Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

Even the individual humans’ feed signatures only contained info about sexual availability and gender presentation, which I didn’t give a damn about.

“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.

Her expression had turned all melty and sentimental. “No hugging,” I warned her. It was in our contract. “Do you need emotional support? Do you want me to call someone?”

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

I didn’t want to answer any reasonable questions. If I was wrong, I’d probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse.

“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.

I also confuse anagram and acronym. I think those are the two. Humans do have too many words.

ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant. Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—” 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.”

I yelled, “ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!”

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.

(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.)

(Foolproof is another weird word. Shouldn’t it be smartproof? It’s not like you’re going to breach and seize control of a ship attached to a space dock by tripping or forgetting to bring your weapon or something.)

(I know, it’s a logo, but I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin things for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I’m not careful I could be a thing again.)