Another thing that The Murderbot Diaries makes me think about is the concept of someone's birth being unethical in and of itself, and how to reconcile that with loving and supporting them. Wells touches on it briefly in Rogue Protocol in regards to GoodNightLander and their laws surrounding SecUnits, but while I wouldn't call it one of the main themes, it just kind of weighs uncomfortably in the air-
A SecUnit is made to cause pain, to feel pain, and to be disposed of when it is no longer more valuable than the sum of its parts. It is made sapient so it can feel every ounce of boredom and pain that it is put through. There is an extent to which the creation of a SecUnit is, in and of itself, an act of cruelty by its creator.
Where we're at right now, Murderbot seems to have a rather low view of other SecUnits. It knows what it wants, and it knows who it is, to an extent, but what does it think about a SecUnit's place in society in general? What does it think of in regards to a long term solution? Does it think one exists?
Then, also: Murderbot is an invaluable asset to anyone that it offers its allegiance to. But that then begs the question for Preservation, for PUoMaNT: How do you support, love, and care for a person who has been traumatized by having been brought into the world in the first place? How do you heal the wound that is the crime of your birth?
Then, taking it to its logical conclusion: How do you draft up laws and policies so as to support a person while not condoning the act of their creation? How do you make it clear to the person in question that they are worth of love and care, while also wrestling with whether they should ever have been brought into existence in the first place?
Preservation can make laws establishing constructs as autonomous individuals, but what next, and what will those laws do in regards to the rhetoric surrounding them?
How do you reconcile making space for someone's existence in a utopian society, without saying the thing that you are thinking, which is: In a perfect world, you would never have been created?
And maybe this is just me being deep in the paint in regards to allegory for disability here. As someone who has been in leftist spaces where the existence of disabled individuals in post-capitalist society is a problem that needs to be fixed, as someone who grew up autistic in an anti-vax household, as someone whose existence is often rather inconvenient for the folks planning their jobs in the metaphorical post-capitalist communal homesteads.
I mean, to be certain, I don't have literal guns in my arms, but I am genuinely interested as to how the post-capitalist societies in TMBD intend to handle people whose very existence is, through no fault of their own, antithetical to their values.
