Цитаты из книги All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries

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.

В качестве бездушной машины для убийств я оказался совершенно негодным.

Конечно, выдуманные люди с развлекательных каналов мне нравились куда больше настоящих, но одних без других не бывает.

Я не стал утруждаться обыском всех мелких помещений – подождем, пока дойдет до стадии «собери все части тел в мешок».

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.

As a SecUnit, I had the responsibility for my clients’ safety but no authority to do anything other than make suggestions, and try to use the company regulations inbuilt in a SecSystem to override the humans’ suicidal stupidity and homicidal impulses.

I wasn’t sure why it had such an impact on them. Maybe I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. Maybe it was the two murder attempts.

I was looking at a sexbot. That is not the official designation, ART said. The official designation is ComfortUnit but everybody knows what that means.

I was used to having a HubSystem and a SecSystem for backup and ART would be taking their place. (Without the part where those two systems were partly designed to rat me out to the company and trigger punishment through the governor module. ART’s freedom to weigh in on everything I did was punishment enough.)

Part of my job as a SecUnit was to give clients advice when they asked for it, as I was theoretically the one with all the information on security. Not that a lot of them had asked for it, or had listened to me. Not that I’m bitter about that, or anything.

You would think a SecUnit who had been shot to pieces multiple times, blown up, memory purged, and once partially dismantled by accident wouldn’t be on the verge of panic under these circumstances. You’d be wrong.

I said, “We arranged to meet. I’m Eden, the security consultant.” Right, so, it was the name of one of the characters in Sanctuary Moon. You probably aren’t surprised by that.

I put on my best neutral expression, the one I used when the extra download activity had been detected and the deployment center’s supervisor was blaming the human techs for it.