Wow this was amazing. One of the best books I have read this year.


So this story follows Jack, a pharma pirate who is being chased down by the company she pirated drugs from after dumping a load of an exact copy of a new drug called Zacuity on the market causing a lot of people to die from a flaw in the drug which causes extreme addition to work.

She runs around the world trying to create a fix for the addition, and tries not to get killed by the agents that are trying to stop her. She's Bi (yay!) and pretty cool.

Half the story focuses on Jack and her cadre of friends who help her achieve this, and the other half on the agents, Eliasz and Paladin who're chasing her.

Some context. In this universe AIs are real in the form of (mostly) humaniod robots. Robots are indentured because people where like, erm, I built this, so I should own it. Some smart ass pointed out that well children are made too, so shouldn't we be able to own people? From this we get a world with real AIs and indentured everybody.

Jack is human, and she has a sidekick who was an indentured slave until Jack killed their owner. Of the agents one of them is human (Eliasz), the other is an AI (Paladin).

This brings us to the major themes of this book. Slavery, and Identity.

On the Jack side of things we have the exploration that jack saving her her sidekick doesn't mean anything unless they are able to financially support themselves, and get normal jobs etc

On the agent side of things we have an exploration of what it means to be in a broken relationship, that is the only thing you have known, and the difference between what gender means to yourself vs what it means to other people.

The AI agent Paladin is genderless technically, and uses He/Him pronouns by default at the start, and after thinking about it by prompting by their team member switches to She/Her.

The relationship between the two agents is very broken. Eliasz has a massive internalised homophobia problem, being terrified at being attracted to Paladin at first, until he discovers her brain was originally belonged to a woman. This is in itself not unheard story to how many straight people react when being attracted to trans people, what is different is that Paladin's mind is for about half this book being forced to be attracted to Eliasz by a series of programs.

Later on this is removed and we get an analysis of if she is actually attracted to Eliasz, ultimately she decides that she is, as every time he's away on missions, she misses him. I do wonder though if she had known anything other than this relationship how she would have felt.

Maybe there will be a sequel that explores this.

Interestingly we DO know she is totally fine with she/her pronouns. However it is explored a bit that she really doesn't care either way and that's a human thing.

The book ends (of course) with Jack getting away and releasing a cure, the two agents going to mars to love each other in peace (with the AI getting their autonomy). Which is kinda odd because you'd think that Paladin wouldn''t be terribly cool with going with someone who has fucked with their mind.