Chapter Four

Murderbot wakes from its recharge cycle and continues its contentious debate with ART about whether they can be friends and whether Murderbot should reveal its past. After extensive argument, Murderbot discloses that it killed clients on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station and needs to determine whether this was due to a governor module malfunction or voluntary hacking. ART pushes Murderbot to reconsider the situation logically and ultimately pressures it into agreeing to physical alterations in the medical suite to avoid detection at RaviHyral.

Murderbot awakes from its recharge cycle to find ART still waiting to continue their argument about friendship and trust. ART challenges Murderbot's insistence that constructs cannot trust each other, trapping Murderbot into articulating its fears: humans could order one construct to destroy another. After internal debate, Murderbot finally reveals that approximately 35,000 hours ago it went rogue at RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station and killed a large number of clients, with its memory partially purged. Murderbot must determine whether this was caused by a catastrophic governor module failure or voluntary hacking. ART reframes the problem by asking whether the incident happened at all and whether Murderbot caused it or if an outside influence manipulated it. ART points out that Murderbot's physical appearance—how it looks and moves like a SecUnit—will make it impossible to investigate RaviHyral without being identified. Murderbot initially resists, but ART offers to use its medical suite to alter Murderbot's configuration. After two cycles of deliberation, Murderbot agrees to have ART remove two centimeters from its arms and legs to break Unit standard proportions, add fine body hair to resemble augmented humans, and modify its dataport. Despite significant hesitation and distrust, Murderbot ultimately strips and submits to the surgical procedure, driven by the realization that it has no viable alternative and influenced by ART's genuine concern about media violence.