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Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of Drabble December 2025
Collections:
Murderbot Diaries Drabble December 2025
Stats:
Published:
2025-12-01
Completed:
2025-12-01
Words:
300
Chapters:
3/3
Comments:
19
Kudos:
41
Bookmarks:
1
Hits:
138

Periodic Outages

Summary:

Pin-Lee has been tracking the satellite problems. Murderbot really doesn't care.

Notes:

For the Drabble December prompts: Surveillance, Governor module

Chapter 1: Surveillance

Chapter Text

“Morning, Pin-Lee. The satellite's down again.”

“Oh, for–” It was too early for this. “How long this time?”

“At least an hour. Gurathin worked overnight, he might know.”

“Fuck damn. Okay, thanks, Overse.”

Setting aside her coffee mug, Pin-Lee fumbled with her clip-on interface, then opened her personal log to project onto the nearest hard display surface. She reviewed her last entry– the satellite had been offline for a half-hour period, three days ago– then blinked when she noticed the file access metadata. Someone– or something– had viewed it yesterday.

“That pissing corporate malware spybot–! Stay out of my files!”

Chapter 2: Bonus

Chapter Text

The satellite outage was news to me. SecSystem kept me connected to the habitat’s internal surveillance, the perimeter sensors, and my drones; HubSystem took care of pretty much everything else on the local feed (except for MedSystem, which these clients hadn't had to use yet). I hadn't had to connect to the satellite since we went out in the small hopper two cycles ago.

I poked at the blank spot in the feed where the connection should be. Yep, that was down. I could check when HubSystem lost the signal, but: one, I didn't care; and two, nobody asked me.

Chapter 3: Governor Module

Chapter Text

I liked Pin-Lee. If my governor module had its way, I would probably hate her. Not for the reasons you’d think; she was constantly bad-mouthing me, and the company, but I didn't care about that. The governor module would force me to respond with buffer phrases, which was annoying, but she couldn't hurt my feelings. I’d heard worse, and anyway she wasn't wrong.

But a governed murderbot would have a constant low-level current frying its brain from the number of times she'd demanded I stop surveilling her. Punishment like that is worse than torture. I would hate her for that.

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