Artificial Condition

“Unsecured” is what they call rogue SecUnits when they want humans to listen and not just start screaming.

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

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 you may have noticed that for a terrifying murderbot I fuck up a lot.

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 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.

Yes, I often want to shake my clients. No, I never do.

I tried to think about why I didn’t want to change my configuration, even to help protect myself. Maybe because it was something humans did to sexbots. I was a murderbot, I had to have higher standards?

Granted, it would have been hard to show realistic SecUnits in visual media, which would involve depicting hours of standing around in brain-numbing boredom, while your nervous clients tried to pretend you weren’t there.

Молодёжь такая импульсивная. Нужно стараться удерживать их от порывов, чтобы они успели состариться.

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

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

I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.
I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this.
It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.

Constructs sometimes fall under the same category as bots, sometimes under the same category as deadly weapons. (FYI, that is not a good category to be in.)

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.

Лучший способ дать людям понять, что они делают глупости, это задавать вопросы.

I said, You have a weapons system.
ART repeated, For debris deflection.

I was starting to wonder just what kind of university owned ART.

I’m used to humans wanting to do things that can get them killed.

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.

If a bot with a brain the size of a transport could roll its eyes, that was what ART was doing.

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.