Quotes from Martha Wells

I just realized I don't like the phrase "as far as I knew" because it implies how much you actually don't know. I'm not going to stop using it, but. I don't like it as much anymore.

Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal?

As a SecUnit, a large part of my function was helping the company record everything my clients did and said so the company could data mine it and sell anything worthwhile. (They say good security comes at a price and the company takes that literally.)

It was a security consultant's job to be skeptical of their clients' assurances that everything was fine. (SecUnit clients, at least, only assured each other that everything was fine while you stared at the wall and waited for everything to go horribly wrong.)

The problem with gunships is they want to shoot at stuff.

She watched me search for seven minutes and forty seconds, then said, "Can I ask you a question?" I never know how to answer this. Should I go with my first impulse, which is always "no" or just give in to the inevitable? I said, "Is it contract-relevant?" Big, adolescent human sigh noise. "I just want to understand something." I gave in to the inevitable. "Yes.

I had archives of everything that had happened since I hacked my governor module, but I hadn't had as much relevant experience in that time. But what I did have were thousands of hours of category mystery media, so I had a lot of theoretical knowledge that was possibly anywhere from 60 to 70 percent inaccurate shit.

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.

I thought it was likely that the only supplies we would need for DeltFall was the postmortem kind, but you may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I'm a pessimist.

I didn't need as much air as humans did, but I needed some, and it was really cold out there, in the colony ship's shadow. This meant that if the life-tender failed it would take me longer to die so I'd have longer to feel dumb about it than a human would.

I guess if you were really determined, you could find a way to get yourself killed by exposing the power connectors under the panels and shielding and, I don't know, licking them or something, but this dead human clearly hadn't.

And if it was this hard with Ratthi and Pin-Lee (Gurathin had never liked me and it was mutual), what was it going to be like with Mensah, if I managed to get that far? I didn't know if I could trust them. I wanted to. But I want a lot of things—freedom, unlimited downloads, new episodes of Drama Sun Islands—most of which I wasn't going to get.

I was depressed this morning. I'd tried watching some new serials last night and even they couldn't distract me; reality was too intrusive.

2.0 said I know violence isn't the solution to everything, but in this case... In this case, yeah.

I needed to have an emotion in private.

I needed to a) keep them here or b) kill them. Let's go with option b.

It was called Worldhoppers, and was about freelance explorers who extended the wormhole and ring networks into uninhabited star systems. It looked very unrealistic and inaccurate, which was exactly what I liked.

Just a regular projectile, not an explosive one, so most of my back was still there. I just didn't feel like walking around leaking in front of humans right now.

The point was to retrieve the clients alive and fuck everything else.

I told Mensah through the feed that I wouldn't speak aloud on the comm anymore. She tapped back an acknowledgment on the feed, and I heard her telling the others to get off my feed and my comm, that she was going to be the only one speaking to me so I wasn't distracted. Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans but I appreciated the thought.

Because change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying.

Miki, damage report." "I am at eighty-six percent functional capacity." It held up its arm stump. "It's only a flesh wound.

In the feed, ART started to play the soundtrack to Sanctuary Moon and weirdly, that helped.

Target Four seemed shocked. "SecUnits aren't supposed to talk back," Target Five said weakly. Tell me about it. "Cargo ship crews aren't supposed to take Port Authority supervisors as hostages, but here we all are.