System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

ART-drone pushed the shuttle forward in one abrupt surge of power. It stopped just short of ramming the B-E shuttle; the cockpits were less than a meter apart. All the humans, Barish-Estranza and Ratthi, screamed.

Put the fucking panic module away, you know what to do.

Also it had that stupid projectile weapon arm, which it immediately started trying to shoot me with again.

You’d think it would be nice not to have distractions and you would be so, so wrong. I am not meant to function without multiple simultaneous inputs.

My angle was bad but I didn’t have a choice; I fired an energy pulse right into its spine and through my palm and fingers. (I’ve had to do this before and it’s never fun.)

It wasn’t dead, it was just catastrophically damaged. (I know, who isn’t?)

My function is impaired, Iris. So is SecUnit’s. Will you shut the hell up? I said. You shut up, it replied.

Not that I could do much to protect the humans now because the primary danger at the moment was one of them slamming the pseudohopper into a wall.

What I wanted to do was sit here and watch Sanctuary Moon with ART-drone.

“One question,” Leonide said, keeping her attention on the control interface. “Is that actually a SecUnit?” “You know,” Iris said conversationally, taking a pad out of the medical kit and wiping bloodstains off ART-drone’s carapace. “You can mind your own damn business.” “Oversensitive,” Leonide said, but she must have been too tired to hide the frustration in her voice. She was quiet for 5.3 seconds, then burst out, “Is someone actually watching entertainment in the feed right now?”

since ART–bot pilot, while not vocal, is still an ART iteration and I could feel it watching her in the feed like a thoughtful predator.)

It was somewhere in the upper atmosphere, that part where it stops being atmosphere and starts being space, I don’t know what it’s called and ART-drone was drifting, watching World Hoppers, and I didn’t want to disturb it by asking.

I sent, We’re coming in with possible pursuit and sent it a vid of the B-E shuttle getting booped by the pathfinder.

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...

I sent back a message packet that said, basically, that I was a security consultant and that wasn’t my job. (Except for the batshit ag-bots, that was clearly my job. I needed to get on that.)

Three indicated that it did want that. It was still tricky trying to tell if it was actually interested instead of just saying yes to everything you asked it, but it did have that weird thing for nonfiction and educational entertainment. I connected it with Holism on the feed.

We were going to have to figure out what Three wanted to do, or how to get Three to tell us what it wanted to do.