Miki went up to the crew area below the control deck where Abene and Hirune sat with Brais and Ejiro. Kader and Vibol were just above us in the cockpit. The humans had turned a couple of the station chairs around to face the curved padded couch, and were watching the bubble of a floating display surface in the middle of the compartment. From the schematics on display, they were going over a proposed route through the facility. I was poking around carefully in their individual feeds, when Abene patted the seat next to her. “Sit down, Miki.”

Miki sat next to her on the couch, and none of the other humans reacted. This was apparently perfectly normal.

“Are you excited to see the inside of the facility, Miki?” Hirune asked it, as she turned the schematic to a new angle. “I’m tired of just looking at maps of it.”

“I’m excited!” Miki echoed. “We will do a good assessment, and then we can have a new assignment.”

Ejiro laughed. “I hope it’s that easy.”

Brais said, “I don’t care if it’s easy or hard, at least we’re moving! Miki was probably getting tired of playing Mus with us.”

“I like games. I would play games all the time if we could,” Miki said.

I had to withdraw back to my dark cubicle. I was having an emotion again. An angry one.

Before Dr. Mensah bought me, I could count the number of times I sat on a human chair and it was never in front of clients.

I don’t even know why I was reacting this way. Was I jealous of a human-form bot? I didn’t want to be a pet robot, that’s why I’d left Dr. Mensah and the others. (Not that Mensah had said she wanted a pet SecUnit. I don’t think she wanted a SecUnit at all.) What did Miki have that I wanted? I had no idea. I didn’t know what I wanted.

And yes, I know that was probably a big part of the problem right there.

I stepped back into Miki’s feed. Don Abene was saying, “—keep in mind that your experience with humans is limited. We think of you as one of our family, but to others, you are a stranger. That’s probably why our security team didn’t want you to look at their things.”

Uh-oh. I ran back Miki’s camera to pick up the part of the conversation I’d missed. Miki had asked Abene why Gerth had reacted that way when it had looked at her and Wilken’s cases. Fortunately, Abene had gotten distracted trying to answer the question while still looking over the facility’s schematic, and hadn’t asked why Miki had gone to see the security team. If she thought to ask about it, would Miki tell her about me? How would it answer that question?