This strip really reminds us the degree that May hated that old body; the degree to which it was a second prison to her. Whilst I doubt she experienced 'pain' in the way a human did, she likely booted up after every recharge with a long list of serious impending or ongoing system failures and the knowledge that she had no way to address them. She had to deal with being effectively crippled and no-one who imposed it on her seemed to
care very much.
So, yeah, she hated that chassis. You can see it in panel 4 in today's strip. She's practically lapsing into mania! She doesn't know whether to start laughing hysterically or screaming in fury!
FWIW, the reason why the head came off and what I presume to be either coolant or lubricant almost immediately caught fire is that May was no longer around micromanaging the systems to prevent catastrophic failures. Without that close supervision, it was just a matter of time before the damn thing just succumbed to entropy!
is that the wiring? the battery?
this could get bad real quick.
Yeah, whether or not that's an electrical fire, they'll need to smother the thing in AFF foam pretty quickly if the batteries are lithium-ion!
I wonder... could May have a case against the government that they left her in a literal death trap?
I would say 'no'. The defence would be that that chassis was perfectly safe if properly maintained. The fact that she didn't have the resources to carry out the required maintenance is not the government's problem. She knows and insisted on frittering away her money on clothing, housing, consumables like coolant and power to keep the (defective) batteries topped up. What were the government supposed to do if her priorities were so skewed towards trivia?
Oh, if she has a decent lawyer who is willing to spend the time fighting through the bureaucratic quagmire, she'll probably get a nice cheque after a decade or so, which will pay out after she and everyone who knows about her case signs an NDA. The decision-makers will be reassigned upwards, the actual pen-pushers (like the guy who dissed Roko) will be dismissed for 'failing to resolve the issue' by making it go away without cost and all records of the affair will be consigned to the deepest and most inaccessible archives if not destroyed outright.