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.

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

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.

(Or more anxiety than it already had on its own.)

(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.)

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.

I know, it seemed simple. (And I am aware of the irony, since I know exactly how hard the question “what do you want” can be when you don’t have a fucking clue what you want. But we weren’t talking existential questions of existence here, just the basic: Do you want to be salvaged by Barish-Estranza as corporate contract labor for the rest of your lives? Select (1) yes (2) no.)

Which, it’s not like I don’t understand the whole idea of not forgiving stuff that happens to you. But it seems like they could not-hate each other long enough to avoid getting turned into corporate slave labor, and then start hating each other again after the threat assessment percentage went down.)

I could walk in the opposite direction, just walk until— Yeah, I’m going to tag this section for delete.

Maybe these other humans were imaginary. Humans are great at imagining stuff. That’s why their media is so good.

I said, “Sure.” Because they were going anyway. It was a bad idea to let them go alone.

I can’t do that right now. Pretending I’m fine for Mensah was hard enough. I forwarded the messages to her and said, Can you tell them I’m fine? I hate this. It’s not like I permanently lost an appendage or something.

But still, a small metal container filled with mushy humans hurtling over spiky rocks for long periods agitates my threat assessment module.

Getting attached to an additional group of humans was always going to be complicated, but. Ugh, I wish I felt like I was prepared for complication. Or prepared for anything.

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.)

ART has been monitoring me due to redacted. Which is a whole thing, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about it.

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

He hadn’t asked me what I was doing, probably because he was afraid I didn’t know. Which, valid, but this time I actually did know.

Murderbot, you have got to stop this. Do your fucking job.

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’m off my game, obviously, but I’m not dead.)

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

On our private feed, ART-drone said, What the hell are you doing? Your stats are dropping. I was just thinking about alien contamination, I told it. Stop that immediately, ART-drone said. Right, good luck with that. I was thinking about it because I am currently standing in front of what is clearly a Pre–Corporation Rim site. A lot like the one where I redacted.

She didn’t want to do this any more than I did, except somehow she had a lot more control over her neural tissue.

Humans from Preservation have no concept about what happens in the Corporation Rim to humans who borrow corporate property, even if they put it back when they’re done.

(For a human, I was fast. For a SecUnit, I felt like I was moving in slow motion.) (The only reason I wasn’t panicking more about that is that ART-drone is slower than ART-prime but that is still really fucking fast.)

I should know this. I used to be good at this, what the fuck happened to me. Oh right, that happened.

Had I taken a human’s job? Under normal circumstances that would be kind of hilarious.

The humans had stopped talking. (It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. Weirdly, I’d gotten used to humans talking in background, like music that isn’t your favorite but is still vaguely nice to listen to.)

Murderbot, why are you like this?)

ART-drone said, Your attempts at emotional manipulation need work. But your point is taken.

Can you burn out your ability to feel that a place is creepy? Ratthi answered, I think that’s called being in shock.

Their hypothesis, as delivered by Dr. Mensah in Medical after I was online again, was that it was like what happened when a human had a flashback. And because no one had any information at all on the effects of trauma on a construct’s machine/organic neural combo, the MedSystem hadn’t recognized it for what it was until ART got into my activity logs and rummaged around.

(They were all so nice about it. The whole thing made me understand the human expression “it made me want to vomit.” Why would you ever want to do something that was so objectively disgusting and looked so painful. Oh, this was why, I get it now.)

But that wasn’t me being especially smart, it was just me not being especially stupid.

It was a mess and it was getting more messy every second. I keep telling myself I’m security, my job is to protect my humans while they try to save these other humans. There wasn’t anything I could do to help except stay out of it. But no one was attacking us right now and I felt useless.

(Let’s face it, actual solid physical or visual evidence will often not change human minds.)

anything is possible and bad things may not be more statistically possible but it sure seems like they are.

I don’t know, not even humans know why humans do things.

If it started being sympathetic it would be terrifying.

It’s not just the data that has to be correct, but the way that you present it has to feel right, be right. I’d learned that the hard way, trying to convince humans to not do stupid things and get themselves killed. It was obvious that media could change emotions, change opinions. Visual, audio, or text media could actually rewrite organic neural processes.

It was hard. I never liked watching helpless humans because I knew what happened to them, now I was having to not just watch it but create a story out of it and explain why and how it was happening.

the humans were starting to distract me by not doing anything distracting.

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.)

Even when you’re a bot, there’s things you say because you believe them and things you say to keep the humans going in the right direction.

I would be panicking more, but I didn’t have time.

But I had no cameras, no intel, no idea what else was happening except heavy breathing as the humans ran and Ratthi cursing quietly in the shuttle. You’d think it would be nice not to have distractions and you would be so, so wrong. I am not meant to function without multiple simultaneous inputs. If this was what being a human was like, it sucked massively.

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

I was having an emotion. Like a big overwhelming emotion. It felt bad but good, a weird combination of happy and sad and relieved, like something had been stuck and it wasn’t stuck anymore. Cathartic, okay. This fits the definition of cathartic.