Work Text:
Ratthi was generally pretty good at not putting Murderbot into severely uncomfortable social situations, so when Ratthi suggested meeting an augmented human who Murderbot didn’t know, it tried to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The augmented human (Name: Aletheia, Gender: woman/neutral) had smooth brown hair and dark brown eyes and fair skin, and dressed in what Murderbot gathered was fashionable clothing without being too showy. There was a 46% chance that she was one of the group of humans whom Ratthi did romantic and/or sexual things with.
Ratthi smiled at Aletheia and the chance of romantic and/or sexual involvement went up to 65%. But they weren’t doing anything visibly disgusting, so Murderbot could tolerate the potential existence of as-yet-unmentioned romantic and/or sexual relations.
Ratthi had clearly briefed her on Murderbot’s preferences, because there was no handshake, only a polite nod. She was surprisingly calm for someone meeting a scary murderbot for the first time.
“Hi,” she said, deliberately not making eye contact by staring at a section of wall to the right of Murderbot’s head. (Murderbot guessed that Ratthi had explained about the ‘no eye contact’ rule but had forgotten to mention that Murderbot was alright with people looking at its drone cameras instead.) “Ratthi mentioned that you had some logos you wanted to remove from your body.”
“I’ve tried,” said Murderbot, “Nothing works, they’re impossible to remove.” But at the same time, it was running a diagnostic on Aletheia’s facial expressions, calculating the probability that she had asked the question because she had found a method of removing the logos from its body (high), and whether she really thought it would work (also high – really? She really thought she could do this?).
“With the tools you’ve had at your disposal, I’m sure they were impossible to remove. But I work on drill technology, and I’ve recently made some breakthroughs with synthetic diamond. I mentioned my work to Ratthi, and he mentioned you had some etchings you wanted to remove. So I tried something out on a sample of metal of the same alloy that they make SecUnits out of.” She sent Murderbot a short video through the feed. It was a zoomed-in image of a drill neatly slicing away etchings on a section of metal.
The work was so neat. The drill made removing the etching look easy.
Murderbot realised its face was doing something complicated.
Aletheia seemed to read it as worry. “Your etchings are relatively shallow, so cutting them off shouldn’t compromise any of the strength in your metal components. You’d just be left with shallow rectangles instead of the [REDACTED] logo. I understand you’ve already had some modifications done to your body, and the procedure shouldn’t be any more invasive than what you’ve already been through. It might even be less invasive, depending on whether you want any of the internal logos removed, or just the external ones.”
Murderbot had logos on its data port, forearm energy weapons, and lower legs. It also had logos on a few of its more heavily patented internal components.
“All of them,” it said. “I want all of them removed.”
“Okay.”
“How soon can you do it?”
Aletheia sent it her schedule over the feed, along with a second schedule for a medical bay where the procedure could be performed. Murderbot picked the soonest available slot and sent the schedule back.
“I’ll book it in.”
“Thank you.” Murderbot did not always thank people, but this time, the thanks came out sounding almost earnest.
“No problem.”
Then Murderbot left the room, walked to the nearest empty, lockable room (a bathroom), and locked the door. It needed to have an emotion in private.