Quotes from Martha Wells

I would have either disposed of the body so it was never found, or made it look like an accident." Indah frowned, and Aylen's brow creased, and they exchanged a look. Eyeing me, Indah said, "How would you dispose of a body so it wouldn't be found?" I'm not the public library feed, Senior Officer, go do your own research. I said, "If I told you, then you might find all the bodies I've already disposed of.

The good thing about being a construct is that you can't reproduce and create children to argue with you.

Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the "usually." But organic elements can be really dangerous, where "really" means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again.

Les clients de SecUnit, en tout cas, se rassurent les uns les autres pendant que leur androïde, le regard rivé au mur, attend que tout vire au cauchemar.

Plus, it was Preservation and there were no scanning drones, no armed human security, just some on-call human medics with bot assistants and "rangers" who mainly enforced environmental regulations and yelled at humans and augmented humans to get out of the way of the ground vehicles.

Che avrei dovuto fare? Ammazzare tutti gli umani perché quelli che erano a capo della sezione costrutti della compa- gnia erano dei senza cuore? Certo, le persone immaginarie del canale d'intrattenimento mi piacevano molto di più di quelle reali, ma non si poteva avere le une senza le altre.

machine-readable code written into human DNA

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

I meant to wait until I was back up to at least 90 percent performance reliability but I heard Amena say, "There's no weapon, you got the wrong ship." The fear in her voice was more obvious and I was suddenly in the room. (Impulse control; I should try to write a code patch for that.)

The whole thing had seemed to start out well and then devolve into a disaster almost before he noticed. Not that that's unusual. But

ART said, You are aboard the Perihelion, registered teaching and research vessel of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. Then it added, I'm not going to hurt your humans, you little idiot.

while I have been a key factor in certain clusterfucks of gigantic proportions and my risk assessment module has serious issues, my threat assessment record is pretty great

We could kill them,' Stone suggested, not helpfully. It would have been a tense moment, except Heart sighed impatiently and said, 'Line-grandfather, not in front of company.' Delin lifted a hand. 'I know Stone is merely stimulating discussion.' Pearl eyed Stone and lifted her spines. 'Perhaps Stone could stop doing that.

Unless ART had decided to murder everybody in which case shit was going to get real.

Then in my skim of the news broadcast I hit an image. It was me. I didn't stop in my tracks because I have a lot of practice in not physically reacting to things no matter how much they shock or horrify me. I may have lost control of my expression for a second; I was used to always wearing a helmet and keeping it opaqued whenever possible.

Like all good advice, Moon didn't think he was going to have much chance to follow it.

I had talked myself into believing that I hadn't actually lost it as much as I thought I had when Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.

The lesson was: if you're going to fuck with something bigger and meaner than you, use a quick targeted attack and then run away really fast.

Then Indigo and her warrior sisters had come, and they were strong and intelligent and sensible, when they weren't being rash, silly, and brave to the point of blind idiocy.

I'm a shut up or get your head smashed.

I was also planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

I had my helmet plate opaqued, so I could wince a lot without any of them knowing.

Okay, so. Good news: I'm not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

But this wasn't a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was Ã¢â'¬Â¦ statistically unlikely.