Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel (The Murderbot Diaries Book 5)

Performance reliability catastrophic drop. Shutdown. Restart.

This was one of the corridors I had walked up and down, working on my pretending-to-be-a-human code, where ART had critiqued my performance.

I felt my face change. The muscles were all stiff, and not from the hit I’d taken. I’m still not great at controlling my expressions, and I had no idea what I looked like.

(Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.)

I never asked clients for information if I could help it. (For a lot of reasons but close to the top was the all-too-common suicidal lack of attention to detail humans were prone to.)