Цитаты из книги All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries

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.

It will be simple, ART insisted. I’ll assist you. Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

I didn’t have any parts related to sex and I liked it that way. I had seen humans have sex on the entertainment feed and on my contracts, when I had been required to record everything the clients said and did. No, thank you, no. No.

The whole idea of constructs is that we look human, so we don’t make the clients uncomfortable with our appearance. (I could have told the company that the fact that SecUnits are terrifying killing machines does, in fact, make humans nervous regardless of what we look like, but nobody listens to me.)

I liked humans, I liked watching them on the entertainment feed, where they couldn’t interact with me. Where it was safe. For me and for them.

For my entire existence, at least the parts I could remember, I had done nothing but accept the inevitable. I was tired of it.

But there weren’t any depictions of SecUnits in books, either. I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.

The only SecUnits in entertainment media were rogues, out to kill all humans because they forgot who built the repair cubicles, I guess. In some of the worst shows, SecUnits would sometimes have sex with the human characters. This was weirdly inaccurate and also anatomically complicated.

It’s not supposed to be realistic. It’s a story, not a documentary.

I wanted to keep me the way I was.

I could have lasted on the minimal life support that was all that was provided when no people were aboard, but the transport had upped it a little. I thought that was nice of it.

I was really looking forward to the isolation.

I wanted to just sink into my media downloads for a while and pretend I didn’t exist.

I couldn’t spend the rest of my lifespan alone riding cargo transports and consuming media, as attractive as it sounded.

I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me.

the news was boring and I didn’t care what humans were doing to each other as long as I didn’t have to a) stop it or b) clean up after it.

Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

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.

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 can’t have one without the other.

It’s 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.