System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

So the next time I get optimistic about something, I want one of you to punch me in the face. Okay, not really, because let’s be real, that would end badly. Maybe remind me to punch myself in the face.

At least it was making me nervous for a survival-based reason instead of … redacted.

(For however many corporate standard years, all I got from humans was “Run in there now no matter how likely you are to get blown to tiny pieces when a quiet tactical approach has a higher percentage of success” and now it’s “Oh no we’re fine, we can hang out in this objectively terrifying immediately hazardous situation for however long.”) (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.)

Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.

It should be reassuring that humans don’t get what other humans are thinking, either, but it just highlights how fucked up human neural tissue can be.

(I know I get pissed off when humans don’t acknowledge my work, but why is too much acknowledgment also upsetting? Sentience sucks.)

humans have a bad habit of assuming that if they know a thing, all the other humans in the vicinity know it, too. Either that or they believe none of the other humans know anything that they don’t know. It’s either one or the other and both are potentially catastrophic and really fucking annoying.

“Be safe, SecUnit,” she said. I don’t know how to respond when humans say that. It was always my job to get hurt.

I don’t know, not even humans know why humans do things.

Yeah, I’ll just code a patch to stop feeling anxiety, wow, why didn’t I think of that earlier. (That was sarcasm, I have too much organic neural tissue for that to work.) (Of course I’ve already tried it.)

Even before I hacked my governor module, I was upset when my coworkers shot me. I wasn’t surprised, but I was upset.

fuck’s sake, it’s not factoring in the exceptions. No wonder taking advice from Sanctuary Moon was better.

I am not meant to function without multiple simultaneous inputs. If this was what being a human was like, it sucked massively.

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.