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.