"This"—Murderbot motions toward the horrible scene—"is helping?" It's tone is flat but not sarcastic, not immediately rejecting everything out of hand. It stares at the bodies and all the gore. That alone doesn't bother it. It's been through too many fights and bloodbaths for that to bother it immensely. These deaths, whatever they are, seem to be whatever happened to people, as judged by Miki and the incredible variety of wounds among the corpses. So, they have to face, what, the dead?

I never talked to a bot like me before. I have human friends, but I never had a friend like me. Miki said that in its feed, one of the last messages it sent before the CombatBot, before that. Murderbot felt like such an asshole. It thought Miki was a pet bot the whole time because that was easier than recognizing that humans and bots could be friends and that Don Abene was Miki's friend, not just its owner, at a time when its own crew had treated it like a pet bot. The problem wasn't Miki or Don Abene. It'd been Murderbot and PreservationAux, and Murderbot hadn't given its crew a chance after they fucked up until it fucked up being there with Miki and Don Abene in the first place and getting Dr. Mensah kidnapped.

Ugh, it hated that some fucked up alien was right. About something. Though it probably doesn't understand what Murderbot understands, only somehow plucking it as SomethingThatMatters like the memories in the books. Which the books were useful, fine. It admits that, but let it keep them then.

This situation. Miki. Penny. It's not a hard parallel to make. "Pretty sure it wants us to be 'friends'," Murderbot comments, "Putting us on a boat to goretopia is a fucked up way to do that, even if that's the way I've met most of my—"

Not friends. It's not comfortable with that word for ART or Mensah or Ratthi or anyone. "People," it settles on. "Ratthi doesn't have to go through traumatic stuff to get to know people, and he knows everyone." Life would be a lot worse for a lot of people if that weren't the case.