System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

next time I get optimistic about something, I want one of you to punch me in the face.

call it the argucussion—with

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.

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.

(Or maybe they did and they just didn’t care. I mean, let’s be honest, which one is more likely? I’m just making an observation here.)

Did I understand how it processed its emotions? No. But I don’t understand how I process my emotions, either. So with everything that was going on right now, it was particularly stupid that what I felt was, you know, whatever it was.

Did humans ever fucking listen to anybody—human, augmented human, bot, SecUnit—who was trying to tell them that they were in danger, that their world was about to fall apart?

It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions.

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.)