Artificial Condition--The Murderbot Diaries

ART watched it walk away through its lock camera. It said, I thought you might destroy it.

Too tired and numb to talk, I signaled a negative through the feed. It hadn’t had a choice. And I hadn’t broken its governor module for its sake. I did it for the four ComfortUnits at Ganaka Pit who had no orders and no directive to act and had voluntarily walked into the meat grinder to try to save me and everyone else left alive in the installation.

I turned to see Tlacey reaching for one of the fallen weapons. I said, “Touch that weapon and I’ll take it away from you and insert it into your rib cage.”

She froze. She was panting from fear, eyes staring. I said, “Tell your sexbot to stop fighting.”

It was still struggling to get up and it was just going to hurt itself further. Especially if it made me mad again.

Tlacey straightened slowly, her jaw working, and the sexbot relaxed. I said, ART, cut off Tlacey’s feed.

Done, ART said.

Tlacey winced as her feed went down. I told Tlacey, “Give the sexbot a verbal command to obey me until further notice. Try to give it any other command and I’ll rip your tongue out.”

Tlacey huffed out a breath, then said, “Unit, obey the crazy rogue SecUnit until further notice.” To me, she said, “You need to get better threats.”

I put a hand on the nearest chair seat and shoved myself to my feet. “I don’t make threats, I’m just telling you what I’m going to do.”

What do you propose to do?

There was a pause. A long one, five seconds. We could kill them.

Well, that was an unusual approach to its dilemma. Kill who? Tlacey?

All of them. The humans here.

I leaned against the wall. If I had been human, I would have rolled my eyes. Though if I had been human, I might have been stupid enough to think it was a good idea.

I also wondered if it knew a lot more about me than what little was in the newsburst.

Picking up on my reaction, ART said, What does it want?

To kill all the humans, I answered.

I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational.

I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.

Huh.

I said to the sexbot, Is that how Tlacey thinks constructs talk to each other?

There was another pause, only two seconds this time. Yes. Then, Tlacey believes you stayed behind to steal the files for the tech group.

She had bought some meal packs with the hard currency card and had them stuffed in her bag. She offered me one and I told her my augments required me to have a special diet and it wasn’t time for me to eat yet. She accepted that readily. Humans apparently don’t like to discuss catastrophic injuries to digestive systems, so I didn’t need any of the corroborating detail ART had just researched for me. I asked her if she liked media and she said yes, so I sent some files to the display surface in the
room, and we watched the first three episodes of Worldhoppers. ART was pleased, and I could feel it sitting in my feed, comparing Tapan’s reactions to the show to mine.

She looked at me and bit her lip. “You’re really augmented, aren’t you. Like, a lot. Like more than someone would choose voluntarily.”

It wasn’t a question. I said, “Um, yes.”

She nodded. “Was it an accident?”

I realized I had my arms wrapped around myself and was leaning over like I was trying to go into a fetal position. I don’t know why this was so stressful. Tapan wasn’t afraid of me. I had no reason to be afraid of her. Maybe it was being here again, seeing Ganaka Pit again. Some part of my organic systems remembered what had happened
there. In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped. I said, “I got caught in an explosion. There’s not much of me that’s human, actually.”

Both those statements are true.

Tapan dropped her bag on the floor and faced me. “I know you’re mad.”

I tried to moderate my expression. “I’m not mad.” I was furious. I thought my clients were safe, I was free to worry about my own problems, and now I had a tiny human to look after that I couldn’t possibly abandon.

She nodded and pushed her braids back. “I know—I mean—I’m sure Rami and Maro were furious. But it’s not like I’m not afraid, so that’s good.”

In my feed, ART said, What?

I have no idea, I told it. I said to Tapan, “How is that good?”

She explained, “In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. You should do the things you’re afraid of.”

If a bot with a brain the size of a transport could roll its eyes, that was what ART was doing. I said, “That isn’t the purpose of fear.” They didn’t give us an education module on human evolution, but I had looked it up in the
HubSystem knowledge bases I’d had access to, in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn’t helped.

She said, “I know, it’s supposed to be inspirational.”

“Will you help me? Please? I’ll understand if you say no. I know I’ve been … I know this could be a really bad idea.”

I had forgotten that I had a choice, that I wasn’t obligated to do what she wanted just because she was here.
Being asked to stay, with a please and an option for refusal, hit me almost as hard as a human asking for my opinion and actually listening to me. I sighed again. I was having a lot of opportunities to do it and I think I was getting good at it. “I’ll help you. Right now we need to find a place to get out of sight.”

I had intended to just stand there and stare at her, which is what SecUnits do to clients who have just performed an act of stupidity so profound it approaches suicide which they ordered us not to stop them from doing. But she looked like she knew she had been stupid, and I had to know. “What happened?”

I wanted to bury my face in my hands, sink down to the floor, and slip into my media, but I didn’t. After twelve long seconds, the intense feeling subsided.

“How do we pay you?” Maro asked. “I mean, can we still afford you after … everything?” After they tried to kill us, she added in our joint feed connection.

“I’ll check my social feed profile on the ring,” I said, and felt pretty good that I had even remembered it
existed. “Send a note to me there, and I’ll find you when I get back.”

“It’s just, I know we’re—” Tapan glanced around. Her expression was tense and unhappy, her body language bordering on desperate. “We can’t stay here, but I can’t give up, either. Our work—”

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

They all stopped talking and stared at me. It made me nervous and I immediately switched my view to the nearest security camera so I could watch us from the side. I had said it with more emphasis than I intended, but it was just the way things were. I wasn’t sure why it had such an impact on them. Maybe I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Maybe it was the two murder attempts.