System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

So I’m here now and it’s fine, everyone shut up about it, okay.

lol top tier Murderbot quote

Note to self: don’t let the ag-bot take it away from you and shoot you with it. Talk about adding insult to injury.)

“Thank you for your help,” Iris said, in a way that could be mistaken for politeness by a bot but a human would definitely know there was an undercurrent of fuck you. “Are you going to bill us later?”

Barish-Estranza must have picked up on that subtext because they backed down and now they think ART is a human commanding officer who’s a giant asshole.)

(And I am aware of the irony, since I know exactly how hard the question “what do you want” can be when you don’t have a fucking clue what you want. But we weren’t talking existential questions of existence here, just the basic: Do you want to be salvaged by Barish-Estranza as corporate contract labor for the rest of your lives? Select (1) yes (2) no.)

In ART’s lounge, Seth pressed his hands to his face and groaned. For a second I didn’t get it. I mean, I want to press my hands to my face and groan, too, but I pretty much always do.

call it the argucussion—

argucussion, I like it lol

Whatever, we wouldn’t have hard data until the University sent their response vessel, if then. I would just factor the possibility into the projected long-term threat assessment and increase my anxiety levels by the commensurate amount. ART, define commensurate.

“What?” Ratthi said aloud, distracted by the autoplay images. “Oh, SecUnit wants me to mention the time I was almost eaten by fauna that came up underneath our aircraft on an inadequately mapped ground survey.”

They were going to volunteer to go down to the surface and check for landing stability. And right after I had made Ratthi talk about almost being eaten, too.

On our private feed, ART-drone said, If you open that hatch now I will turn this thing around and go home.

lmao not ART threatening to turn the car around

In this sequence a subsurface hostile fauna takes down an aircraft at forty meters. I sent it into the team feed. Tarik yelled, “What the— What the fuck was that?” Raising his voice to talk over Tarik, Ratthi said, “I understand your concern, SecUnit, but you are not jumping out at this height!”