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.

“And I don’t want to leave. But I won’t be on the Wayfarer forever anyway. Someday, when the time’s right, I’ll go do other things. If that time gets chosen for me, well… okay.”

“It’s our hobby,” Bear said. “We only sell them to neighbors and trusted friends. We’re not in the business of equipping bad guys. But if you want to discourage bad guys, oh yeah, we can do that.”

“… Modding isn’t just about getting sewn up with cool tech, it’s about orchestrating a balance between the synthetic and the organic. If you don’t care about the well-being of the organic, then– ow!” He yelped as Kizzy pulled his hair.

“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 really old practice, goes back to pre-Collapse computer networks. We’re talking old tech here. People would choose names for themselves that they only used within a network. Sometimes that name became so much a part of who they were that even their friends out in the real world started using it. For some folks, those names became their whole identity. Their true identity, even. Now, modders, modders don’t care about anything as much as individual freedom. They say that nobody can define you but you. So when Bear gave himself a new arm, he didn’t do it because he didn’t like the body he was born in, but because he felt that new arm fit him better. Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside.”

“You’re Rosemary Harper. You chose that name because the old one didn’t fit anymore. So you had to break a few laws to do it. Big fucking deal. Life isn’t fair, and laws usually aren’t, either. You did what you had to do. I get that.”

“…People change feather families whenever they need to, and people need different things at different times in their lives. It’s almost unheard of for an Aandrisk to stay with the same people their entire life…”

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.