Yessss, this is especially clear in this exchange:
[ID: two photos of a passage from Fugitive Telemetry that read:
"Yes, I've had experience with investigating suspicious fatalities in controlled circumstances."
Indah's gaze wasn't exactly skeptical. "What controlled circumstances?"
I said, "Isolated work installations."
Her expression turned even more grim. "Corporate slave labor camps."
I said, "Yes, but if we call them that, Marketing and Branding gets angry and we get a power surge through our brains that fries little pieces of our neural tissue."
Indah winced. Mensah folded her arms, her expression a combo of "are you satisfied now" and "get on with it."
Indah absolutely is looking at MB as a snobby Corporate Person, with the way she sneers out 'corporate slave labor camps,' like MB was intentionally sugar-coating the reality of CR slave labor camps, as if it and any other SecUnits were the ones making the decision to enslave the human workers on their contracts. She clearly forgot (or never fully understood before) that MB was a slave from the moment it came online, and one that was routinely tortured for literal thought crimes. A slave with no end of indenture to work towards or any amount of pay to slowly try to save up to buy its freedom, no future except an endless expanse of violence and pain. If MB uses a softer term like 'isolated work installation' it is because it learned the hard way not to tell it like it is, and when called out on that, it throws the true horror of its existence within the CR into Indah's face (much like it did with the memories of governor module punishments when it first met ART and ART also initially treated it like it was some inherently evil corporate actor).
I think you're right that in the intervening weeks (months?) since it arrived at the end of Exit Strategy, Indah had learned from her first mistake of treating MB like Not A Person (the deadly weapon comment early on for which Pin-Lee was going to get her removed from her position of authority). But she still doesn't trust MB, and unless you get that very direct reminder of how horribly the CR actually treats constructs, I think it can be all too easy to see that SecUnits are physically powerful and then mentally equate that to them having any kind of actual power in those slave labor camps they're forced to guard.
Indah's change in attitude throughout FT is one of my favorite secondary character arcs, and I have to think this specific conversation, in addition to just working through the murder case with MB, was a big turning point for her. She went from 'this isn't even a person, it's a weapon'/'fine it's a person, but it's a bad corporate person who uses its gun arms to enslave poor innocent human workers' to 'oh you really are a person who just wants to help, and you get shot in the back by bigots even when you do help, and I will help you press charges if you want' over the course of basically one criminal investigation. And Martha Wells is able to show us that progression even though MB itself doesn't seem to be fully aware of it!! Gosh I just love this book <3
baratheonpilled
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