But sitting here in a hotel lobby, watching a biozone and running every not-a-SecUnit behavioral code I had, the fantasy fell apart. The hard reality was that I didn’t know what Mensah was to me.

Even after Miki, I still didn’t want to be a pet robot.

Up in the room, Pin-Lee was pacing slowly and trying not to grind her teeth and Ratthi had gone to the bathroom three times. Gurathin was just sitting and staring. Then he said over the feed, Are you there, SecUnit?

No, I left, I said, I’ve decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed.

Okay, so that did sound like a much better idea than I meant it to.

There was a pause, then he said, I’m not your enemy. I’m just cautious.

I don’t care about your opinion, I said, and then immediately wished I’d put myself on a one-second delay so I could delete it. It made it sound like I did care. Which I didn’t.

One minute crawled by. Then two. Gurathin said, What did you do, while you were gone? Where did you go?

I didn’t want to answer, because I didn’t want to talk about it, but it seemed weirdly petty to just ignore him. I pulled a selection of video from the trip with Ayres and the others on the way to HaveRatton, mostly exchanges I’d tagged so I could critique my performance later. (A few times I’d broken up fights, been forced to give relationship advice, and the infamous Cracker Wrapper in the Sink Incident.) I cut it together, labeled it “Murderbot Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant,” and sent it to Gurathin.

He was still watching it when the GrayCris representative walked into the lobby from the main entrance.

There was nothing physical to set him apart from the other humans and augmented humans wandering in and out. He was a tall pale human, with long light-colored hair, and he was wearing one of the many local variations of business attire: a dark long-sleeved jacket that went to the knees, over wide pants.

I tapped Gurathin and he stopped the video play.

The GrayCris rep paused and a flash of annoyance crossed his face. He’d encountered the choked hotel feed. The hotel system registered the charge to a station credit account and then gave him access. I caught the results of the routine scan from the hotel’s security drone: no weapons, just interface activity. A brief analysis of the drone’s read gave me a 65 percent probability that he had something on him to falsify the scan. So he was probably armed and probably carrying a secured comm device.