“If you were of a mind to appreciate such things, the People’s Library was an architectural marvel. Layered like an upside-down wedding cake, it rose in widening rings, defying gravity. The smallest level was situated half on the Lake Erie shore, while the other half balanced atop supports erupting from its gunmetal-gray waters. Encircled by a sleek promenade, part of it cantilevered over the tide. The structure rose like a cathedral of knowledge, spun from glass and hempcrete and bamboo, housed with virtual people, their lives and stories eternally adrift.”

The diction in Echo’s description—"if you were of a mind to appreciate such things”—communicates both Echo’s ability to appreciate the architecture of the library and her wariness of what it stands for. The simile comparing library to upside down wedding cake communicates the transitory, unrooted nature of the library (cakes are decorative but not durable). That the library hangs over the lake is another reminder that it has no firm foundations, while the description of virtus as “adrift” shows, too, that the contents of this library are what make it a passing thing. The contrast between materials and mission sets up a contrast between the two libraries, deepening Institutions as Battlegrounds for Competing Visions of the Future.

“Never let anyone define for you what it means to be a human being.”

Jesse Cooper is a virtu, a digitized version of a person rather than a person in the real world and one who is imprisoned in his room. His statement is also one of the first and most important moments when Echo and virtus confront the implications of virtu technology for what counts as human identity, introducing The Philosophical Dilemma of Technological Immortality. The quote also connects Jesse’s identity as a Black man who joined a military that refused to recognize his full humanity, emphasizing his importance to Black history. References like these in the context of a near-future science fiction narrative ground the novel in the tradition of Black speculative fiction.

“The thing was, you simply couldn’t stop progress. So when the administration had practically blackmailed her into taking the job, she’d lied to herself about having a better chance at changing things from the inside. She understood Human.exe; she just chose to fight a different way, one that didn’t involve losing her home or being confined to reading from the sparse collection available in a prison library.”

Echo is making a value judgment about the ethics of having taken the job at the People’s Library. She admits that there is something unethical about taking the job but then tries to justify her choice by framing it as fighting the battle for public institutions from within. The difference between what she believes and what she does creates one of her primary internal conflicts, one that she spends the rest of the novel trying to resolve.

“The woman coughed and Echo refocused. ‘Zero,’ the woman sputtered. ‘It all begins with nothing.’ Echo hadn’t seen the number but knew its association well enough. Zero represented the color black for her, an infinite blank canvas, full of promise.”

Regina Blum’s cryptic message incites Echo to change as she pursues what the message actually means. The message also presages the novel’s meditation on how human consciousness begins and what it is, as Echo’s conversations with the virtus allow her to unravel the message. It is also significant that a member of Human.exe makes this statement. Her utterance happens in an institutional space owned by Universal Trust, a corporation that relies on a scientific experiment rather than engaging with the longstanding philosophical debates around human consciousness. This moment thus presents a clear contrast between how Universal Trust and Human.exe operate.

“Virtus were not real. But with each passing month, they did things that challenged that notion.”

These two sentences encapsulate the central question that drives the novel, namely, whether virtus are persons or not. This quote is from Echo’s interior monologue about the virtus, so it is clear that she from the very beginning suspects that there is something more than virtual about the virtus. Her decision to avoid confronting this reality underscores the degree to which her work for the library conflicts with her personal ideas and values.

“‘Truth is fluid—’ ‘And a lie with enough kick to it makes you an asshole.’”

Percy repeats the first part of this motto throughout the novel. In this quote, Echo chooses to finish the lines for him when she first becomes aware he is lying to her, making this one of the first moments when she gains insight into his worldview and values, reflecting Secrecy and Censorship Beneath Narratives of Social Progress. Her angry response to Percy shows that she has different values. Henry uses the exchange to indicate an important plot point and as characterization, foreshadowing the coming conflict between them.

“How had she become more comfortable with him than she was out in the real world? It was because this job and the virtus had become the perfect salve for a grapheme synesthete’s most intimate wounds.”

A salve soothes rather than heals, so the word choice here reflects Echo’s awareness that as comfortable as the virtual world makes her feel about the loneliness she experiences as a person who refuses to tell others about her synesthesia, that world can’t address her feelings in the physical world. She questions herself, showing a degree of self-awareness that is characteristic of who she is. This is also a moment when the existence of the virtus unsettles her sense of her own identity.

“I used to deride the notion of heaven and hell, being of a mind that those were only constructs made by men for the sole purpose of averting anarchy. I do wonder about that now.”

As a historical figure, Margaret Cavendish emphasized reason as a means to knowledge and was willing to challenge the scientific norms of the time because of that. Here, however, she uses religious language to help Echo understand that Margaret is living a kind of afterlife because she is trapped in virtual space. Margaret’s comment is a reminder to Echo that the technological immortality Universal Trust bestows on Margaret doesn’t allow Margaret any agency, leading Echo to think through the ethics of what Universal Trust has done and to confront The Philosophical Dilemma of Technological Immortality.

“The truth was, the experience was so much better than what she could have imagined. And that frightened her even more. The loss she felt, particularly at losing Jesse and Margaret, was akin to losing a person who was not already dead. It didn’t make any sense.”

Jesse and Margaret are historical figures who are long since dead in reality, but Echo feels the loss of the virtus as real grief. Her ability to feel grief over their deletions shows that the virtus are something more than copies of real people, as Echo and everyone else claims at the start of the novel. Echo has a key insight into how the existence of the virtus calls into question her ideas about death and The Philosophical Dilemma of Technological Immortality. Her recognition that the grief is real is one of the reasons she becomes more aggressive in her efforts to fight back in a system that permits such deletions with no consequences.

“Clichés became known as such because they were so often true. For Echo, appearance and surroundings fit into that category. The right clothing, how you presented to the outside world, and sometimes more importantly, to yourself, really influenced how you felt.”

The novel is full of masks. In this instance, Echo has her own mask—self-presentation—that shapes how others see her, but more importantly, shapes how she sees herself. Her understanding of how self-presentation shapes identity shows the impact the virtus have on how she thinks about identity. Her notion of identity at this point is that it is performative.

“Echo had experienced a kind of rebirth during her brief pairing, whether it was with Ada or the Model itself, she was unsure, but what she did feel was smarter, more capable. Infinite. Inhuman. Protohuman. An evolution. Devolution.”

The sentence structure here—a series of stark words punctuated with periods—reflects the way Echo’s mind works as she tries to manage large streams of data with a human brain. In addition, the movement back and forth between words with positive and negative connotations shows her ambivalence about what she is becoming. This quote reflects one of the central dilemmas of the novel, which is what is gained and what is lost when humans meld with AI.

“Truth is fluid, so a lie spoken with vehemence can become solid. Ivan Oliphant thought everyone should have a motto, and that was his.”

Echo has heard Ivan repeat a variation on this line throughout the first part of the novel, but in the novel’s Interlude, Henry presents the meaning of the line from Ivan’s perspective for the first time. The line reveals that Ivan is more than a cynical person who has made compromises along the way. He is instead a person who fully embraces secrets and lies as a way of living. The values he espouses here explain why he is willing to mastermind Universal Trust’s use of the UBI test as part of its experiment, so this is an important moment of characterization and a reflection of Secrecy and Censorship Beneath Narratives of Social Progress.

“He would allow her to continue for a time. He liked the librarian, after all. But once she’d given him everything he needed to ascend to the level of the greatest technical and business mind of their time, earning himself an elevated position within the secret confines of Universal Trust, Ivan would give the word, and Echo London would be a memory. A figure in history who had ushered in the next wave of human evolution. Ivan drew his forearm across his face, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. It was all so very beautiful.”

Ivan cries in this passage while outlining the death he plans for Echo. The tears are clearly not out of grief because he talks about the plan with glee. He is instead moved by his own cleverness and is able to be so moved because he does not really see Echo as a person who will suffer as a result of his actions. The quote also shows how a refusal to acknowledge the humanity of the virtus is contagious, in that it encourages Ivan to think about humans in the physical world as disposable as well.

“‘Two things uniquely human,’ Echo said. ‘To a fault, we’re a curious bunch. Even if it threatens to wipe us out, we haven’t been able to dampen our need to know more. Advancement for advancement’s sake. And don’t get me started on the almighty dollar. You better believe someone is going to profit off this.’”

Echo’s insight here is that human curiosity can be dangerous, especially when it comes to the unforeseen results of technology. The danger also comes from more intentional actions that stem from a willingness to put profit above all else, which is exactly what is happening in the People’s Library and with the UBI test. The dilemma she acknowledges speaks to Institutions as Battlegrounds for Competing Visions of the Future.

“The concept of anonymity had become like a folktale that grandparents told to the children sitting at their knees. Faceless, nameless. These gifts were a part of the past that was never to be revisited, like gas-powered cars.”

The two comparisons—anonymity to folktales and anonymity to gas-powered cars—capture two important truths about anonymity in the technology-rich world of The People’s Library. A folktale is a story that people only half believe in, and folktales are firmly rooted in the past. People have accepted that anonymity can no longer exist. Society phased out gas-powered cars because a newer, seemingly better alternative came along. The comparison indicates that loss of anonymity has been normalized as a part of the future AI and automation have brought to Cleveland. Echo’s admission that the battle for anonymity has already been lost reflects that powerful corporate forces are winning the broader battle over what the future of humanity will look like.

“Self-preservation was the foremost thought of all beings. Gina, Ada, whatever she was or is, had become sentient.”

The “whatever she was or is” phrase reflects the reality of artificial general intelligence has outstripped humans’ ability to describe it in language. Echo isn’t quite ready to name what Gina/Ada is, but she recognizes the entity as having a trait one traditionally associates with living things. Echo is able to accept that Gina/Ada has this drive only because she has had the same insight through her interactions with the virtus. Finally, her recognition that AI can have a fear of death shows the shift in her understanding of mortality and The Philosophical Dilemma of Technological Immortality.

“This was what she’d missed. Because what? Because she was afraid of them seeing her have a number-induced meltdown. As her therapist had mentioned, it would have been easier to just explain it to people. Those who cared would understand, and anyone else wouldn’t matter. Maybe if she made it out of this, she would take Walter up on his offer next time.”

Echo has this quiet but important interior monologue in a moment of high tension and action in the novel. The intense challenges she has faced and is facing in the moment lead her to re-evaluate how she sees relationships and synesthesia. This breakthrough is an important pivot in her character arc, making her more open to human relationships.

“She sensed Gina there in her head, battering down the thin walls that separated them. And Echo was determined to help her. But Tommy was also wrong. He just needed to apply himself like everyone else. Echo was living, breathing proof of that. With Gina, she was more. She wasn’t so alone anymore. She had access to every fact known to humanity; she only had to think it to get an answer. She felt smarter and more capable than she ever had before. With the proper monitoring and controls, what exactly was wrong with that?”

This moment shows the danger melding with AI (and Gina in particular) poses to Echo. Her voice here, especially the self-rationalization and her argument that Tommy should just pull himself up by his bootstraps, sounds unlike her voice elsewhere, which is generally introspective and sensitive to others. The phrase “proper monitoring and controls” is the giveaway that Echo melded with Gina espouses the values of Universal Trust and Ivan.

“If not Ivan, then another purported visionary would always be waiting in the wings, wouldn’t they? That was humanity, wasn’t it? Push the boundaries. Explore. Never, ever be satisfied.”

Echo is approaching the moment when she will defeat Ivan, but instead of feeling triumphant, she feels a sense of worry that this danger is an enduring one that will rise again. She phrases the articulation of this danger as questions, however, which shows her uncertainty around the question of whether the drive to explore dangerous corners of reality is truly what makes humanity what it is. That uncertainty is writ large in the novel, which doesn’t offer an ultimate answer to these questions.

“I love you, Echo London. You think you feel the same way, but you don’t. You can’t love a replica. I thank you for giving me a second chance to feel. It’s a gift that not everybody gets, and to meet you was the icing on that cake. Do what you have to do, what you know is right.”

Jesse’s admission that he loves Echo and immediate point that she can’t really love him show that he is willing to make sacrifices for Echo’s own good—an act of love. The ability to love is associated with personhood. This interaction calls into question the difference between human identity and virtu identity. Jesse’s refusal to let Echo stay with him in the virtual world is one of the reasons Echo chooses to return to her own reality to pursue relationships with people such as Walter. She has changed from a person who isolates herself to one who seeks connections in the physical world, which constitutes a substantial shift in her identity.

“Then she realized that like everything else in the virtual space, death wasn’t real.”

Echo has been grieving the deletion of the virtus and the violence of her destruction of the virtual Ivan, but her experiences have now taught her that the rules that govern physical reality and virtuality truly are different and consequential. Echo has learned about human identity, and that the possibly of real and permanent death is part of what makes human life valuable and distinct from virtual life. This realization governs her ethics, namely, that she refuses to kill Ivan in the real world. The realization also speaks to The Philosophical Dilemma of Technological Immortality.

“On the billboard screen overlooking the park, the whole scene played out on repeat. Ivan, Reid, and Echo. Audio on full blast. His twisted plan, his sneering face on display for everyone to see. Just then, Walter nudged her and pulled her back. The normally tranquil lawn space was erupting with the fury.”

Secrecy and Censorship Beneath Narratives of Social Progress are how forces like Universal Trust have been winning the battle for the future of humanity. Walter chooses total transparency and exposure to counter these forces. The future he imagines is one in which people make choices not because they have been manipulated into doing so, but because they have all the facts they need to make informed decisions.

“People viewed the building itself as the center of a plan that the government had once again enacted against the very citizens who’d put them in office. Experimenting on the populace wasn’t a new thing; the surprise had been the chosen route.”

This description highlights that the people outside of the library view it as a symbol for the unethical way governments withhold information from citizens as a way of exercising power over them. When those citizens destroy the library, they are declaring that they want a future in which keeping secrets and censorship aren’t the primary ways government interacts with citizens. The phrase “once again” connects the experimentation of Universal Trust to a longer tradition of government exploitation of vulnerable citizens. Henry’s attention to that history is one of the ways in which her work engages with the conventions of Black speculative fiction.