Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (The Murderbot Diaries, #4.5)

by Martha Wells

Knowing what would happen, she wouldn’t choose a different planet, a different bond company. Because then SecUnit would still be someone’s property, would be waiting for the contract where the negligence or greed or indifference of its clients got it killed.

If not for SecUnit, Ayda Mensah would be dead,

It’s hard to make a proper argument when you’re both on the same side.

armaments.

“The situation is a person who saved my life, multiple times, and the lives of the rest of my team.”

The problem is that part of her mind still believes she’s on TranRollinHyfa, held prisoner by corporate murderers.

The Corporation Rim has always been a slave state, though it calls its institutionalized slavery “contract labor.”

The production of human/bot constructs is just a more horrific twist, a mental slavery as well as a physical one. At least victims of contract labor are free to think their own thoughts. But we tell ourselves that constructs aren’t aware of their predicament. What SecUnit makes us realize is that this is not true; they are all aware of what they are and what’s been done to them. But the only choice they are ever offered is obedience or pain and death.

But it had taken a sentient being who understood fear and pain to talk its way through Volescu’s blind terror.

It’s about being treated as a thing, isn’t it.

And if someone else was in her position, she would tell them how unhelpful comparisons like that are, that fear is fear.

She should go back to her family in her quarters soon. But it’s easier here, where everyone knows what happened and no one feels the need to ask questions or is trying to get her to tell them everything is fine and she is exactly the same as she was the day she left. Work is a good excuse.