System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

I was monitoring ART-drone’s systems and it was dropping toward catastrophic failure. I said, You need to hurry. ART: handoff initiated. ART-drone: handoff. And ART-drone shut down. Suddenly, it was just a chunk of metal. Iris made a half-sob noise that startled me so badly I flinched. She threw a wary look at Leonide and said on our private channel, Did they have time for the upload? Yes, I said. She nodded and wiped her eyes. I know they’re the same, it’s all just Peri. 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. It was like the way I’d felt when I killed the Target who threatened Amena and laughed at me because I was upset when I thought ART was dead. Except without the violence, and that only lasted a minute or so, and this seemed like it would go on a while. Nobody was dead and I hadn’t had a relapse of my stupid memory thing. And if I did have a relapse, at least I knew what it was now. Don’t just sit there, ART said to me and Iris as it brought the shuttle into its docking module. Console each other. I said, You fuck off at the same time...