My fic: Murderbot: 17%: Gen
Mar. 15th, 2022 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stonepicnicking_okapiTitle: 17%
Fandom: Murderbot Diaries
Length: 500
Rating: Gen
For: GYWO Yatzhee roll #1, prompt
Summary: Murderbot gets distracted during an attack.
performance reliability at 83% and dropping
83% was not bad given how outnumbered and outgunned I was, but if experience had taught me anything, it was that it’s the 17% that gets you.
I was a rogue SecUnit who’d hacked my governor module, a murderbot, and a hopeless specimen of heartless killing machine.
I was also down two of six drones, and I had just taken about a dozen hits from energy weapons and a similar number of explosive bolts.
Hostile #8 was destroyed—I told myself I’d stop counting when they numbered double-digits—when Hostile #9 appeared from out of nowhere, nowhere I was looking, that is.
My remaining drones swarmed in combat mode.
Then something, something small, caught my attention.
Bad, murderbot. You complain about the distractibility of humans and augmented humans, and here you are, in the middle of battle, getting distracted.
The something laid in a thick braid of wires in the exposed wall of the opposite side of the corridor. It was a square cube of metal with a 3 x 3 configuration of bolts. It looked like the front piece of a transport—if said transport had been shrunk to be held between a pair of hands.
“Murderbot! What are you doing?”
ART’s comm.
“Killing hostiles, asshole. What are you doing?”
“Correction. You were killing them, but now you’re—”
I threw myself at opposite side of the corridor, grabbed the something, and tucked it under my suit.
“Get to the hatch, murderbot!”
I got to the hatch.
Barely.
---
The something wasn’t in my suit when I came back online.
“Great,” I sighed. All my time with humans and augmented humans has taught be to be an expert sigher. “All for nothing.”
Then a med-bot rolled forward with a tray.
“I took the liberty of cleaning it and checking it for alien remnant and other potential contaminants,” said ART. “It’s clean.”
“Thanks. How many cycles until we reach Preservation?”
“Oh, about a hundred episodes of Concentric Nautilus.”
“Cue it up.”
---
I was a little nervous when I returned from my visit with Mensah and her family.
Okay, I was a lot nervous.
And ART noticed.
“I trust all is well,” he said in the most annoying tone imaginable, a tone which said he knew damn well something was off.
“Yeah, um, everyone was good. I went with Amina and her offspring to a cultural festival.”
“Indeed? Little Eden is growing up.”
“Yeah, she, um, really into crafts and, uh, making things.” Why was this so fucking hard? Because everything was hard compared to watching media, which I really wished I was doing instead of this.
I reached into my bag and produced the thing.
“She made you this!” I blurted it out in one long syllable.
“Eden? Made? Me? That?”
“That’s what I said. Here!”
A bot appeared to claim it, it being a miniature replica of ART, with the something on its front piece.
As I said, it’s the 17% that gets you.
Fandom: Murderbot Diaries
Length: 500
Rating: Gen
For: GYWO Yatzhee roll #1, prompt
Summary: Murderbot gets distracted during an attack.
performance reliability at 83% and dropping
83% was not bad given how outnumbered and outgunned I was, but if experience had taught me anything, it was that it’s the 17% that gets you.
I was a rogue SecUnit who’d hacked my governor module, a murderbot, and a hopeless specimen of heartless killing machine.
I was also down two of six drones, and I had just taken about a dozen hits from energy weapons and a similar number of explosive bolts.
Hostile #8 was destroyed—I told myself I’d stop counting when they numbered double-digits—when Hostile #9 appeared from out of nowhere, nowhere I was looking, that is.
My remaining drones swarmed in combat mode.
Then something, something small, caught my attention.
Bad, murderbot. You complain about the distractibility of humans and augmented humans, and here you are, in the middle of battle, getting distracted.
The something laid in a thick braid of wires in the exposed wall of the opposite side of the corridor. It was a square cube of metal with a 3 x 3 configuration of bolts. It looked like the front piece of a transport—if said transport had been shrunk to be held between a pair of hands.
“Murderbot! What are you doing?”
ART’s comm.
“Killing hostiles, asshole. What are you doing?”
“Correction. You were killing them, but now you’re—”
I threw myself at opposite side of the corridor, grabbed the something, and tucked it under my suit.
“Get to the hatch, murderbot!”
I got to the hatch.
Barely.
---
The something wasn’t in my suit when I came back online.
“Great,” I sighed. All my time with humans and augmented humans has taught be to be an expert sigher. “All for nothing.”
Then a med-bot rolled forward with a tray.
“I took the liberty of cleaning it and checking it for alien remnant and other potential contaminants,” said ART. “It’s clean.”
“Thanks. How many cycles until we reach Preservation?”
“Oh, about a hundred episodes of Concentric Nautilus.”
“Cue it up.”
---
I was a little nervous when I returned from my visit with Mensah and her family.
Okay, I was a lot nervous.
And ART noticed.
“I trust all is well,” he said in the most annoying tone imaginable, a tone which said he knew damn well something was off.
“Yeah, um, everyone was good. I went with Amina and her offspring to a cultural festival.”
“Indeed? Little Eden is growing up.”
“Yeah, she, um, really into crafts and, uh, making things.” Why was this so fucking hard? Because everything was hard compared to watching media, which I really wished I was doing instead of this.
I reached into my bag and produced the thing.
“She made you this!” I blurted it out in one long syllable.
“Eden? Made? Me? That?”
“That’s what I said. Here!”
A bot appeared to claim it, it being a miniature replica of ART, with the something on its front piece.
As I said, it’s the 17% that gets you.