It’s the smell of the station that’s making it hard for him to sleep, Gurathin decides. Not that it’s a bad smell. Some places in the Corporation Rim smell bad—industrial plants smell like their products, mines inevitably smell like you’re breathing some sort of particulate that isn’t good for your health. But a decently funded multi-wormhole crossroads like this one smells like whatever the top shareholders decide to put in the air supply, and for this one, that seems to be Mountain Glade™ by PurEssIne.
Gurathin has smelled planets, and even mountains. Even allowing for different vegetation and different genetic engineering, the smell is fake. It bothers him because it’s fake.
It bothers him because at the bottom of his mind, there’s a fear of Waking Up Back There and realizing he never actually left.
They’ve done this before. With difficulty. Murderbot hates being touched, but it’s all right with touching so long as it’s the active party and the other is more or less passive. (It knows why, it says. Or at least it can guess why. It doesn’t want to talk about it.) What could make passively being touched into active touching—well, the first they tried this, Gurathin was distinctly worried about shifting and grabbing an arm or snuggling in tighter and getting thrown against the wall so hard he stuck.
(There is—always was—an intimidation factor from developing a whatever-the-hells-this-was with someone who could rip your arm off casually if they chose to. Gurathin had never particularly cared about being outmatched physically because physicality had never been where he lived, so to speak, but SecUnits—were on another level, when it came to people to be nervous about. All right, fine—scared about.)
Murderbot had pointed out that it didn’t sleep. That it wasn’t going to shut down or go into stasis. That if it wasn’t startled—which, it informed Gurathin, he wasn’t capable of doing even at his fastest—then there was no reason to fear an uncalibrated reaction and if it didn’t like what Gurathin was doing, it would just push him off onto the floor.
(Which was true, but it didn’t have to be an asshole about it.)
At any rate, it had held Gurathin very uncomfortably once, and very uncomfortably another time, and another, and then there had been that time when they had worked to rescue that other survey team from the flash flood and things had gone wrong, and Murderbot had insisted that Gurathin was probably feeling mental stress and ought to fall asleep on it—and Gurathin, who did understand completely refusing to fucking cope with one’s own emotions until a later date, had grumbled and complied and listened to incomprehensible details about media that he absolutely doesn’t care about.
He still doesn’t know which one Flight Officer Kogi is. There is, however, something oddly soothing to listening to some incredibly convoluted anecdote about what Flight Officer Kogi has done. Complete with footnotes on what had happened three seasons earlier which made it all but inevitable that they do it. It seems bizarre that a being this sharp and analytical and fascinatingly sneaky would spend so much time analyzing things that only happened because someone in the writer’s room was low enough on caffeine to make it seem like a good idea. But then, Murderbot’s incredibly intimidating ally/friend/whatever-the-hells, the starship, has as much processing power as the team put together and is even more ridiculous about shovel-worthy entertainment, so—possibly Gurathin is just being a snob about it. He’s been accused of it before. Usually correctly. Not that he’s going to admit it.
The words start to blend into the nonsense of pre-sleep. Along with faint, dream-like images on Gurathin’s inner eyelids. Not the feed, much as he doomscrolls when agitated. Murderbot is perfectly capable of knocking him off a news site and has done it before. No, these are just dreams.
He is almost asleep when he hears Murderbot wind its episode recap down and, faintly audible through the feed, hears another episode start. Murderbot hums along. It always does. After years of enforced silence, it gets to hum and sing along with things, and nobody is going to stop it.
(Not that it needs the help, but Gurathin would be more than happy to introduce vague but troubling red flags into the financial accounts of anyone who tried. There aren’t any universal rights in the galaxy, not really, but humming should be one of them.)
The last thing he senses before he falls asleep is that Murderbot smells like a being who has showered three times that day in three different scents of Cleanse™ by PurEssIne. The last thing he thinks before he falls asleep is that that is almost certainly because it did.