Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries

I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can’t just stop.

Abene had tried to change Miki’s priority to saving its own life, and it had refused her. Which meant she had allowed its programming that option, that ability to use its own judgment in a crisis situation. It had decided its priority was to save its humans, and maybe to save me, too. Or maybe it had known it couldn’t save any of us, but it had wanted to give me the chance to try. Or it hadn’t
wanted me to face the bot alone. Whatever it was, I’d never know.

What I did know was that Abene really had loved Miki. That hurt in all kinds of ways. Miki could never be my friend, but it had been her friend, and more importantly, she had been its friend. Her gut reaction in a moment of crisis was to tell Miki to save itself.

I stepped back into the crew area just as Miki flung Gerth after Abene and hit the manual seal for the hatch. It dropped and Miki turned. I told it, Miki, get out of here! Go hide in the cargo!

No, Rin, it said, I’m going to help you!

In the feed, Abene yelled at Miki to come in with them, she would tell Kader to open the hatch if it would just come in—and Miki told her, Priority is to protect my friends.

Priority change, Abene sent. Priority is to protect yourself.

That priority change is rejected, Miki told her.

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.)

It was the hair-grabbing thing that bothered me. Along with the snide “it’s not personal.” If Wilken had shot with no warning, Abene would be dead and Miki would be in pieces now. But Wilken had wanted Abene to know that she was betrayed. That was personal.

I don’t like personal.

I ran Miki’s
feed back, skimming it to see what had happened. Wilken had waited until I was busy with the combat bots, then had returned to Abene and Miki. She had moved toward them fast, saying she had something important to tell them off the comm and feed. Then she had grabbed Abene by her hair. It was still hanging loose, her helmet left behind after I’d broken the release tab to get her away from the bio sampler.

Wilken had pointed the weapon at Abene’s head and said, “Sorry, it’s not personal.” That comment had cost her the kill, it had given Miki time to slam in between them and force the weapon up and away. (Just because Miki was a pet bot that carried things for humans didn’t mean it wasn’t strong enough to take on powered armor.) Wilken had fired the weapon, destroying Miki’s hand, which hadn’t slowed Miki down, either.

I tapped Miki’s feed. Have you checked the ship recently?

I’m monitoring Kader’s feed for Don Abene and checking the onboard system status every 2.4 seconds, SecUnit. Ejiro is in the medical suite and is expected to fully recover.

This was the first time I’d heard Miki sound even minimally annoyed. I was vaguely encouraged by that, for some reason. Acknowledged, just checking.

Miki sent me a smile glyph. It’s good to check on our friends.

Well, I’d asked for that.

I was congratulating myself (because nobody else ever does it) on an excellent save. Human security had literally just noticed that something had tried to steal their client’s head. Then Gerth said, “That’s a SecUnit!”

All the humans stared at me and Abene. More importantly, Wilken and Gerth had pointed their weapons at me. Oh, Murderbot, what did you do?

(I don’t even know. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I went from being told what to do and having every action monitored to being able to do whatever I wanted, and somewhere along the way my impulse control went to hell.)

The only way out of this was to kill them.

If I did that, I’d have to kill all of them. Including Miki. Including Abene. Her still-attached head was resting against my collarbone and her hair was all warm and soft where it was in contact with my human skin.

Right, so the only smart way out of this was to kill all of them. I was going to have to take the dumb way out of this.

There were lots of security cameras everywhere, they just weren’t active. Miki was right, there was nothing but dead air in here, no facility feed activity despite the power for lights and environmentals.

Maybe they thought the systems would be lonely if they were left active, Rin, Miki said. What do you think?

I wondered if ART had thought I was this stupid when it had been riding around in my head. Maybe, but the chances were good that if that had been the case, ART would have said so.

Abene patted the seat next to her. “Sit down, Miki.”

Miki sat next to her on the couch, and none of the other humans reacted. This was apparently perfectly normal.

“Are you excited to see the inside of the facility, Miki?” Hirune asked it, as she turned the schematic to a new angle. “I’m tired of just looking at maps of it.”

“I’m excited!” Miki echoed. “We will do a good assessment, and then we can have a new assignment.”

Ejiro laughed. “I hope it’s that easy.”

Brais said, “I don’t care if it’s easy or hard, at least we’re moving! Miki was probably getting tired of playing Mus with us.”

“I like games. I would play games all the time if we could,” Miki said.

I had to withdraw back to my dark cubicle. I was having an emotion again. An angry one.

Before Dr. Mensah bought me, I could count the
number of times I sat on a human chair and it was never in front of clients.

I don’t even know why I was reacting this way. Was I jealous of a human-form bot? I didn’t want to be a pet robot, that’s why I’d left Dr. Mensah and the others. (Not that Mensah had said she wanted a pet SecUnit. I don’t think she wanted a SecUnit at all.) What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted.

And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.