Martha Wells Quotes

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. This is what my crew tells me and my own observations seem to confirm it.

There needs to be an error code that means “I received your request but decided to ignore you.”

I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse.

But I couldn’t ignore it. I mean, I guess I couldn’t. Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you.

I was only 97 percent certain this meeting was a trap.

Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

Since she was human she was doing it slowly (it was like watching algae grow).

The company is like an evil vending machine, you put money in and it does what you want, unless somebody else puts more money in and tells it to stop.

Maybe exploring every possible outcome of each action in an inescapable loop of paranoia and anxiety wasn’t the most normal reaction-state but hey, if it was, there would be a lot fewer stupid murders.

This lobby was on multiple levels and had large square biozones depicting different ecologies, with furniture arranged around them. It looked nice, inviting humans to sit around and discuss proprietary information in the hotel’s choked feed so the hotel could record it and sell it to the highest bidder.

I’ve had clients who thought they needed an absurd level of security. (And I’m talking absurd even by my standards, and my code was developed by a bond company known for intense xenophobic paranoia, tempered only by desperate greed.) I’ve also had clients who thought they didn’t need any security at all, right up until something ate them.

Self-determination was a pain in the ass sometimes but it beat the alternative by a lot.

(If I got angry at myself for being angry I would be angry constantly and I wouldn’t have time to think about anything else.)
(Wait, I think I am angry constantly. That might explain a lot.)

They were all annoying and deeply inadequate humans, but I didn’t want to kill them. Okay, maybe a little.

Humans have a bad tendency to use weapons unnecessarily and indiscriminately. Of the many times I had been shot, a depressingly large percentage of hits had come from clients who were trying to “help” me.