Yeah, this is pretty much the scenario that I imagined when Corpse Witch first mentioned the encryption key. Yes, it
is effectively slavery through blackmail which, IRL, is disturbingly common, even in first world countries. There just seems to be some people who regard the amount of effort required to coerce unpaid service to be worth the feeling of superiority that comes from having slaves.
FWIW, I don't think that it is possible to attempt to forcibly extract the key from Corpse Witch in any way without her deleting. She might even have a 'dead man's switch' command set up to go at a moment's notice (based on her awareness of how volatile Bubbles can be sometimes). The only practical option would be to surprise and disable her and then access her memory in a useful way for as long as it takes to find the key without her regaining consciousness. It strikes me as that would be a difficult task, especially as a being like her
has to have a few contingencies in place to protect herself and the information she wishes to keep secret.
No, my idea is that the point will come where Bubbles will take permanently losing those memories as the price she has to pay and pays it because the alternative just simply isn't tolerable anymore. Sometimes, to lose the chains, you have to lose other things too. Freedom always brings with it a price. I suspect that Corpse Witch would be furious at having misread to what lengths Bubbles was willing to go to and will bitterly blame Faye for this defeat.
Yes, but the question is, do you think she has any chance of being treated better by the "legitimate" authorities?
Probably not although Bubbles might be allowed to walk without being prosecuted herself depending on how big a fish she helps them land.
Didn't Bubbles have therapy in the past? The "better minds than yours have tried" line made it sound that way.
I suspect that she got a lot of very conditional 'help' from the self-righteous in the AI community. Basically, they encouraged her to publicly recant and repent, telling her that making a show of admitting that she was wrong and that no-one should follow her path would make her feel better.