Network Effect Quotes
"I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security... right up until something ate them."
"Dr. Arada, who is what her marital partner Overse calls a 'terminal optimist,' was somewhere in the comfortable middle zone."
"I’m a murderbot, I don’t give a crap about boats."
"I said, 'I’m a Shut Up or Get Your Head Smashed.' So that was two sentences I’d needed."
"I’ve reported to my contracted supervisor."
"He pressed his lips together... Then he hesitated and said, 'Look, I—I didn’t mean to get you shot. I’m sorry.'"
"Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately."
"I don’t like planets but she lured me there by explaining that it was for an Art Festival/Conference/Religious Observation that would include 'a lot of' live performances."
"But the company didn’t own me anymore and the only human here I was answerable to was Arada, and only in limited ways determined by a contract that Pin-Lee had negotiated for me."
"I wasn’t sure what it was but you could probably describe it as 'skeptical.' (Ratthi says that’s how I look most of the time.)"
"It would never stop being novel to be around a bunch of humans in a relatively confined space and be able to close a door between me and them and not have to care what they were doing."
"But whatever, with all that going on, nobody noticed me."
"It’s hardly surprising that I feel safer with you. It’s also easier to be around people who understand what happened, what it’s like to be in that situation. That’s you and the rest of the survey team."
"So there were two positions on whether the Preservation Planetary leader needed security."
"I had always wanted humans to listen to my advice."
"It’s not like I’m having a good time either right now."
"I wasn’t having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART."
"She was being sarcastic but I knew of raiders who had done things like this for reasons almost as stupid. But this wasn’t a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was… statistically unlikely."
"I didn’t forget that I had one of ART’s comms tucked into the pocket under my ribs."
"I was starting to panic. I didn’t want ART to be hurt, and anything that could hurt ART could destroy me and Amena."
"Had ART been able to use the deactivated comm to track me after our survey ship arrived through the wormhole? Yes, probably."
"I needed to get rid of my EVAC suit. In gravity they made movement cumbersome, and could be hacked if I wasn’t careful."
"I was lying in a heap on the deck, a broken fragment of something grinding into my cheek."
"You can hit a SecUnit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown."
"I sent the order to power down and they dropped to the deck with two loud thunks."
"Amena’s bravado was turning into real anger."
"If you weren’t so angry at me, you’d realize I was right."
"I had a lot of code to write so I can hack the targetControlSystem."
"I don’t know anything about transport engines but I know you shouldn’t shoot at them."
"I am not. You’re emotionally compromised."
"I could have said 'Don’t say I never gave you anything' and we could have had reassuring sarcastic banter, like one of my shows."
"I wondered if the shuttle was still aboard. If ART’s shuttles were still aboard."
"It’s for the best. It doesn’t seem like you know how to control it."
"The last thing I needed was to be whacked into an involuntary restart again."
"I hadn’t seen any sign of damage or disturbance up to this point."
Then she whispered to herself, "All right, all right. Let’s think."
"I could see the display Amena was interpreting, but I’d found another diagram of ART on a new display."
"Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is."
"Oh, we’re here, we’re here! Where are you?"
"But I was estimating a 70 percent chance that if we hadn’t exited the wormhole so absurdly early, Arada and the others wouldn’t have survived much longer."
"So now I had four more humans to worry about. Fantastic."
"Then I got an alert from a sentry drone."
"I was assuming targetControlSystem wasn’t going to be cooperative about admitting visitors."
"ART would have laughed at an attack like that."
"I don’t know if I tried to make ART stop but that was when I lost all input again."
"ART, stop talking to my human behind my back!"
"I couldn’t tell exactly when targetControlSystem had been uploaded to ART’s systems, but it was before this point because the status updates told the story of a subtle but intense battle over the weapons."
"ART’s crew had been held hostage for its good behavior, but it hadn’t been willing to kill our survey team even after it knew it had me in its tractor."
"Something first removed and then significantly altered sections of its personal memory."
"The Targets couldn’t have any idea SecUnit would be capable of seizing control of the ship when they brought it aboard."
"I suspect they came in the supplies for one of the two colonies, either the original one or the corporate colony seeded by Adamantine."
"What we do know for certain is that the Targets were altered to look as they do."
"I apologize for kidnapping you and causing potential collateral damage to your clients."
"If they weren’t all dead, they’d be trying to kill us, or stick implants in us."
"You’re probably right about that. I’ll talk to the others."
I’m not even sure "likes" is the right word there, but basically, ART gives its opinion whether you like it or not.
"There was, and is, still a potential danger from individual dependents or employees of GrayCris."
"For a being as sophisticated as you are, it is baffling how little understanding you have of the composition of your own mind."
"It’s to keep the humans and augmented humans from leaving the planet."
"You wouldn’t have to rip me out of my body, just copy me."
"It’s not like you’re going to breach and seize control of a ship attached to a space dock by tripping or forgetting to bring your weapon or something."
"That’s doable. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble convincing the council and the advocates that this needs to be under a limited duration diplomatic seal."
"SecUnits have a distance limit, imposed by the contract owner."
"Dead clients don’t count. Otherwise you could just kill one and carry them around with you."
"I just really like you. Not in a weird way."
"I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients."
"I’d been humoring ART, not really admitting it to myself."
"But if ART’s crew had arrived in the drop box while this was going on, I didn’t like their chances."
"At least, that’s what I thought at the time."
"So this all looked like a big mess but it told me two things: (1) the theory about the Targets being colonists who had been exposed to alien remnant contamination was probably correct."
"I didn’t like that plan. We didn’t know how long the fighting had been going on and it might stop at any moment, and whoever won would go after the trapped humans."
"Iris was small, shorter and slimmer than Ratthi, not much bigger than Amena."
She hesitated, undecided but wanting to believe. "I will if you show me your face."
"I told the suit to retract the faceplate and fold its hood down."
"Is Peri all right? Where is it? And how did you get here? Did you follow us to this system?"
"I’m not going to turn around and show you my neck, strange person I just met on a hostile planet."
"But you are the SecUnit Perihelion told us about?"
"I said, It would take too long, and the pods might be blocking the shaft. I’ve got a better idea."
"The problem was mostly me, I felt guilty asking for help, though I’d tried to set things up so neither human would be exposed to fire."
"I told it, Okay, you keep the ship. I’ll take the planet."
"I have never been around humans who behave this way with a SecUnit and it is disconcerting."
Iris said, "Is Peri all right? Where is it? And how did you get here? Did you follow us to this system?"
"It is like retrieving an endangered client, only the client is a SecUnit and the humans are planning the retrieval."
"That’s the Adamantine colony’s language."
"Change is terrifying. Choices are terrifying. But having a thing in your head that kills you if you make a mistake is more terrifying."
"No one had ever rescued me before except Dr. Mensah."
"You could always come back and visit us."
"I wasn’t going to put it quite that way, but yes."
"The good thing is, you do know what you want."
"I don’t want to not see you again, either."
"I’ve been amassing a collection from the university’s archives."
"I think your memories are providing it with the sort of context you obtained from human media."
"Maybe I’d always been a weird SecUnit; maybe 3 would have better luck communicating with other SecUnits."
"Maybe I needed to get 3 a copy of Dr. Bharadwaj’s documentary, too."
"For now, keyword searching ART’s index, I think I’d found something even less realistic than Timestream Defenders Orion."