I felt the brush of Mensah’s awareness in the feed. She must have woken when Gurathin spoke. He finally said, “You don’t blame humans for what you were forced to do? For what happened to you?”

That got their attention. There was no reply. Not a surprise. The only people I’ve run into who actually want to get into conversations with SecUnits are my weird humans. I said, “I have an alternate solution to both our problems.”

“Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.”

You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld.

I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldn’t see them staring at me.

But most people can only be so anxious and so terrified and so sleepless and so cowed and awed before the yawning abyss of the future for so long. Eventually, the body simply can’t sustain it. Eventually, some work has to get done. Eventually, adrenal glands need a bit of a break.

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

Nobody understood what the Absolute Zeros believed so hard, they couldn’t even wedge it into their lyrics yet: The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

“Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.”

“I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us?”

Supposed to want.

Supposed to want.

Mensah’s expression said she was worried. She looked at me. “What do you think?”

“Dr. Mensah is the current admin director on the steering committee. It’s an elected position, with a limited term. But one of the principles of our home is that our admins must also continue their regular work, whatever it is. Her regular work required this survey, so here she is, and here we are.”

“I’m…I’m the coyote. I make the most magnificent contraptions, and I always think this time, this time everyone will see how good I really am, but they only ever burn me up and leave me starving to death.”

I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldn’t see them staring at me.

I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment and no one wants to see that.

The thing that surprised me is that nobody stared at us. Nobody gave us a second look. The uniform, the pants, the long-sleeved T-shirt and jacket, covered all my inorganic parts. If they noticed the dataport in the back of my neck they must have thought I was an augmented human. We were just three more people making our way down the ring. It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didn’t know each other as I was in my armor, in a group of other SecUnits.

Mensah had seen me when she signed the rental contract. But she had barely looked at me and I had barely looked at her because again, murderbot + actual human = awkwardness. Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

Part of it is, they didn’t want me here. Not here in their hub, but here on the planet.

I had worked for some contracts that would have kept me standing here the entire day and night cycle, just on the off chance they wanted me to do something and didn’t want to bother using the feed to call me. Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

Alongside such oddities, his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird.

“Rosemary, on behalf of the crew of the Wayfarer, I would like to apologize,” Sissix said. “Coming into a new home deserves a better welcome than anything Artis Corbin can give. I’m sure you know all about the escape pods by now, and nothing about who we are and what we do.”

The trappings of a bureaucrat trying to pretend he had the same clout as the powerful species around him.

“We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.”

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld.

The Friends of Digital Sapients were one of those organizations that had their hearts in the right place but their heads firmly up their asses. On paper, Jenks believed a lot of the same things they did, namely that AIs were sapient individuals worthy of the same leagl rights that everyone else had. But the FDS went about it all wrong.

The trappings of a bureaucrat trying to pretend he had the same clout as the powerful species around him.

I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldn’t see them staring at me.

It’s wrong to think of a construct as a half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it.

“Dr. Mensah is the current admin director on the steering committee. It’s an elected position, with a limited term. But one of the principles of our home is that our admins must also continue their regular work, whatever it is. Her regular work required this survey, so here she is, and here we are.”

Ashby sighed, swallowed his irritation and became the captain. He kept his face neutral, his ears open. Talking to Corbin always required a moment of preparation, and a good deal of detachment.

Dr. Chef shook his head, the skin on his cheeks shivering. “I don’t like implants that aren’t medically necessary. Besides, what’s the point of talking to different species if you don’t take the time to learn their words? Seems like cheating to simply think things and let the little box do the talking for you.”

Ashby’s hackles were up, but truthfully, this was an ideal way for a conversation with Corbin to go. Get him away from the crew, let him vent, wait for him to cross a line, then talk him down while he was feeling penitent.

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another.

I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it.

I had worked for some contracts that would have kept me standing here the entire day and night cycle, just on the off chance they wanted me to do something and didn’t want to bother using the feed to call me. Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

But the constant sounds of people working and laughing and fighting all around him had become a comfort. The open was an empty place to be, and there were moments when even the most seasoned spacer might look to the star-flecked void outside with humility and awe.

Dr. Chef exhaled a disparaging rumble and fixed his beady eyes on Rosemary. “Some advice? If Kizzy ever says the words ‘you know what would be a great idea?,’ ignore whatever comes after.”

A past birthday gift from Kizzy, who always ignored the fact that none of the non-Human crew members traditionally celebrated birthdays.

Alongside such oddities, his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird.

“Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?”

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.

No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they most want. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

“Because you’re a friend,” she said, the edge leaving her voice. “And because making connections is what I do. And if you’re serious about this, I’d rather you go through me than some back-alley hack. Though, truth be told, I’m also hoping that by the time I find someone, you’ll have decided I was right about it being a bad idea.”

It’s wrong to think of a construct as a half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.

Ashby scratched his beard and thought. What did he want it for? After he’d first left home, all those years ago, he’d sometimes wondered if he’d go back to the Fleet to raise kids, or if he’d settle down on a colony somewhere. But he was a spacer through and through, and he had the itch for drifting.

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No–it’s Englishblokeman.

The Friends of Digital Sapients were one of those organizations that had their hearts in the right place but their heads firmly up their asses. On paper, Jenks believed a lot of the same things they did, namely that AIs were sapient individuals worthy of the same leagl rights that everyone else had. But the FDS went about it all wrong.

Nobody understood what the Absolute Zeros believed so hard, they couldn’t even wedge it into their lyrics yet: The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

If the humans see me actually doing my job, it helps keep suspicions from forming about faulty governor modules.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

Because you need me. I don’t know where that came from. All right, it came from me, but she was my client, I was a SecUnit. There was no emotional contract between us. There was no rational reason for me to sound like a whiny human baby.

But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, ther was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.

“No, but see, that’s why it’s so fun! It’s like a puzzle, figuring out what kind of circuits the old ones will talk to, adding new bits to make things more homey, staying on top of all the old framework’s secrets so we don’t blow up.”

MedSystem’s feed informed me that Ratthi, Overse, and Arada’s heart rates had just accelerated. Mensah’s hadn’t, because she had already thought of all this. It was why she had sent Pin-Lee and Gurathin to shut off HubSystem. Nervously, Ratthi said, “What do we do when they come here?” I said, “Be somewhere else.”

I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it.

Dr. Chef shook his head, the skin on his cheeks shivering. “I don’t like implants that aren’t medically necessary. Besides, what’s the point of talking to different species if you don’t take the time to learn their words? Seems like cheating to simply think things and let the little box do the talking for you.”

“Your version of used is usually better than new,” Jenks said. He meant it. Pepper was a wizard when it came to bringing tech back from the dead.

“Because you’re a friend,” she said, the edge leaving her voice. “And because making connections is what I do. And if you’re serious about this, I’d rather you go through me than some back-alley hack. Though, truth be told, I’m also hoping that by the time I find someone, you’ll have decided I was right about it being a bad idea.”

Ashby’s hackles were up, but truthfully, this was an ideal way for a conversation with Corbin to go. Get him away from the crew, let him vent, wait for him to cross a line, then talk him down while he was feeling penitent.

He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

Kizzy nodded, stuffing a handful of puffs into her mouth. “Srvsts mmdn mmf–hrm.” She swallowed. “Survivalists abandon babies if they’re sick or different or whatever. Just like, oh, hey, this one’s kind of weird, better leave it behind so we can weed out the weak genes.” Kizzy clenched her fists, crushing the puffs within the bag. “Gah! It’s so stupid!” She looked down at the bag as if seeing it for the first time. “Aww.”

“Mala wouldn’t let them do it. Jenks says once she got the doctors to admit that him being small didn’t mean he wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t even a question for her. Didn’t have anything to do with the Gaiist stuff at that point. He says she was just sick of people telling her that there was something wrong with her kid.” She stopped and looked around. “And I’ve totally been walking the wrong way.”

Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags,…

“Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.”

…their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

The Lovey that Jenks knew was uniquely molded by the Wayfarer. Her personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they’d been, every conversation they’d shared. And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn’t the same be said for organic people? Weren’t they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along? In Jenks’s eyes, the only real difference in cognitive development between Humans and AIs was that of speed.

I didn’t know what I would do on a farm. Clean the house? That sounded way more boring than security. Maybe it would work out. This was what I was supposed to want. This was what everything had always told me I was supposed to want.

“I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us?”

“The very fact that we use the term cold-blooded as a synonym for heartless should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles,’ she pictured him saying. ‘Don’t judge other species by your own social norms.’ “

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

“I did the same thing when my daughters were off at war. That’s why I don’t like that he’s doing it. I know how all that wondering can eat away at a person.”

Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?…

Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other than that it rocks?…Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have a soul?

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.

It took me two seconds to realize she was talking to me. Fortunately, since it seemed like we were really doing this, I had actually been paying attention and didn’t need to play the conversation back.

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

Basically freehold generally meant shitshow so I hadn’t been expecting much from them. But they were surprisingly easy to work for.

Part of it is, they didn’t want me here. Not here in their hub, but here on the planet.

“Mala wouldn’t let them do it. Jenks says once she got the doctors to admit that him being small didn’t mean he wasn’t healthy, it wasn’t even a question for her. Didn’t have anything to do with the Gaiist stuff at that point. He says she was just sick of people telling her that there was something wrong with her kid.” She stopped and looked around. “And I’ve totally been walking the wrong way.”

…their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

“I have never understood potatoes,” Sissix said. “The whole point of a potato is to cover it with salt so you don’t notice how bland it is. Why not just get a salt lick and skip the potato?”

Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

“Rosemary, on behalf of the crew of the Wayfarer, I would like to apologize,” Sissix said. “Coming into a new home deserves a better welcome than anything Artis Corbin can give. I’m sure you know all about the escape pods by now, and nothing about who we are and what we do.”

Kizzy nodded, stuffing a handful of puffs into her mouth. “Srvsts mmdn mmf–hrm.” She swallowed. “Survivalists abandon babies if they’re sick or different or whatever. Just like, oh, hey, this one’s kind of weird, better leave it behind so we can weed out the weak genes.” Kizzy clenched her fists, crushing the puffs within the bag. “Gah! It’s so stupid!” She looked down at the bag as if seeing it for the first time. “Aww.”

Dr. Chef exhaled a disparaging rumble and fixed his beady eyes on Rosemary. “Some advice? If Kizzy ever says the words ‘you know what would be a great idea?,’ ignore whatever comes after.”

“I have never understood potatoes,” Sissix said. “The whole point of a potato is to cover it with salt so you don’t notice how bland it is. Why not just get a salt lick and skip the potato?”

A past birthday gift from Kizzy, who always ignored the fact that none of the non-Human crew members traditionally celebrated birthdays.

“No, but see, that’s why it’s so fun! It’s like a puzzle, figuring out what kind of circuits the old ones will talk to, adding new bits to make things more homey, staying on top of all the old framework’s secrets so we don’t blow up.”

…Binned–a word which had come, over the millenia, to mean: carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

“Grum games are rather similar, thematically. I think our species are rather alike, in some ways. Humans would’ve died out, to, if the Aeluons chanced upon the Fleet. Luck’s what saved them. Luck, and discovering humility. That’s really all that makes Humans different from Grum. Well, aside from the obvious.” He chuckled, gesturing to his body.

It’s wrong to think of a construct as a half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment and no one wants to see that.

“If people won’t be shooting at me what will I be doing?” Maybe I could be her bodyguard.

I didn’t know what I would do on a farm. Clean the house? That sounded way more boring than security. Maybe it would work out. This was what I was supposed to want. This was what everything had always told me I was supposed to want.

I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.

Ashby scratched his beard and thought. What did he want it for? After he’d first left home, all those years ago, he’d sometimes wondered if he’d go back to the Fleet to raise kids, or if he’d settle down on a colony somewhere. But he was a spacer through and through, and he had the itch for drifting.

“The very fact that we use the term cold-blooded as a synonym for heartless should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles,’ she pictured him saying. ‘Don’t judge other species by your own social norms.’ “

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the fragile illusion of invulnerability inherent in being just like everyone else. No–it’s Englishblokeman.

“Damn…I thought you were the other one. I hate carbons. You all look the same.”

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld.

Supposed to want.

He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

Dr. Chef shook his head, the skin on his cheeks shivering. “I don’t like implants that aren’t medically necessary. Besides, what’s the point of talking to different species if you don’t take the time to learn their words? Seems like cheating to simply think things and let the little box do the talking for you.”

“I’m…I’m the coyote. I make the most magnificent contraptions, and I always think this time, this time everyone will see how good I really am, but they only ever burn me up and leave me starving to death.”

Life is beautiful and life is stupid.

Neither Decibel nor Oort nor poor dead Mira ever imagined the power of the ordinary to gum up the works of the epic.

So they could feel a little more human by osmosis…Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility.

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

MedSystem’s feed informed me that Ratthi, Overse, and Arada’s heart rates had just accelerated. Mensah’s hadn’t, because she had already thought of all this. It was why she had sent Pin-Lee and Gurathin to shut off HubSystem. Nervously, Ratthi said, “What do we do when they come here?” I said, “Be somewhere else.”

Mensah’s expression said she was worried. She looked at me. “What do you think?”

Ashby sighed, swallowed his irritation and became the captain. He kept his face neutral, his ears open. Talking to Corbin always required a moment of preparation, and a good deal of detachment.

Ashby had no idea what Corbin was getting at, but this was Corbin’s standard operating procedure. Complain first, explain later.

Ashby’s hackles were up, but truthfully, this was an ideal way for a conversation with Corbin to go. Get him away from the crew, let him vent, wait for him to cross a line, then talk him down while he was feeling penitent.

“We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.”

The Lovey that Jenks knew was uniquely molded by the Wayfarer. Her personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they’d been, every conversation they’d shared. And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn’t the same be said for organic people? Weren’t they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along? In Jenks’s eyes, the only real difference in cognitive development between Humans and AIs was that of speed.

Rosemary frowned. She had a rough idea of how tunnels worked, but she’d never been able to make the idea stick.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

But the constant sounds of people working and laughing and fighting all around him had become a comfort. The open was an empty place to be, and there were moments when even the most seasoned spacer might look to the star-flecked void outside with humility and awe.

“I’m…I’m the coyote. I make the most magnificent contraptions, and I always think this time, this time everyone will see how good I really am, but they only ever burn me up and leave me starving to death.”

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.

I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

“Grum games are rather similar, thematically. I think our species are rather alike, in some ways. Humans would’ve died out, to, if the Aeluons chanced upon the Fleet. Luck’s what saved them. Luck, and discovering humility. That’s really all that makes Humans different from Grum. Well, aside from the obvious.” He chuckled, gesturing to his body.

The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?…

Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other than that it rocks?…Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have a soul?

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.

“I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us?”

Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.

Nobody understood what the Absolute Zeros believed so hard, they couldn’t even wedge it into their lyrics yet: The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags,…

It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.

“Because you’re a friend,” she said, the edge leaving her voice. “And because making connections is what I do. And if you’re serious about this, I’d rather you go through me than some back-alley hack. Though, truth be told, I’m also hoping that by the time I find someone, you’ll have decided I was right about it being a bad idea.”

“No, but see, that’s why it’s so fun! It’s like a puzzle, figuring out what kind of circuits the old ones will talk to, adding new bits to make things more homey, staying on top of all the old framework’s secrets so we don’t blow up.”

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

Ashby had no idea what Corbin was getting at, but this was Corbin’s standard operating procedure. Complain first, explain later.

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

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

If the humans see me actually doing my job, it helps keep suspicions from forming about faulty governor modules.

“For lo, does not Goguenar’s Third Unkillable Fact tell us: ‘Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does?’ "

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another.

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another.

MedSystem’s feed informed me that Ratthi, Overse, and Arada’s heart rates had just accelerated. Mensah’s hadn’t, because she had already thought of all this. It was why she had sent Pin-Lee and Gurathin to shut off HubSystem. Nervously, Ratthi said, “What do we do when they come here?” I said, “Be somewhere else.”

So they could feel a little more human by osmosis…Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility.

The question has never even been: Do you understand object permanence, can you recognize yourself in the mirror, do you bury your dead, do you bond emotionally with your young?…

Elephants do all those things, and some humans definitely don’t. The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony? Enough brainpower and fine motor control and aesthetic ideation to look at feathers and stones and stuff that comes out of a worm’s more unpleasant holes and see gowns, veils, platform heels? Enough sheer style and excess energy to do something that provides no direct, material benefit to your personal survival, that might even mark you out from the pack as shiny, glittery prey, to do it for no other than that it rocks?…Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have a soul?

Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags,…

So they could feel a little more human by osmosis…Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility.

“Damn…I thought you were the other one. I hate carbons. You all look the same.”

That got their attention. There was no reply. Not a surprise. The only people I’ve run into who actually want to get into conversations with SecUnits are my weird humans. I said, “I have an alternate solution to both our problems.”

I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

Basically freehold generally meant shitshow so I hadn’t been expecting much from them. But they were surprisingly easy to work for.

The Friends of Digital Sapients were one of those organizations that had their hearts in the right place but their heads firmly up their asses. On paper, Jenks believed a lot of the same things they did, namely that AIs were sapient individuals worthy of the same leagl rights that everyone else had. But the FDS went about it all wrong.

“Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience. All things, from evolution to municipal sanitation to marriage to the Big Bang to diplomacy to the distribution of shops in urban centers, trend toward the most convenient outcome for the greatest number of lazy bastards, because the inconvenient stuff ends up alone without any friends and a foot growing out of their head and who has the time?”

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.

It took me two seconds to realize she was talking to me. Fortunately, since it seemed like we were really doing this, I had actually been paying attention and didn’t need to play the conversation back.

Mensah set up a watch schedule, including in time for me to go into standby and do a diagnostic and recharge cycle. I was planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

I had worked for some contracts that would have kept me standing here the entire day and night cycle, just on the off chance they wanted me to do something and didn’t want to bother using the feed to call me. Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

Mensah’s expression said she was worried. She looked at me. “What do you think?”

“The very fact that we use the term cold-blooded as a synonym for heartless should tell you something about the innate bias we primates hold against reptiles,’ she pictured him saying. ‘Don’t judge other species by your own social norms.’ “

Mensah set up a watch schedule, including in time for me to go into standby and do a diagnostic and recharge cycle. I was planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

No one is ever really satisfied with what they’ve got, look at that skinny bastard Old Ruutu, he heated up his whole planet like a leftover takeaway, and he still wasn’t really that happy, if you ask me. People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they most want. Before and after, they’re all monsters.

The key to a happy life, Capo devoutly believed, was never giving much of a damn what happened in any given day so long as you got in a nap, a kill, and a snuggle, and the snuggle was optional.

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

Ashby scratched his beard and thought. What did he want it for? After he’d first left home, all those years ago, he’d sometimes wondered if he’d go back to the Fleet to raise kids, or if he’d settle down on a colony somewhere. But he was a spacer through and through, and he had the itch for drifting.

But with the last of her savings running thin and her bridges burned behind her, ther was no margin for error. The price of a fresh start was having no one to fall back on.

Because you need me. I don’t know where that came from. All right, it came from me, but she was my client, I was a SecUnit. There was no emotional contract between us. There was no rational reason for me to sound like a whiny human baby.

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

I felt the brush of Mensah’s awareness in the feed. She must have woken when Gurathin spoke. He finally said, “You don’t blame humans for what you were forced to do? For what happened to you?”

Mensah had seen me when she signed the rental contract. But she had barely looked at me and I had barely looked at her because again, murderbot + actual human = awkwardness. Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

“We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.”

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

…Binned–a word which had come, over the millenia, to mean: carefully, lovingly recorded for posterity by the Elakhon and preserved against the ravages of time, war, and the children’s disrespect for history.

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.

A past birthday gift from Kizzy, who always ignored the fact that none of the non-Human crew members traditionally celebrated birthdays.

Alongside such oddities, his small stature was nothing special. It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird.

“…on a long haul, this” – she tapped the top of Rosemary’s head– “needs to be the most important thing you take care of.”

But the constant sounds of people working and laughing and fighting all around him had become a comfort. The open was an empty place to be, and there were moments when even the most seasoned spacer might look to the star-flecked void outside with humility and awe.

Basically freehold generally meant shitshow so I hadn’t been expecting much from them. But they were surprisingly easy to work for.

Part of it is, they didn’t want me here. Not here in their hub, but here on the planet.

“I did the same thing when my daughters were off at war. That’s why I don’t like that he’s doing it. I know how all that wondering can eat away at a person.”