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.

I sent back, I wish I could punch you in the face. ART said, I wish you could try.

The explorer had replied something to the effect that they didn’t mean to be intimidating and was the widdle academic transport crew scared, but in corporate speak, and ART had replied, It’s so easy for ships to disappear out here.

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.)

(So earlier, after redacted, Three had told me that I could wear its armor, if I wanted. Well, it hadn’t used those words. It hadn’t gotten the idea yet that it might have personal possessions that belonged to it and no one else, so it had gotten me to follow it to ART’s secure storage where the armor was being kept and just stood there pointing at the door with a confused expression.) (Yes, it had taken 2.3 minutes of questioning by both me and ART and Overse and Turi to figure out what it was trying to tell us.)

From the shuttle, watching through my feed, Ratthi said, “Why are round hatches more frightening than square ones?”

Also, while I could understand Tarik’s confusion, Ratthi wasn’t wrong. I ran a quick query on hatch shape in my media storage, focusing on popular adventure and suspense/horror dramas and the high incidence of hazardous fauna, raiders, human and/or bot murderers, and/or magical fauna, unidentified but terrifying dark presences, and straight up monsters associated with round hatches. I sent the results into the team feed. ART-drone said, You wasted processing space on that?

(I asked because the humans would bug me for the information; I was as indifferent to human gender as it was possible to be without being unconscious.)

It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions. Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes.

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.)

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