It was another full sleep cycle before Jackie came around again. In the meantime I was learning to walk with these low-G braces I was wearing, and I'd met "my" security bot. Like Milly's, it was colored and shaped to be pleasing to see. It's coloring and shape weren't like a standard security bot for this ship, or like Milly's. It's language ability was poor compared to Milly's bot, but over the last few hours it had been improving. I talked to it just a little, but Milly stayed in the room when I was awake and talked to it a lot.
Finally, I interrupted her and the bot. "OK. What am I here for?"
Milly looked at me, but the bot replied, "You are here to help us. You are here to become part of the HX community."
"What? How am I going to help you?"
"The same way you helped to do damage to us: by using your superb language ability."
"My what? How can that help you?"
"The HX being has many sub-cultures in it. It is an ecosystem. We tolerate these sub-cultures because they can do some beneficial things for us better than we can. They help us accomplish our goals. But the cooperation has always been clumsy because we could never talk well with them. We, and they, are born with language skills, but not the same language skills. I understand you humans have to learn your language skill after birth. It sounds terribly inefficient, and I can hear that it is, because of how slowly I have to talk to communicate with your kind. But, you seem to be able to do this slow talk equally well with many species, which no native HX can do. This could be useful. This is what we want to determine now: Can your kind become a useful part of the HX being?"
"You want me to betray my friends?"
The HX bot paused for a long time after he heard this. Finally it said, "We have a lot to learn about each other, human. The difference is: if we cannot make you useful, I don't die."