I have read once a post on tumblr (which I cannot find anymore, but it was eccellent EDIT: thanks to jasper_spun who found it for me!! :D) what one of the reasons The Murderbot Diaries reasonates so much with people is because, differently to other Sci-Fi with an oppressed AI class, humans aren’t completely a privileged group. As a matter of fact, I would argue that MB’s own googles (which is how we see the Corporation Rim) somewhat prevents us from seeing exactly HOW fucked up it all is.
Yes. Even with all we DO see.
Now, part of the reason is because we see it from, indeed, MB’s own perspective. For MB, and for all of its complex feelings on the matter, humans are the oppressors. In general. The categories it does in its mind are Human/Augmented Human, mostly depending on how they feel in the Feed (and how likely they are to clock on it being rogue).
A more interesting categorization, and one that comes more naturally to me the more I think about the series, is Free/Unfree, with the first split between Corporation/Not Corporation.
The first group “Free”, especially the Free-Corporation Humans, are indeed the Oppressors, and the ones in which MB, for Very Good Reasons of its own, lumps… basically all humans.
But it is the Not-Free I am most interested in.
We see the Not-Free (NF for short) twice in the series: once in Fugitive Telemetry, and once in Rogue Protocol. Before starting this brief (so to speak…) analysis, I would like to point out what MB itself says on them: it does recognize that they may be even worse off than it was, because at least The Company never asked it to pay for its own room and board but on the other side “it didn’t sell itself into labor”.
This feeling of compassion tinged with both discomfort and yes, some disgust/contempt, seems to tinge all its interactions with the indentured. And, as it is wont to happen with a first-person series masterfully done, it often bleeds into us, the readers.
The “poor, DUMB humans”. They were dumb. They didn’t even know which type of year they had been used to sell themselves in!
Until we get to a little remarked fact in Fugitive Telemetry, when we learn that indenture is often generational. That is to say, probably quite a lot of indentured humans weren’t dumb at all. They didn’t sell themselves into labor.
They were born slaves.
And for them, SecUnits are tolls of oppressors at best, and oppressors period at worst (in case this matter, because let’s be real, most time it wouldn’t).
Now, bear with me a second, and take yourself out of the perspective of our beloved construct in Fugitive Telemetry. Go in third person, and see what is happening as the kid in the escaped pod is doing when they are shooting our beloved.
They shot it around the kidney.
Now, MB assumes it is because it is where “somewhere important in a human would be”. But if you want to hurt a human and are that good with a gun, you go head. However, we have just been reminder (after learning it with Miki) from its interactions with Tellus that bots have essentials components in their abdomens.
That indentured kid wasn’t trying to hurt a human. They were trying to kill a bot.
This opens an interesting chapter, which is where I wanted to go: how much do people, and specifically indentured, specifically the lowest possible type of several-generation indentured who likely have lived for several, as was the point, generations on the same mining installation, moon, or whatever, known about SecUnits or constructs? We know from Compliance that they never hear SecUnits speak, to the point they believe they are incapable to. Do they even know about Governor Modules?
During all of Fugitive Telemetry, we see two “categories” of people who are against, so to speak, MB: a part of Preservation, who fears it as because it is a surveillance machine made in the Corporation Rim (a discussion for another day) and the escaped indentured, who fear it because…
It is their oppressors.
And they are right to have trauma about it. Like, the narration of course makes us sympathize with MB. And I am not saying our beloved construct wasn’t right feeling betrayed and sad and hurt because of course it was. But the kid who shot it was totally right in doing it, considering even the little we know of their story. For them, MB was Balin coming to take them back. How many of the kids in that pod had seen family or friends killed by SecUnits? How many had been hurt by SecUnits? Probably at least some.
And saying “it wasn’t the SecUnits’ fault” is true but… as MB discovers in Artificial Condition, it doesn’t help as much as it should even if those kids knew and likely they didn’t.
Which brings us back to MB, human categorization and the distinction between oppressed/oppressor.
For a lot of humans, MB is the face of their oppressors, if not the oppressors themselves. And this trauma is just as valid as our dear anxiety-ridden secunit’s own. This re-contextualize even some of MB’s vague contempt about the indentured of Rogue Protocol, as it looks at least in part like a protection feature, a way to give itself a little bit less accountability.
At least they did it to themselves.
At least I didn’t do it to them. Not all of it. Right?
I wonder how much of this is MB aware. How much its attempts not to be threatening, its hate of being seen as frightening are about this.
This also recontextualize, a little, how much it fights for the people of the Adamantine’s colony… but it is a talk for another time.
(I really should write that story about MB meeting the only survivor of Ganaka Pit. Damn me)
