Quotes from Martha Wells

I really needed to get around to setting that one-second delay on my mouth.

Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.

Frankly, I didn't know what station security was going to do about it, either. In fact, I'm sure station security was now shitting itself almost as hard as I metaphorically was.

My clients are the best clients.

Oh shit, my media!...No, wait, I had access to some of it.

I had cleaned off all the blood and fluid with the hygiene unit but was too angry to take a shower. (Showers are nice and I wanted to stay angry.)

Nobody fucking listens to me.

I don't want to not see you again.

Unidentified One sounded even more amused. "You had better have the weapon we were told of, or I'll take your ribs out one by one and break them in front of your little face." I saved that for future reference. Unidentified One seemed to have gone to some trouble with the wording of that threat, it would be a shame if they never experienced it firsthand.

I was getting an idea. It was probably a bad idea. (When most of your training in tactical thinking comes from adventure shows, that does tend to happen.)

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

I yelled, "No!" which I'm not supposed to do; I'm always supposed to speak respectfully to the clients, even when they're about to accidentally commit suicide.

That's the other problem with human security: they're allowed to give up.

I knew interpreting the emotional subtext in the speech and apperance of real humans was completely different from interpreting it in shows and serials. (For one thing, the shows and serials were trying to communicate with the viewer. As far as I could tell, real humans usually didn't know what the hell they were doing.)

The humans hadn't gotten a lot of sleep last night, from the crowding and the strong possibility of dying.

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.

There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it.

This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn't help.

I am tired of the whole concept of humans right now.

The full station threat assessment for murder was sitting at a baseline 7 percent. (To make it drop lower than that we'd have to be on an uninhabited planet.) (I've never been on a contract on an uninhabited planet because if I was on the planet on a contract then we'd be inhabiting it.)

It's not a baby, it's a copy of me, made with code." Amena folded her arms and looked intensely skeptical. "That you and ART made together, with code. Code which both of you are also made out of.

Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don't have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now.

I'd hacked my governor module and kept doing my job because I didn't know what else to do (except you know, a murderous rampage, but murderous rampages are overrated and interfere with one's ability to keep watching media)

The reason why they were trying to kill, maim, etc., each other wasn't the SecUnit's problem, it was for the humans' supervisor to deal with. (Or to willfully ignore until the whole project devolved into a giant clusterfuck and your SecUnit prayed for the sweet relief of a massive accidental explosive decompression, not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.)