OK, I’m going for a Martha Wells two-fer today. And I’m going to start of with the shorter story. I have to give mu thanks to faintingviolet here because if I hadn’t read their review, I would not have known this had been released.
And I thought I kept up pretty well with most things related to Murderbot
But even though this short story is, well, short, (a fragment of a story even) it made me very happy because it focuses of Peri/ART. Told from the point of view of Iris, Rapport starts with ART and some of the other crew members preparing to board a station that may have undergone a kind of hostile takeover. And ART is being a bit of a dick. Perhaps not unusual from the Asshole Research Transport, but that’s not the only unusual thing it’s doing. It’s taken a bit of initiative and started assisting the boarding crew by hacking the station’s security camera system. And it’s this shift in behavior ART is showing here does catch Iris’s attention.
Where had ART picked that idea up? From some human-generated media, it seems. Where had ART sourced that from? Iris does play with the idea that ART may be involving into new, higher being or something, but the explanation is a little more simple than that:
Iris blurted out “Did you meet someone?”
This is not the strongest of short stories; I think it’s right to describe it as a fragment. But it does make a nice bit of window dressing for the later installments of the series overall.
For cbr17bingo, this is Review. Thanks faintingviolet
That’s another bingo—vertical, second from left.