Rogue Protocol

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered.

Nobody grabs SecUnits. I hadn’t realized this was a perk until now.

I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

Somewhere there had to be a happy medium between being treated as a terrifying murder machine and being infantilized.

In the bot-fighting business, small mistakes like that get you torn apart.

Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this.

There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.

There were tons of agreements between political and corporate entities, inside and outside the Corporation Rim, dealing with alien remnants. Basically you weren’t supposed to touch them without a lot of special certifications and maybe not even then.

Or Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that’s how they treated it. I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private.

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas.
(Yes, that was sarcasm.)

Miki said, It’s okay, Rin. Don Abene is always cautious.
I’d seen lots of dead cautious humans, but I wasn’t going to say that to Miki.

And there was no way their bond company would have guaranteed the survey without some kind of professional security. That was unrealistic. Heroic SecUnits were unrealistic, too, but like I had told ART, there’s the right kind of unrealistic and the wrong kind of unrealistic.

The good thing about pretending to be an augmented human security consultant instead of a construct SecUnit is that you can tell the humans to shut up.

At various points in our relationship, ART had threatened to kill me, watched my favorite shows with me, given me a body configuration change, provided excellent tactical support, talked me into pretending to be an augmented human security consultant, saved my clients’ lives, and had cleaned up after me when I had to murder some humans. (They were bad humans.) I really missed ART.