#mb identifiers

[coquelicoq]

She [Naja] had put a receiver outside the house and hardwired it to the internal feed. It was a one-way connection, pulling in a public news and info channel but not sending anything. Not bad, especially since Naja wasn't augmented. (Platform Decay, ch 3, p 47)

five pages later...

Naja had small knee augments compensating for eroding joints. (ch 4, p 52)

so she has augments but isn't augmented? meanwhile we have this from Network Effect:

Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules. (p 93)

confirming that there are different types of augments, including the kind that naja has in her knees. maybe when murderbot says "augmented human" it means specifically "human with augments that have [some criterion that is salient to murderbot]"? i guess that kind of fits with my prior observations that murderbot's use of "humans and augmented humans" is a) not super clear and b) at least partly predicated on how the presence of augments affects murderbot's ability to do its job and/or avoid being caught and dismantled...

[coquelicoq]

We were in a junction in the Preservation Station mall, a circular space where three small corridors met, one a short passage that led through to a large secondary main corridor: the Trans Lateral Bypass. (All the corridors here had names, a Preservation tradition that was only mildly annoying.) (Fugitive Telemetry, p. 2)

i love this bit because it's not at all unreasonable to have a way to distinguish corridors from each other...what about this is even mildly annoying, murderbot? that they are descriptive instead of numbered Corridor 1, Corridor 2, etc.? would love for you to come to my neighborhood and see all the streets named after dead people. it could be worse!

the thing is, mb assigns designations to things all the time. Ship, Transport, Hostile One, Human Four, whatever. these are names too. so why is it okay when mb does it but not otherwise? maybe it's that mb is used to working alone, which means it gets to make up the designations itself and they don't have to make sense to or be available to anyone else. but when you work with others, you have to coordinate with them to refer to things the same way so they know what you're talking about and vice versa.

the trans lateral bypass already having a name that mb didn't give it is a minor thing, but it's still an indication that mb is not operating independently here and it's necessary for mb to follow the lead of others. mb has a bit of a kneejerk reaction to not having total independence, because independence is so closely intertwined with autonomy for it. but they aren't the same thing, and you don't have to have total control over your environment to be an autonomous person. mb knows this, but knowing it and Knowing it are different, and maybe that's where the mild annoyance comes in.