Artificial Condition

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

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans.

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.

So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.

I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn't exist.

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.

Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

I felt this would be the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.

I liked protecting people and things. I liked figuring out smart ways to protect people and things. I liked being right.

I would defer to your expertise in shooting and killing things. You should defer to mine in data analysis.

I was only 97 percent certain this meeting was a trap.

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.

This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn’t help.

you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.

There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it.

Not that a lot of them had asked for it, or had listened to me. Not that I’m bitter about that, or anything.

I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it. If I was going to follow my plan, such as it was, I needed to care. If I let myself not care, then there was no telling where I'd end up.

That could be a good sign, right?” “Sure,” I said. It was a terrible sign.

I didn’t react visibly, because I’m used to clients making bad decisions, and I was getting a lot of practice at controlling my expression.

Now that I knew something was hacking the security cameras to watch me, I could use countermeasures. I probably should have been doing that from the beginning, but as you may have noticed that for a terrifying murderbot I fuck up a lot.

It was the logical choice, it was the obvious choice, and I would still rather peel my human skin off than do it. I was going to have to do it.

When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

Humans can miss a lot of little clues, but me being able to fire energy weapons from my arms would be something of a red flag.

Humans are nervous of me because I'm a terrifying murderbot, and I'm nervous of them because they're humans.

The systems of constructs are inherently inferior to advanced bots, but you aren’t stupid. Yeah, well, fuck you, too, I thought, and initiated a shutdown sequence.