Point of View

The novel uses a third person narrator that reflects Irina, Kern, and Thales' perspectives of the city. In Irina's chapters, there is a greater focus on the inner workings of technology, and descriptions of her subjective experience when she enters the thoughts of AI. She often experiences fugues, where she perceives hallucinations of AI generated images. These images may be distorted or have a dreamlike quality which makes them difficult to explain in logical terms. The snippets of images that she sees in her fugues make up part of her subjective experience. As she comes to learn more about how her memory implant functions to create these dreamlike fugues, she is able to control her perceptions and enter symbolic illusions through which she can achieve her goals. These include an airplane flight in which she interacts with Thales, a journey through a simulated tower and...