murderbot

As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

I had the sensation again, my head shoved underwater, being temporarily incapacitated as ART used me as a bridge to reach the bot controlling the shuttle.

(Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me.)

I had an input on my threat assessment module continuously now so I could get real-time updates instead of just checking it periodically, and yes, it was a constant source of irritation because it reacted to everything. No, it was not helping my anxiety.

Overconfident humans who don’t listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.

SecSystem records everything, even inside the sleeping cabins, and I see everything. That’s why it’s easier to pretend I’m a robot.

(SecUnits make humans and augmented humans uncomfortable and on my contracts, my clients had acted in a variety of nervous and inconsistent ways when I was around. (No matter how nervous they were, just assume I was more nervous.)

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is.

ART, who I couldn’t block because it’s a monster, said, I have a targeting lock on their bridge.

(I don’t even know. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I went from being told what to do and having every action monitored to being able to do whatever I wanted, and somewhere along the way my impulse control went to hell.)

I stepped past Eletra and out the hatch in time to catch the targetDrone waiting there. I slammed it into the bulkhead and shook the remnants off my hands.

Farid cleared his throat. “So … you’re really a SecUnit?” Yeah, I get that a lot here.

It was clear that even after seeing my face on Volescu’s camera video, they didn’t recognize me without the helmet. So then I had to look at them and say, “I’m your SecUnit.”

(If I’m going to make up shit I’d rather do it about something else besides how a human got murdered by another human.)

“Station Security is forty-seven seconds out.” SecUnit’s voice is even and conversational. And confident. This is a confrontation it knows how to handle.

I was congratulating myself (because nobody else ever does it) on an excellent save.