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

by Martha Wells

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. Whether that thing is a hostage of conditional value, or a very expensively designed and equipped enslaved machine/organic intelligence. You’re a thing, and there is no safety.