. I especially didn’t like that the Targets had killed him. He wasn’t my human but he had popped off right in front of me and I hadn’t been able to do anything about it. They’re so fucking fragile.

Amena gave up on the mask and gave me her full attention. “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.”

Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?” I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?” Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!” There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!”

I wasn’t expecting that. It was so far from what I thought she had meant, and she was so upset, that the truth inadvertently came out. “My friend is dead!” Amena was startled. Staring blankly at me, she asked, “What friend? Somebody on the survey?” I couldn’t stop now. “No, this transport. This bot pilot. It was my friend, and it’s dead. I think it’s dead. I don’t see how it would have let this happen if it wasn’t dead.”

Amena started to reach out for me and then pulled her hand back when I stepped away again. “But I think you’re emotionally compromised right now.” That was … that was so completely not true. Stupid humans. Sure, I’d had an emotional breakdown with the whole evisceration thing, but I was fine now, despite the drop in performance reliability. Absolutely fine.

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.

“No, the font was lovely. But whenever the company is mentioned you edit out the company and change it to the company.” Checks session recording. “In fact, you’ve just done it now.” “That’s not a question.” “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.” pause “Is it the logos? You’ve mentioned them before. I did think at the time, that you wouldn’t have known they were impossible to remove if you hadn’t already tried.” “That’s one of the reasons.”

She sighed and rubbed at a dark stain on her shoe. He’s still getting over what happened with second mom getting abducted after her survey. Things like that don’t happen on Preservation. It was a big shock. And … maybe he’s a little jealous. She can talk to you about what happened to her, but she can’t talk to us.

(SecUnits weren’t allowed to sit down, ever, but humans and augmented humans did it every chance they had.)

ART would have laughed at an attack like that. (Actually, ART would have laughed at the part where it sent back a code bundle that would have eaten my face.)

It was a compressed packet, a type meant to be sent in-system, not carried via transports through wormholes. Which meant it had originated with ART’s internal comm array. It was tagged with the name “Eden.”

Eden. Eden was the name I used on RaviHyral, when ART had helped me. This had to be a trick, except that targetControlSystem was drowning in the code bundles I’d sent; it shouldn’t have the ability to send me a packet now. But something on board ART had sent it. I started an analysis of the transmission.

The compressed video clip in the packet was from the serial World Hoppers, from a story arc climax episode, when a secondary main character’s mind had been taken over by a sentient brain-virus (I know) and the story was really much better than it sounds but it was the moment when the character said, I am trapped in my own body. I really needed to get up to ART’s bridge.

In the corridor outside Medical, Amena jerked to a halt and yelled, “No, no!” “What?” Arada demanded. “They got—They shot—” Amena waved wildly at the Medical hatch. “Stay here with them!” and bolted away. Her drone squad careened after her.

In the corridor, Amena whispered to Arada, “I think it’s dying.” Arada took the fire suppressant away from Amena and handed it to Thiago. She told him, “Be ready.”

Eden, the clip had been directed to Eden, a fake name I’d used for human clients, a name ART had never called me. My name, my real name, is private, but the name ART called me wasn’t something humans could say or even access. It was my local feed address, hardcoded into the interfaces laced through my brain. It was worth a shot, I guess. I submitted it to the request field.

Then ART’s voice, ART’s real voice, filled the feed. It said, Drop the weapon. Arada dropped her energy weapon and Thiago dropped the fire suppressant. Both held up empty hands. I told it, Don’t hurt my humans.