18 July 2021

Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries) – Martha Wells

Chapter 1

Maybe the schedules hadn’t been updated; humans are so fucking unreliable when it comes to maintaining data.

Chapter 2

I don’t need much air, and can always go into hibernation mode if I run out, so the minimal atmosphere on automated transports is fine for me.

There was also a human-form bot standing nearby. I hadn’t seen one in a while in person, just on the entertainment feed. They aren’t popular in corporation territory, because there’s not a lot of things they can do that task-specific bots can’t do better, and with the feed available their data storage and processing ability isn’t that exciting. Unlike constructs, they don’t have any cloned human tissue, so they’re just a bare metal bot-body that can pick up heavy things, except not as well as a hauler bot or any other kind of cargo lifter.

Chapter 3

No drones, but then humans aren’t good with security drones; it takes multi-track processing to direct them and most humans just can’t do it without extensive augmentation.

Chapter 5

Confused at the apparently empty passage, it tried to trace the signal. And I pinged it with a compressed list of drone control keys. (That’s not in the stealth module, and it’s not a function of company-supplied SecSystems. I got it from the proprietary data of a company client who worked on countermeasures for combat drones. I had managed to resist deleting it to fill that space up with new serials. I knew someday it would come in handy.) One of the keys worked and the drone switched into neutral standby. I wandered around in its control code for a minute or two, making sure I knew how it worked.

Which meant that the combat bots had stopped to repair each other (Yes, they’re self-repairing unless their main processing center is destroyed. Yes, that is a pain in the ass and also terrifying.)

I hate hostage situations. Even when I’m the one with the hostages. Miki said, “That’s not good.” See, that? That is just annoying. That contributed nothing to the conversation and was just a pointless vocalization to make the humans comfortable.