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Title: All Systems Red Authors: Martha Wells Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 21 Date: 2025-12-04 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
This is why I didnât want to come. Iâve got four perfectly good humans here and I didnât want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. Itâs not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.
The problem I was going to have is that the way murderbots fight is we throw ourselves at the target and try to kill the shit out of it, knowing that 90 percent of our bodies can be regrown or replaced in a cubicle. So, finesse is not required.
I know I said SecUnits arenât sentimental about each other, but I wished it wasnât one of the DeltFall units. It was in there somewhere, trapped in its own head, maybe aware, maybe not. Not that it matters. None of us had a choice.
Tags:ai
I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldnât see them staring at me.
Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency.
I donât know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isnât that, itâs that I donât want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me. Thatâs why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favorite human. By the time you get this Iâll be leaving Corporation Rim. Out of inventory and out of sight. Murderbot end message.
I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I donât know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Tags:ai,failing,perspective
The sense of urgency just wasnât there. Also, you may have noticed, I donât care.
Itâs wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.
Tags:ai,favorite,technology
It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didnât know each other as I was in my armor, in a group of other SecUnits.
There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub, sprawled on the floor, in chairs, the monitoring stations and projection surfaces behind them showing impact damage from projectile and energy weapon fire. I tapped the feed and asked Mensah to fall back to the hopper. She acknowledged me and I got confirmation from my outside drones that the humans were retreating.
And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.
What was I supposed to do, kill all humans because the ones in charge of constructs in the company were callous? Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you canât have one without the other.
Because you canât walk up to another murderbot with an armor-piercing projectile or energy weapon inside the habitat and not be looked at with suspicion. You can walk up to a fellow murderbot with a tool that a human might have asked you to get.
I was depressed this morning. Iâd tried watching some new serials last night and even they couldnât distract me; reality was too intrusive. It was hard not to think about how everything was going to go wrong and they were all going to die and I was going to get blasted to pieces or get another governor module stuck in me.
Back in the safety of the ready room, I leaned my head against the plastic-coated wall. Now they knew their murderbot didnât want to be around them any more than they wanted to be around it. Iâd given a tiny piece of myself away. That canât happen. I have too much to hide, and letting one piece go means the rest isnât as protected.
I have a trick where I make HubSystem think I received it and then just put it in external storage. I donât do automated package updates anymore, now that I donât have to. When I felt like it, presumably sometime before it was time to leave the planet, Iâd go through the update and apply the parts I wanted and delete the rest.
I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.
Ratthi said, âThe one where the colonyâs solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?â Again, I couldnât help it. I said, âShe didnât kill him, thatâs a fucking lie.â Ratthi turned to Mensah. âItâs watching it.â
Dr. Gurathin, the least talkative one, was an augmented human and had his own implanted interface. I could feel him poking around in the data, while the others, using the touch interfaces, were just distant ghosts. I had a lot more processing power than he did, though.
Murderbots arenât allowed to ride with the humans and I had to have verbal permission to enter. With my cracked governor there was nothing to stop me, but not letting anybody, especially the people who held my contract, know that I was a free agent was kind of important.