System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

(Dr. Bharadwaj says even good change is stressful.)

Martyn told me that Iris and ART have been interacting since Iris was a new human baby and ART was a new whatever the hell it is and sometimes that is not surprising at all.

(ART is a secret from everyone except for the upper level departments at the University of Mihira and New Tideland. Barish-Estranza had no idea what it was dealing with.)

(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.

(“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I had told Mensah. “I think you might know,” she had said. “You just don’t want to talk about it.”)

Whether they’re going to trick them into leaving, or use force. She did something with her mouth that was not a smile. Or worse. I could have asked what “or worse” meant in this context but there was only so much I could take and I thought I’d hit my limit about, I don’t know, four years ago.

But since the thing that happened I don’t think I’ve had an emotion that wasn’t the visual equivalent of a wet blanket crumpled on a floor.

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