a piece of murderbot meta that's been lurking in my brain is about the distinction between 'humans' and 'augmented humans.'
murderbot makes the distinction fairly scrupulously. it will occasionally lump a mixed group together, especially in conversation, as 'humans' or 'my humans,' but in the narration and particularly in the theoretical rather than the concrete, it will usually opt for the longer, clunkier phrase.
'humans and augmented humans.'
it even sounds extra awkward beyond length, because linguistically 'augmented humans' sounds like a subcategory of humans, which should therefore not be linked to it with a simple 'and.' normally you would say 'standard and augmented humans' or 'humans, some with augments' or 'humans and the augmented' or anything that didn't have you using the same noun twice, which is somewhere on the line between inelegant and actually unclear. this awkwardness makes the phrase really attention-grabbing.
so i at first assumed 'augmented humans' to be a gloss of something easier to say in whatever future language murderbot is really speaking; no society, especially fast-paced results-oriented ones like these, that has to frequently use a conceptually simple term with five fairly complex syllables is going to fail to come up with a snappier alternative.
the distinction between baseline humans and cyborgs is thus heavily underlined as a setting element by the narration.
but what's really interesting is that as the series goes on we don't see this distinction reflected to the same degree outside of murderbot.
there's no cultural bright line either in the Corporation Rim, or Preservation, or the place Miki's humans were from, that defines an 'augmented human' as a strictly different creature from a 'human.'
there are no separate physical facilities, in any of the levels of hotelry we visit for example, and we never that i can recall hear anyone else go out of their way to draw that same linguistic distinction.
the distinctions made on the human end tend to be purely functional--what tasks someone's augments make them suited for, which they are accordingly assigned.
which suggests it's not a worldbuilding element so much as it is a characterization one. so it's unlikely murderbot's language pack or media consumption presented the 'humans and augmented humans' construction as normative.
it's important to murderbot that some humans are cyborgs.
for reasons that are almost certainly connected to how it identifies as a machine intelligence but does a lot of its processing with human brain parts, lmao. i mean, the inverse situation, right there, how could you not care if you're inclined to self-reflection, cogitation on identity, and the assignment of things and people to rigid categories.
but the exact nature of how murderbot connects the two concepts and why it results in rigorously distinguishing augmented humans as their own category escapes me.
i mean, murderbot is never not aware that it's a construct rather than a true bot, and it does make that distinction pretty often as well, it's just less overt because both words are a reasonable length and obviously distinct.
but...idk. it's not really one of the things it's especially (openly) hung up on?