Rogue Protocol

There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop.

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas. (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

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. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered.

I was tired of pretending to be human. I needed a break.

Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this.

Pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy.

Why yes, I did want to disengage the safety protocols, thanks for asking.

Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.

Miki said, “That’s not good.” See, that? That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.

I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.)

Then there was Asshole Research Transport. ART’s official designation was deep space research vessel. At various points in our relationship, ART had threatened to kill me, watched my favorite shows with me, given me a body configuration change, provided excellent tactical support, talked me into pretending to be an augmented human security consultant, saved my clients’ lives, and had cleaned up after me when I had to murder some humans. (They were bad humans.)

That’s the other problem with human security: they’re allowed to give up.

I looked down. I was dripping onto the floor, a mix of blood and fluid. I hate it when I leak.

I needed to have an emotion in private.

Frankly, I didn’t know what station security was going to do about it, either. In fact, I’m sure station security was now shitting itself almost as hard as I metaphorically was.

Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realized this was a perk until now.

The reason why they were trying to kill, maim, etc., each other wasn’t the SecUnit’s problem, it was for the humans’ supervisor to deal with. (Or to willfully ignore until the whole project devolved into a giant clusterfuck and your SecUnit prayed for the sweet relief of a massive accidental explosive decompression, not that I’m speaking from experience or anything.)

there’s the right kind of unrealistic and the wrong kind of unrealistic.

Fucking up a planet, even part of a planet, for no reason was kind of a big deal, and I was surprised they had gotten away with it. Okay, no, I wasn’t surprised.

Miki, damage report.” “I am at eighty-six percent functional capacity.” It held up its arm stump. “It’s only a flesh wound.

I stared straight ahead. If there was one thing good about this situation, it was reinforcing how great my decisions to (a) hack my governor module and (b) escape were. Being a SecUnit sucked. I couldn’t wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.

humans are so fucking unreliable when it comes to maintaining data.

I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (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.)

Again, I know in the telling it sounds like I was on top of this situation but really, I was still just thinking, Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I didn’t want to see helpless humans. I’d rather see smart ones rescuing each other.

It was a security consultant’s job to be skeptical of their clients’ assurances that everything was fine. (SecUnit clients, at least, only assured each other that everything was fine while you stared at the wall and waited for everything to go horribly wrong.)

As a SecUnit, a large part of my function was helping the company record everything my clients did and said so the company could data mine it and sell anything worthwhile. (They say good security comes at a price and the company takes that literally.)