You made a mistake, Murderbot, a really bad mistake. How the hell was I supposed to know there were transports sentient enough to be mean? There were evil bots on the entertainment feed all the time, but that wasn’t real, it was just a scary story, a fantasy.

I’d thought it was a fantasy.

I said, “Okay,” shut down my feed, and huddled down into the chair.

I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

The transport didn’t respond. I tried to come up with countermeasures for all the different ways it could hurt me and how I could hurt it back. It was more like a SecUnit than a bot, so much so I wondered if it was a construct, if there was cloned organic brain tissue buried in its systems somewhere. I’d never tried to hack another SecUnit. It might be safest to go into standby for the duration of the trip, and trigger myself to wake when we reached my destination. Though that would leave me vulnerable to its drones.

I watched seconds click by, waiting to see if it reacted. I was glad I had noted the lack of cameras and not bothered trying to hack into the ship’s security system. I understood now why the humans felt it didn’t need additional protection. A bot with this complete control over its environment and the initiative and freedom to act could repel any attempt to board.

It had opened the hatch for me. It wanted me here.

Uh-oh.

Then it said, You can continue to play the media.

I just huddled there warily.

It added, Don’t sulk.

I was afraid, but that made me irritated enough to show it that what it was doing to me was not exactly new. I sent through the feed, SecUnits don’t sulk. That would trigger punishment from the governor module, and attached some brief recordings from my memory of what exactly that felt like.

Seconds added up to a minute, then another, then three more. It doesn’t sound like much to humans, but for a conversation between bots, or excuse me, between a bot/human construct and a bot, it was a long time.

Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you.