System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

(I’m just saying that it would be nice for the humans to give me a realistic situation report for once.) (Dr. Bharadwaj says even good change is stressful.)

Iris told Thiago that it had undergone a traumatic experience and would verbally act out until it had fully processed what had happened.

could really see from this point; the space was too big and dark. (I could turn on my helmet light, but it would make me a great target, if a hostile had detected my entrance. Which, if I were a human hiding up here in isolation and a stranger walked in suddenly in an unfamiliar brand of environmental suit, I’d shoot at me.) (Okay I wouldn’t, but then I’m not a human who was panicking about getting murdered or whatever.) (I’m a SecUnit who was panicking about getting murdered or whatever by panicking humans.)

Whatever caused the false memory to spontaneously appear out of fucking nowhere, it had made my performance reliability drop so quickly that I shut down, variously upsetting and freaking the humans out. Their hypothesis, as delivered by Dr. Mensah in Medical after I was online again, was that it was like what happened when a human had a flashback.

I had to make media to tell a story to these humans. Not my story, and not just me talking. I had to tell their story, the story of what would happen to them if they said yes to Barish-Estranza. It would technically be fiction, but the kind of fiction that was true in all the ways that mattered.

That the drone will be repaired and the next time we need it, it’ll be the same. But still, when something happens like this, it scares me. I just don’t want to lose any piece of Peri, you know? I know, I said. And I did know, and now I was having an emotion. Like a big overwhelming emotion. It felt bad but good, a weird combination of happy and sad and relieved, like something had been stuck and it wasn’t stuck anymore. Cathartic, okay. This fits the definition of cathartic.

And I had decided, for real this time, which ship I would be on when I left. Do you know where we’re going next? I asked ART.