Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6)

by Martha Wells

Humans do the “make it a question so it doesn’t sound so bad” thing and it still sounds bad.

They don’t want me. (Hey, I don’t want me, either, but I’m stuck with me.)

No, it was not helping my anxiety. But it was necessary.)

“Yes, I’ve had experience with investigating suspicious fatalities in controlled circumstances.” Indah’s gaze wasn’t exactly skeptical. “What controlled circumstances?” I said, “Isolated work installations.” Her expression turned even more grim. “Corporate slave labor camps.” I said, “Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets angry and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue.”

Whatever—the big danger to humans is not raiders, angry human-eating fauna, or rogue SecUnits; it’s other humans.

Being the top Preservation expert in dealing with contract law in the Corporation Rim apparently made Pin-Lee like the CombatUnit version of a lawyer.

Pin-Lee had promised, “Don’t worry, I’ll preserve your right to wander off like an asshole anytime you like.”) (I said, “It takes one to know one.”)

Okay, wow. But it wasn’t like it hurt my feelings or anything. Not at all. I was used to this. Completely used to it.

If GrayCris shows up and blows the station all to hell, it won’t be my fault. Right, so it probably will be my fault. There just won’t be that much I can do about it.

(I had promised not to hack Station systems. Nobody had said anything about not setting up my own systems.)

“There are two ways to move through station transit rings if you’re afraid someone’s watching for you. You can try to fade into the background, which is much easier to do if there’s a crowd. You can also make yourself look distinctive, like someone who isn’t worried about being seen.”

I know a “fuck off” when I hear one. So I fucked off.

the humans on the Station wouldn’t have to think about what I was, a construct made of cloned human tissue, augments, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module. I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

Mensah’s really smart, she can sort-of bribe me and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.

I just realized I don’t like the phrase “as far as I knew” because it implies how much you actually don’t know. I’m not going to stop using it, but. I don’t like it as much anymore.

(Yeah, good luck with that. Trying to get humans not to touch dangerous things was a full-time job.)

(I don’t know why bot behaviors that are useless except to comfort humans annoy me so much.) (Okay, maybe I do. They built us, right? So didn’t they know how this type of bot took in visual data? It’s not like sensors and scanners just popped up randomly on its body without humans putting them there.)

It’s also not like I didn’t know what the real problem was. I’m not a bot, I’m not a human, so I don’t fit into any neat category. Also, I hate being patronized. (The whole bot-guardian system is like an attraction field for humans who like to be patronizing.)

I could hack the port’s transient arrivals system but I had said I wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t. Also, it seemed pointless to do it just to run a search that Tural and the other Station Security techs could run as soon as they bothered to read my report. But just asking for information had worked really well the first time so I decided to try it again.

(The humans not being able to tell what I was doing just guaranteed that whatever they assumed I was doing would be way, way worse than me having a brief comm interaction with each transport in dock, trying to get info for stupid Station Security.)

If I didn’t find anything, this was going to be a huge waste of my time. Possibly I should just stop complaining like a human and get on with it.

That left me with the human most likely to want to drop everything and come watch me break into a damaged transport and the human also most likely to come watch me break into a damaged transport but only so he could argue with me about it. So I called both of them.

I would be more pissed off about him saying that except a) he was right about the passive aggressive thing and b) he was standing where I had told him to stand, blocking the nearest port camera view of what I was doing.

but without evidence I was just making up shit. (If I’m going to make up shit I’d rather do it about something else besides how a human got murdered by another human.)

she was listed as a Special Investigator. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was a good job title and honestly it made me a little jealous.

Aylen looked me over again in that way humans do when they’re trying to intimidate you and they fail to understand you’ve spent the entire length of your previous existence being treated like a thing and so one more impersonal once-over is not exactly going to impress you.

There was a lot I didn’t know for sure. I am going to have to stop scaring the shit out of myself.

Aylen did not make it clear that she didn’t like the fact that I was invited. It would have been easier if she had, because then I would have known where I stood, and if I should be an asshole or not.

(I will never figure out how humans decide who gets to sit where and do what, it’s never the same.) (There were more cups and small plates with food residue on the table. They’re always eating.)

She tapped the investigators’ private feed, which I had not been given access to and did not hack, because apparently I get to sit in a chair but not participate.

It could have just been that Target Four had a bad memory. (I was always having to remember that humans didn’t have full access to the archives stored in their neural tissue, which explained a lot about their behavior.)

Whatever, the chance that it was GrayCris activity that had caused Lutran’s death was dropping rapidly. I could leave Station Security to finish up. Go back and catch up on my media while I kept watch over Mensah. I should do that. The rest of this was Station Security’s job, I could leave. I could pretend to be the enigmatic SecUnit and just get up and walk out. Pin-Lee had written my employment contract that way, so I could just leave. I wasn’t leaving.

There had to be something I was missing. Or maybe I’m just a robot with enough human neural tissue jammed in my head to make me stupid who should have stayed with the company, guarding contract labor and staring at walls.

But sometimes you have to look into every possibility, even the dumb ones.)

(The only thing worse than humans infantilizing bots was bots infantilizing themselves.)

If I was going to be useless, I could at least be useless where stuff was going on.

I had to get Indah to trust me. I could start by talking to her, I guess, I had actually not tried that yet, really.

“You are the most paranoid person I’ve ever met, and I’ve worked in criminal reform for twenty-six years.” I don’t even know how to react to that. She’s not wrong but hey, I need my paranoia.

You know, swearing during operations doesn’t meet the professional conduct standards of Station Security. By this point I knew that was Aylen’s idea of a joke. I replied, Because Senior Indah has never told anybody to fuck off. You have me there.

I didn’t need as much air as humans did, but I needed some, and it was really cold out there, in the colony ship’s shadow. This meant that if the life-tender failed it would take me longer to die so I’d have longer to feel dumb about it than a human would.

That plan was easier plus 100 percent less murdery. And I liked it better. Huh. I liked it better because it wasn’t a CombatUnit plan, or actually a plan that humans would come up with for CombatUnits. Sneaking the endangered humans off the ship to safety and then leaving the hostiles for someone else to deal with, that was a SecUnit plan, that was what we were really designed for, despite how the company and every other corporate used us. The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.

Fortunately I had a lot of experience being screamed at and stared at by terrified humans. It was never comfortable,

Indah glared at me. “You talk to Dr. Mensah like that?” “Yes. That’s why she’s still alive.”

Balin’s secondary function allowed it to kill humans and there is only one kind of bot made in the Corporation Rim with that function. Under Balin’s general purpose carapace, it was a CombatBot.

(Okay, so a human or augmented human might have made those same mistakes. Maybe exploring every possible outcome of each action in an inescapable loop of paranoia and anxiety wasn’t the most normal reaction-state but hey, if it was, there would be a lot fewer stupid murders. I don’t know what I’m trying to get at with this. I’d make a better corporate spy? Probably? Except not being a corporate spy left a lot more time for media so that was just never going to be an option.) (And also, I’d rather be disassembled while conscious, again.)

All I wanted to do was watch media and not exist. I said, You know I don’t like fun.

She said, “I’ll authorize the hard currency card payment for you. And I assume you’re open to another contract the next time something weird happens.” I paused in the doorway. The expected wave of depression at the idea of ever doing this again had somehow not happened. Huh. I said, “Only if it’s really weird.” She said, “Understood.”