Artificial Condition

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.

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.

Armor doesn’t have pockets, so score one for ordinary human clothing.