i-gwarth:

I remember thinking, in the earliest days of Warframe, how distinctly inhuman the Corpus crewmen sounded. Their voices were not merely garbled and speaking a foreign language. They were beastly. There were howls and growls and sounds that resembled the robotic shrieks of the Moa more than any human noise.

And I would think, in those days, how appropriate that was.

The Corpus, as a culture, seem to have a distinctly capitalist obsession with mechanization as a means of control. But I don’t just mean that they employ robots to do their labour. They do, but they clearly use humans as well. I mean that they emphatically try to make those very humans as machine-like as possible. The boxy helmets, the identical suits, the strictly controlled and surveilled environment, the garbled, electronic voices… all these things point to a sustained effort to take the humanity out of the humans, to reduce them to cogs in a profit-making machine.

The Solaris seem to me like the perfect illustration of the failure of that effort. Here we have a population of Corpus-indebted slave workers, toiling away in a mine deep under an inhospitable planet, trying to change it for the better even knowing that they probably won’t live to see the end result of their efforts. The Solaris are augmented to a disturbing degree: human arms and legs controlled by robotic heads, as if there was an attempt to enslave their minds for compliance rather than strengthen their bodies for labour.

They ought to be the culmination of the Corpus doctrine of turning humans into machines.

And yet the halls of Fortuna echo with music. Their heads may have been torn off and replaced with robotics, but their human hearts sing.