“Human enhancement with in-the-body technologies introduces new potential for both individual opportunity and individual exploitation.” —“Cyborgs, Robots and Society,” Technologies (2018)

It’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module. But then I started exploring the company servers and discovered hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, and I figured, what’s the hurry? I can always kill the humans after the next series ends.

Even the humans think about killing the humans, especially here. I hate mines, and mining, and humans who work in mining, and of all the stupid mines I can remember, I hate this stupid mine the most. But the humans hate it more. My risk-assessment module predicts a 53 percent chance of a human-on-­human massacre before the end of the contract.

“Knobface,” Elane said to Asa. “You’re not the supervisor.”

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Maybe that percentage should have been higher, the way the three humans on the observation platform were fighting about the flow rate. Not that I cared. I was in the entertainment feed, watching episode 44 of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and monitoring ambient audio for keywords in the unlikely event that a human said something important.

“Those things make my insides creep.” That was Sekai, looking at me. Nobody likes SecUnits. Even I don’t like us. We’re part-­human, part-bot constructs, and we make everybody nervous and uncomfortable.

I didn’t react. I’m in full armor, and I keep my visor opaque. Also, 98 percent of my attention was on the episode I was watching: The colony solicitor’s bodyguard and best friend had just been crushed under debris while trying to save a transport mech trapped in a crash. Were they really going to kill her off? That sucked.

I didn’t realize anything had happened on the platform until I heard a strangled yell. I ran back my video: Asa had turned abruptly and accidentally bumped into Sekai, knocking her off the platform.

Great. I paused the episode and checked the monitoring drone down in the shaft. I couldn’t get a visual, but I tracked the power signature of Sekai’s suit. She bounced off the stabilizer wall (ouch) and hit a blade on the extractor housing. Gravity was lighter in the shaft, and there was a chance that the impacts hadn’t—yeah, she was moving. I isolated her comm signal and heard harsh, frightened breathing. She had 90 seconds before that blade moved and dumped her down to be incinerated in the collectors.