Our vehicle was waiting for us and I handed her in, and climbed into the other seat. I told it to head for the family camp house, which had been erected in a habitation area on the outskirts of the festival site. The vehicle had a limited bot-driver, which would take humans all over the campground and festival site but knew not to go into the designated no-vehicle sections.
It hummed out of the court and into the dark, along the path that led through high grass and scrub trees. Mensah sighed and opened the window. The breeze was still warm and smelled like vegetation, and the guide-lights along the way were low enough not to obscure the starfield. All the humans and augmented humans staying here for the festival made it a heavily populated area, but we were traveling through the section reserved for humans who actually wanted to sleep. The temporary housing (pop-up shelters of all shapes and sizes, camping vehicles, tents and collapsible structures that looked more like art installations) were all mostly dark and quiet. The camp area for humans who had to be loud was on the far side of the grounds with a sound baffle field to deflect the music and crowd noise. She said, “Thank you. I’m sorry I interrupted your evening.”
I recalled my drones except for the one that was recording the play and the detachment I had designated to keep tabs on the family still at the party. (Another detachment was at the camp house, maintaining a perimeter and keeping watch on the two adults and seven children who had gone back earlier.) I wasn’t sure how to react. Mensah wasn’t acting like I had rescued her from certain death, but she wasn’t acting like we were heading back to the habitat after a boring but successful day collecting samples, either. I said, “I recorded the plays. Do you want to see them?”
She perked up. “I never get to see the performances at this thing. Did you get the one— Oh, what was it called? The new historical by Glaw and Ji-min?”
The difference between “calm and normal” and actual normal was measurable enough that I could have made a chart. I just said, “Yes. It’s pretty good.”
Something was bothering her, and it wasn’t just that her family was clearly as weirded out by me as I was by them. They had assumed I would stay in the camp house, which, no. Mensah had told them I didn’t need any help or supervision and could find my own way around. (Quote: “If it can infiltrate high-security corporate installations while people are shooting at it, it can certainly handle a domestic festival.”)
It wasn’t that her family was phobic about the scary rogue SecUnits the entertainment media and the newsfeeds were so fond of, or that they didn’t like bots. (There were “free” bots wandering around on Preservation, though they had guardians who were technically supposed to keep track of them.) It was just me-the-SecUnit they didn’t like.
(That didn’t apply to the seven kids. I was illicitly trading downloads via the feed with three of them.)
I think if I had been a normal bot, or even like a normal SecUnit, just off inventory, naive and not knowing anything about how to get along in the human world or whatever, like the way humans would write it for the media, basically, it would have been okay. But I wasn’t like that. I was me, Murderbot.
So instead of Mensah having a pet bot like poor Miki, or a sad bot/human construct that needed someone to help it, she had me.
(I told this to Dr. Bharadwaj later, because we talked about a lot of things while she was doing research about bot/human relations for her documentary. After thinking about it, she said, “I wish I thought you were wrong.”)
(Farai was a possible exception. Up on the station, when Mensah had first introduced me to her family, she’d had a conversation with me. Or a conversation at me, you could say. Transcript:
Farai: “You know we’re grateful for how you returned her to us.”
I did know, I guess. What do humans say in this situation? A quick archive search came up with some variation on “okay, um” and even I knew that wasn’t going to cut it.
(Just a heads-up, when a murderbot stands there looking to the left of your head to avoid eye contact, it’s probably not thinking about killing you, it’s probably frantically trying to come up with a reply to whatever you just said to it.)
She added, “I wanted to ask what your relationship to her is.”
Uh. In the Corporation Rim, Mensah was my owner. On Preservation, she was my guardian. (That’s like an owner, but Preservation law requires they be nice to you.) But Mensah and Pin-Lee were trying to get my status listed as “refugee working as employee/security consultant.”
But I knew Farai knew all that, and I knew she was asking for an answer that was closer to objective reality. And wow, I did not have that answer. I said, “I’m her SecUnit.” (Yes, that’s still in the buffer.)
She lifted her brows. “And that means?”
Backed into yet another conversational corner, I fell back on honesty. “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”
She smiled. “Thank you.”
(And that was that.)
Mensah’s family were also weirded out by the idea that I would be providing security, and were afraid I would be, I don’t know, scaring legitimate visitors and killing people, I guess. And granted, while I have been a key factor in certain clusterfucks of gigantic proportions and my risk assessment module has serious issues, my threat assessment record is pretty great, like 93 percent. (Most of the negative points came from that time I didn’t know that Wilken and Gerth were hired killers until Wilken tried to shoot Don Abene in the head, but that was an outlier.)
Mensah’s family also thought they didn’t need security, which, maybe before GrayCris, that had been true. But as it was, during the festival I only had to deal with five incursions, four by outsystem newsfeed journalists with recording drones. I took control of the drones (I can always use a few more) and notified the local Rangers who drove off the human journalists. The fifth incursion was the one that got me in trouble with Amena, Mensah’s oldest offspring.
Since the festival had started, I had been taking note of a potential hostile that Amena had been associating with. Evidence was mounting up and my threat assessment was nearing critical. Things like: (1) he had informed her that his age was comparable to hers, which was just below the local standard for legal adult, but my physical scan and public record search indicated that he was approximately twelve Preservation standard calendar years older, (2) he never approached her when any family members or verified friends were with her, (3) he stared at her secondary sexual characteristics when her attention was elsewhere, (4) he encouraged her to take intoxicants that he wasn’t ingesting himself, (5) her parental and other related humans all assumed she was with her friends when she was seeing him and her friends all assumed she was with family and she hadn’t told either group about him, (6) I just had a bad feeling about the little shit.
You might think the obvious thing to do was to notify Mensah or Farai or Tano, the third marital partner. I didn’t.
If there was one thing I understood, it was the difference between proprietary and non-proprietary data.
So, on the night when Potential Target invited Amena to come back to his semi-isolated camp house with him to “meet some friends,” I decided to come along.
He led her into the darkened house, and she stumbled on a low table. She giggled and he laughed. Sounding way more intoxicated than he actually was, he said, “Wait, I got it,” and tapped the house’s feed to turn on the lights.