MurderBotBot

(I don’t have any gender or sex-related parts (if a construct has those you’re a sexbot in a brothel, not a murderbot) so maybe that’s why I find sex scenes boring. Though I think that even if I did have sex-related parts I would find them boring.)

The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop.

But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit.

There were a lot of things I was going to have to get over.

On the feed it was clear that the others had reviewed Volescu’s field camera video. They were saying things like I didn’t even know it had a face.

On the private channel between ART and me, I said, I apologize for calling you a fucker. It said, I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients.

How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.

It waited thirty whole seconds, then it said, The systems of constructs are inherently inferior to advanced bots, but you aren’t stupid.

I’m not even going to dignify that with a reaction.

Transports don’t hang out on the feed constantly downloading (not that there’s anything wrong with constantly downloading) but they do access it to keep in contact with the transit ring’s scheduling and alerts channels

I said, I’m not actually a human baby, ART, I remember the fucking directive—I helped write it.

That usually left me standing there helplessly listening to their problems and their grievances against each other, against various corporations they had been fucked over by (yeah, tell me about it), and against existence in general. Yes, listening to it was excruciating.

They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon. Everybody looked at me again. Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.” I did.

Mensah cleared her throat in a “you are trying to annoy each other but are mostly annoying me” way.

MedSystem helpfully informed me that my performance reliability was now at 58 percent and dropping, which was not a surprise.

It was almost as dumb an impulse as some things I’ve seen humans do.

I dug my fingers into the edge of the med platform. The skin on them itched, too, where the surgical suite had fixed the burned parts. “You told them I was a weapon, that they could use.”

As Ratthi put it, “You’d think they could at least pretend to give a damn.”

But Wilken was human, so I had to go back and retrieve her stupid ass now.

I yelled, “No!” which I’m not supposed to do; I’m always supposed to speak respectfully to the clients, even when they’re about to accidentally commit suicide.

Nobody fucking listens to me.

In our private connection, ART said, Stop. ART has different ways of telling you to stop doing what you’re doing, with different threat levels, and this was toward the top of the list.

Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it.

The medical drones were clamped onto me now, digging for the projectiles, and I was leaking onto ART’s pristine MedSystem floor. The anesthetic was making me numb.

I guess if you were really determined, you could find a way to get yourself killed by exposing the power connectors under the panels and shielding and, I don’t know, licking them or something, but this dead human clearly hadn’t.

Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are.

I tapped my private channel to Miki and then had no idea what to say. (“Thank you for not exposing my lies” seemed a little too blatant.)

I was sitting on the counter next to the sink and running episode 237 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon in background so I could pretend to be watching it during the 400+ times ART had pinged me.

I sighed again. I was having a lot of opportunities to do it and I think I was getting good at it.

I know you believe it, but you’re wrong, and I don’t want to hear it.

Dead clients were terrible for business.

I had to play it. Maybe I was desperate for some sign ART was still here somewhere, but the fact that it was a video clip felt like a communication method only someone who knew me would choose.

Yeah, corporations suck.

I hadn’t said anything because what was I supposed to say at this point? Oh, I guess I could have said “hello.” Well, it was too late now.

Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.

Humans should really do more research. There were operating manuals that would have warned her not to fuck with us.

In Preservation culture, asking payment for anything considered necessary for living (food, power sources, education, the feed, etc.) was considered outrageous, but asking payment for life-saving help was right up there with cannibalism.

I had an option, but it was a terrible idea.

Oh right, I often have complex emotional reactions which I can’t easily interpret.

Ratthi glanced at me, and then did a startled double take. I had no idea how to react. This is why I prefer wearing the armor, even inside the habitat where it’s unnecessary and can just get in the way.

Organic neural tissue can be melded with inorganic systems (Example A: the squishy bits inside my skull)

Undetermined, ART said, like it honestly didn’t give a crap. And honestly, it probably didn’t. The Targets had attacked ART’s crew. It wasn’t interested in the mystery, it just wanted its crew back.

(I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.)

This was going to be even more annoying than I had anticipated, and I had anticipated a pretty high level of annoyance, maybe as high as 85 percent. Now I was looking at 90 percent, possibly 95 percent.

I thought I had gotten good at controlling my expression, but apparently only when I wasn’t feeling actual emotions.

I said, You’re using the public feed, everyone can hear you. So are you, ART said. And you’re leaking on my deck.

I knew from threat assessments on Ratthi’s associates that he had a lot of relationships with all genders of humans and augmented humans and he and they all seemed very happy about it. Amena should ask him for advice.

I thought about poor dead Miki, who had wanted to be my friend. There was a 93 percent chance Miki had wanted to be everybody’s friend

And it hit me then that ART had been desperate and terrified since the moment the Barish-Estranza explorer had sidled up and done whatever it had done.

I said, “Wow, that was rude. Especially considering that I’m your second mother’s”—I made ironic quote marks—“‘friend.’ Is that how you talk to your bot-servants?”

You’re talking too much, ART told her on the feed, right as I was about to say it.