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I knew Mensah would be disappointed and Indah would be mad if I killed this asshole. So I was going to have to make it look like he wasn’t murdered.
I thought Marne was just that specific, pretty common type of asshole who wanted to give a not-quite-legally-adult person intoxicants and do sex stuff with them. I let myself into his camp house because he seemed to be trying that with Mensah’s daughter. While I was waiting, I spotted his spare interface and decided to go through his messages. That’s when I found out he had targeted Amena because he was working for someone. Those messages between him and a burner account made me glad I didn’t have a digestive system.
The last exchange was from over fifteen cycles ago and I could see from the transfer strings on the incoming messages that Marne’s contact was not in this system. Luckily, the same messages that guaranteed him a (probably fictional) pile of currency and a (definitely fictional) high-paying corporate job also hinted at the terrible things that might happen to him and his loved ones if he backed out. That gave me a great idea. I put the interface on silent/no connection and held onto it.
The way he screamed when he turned on the light and found me standing there would have been funny if I hadn’t been planning his murder. I got Amena out of there as quickly as I could and let her be mad at me all the way back to the road. (She actually told me, “He wasn’t a corporate spy.” I let her keep thinking that.) I also let her think I was going back to the festival after I put her in a vehicle to her family’s camp house, then I ran back to Marne’s and hacked the lock again.
He was sitting in the main room with a beverage of some kind, which he spilled when his whole body twitched when I walked in. He started telling me that he and Amena were just friends, and there was no need to tell her family about this. He shut up when I deployed the energy weapons in my arms.
“Where’s the drug you were going to give her?” I asked. He tried to act confused, but I told him I’d read his messages and knew everything.
He was supposed to drug Amena and then bring in several friends to do a lot of sex things to her while she couldn’t resist. (He’d lined up two ‘friends’ who were probably still waiting for his go-ahead message. I'd found the arrangements in his chats.) Everything they did to her was supposed to be recorded, of course. That was the point. The recording would be used against Mensah—it wouldn’t be released for the enjoyment of the kinds of humans who enjoy watching that kind of thing as long as she did as she was told. (Yes, they would have sold the video once they’d gotten everything they wanted from her.)
He pulled a little pill from his pocket and handed it to me. It was the kind that dissolved instantly in water. Turns out they also dissolve pretty quick when you shove them into a human’s mouth and hold their jaw closed for a minute. He passed out pretty soon after that, in the middle of begging me not to hurt him.
I turned his spare interface back on and sent a message to his mystery contact, saying that Mensah’s security had taken Amena away and he didn’t think he’d be able to get close to her again. I even added a little plea that they leave his relatives alone. (I’d try to make sure no one got to them. I’m a murderbot, not a monster.) Once that logged as transmitted, I powered the interface down and put it in the sealing pocket in his shirt.
Then I picked him up and carried him thirty meters through a wheat field to a little pond, where I found a nice wide patch of small stones right along the edge that I could kneel on without leaving visible evidence while I held his head underwater for three minutes. Then I let all of him slide into the water and went back to the festival. I made sure a bunch of people saw me at some late-night performances.
They found his corpse a couple of hours after the primary rose. They found the messages on the interface a few hours later. In between those two things, I told Mensah that I'd separated Amena from him the previous evening before going back to the festival. (They never even checked my alibi. Yet another reason humans should never do security.)
The humans logically deduced that, fearing what the corporates would do to him, he’d taken the easier path of dosing himself with those strong narcotics he’d acquired to use on Amena and walking into the nearest body of water. I didn’t even have to ask Mensah to arrange protection for his relatives—she thought of that herself.
I let the constabulary take care of finding and questioning the two friends who were supposed to help Marne do all that stuff to Amena. They ended up having to put in like three years worth of community improvement work, and even longer talking to a specialist about their 'antisocial impulses'. I didn't like it, but I was pretty sure one murder was all I could get away with under the circumstances. I saved their IDs and images to my permanent storage, though. You never know when you might bump into someone when no one else is around.