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Suzanne Palmer: The Secret Life of Bots (EBook, 2017, Clarkesworld Magazine) 3 stars

Autonomous maintenance robots take on a much larger role in saving a spaceship from aliens …

Entertaining story of a bot that saves the day.

3 stars

An interesting story about a little bot that is reluctantly given a small task on a spaceship, only to discover a bigger calling and sets out to save the day.

An autonomous bot (later known as Bot 9) is activated on a spaceship and tasked with tracking down and eliminating an 'organism' running around the ship. Its task is made more difficult when the organism turns out to be more deadly than it looks, having eliminated a number of other bots on the ship.

But things take a turn for the worse when Bot 9 discovers why the ship has reluctantly activated it, the task that the ship has to fulfil and how it is to do it. Fortunately, Bot 9 still has a module to come up with an improvised plan that may yet save the day.