System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

On the team feed, ART said, SecUnit, status report. Or punch ART in the face. I sent back, I wish I could punch you in the face. ART said, I wish you could try.

Remember those agricultural bots that I said looked scary but were actually harmless? Yes, I was hilariously wrong about that at the time and I hadn’t gotten any less wrong since then.

(For however many corporate standard years, all I got from humans was “Run in there now no matter how likely you are to get blown to tiny pieces when a quiet tactical approach has a higher percentage of success” and now it’s “Oh no we’re fine, we can hang out in this objectively terrifying immediately hazardous situation for however long.”)

Yeah, this plan was … not going to work. (I could see my mistake now. I’d let ART and the humans come up with this idea.

Oh, great save, B-E SecUnit, most humans wouldn’t have been able to evade that. What the hell kind of retrieval was that supposed to be? ART, watching my visual data, said, That was .2 degrees away from a murder attempt.

The only thing I could do was confuse it as much as possible. I rolled over and groaned like a human (potentially not a great idea, it sounded embarrassingly fake) and pulled a few clips from Sanctuary Moon of the various scenes where the colony solicitor’s bodyguard had been injured and had to stand up again.

I’d restricted my camera views to ART to keep the humans from getting more agitated, but once it was clear I had survived, ART had shared a clip of my close call. Probably so it had someone to be angry about it with.

ART had told Mensah it wouldn’t push me. Just because its MedSystem was certified for emotional support and trauma recovery it thought it knew everything.

“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?”

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.

(According to Martyn, ART is of course capable of doing its own accounting, but it always ends up with extra numbers that no one can trace. So now Turi does it and has to keep a hardcopy ledger because otherwise ART would alter their data. No one knew if ART was making up numbers for the hell of it or if these numbers represented actual credit balances that ART was hiding somewhere.)

space embezzlement

The first thing the new Barish-Estranza explorer had done was power up to ART and try to intimidate it/us. (I know. I was below 66 percent operating capacity at the time and I thought it was a bad idea. ART had dropped its main weapon port and transmitted, Targeting lock acquired. 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.

There was a pause, indicating a scramble to adjust operational parameters, then they made the mistake of trying to intimidate back with something like Oh yeah well you’ll get damaged, too, and I am not exactly an expert on nonfictional human interactions but that just obviously wasn’t going to cut it. ART transmitted, You can make this complicated situation simple for me.

Fortunately, between ART, me, our humans, and the colonists, the level of paranoia about virus contamination on this planet was more than adequate, even by my standards.

We didn’t want the colonists to know Three was a SecUnit, mostly to fend off conversations about how much the giant angry planet-bombing transport likes this SecUnit and will it lose its mind if a rock falls on it or something.