Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5)

by Martha Wells

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.”

Target Two whispered something, which FacilitySys rendered as “What are you?” I said, “I’m a Shut Up or Get Your Head Smashed.”

“Let him go.” I didn’t really feel like negotiating. I have a module on it, somewhere in my archive. It was never much help.

“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.

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

She was scornful, and way overconfident. “I wasn’t going to let him hurt me.” I said, “If I thought he was going to hurt you, I’d be disposing of his body. I don’t fuck around, either.”

I’d watched family dramas before, but I’d never spent much time around human families before coming to Preservation. (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.)

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

Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

One big problem with that scenario, no wait, two: 1) getting aboard without ART’s cooperation and 2) doing something to ART without getting violently murdered. (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.)

Unidentified One sounded even more amused. “You had better have the weapon we were told of, or I’ll take your ribs out one by one and break them in front of your little face.” I saved that for future reference. Unidentified One seemed to have gone to some trouble with the wording of that threat, it would be a shame if they never experienced it firsthand.

I grabbed Target One’s face. Not my best strategic attack, but the quickest way to shut it up. Using its face as a handle, I slung it sideways into the couch built against the bulkhead.

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.

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.

Amena said, “SecUnit! My mother will be angry if you hurt him!” Oh, we were going to try that tactic, were we. I said, “You obviously don’t know how your mother actually feels about Corporates.”

ART said, And this is your idea of being helpful. I said, “This is my idea of the opposite of being helpful. I am here against my will and you are going to regret that.”

“Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don’t have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.”

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.”

(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.)

Her skin was one of the mid browns that was common to a large percentage of humans but it had an artificially smooth even tone that indicated cosmetic enhancement. (My skin was less even than hers and it gets completely regenerated on a regular basis due to me being shot in the face.)

“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.)

ART put the contact on hold and said, Clear. And then it did one of my what-the-hell-have-the-humans-done-now sighs.

(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.)

I ran my code to make my movement and body language more human to keep from drawing attention. I was running it now out of habit. When I stopped it, I’d look a lot more like a “normal” SecUnit even without armor. (Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

“Surely they won’t suspect anything,” Ratthi was saying to the others at the bulk dock. “Who runs around with a friendly rogue SecUnit? Besides us, I mean.”

Overse added, “Just remember you’re not alone here.” I never know what to say to that. I am actually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.

“The name I call Perihelion is ART, which stands for Asshole Research Transport.” Seth’s grim expression relaxed and Tarik said, “You definitely know the real Peri.”

That’s not in your deployment directive. I was pretty sure of that, because I hadn’t known TargetContact existed until 2.0 had given me its report. Yeah, I wrote a new directive. Killware was not supposed to be able to alter its deployment directive, so that was disturbing.