System Collapse (The Murderbot Diaries, #7)

by Martha Wells

At least it was making me nervous for a survival-based reason instead of … redacted.

Me, ART, Mensah, Seth, and Martyn had all made that decision, because of redacted.

(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.”) (I’m just saying that it would be nice for the humans to give me a realistic situation report for once.) (Dr. Bharadwaj says even good change is stressful.)

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.

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.

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

You’re stalling, ART-drone said. I am not. I can stand here and be useless without any ulterior motives, thanks.

I had let Iris and Tarik secure their environmental suits and get out to look at the hatch, but made Ratthi stay at the controls. It was hard keeping him in there because he really likes to walk around on planets and he is also great at finding dangerous shit.

“Be safe, SecUnit,” she said. I don’t know how to respond when humans say that. It was always my job to get hurt.

Tarik lowered his hands, still looking at me. “Right. We should talk about this later.” We probably should but we absolutely are not going to, not if I can help it.

This place wasn’t as creepy as it had been at first. It was also, weirdly, way easier to walk around in here than it had been to step through the hatch. I tapped my private feed connection with Ratthi and said, Can you burn out your ability to feel that a place is creepy? Ratthi answered, I think that’s called being in shock. Thanks, Ratthi. If I wanted someone to ruin my fun, I’d have asked ART-drone.

I didn’t want to just stand here waiting, and watching media under these circumstances was clearly not a good idea no matter how much I really, really wanted to watch media.

I was as indifferent to human gender as it was possible to be without being unconscious.)

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.

Of course, ART-drone said. It poked me in the threat assessment module. And what is the probability of that, again, exactly? It’s such an asshole when it knows it’s winning. Fuck off, I told it.

ART-drone said. You should stop worrying. 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.)

Who wrote this fucking module, for fuck’s sake, it’s not factoring in the exceptions. No wonder taking advice from Sanctuary Moon was better.

(Yes, ART was not the only one. I was still processing whether this was a surprise, not a surprise, or a horrible shock. So were my humans. My Preservation humans.) (It was weird to have so many humans I had to give them group names.)