Quotes from Martha Wells

For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind.

The one good thing about having emotions was that it accelerated the repair process for my memory storage. (The bad thing about having emotions is, you know, OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME.)

That's mostly a metaphor. My uneaten client stat is high.

there's the right kind of unrealistic and the wrong kind of unrealistic.

I can't do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.

The systems of constructs are inherently inferior to advanced bots, but you aren't stupid. Yeah, well, fuck you, too, I thought, and initiated a shutdown sequence.

Now that I knew something was hacking the security cameras to watch me, I could use countermeasures. I probably should have been doing that from the beginning, but as you may have noticed that for a terrifying murderbot I fuck up a lot.

On the shows I liked best, monsters were always a possibility in these situations, but in reality it only happened around 27 percent of the time. Also a joke. Mostly.

Target Four ran toward me because assholes love to see your face when they kill you.

Humans do the "make it a question so it doesn't sound so bad" thing and it still sounds bad.

I had a stab wound so large you could see the metal of my interior structure, but Senior Indah was too polite to mention it. The medical bot extended a delicate sensor limb toward me. On the feed I told it anything that touched me would get torn off and thrown across the room. It pulled the limb back and used it to check Hostile Two instead.

I'm a murderbot, I don't give a crap about boats.

Don't worry, I'll preserve your right to wander off like an asshole anytime you like.

They don't give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, even those are cheap versions.

All right," she said, and looked at me for what objectively I knew was 2.4 seconds and subjectively about twenty excruciating minutes.

On the feed the humans settled some details of what I was designating as Operation Not Actually A Completely Terrible Plan.

I had to run back the drone's camera feed to catch up, I had been so busy conquering that burst of non-annoyance.

It's about being treated as a thing, isn't it. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You're a thing, and there is no safety.

Overconfident humans who don't listen to anybody else scare the hell out of me.)

I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (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.)

humans are so fucking unreliable when it comes to maintaining data.

Humans can miss a lot of little clues, but me being able to fire energy weapons from my arms would be something of a red flag.

With rueful resignation, she added, "Stone said I should just take you, fight it out, and get it over with." That was typical. "He gives me lousy advice, too.

So that was what had happened before the survey. Now we're here, ready for the next major disaster. (Spoiler alert.)