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

by Martha Wells

If not for SecUnit, Ayda Mensah would be dead, her body dumped in a recycler somewhere on TranRollinHyfa or some other supposedly neutral transit station, for the value of neutral that meant “whatever the highest bidder wants.”

“You’ve brought a corporate…”

“A product of corporate surveillance capitalism and authoritarian enforcement to the seat of our government.

Ephraim is a good person and he won’t make the argument that SecUnit is not a person, not qualified as a refugee under Preservation law.

“Can you separate that person from the purpose they were created for?”

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

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 a...

But

the only choice they are ever offered is obedience o...

“Until bots have full autonomy, this problem is not going away.”

And the other problem is that SecUnits aren’t bots and aren’t human; they fall between the cracks of the existing protections even in the Preservation Alliance.

Along with the horror of what had just happened, there had been the dawning realization that they had fallen into thinking of their SecUnit as a faceless machine, a convenience, an interface with their security system.

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

“They’re every bit as dangerous as humans.”

Except humans can’t fire energy weapons out of their arms, calculate the exact right moment to jump off a rushing vehicle and survive, or hack the systems of an entire transit station port,

No, humans have to hire someone to do all that for them, or enslave a...

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.

Now that the furor over corporate murder and abduction is dying down, the survey needs to finish its reports so the council can decide if they want to pursue their claim on the planet.

Pin–Lee flicks between different displays. She’s working on the contract they would offer to the corporate body who “owns” the planet in question.

In the Corporation Rim, everything has to be owned by someone.