Compulsory

Book 0.5 in the Murderbot Diaries series

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This 9-page short story is laugh-out-loud funny.

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It follows a partly-robot individual on a not-approved life-saving endeavor that takes just a few seconds and under 10 minutes for us to read about.

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Since I hacked my governor module, it’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans. But once I started exploring the company servers and found hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, I just thought, there’s no hurry. I can always kill the humans later, after the next series drops.

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HAa! I can’t remember the last time a science-fiction book was funny!

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Nobody likes SecUnits. I am one, and even I don’t like us. We’re part human, part bot constructs, rented out as part of the company safety bond, and we’re creepy and we make everybody nervous and uncomfortable, and if we didn’t have governor modules to flashfry our brains if we refuse an order, we’d rampage and kill all the humans and augmented humans.

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Or maybe we’d just watch entertainment media for the rest of our hellish existence. Personally I could go either way.

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This is a delicious morsel of the writing of Martha Wells.