shel's zone

The second art exhibition I saw today was an intense audio-visual experience! And the socio-political/economic/climate theme had a dystopic vibe. The soundscape was an integral part of it, so I'll include a couple links to the artists' youtube pages:

I can see how, from the perspective of a cop who has grown up in Preservation culture, this must be incredibly annoying, and means even setting aside any prejudices over a SecUnit being a deadly weapon, it kind of comes across to Indah as someone who she can't trust to follow basic standards of professional ethics if it thinks it knows better.

[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."

End ID]

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.

Soft pastel landscape from Mistaken Point, Newfoundland, one of the most magical adventures I've ever been on.

an earlier stage:

Decades before the New York City subway cars were lined with advertisements for niche dating apps, personal injury lawyers, prescription weight loss medicines, and alternative internet browsers, the interiors of many of the city’s trains were adorned with editions of the two-toned mock newspaper known as The Subway Sun. Primarily produced between 1936 and 1965 under the artistic direction of late cartoonists Fred Cooper and Amelia Opdyke Jones, the imitation periodical campaign by the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) fulfilled a variety of purposes in the subway system for over five decades. It encouraged polite passenger etiquette, but also promoted local attractions as a way to entice New Yorkers to use public transit — from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Your brain is a 25-watt computer.