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Auctions As Threatened
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Published:
2025-07-06
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What Trust Means

Summary:

Dr. Mensah meets ART properly for the first time. She's still not sure if she can trust it.

Notes:

Written for McBangle, for Auctions As Threatened! Hope you enjoy! I love Murderbot's friendship with Mensah, and Murderbot's friendship with ARt, but I have a hard time imagining Mensah feeling much warmth toward ART after everything :')

Work Text:

I walked next to Mensah as she uncertainly wandered ART’s halls for the first time.  It had made its whole crew clean up everything and deployed all of its drones to fix everything the Targets had messed up, and also removed all the blood and guts I had left everywhere, so the rooms and hallways practically sparkled.  Mensah still looked dubious.  ART perched on the edge of my feed, leaning into me so hard I had to keep poking it to avoid getting swamped in its anxious impatience for her response.

“So Perihelion is your friend?” Mensah asked, looking around at the gentle blue lights lining the hallway.

Well that was an awkward question.  I made that head-tilt “ehh” gesture that Preservation humans did a lot.  ART got offended at me in the feed.  So I said out loud, “We met after I left.  That first time.  It wasn’t planned.  But we ended up travelling together for a little bit.”

She’d gotten a brief explanation of ART’s whole deal from Seth.  ART’s secrecy was shot anyway because if he didn’t tell her then I would or Amena absolutely would, so Seth got to get the explanation and apology in first before Mensah boarded for the first time.  She took it pretty well.  She was still kind of more hung up on the kidnapping thing.

“And it helped you, back then?” Mensah asked.

“Yeah.  It helped me… look into some things that happened in the past.  And it’s the one that made me look more like a human, to blend in better.  When I thought I might… you know.  Just wander around undercover for a while.”

Mensah nodded.  Yeah, she knew.  “Did you ever think it was going to come back for you?”

No, ART broke in.  It was just as much a surprise to SecUnit as it was to you.  It was very upset with me for kidnapping it and your family and friends. 

“I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen,” I confirmed.  “I was not happy with it either.”

I didn’t know that was going to happen until I was boarded by hostile alien remnant infected raiders and my crew was kidnapped, ART said.  That was not my intention.  I am very sorry for distressing you.  I tried to leave a message reassuring you that I meant no harm.

“It was not a very reassuring message,” Mensah said dryly.

I was under a lot of pressure.

“You put us under a lot of pressure, too.”

“It’s an asshole, but it did apologize for that,” I said.  “Eventually.”

I did! ART added.

“And no one was hurt, in the end,” Mensah murmured, more to herself than to me or ART.

SecUnit thinks very highly of you, ART said.  I did not want this to be our first meeting.

“There are definitely better circumstances it could have been under,” Mensah said.

In a private channel, ART said to me, This isn’t going well.  She still seems upset.

I mean, yeah, I said.  You kidnapped her daughter and her friends.  She got kidnapped by corporates last year.  She’s not going to be happy about that sort of thing.  It wasn’t like that was a secret, and it wasn’t hard to find news reports in ART’s big database of journals and newsfeeds to point it to.  “Head of Freehold State Kidnapped And Held By GrayCris” was news when it all came out.

Oh, said ART.

I didn’t mean to kidnap anyone, ART told Mensah.  I was trying to get help from SecUnit.

“You left us all very afraid,” Mensah said.  “We weren’t sure if anyone would still be alive, when we came out of the wormhole to find you.  This is an… adjustment.”

I wasn’t trying to scare you, ART said.  Then, with embarrassment I don’t think Mensah could feel but I definitely could, I was afraid too.

“I heard an overview of what happened,” Mensah said.  “It does sound like a terrifying situation.”

I had absolute faith that SecUnit would know what to do.  And, if it helps, I knew that the wormhole trip would only be a few hours.  No one would suffocate, and that wasn’t part of any plan.

It did not know that Ratthi, Arada, Overse, and Thiago wouldn’t suffocate in that pod, the liar.  Except that, I guess, it did know that the wormhole trip would only be a few hours.  And it had clearly had faith in me to handle the Targets.

Which, well, I had.

It still felt weird.  It was hard to be mad at ART for that, anymore.  I’d been down in the dark, face to face with TargetControlSystem.  I knew just how much it gets into your brain and how terrifying that is.  It was hard to be mad at any choices anyone would make, going through that.

But also, I was hardly going to tell Mensah “I know you have trauma about being kidnapped and held by corporates and that was really awful, but this kidnapping was fine, actually.”

So I said, “It was freaking out.  It wasn’t making great decisions.”  I did the feed equivalent of glaring at ART to tell it not to argue the point.

“I guess that is understandable,” Mensah said.  She still didn’t sound happy about it, but she didn’t sound mad, either.  Mostly she sounded tired, like she was letting a lot of stress out, slowly, and not sure what to replace it with.

In our private channel, ART was leaning into me again, and poking me with Is she still mad?  What can I do to make her not mad?

“It won’t happen again,” I said.  “I promise.  This was an accident and nobody liked it or wanted it to happen, and I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

“This wasn’t your fault at all, SecUnit,” Mensah said.  “I’m not—I’m not upset with you for this.  It’s just.  I spent a month in that wormhole, not knowing what I would find, and I couldn’t do anything but worry, and now, I admit I don’t know what to make of all this.”

Tell her it won’t happen again, I told ART.

I can’t necessarily predict—

Tell her it won’t happen again.  And mean it.

We passed the Argument Lounge.  Mensah glanced inside, and stopped for a moment to take it in.  ART wasn’t that impressive (at least, in terms of spaceships in media; I had pretty limited experience with passenger transports in real life, and none of them had been that impressive compared to the ships they show in serials), but it was meant to be lived in for months at a time, and the chairs were soft and worn in, the lights in here were warm, and the floor was tiled in black, white, and blue patterns that made it feel like a home and not like a transport to get humans from point A to point B. 

Not like a prison cell, either.

ART finally said, Dr. Mensah, this was an unforeseen emergency and an accident.  I promise it will not happen again and I will provide ample warning next time I enter Preservation space.

“Thank you, Perihelion,” Mensah said.

“It’s bad at apologizing, because it really likes to be right all the time,” I said.  “But it is sorry.”

Mensah took a deep breath, and let out a deep sigh.  Then she turned, to briefly look up directly at me.  “You trust this ship, SecUnit?”

It was another question that made my insides feel weird.  But there was only one real answer. “Yeah, I do.”

“Okay,” Mensah said.  “Okay.  Then that’s good enough for me.”