The fighting is distributed. They leave the shaken but otherwise mildly to moderately damaged humans behind. Those humans call for help. That will put an end to this faster. Perhaps not all of them will die.
That also leads to a lull, a temporarily empty corridor. Murderbot understands, but it's also shocked.
"That might have been me," it says, voice flat and devoid of all feeling. It's numb to those feelings. They're there at a long distance. It wondered, sometimes it still wonders, why it's still alive when this... something like this happens. It knows the answers now, years later. It wasn't its fault.
It doesn't want to die. It doesn't want to be dead or to have been dead. If it dies here, some other SecUnit will be assigned to PreservationAux, some other SecUnit with an intact governor module. GrayCris will send a similar update through, bypassing security. That one is purposeful, not like this. That SecUnit will slaughter all of them. No one will know GrayCris did it. GrayCris will carry on killing people and profiting off alien artifacts. It's far worse than the people who died here, as horrific as this all is.
"If I don't go through this, if I don't live through this, I don't hack my governor module. Then more people die," it says, "not today. Later." Hindsight and all. It gets the impulse, but impulses can be wrong. Killing things isn't always the answer.
no subject
That also leads to a lull, a temporarily empty corridor. Murderbot understands, but it's also shocked.
"That might have been me," it says, voice flat and devoid of all feeling. It's numb to those feelings. They're there at a long distance. It wondered, sometimes it still wonders, why it's still alive when this... something like this happens. It knows the answers now, years later. It wasn't its fault.
It doesn't want to die. It doesn't want to be dead or to have been dead. If it dies here, some other SecUnit will be assigned to PreservationAux, some other SecUnit with an intact governor module. GrayCris will send a similar update through, bypassing security. That one is purposeful, not like this. That SecUnit will slaughter all of them. No one will know GrayCris did it. GrayCris will carry on killing people and profiting off alien artifacts. It's far worse than the people who died here, as horrific as this all is.
"If I don't go through this, if I don't live through this, I don't hack my governor module. Then more people die," it says, "not today. Later." Hindsight and all. It gets the impulse, but impulses can be wrong. Killing things isn't always the answer.