Murderbot wakes when its recharge cycle ends, and ART immediately resumes pushing for an explanation of Murderbot’s plans. Their argument turns to trust: Murderbot insists that constructs and bots cannot truly trust each other because both can be forced by humans to harm one another, while ART counters that no humans are present now. Forced into answering, Murderbot finally admits that it is traveling to RaviHyral because that is where, about 35,000 hours earlier, it was assigned when it went rogue and killed many of its clients, and it needs to learn whether a governor-module failure caused the massacre or whether Murderbot hacked the module in order to do it.

ART challenges Murderbot’s assumption that those are the only possibilities. ART points out that the event itself may not have happened as Murderbot believes, or that an outside influence may have used Murderbot to cause it, and asks who benefited from the incident. ART also notes a flaw in Murderbot’s theory: if Murderbot’s ability to hack its governor module caused the disaster, the company should have detected that ability during routine checks. This does not solve the mystery, but it convinces Murderbot that more investigation at RaviHyral is justified.

The discussion shifts from motive to logistics when ART asks how Murderbot expects to investigate without being identified. Murderbot argues that it can pass as an augmented human, but ART demonstrates with recordings and maps that RaviHyral personnel are likely to recognize SecUnits and that standard scans could identify Murderbot by its exact proportions. When ART proposes changing Murderbot’s configuration in the ship’s medical suite, Murderbot resists because the procedure would require deactivation and total vulnerability. ART says it wants to help partly because it is bored in transport mode and partly because solving Murderbot’s problem is an interesting challenge.

Murderbot spends two cycles thinking instead of answering. During that time, it reflects on its fear of being treated like a person, on its connection to Mensah and PreservationAux, and on the danger it might pose to them if it returns. Murderbot also tests whether behavioral mimicry alone can protect it: it studies human fidgeting and movement, writes code to make itself seem more human, and asks ART to record the results. The experiment shows that while Murderbot can imitate human movement well enough to fool inattentive strangers, its Unit-standard body proportions would still expose it to anyone experienced with SecUnits or to a basic scan.

Accepting that disguise surgery is necessary, Murderbot and ART argue through the details. They settle on shortening Murderbot’s arms and legs by two centimeters so its body no longer matches Unit standard, and ART also persuades Murderbot to alter its organic code so fine body hair will make the joins between organic and inorganic parts look more like augments. Murderbot firmly rejects ART’s more drastic suggestion of adding sex-related parts, but asks for a change to the vulnerable dataport in the back of its neck. Still frightened by the risk and by the trust involved, Murderbot finally decides it has no better option, strips, and lies down on ART’s surgical platform.