Content Warning: This section of the book and the guide discusses enslavement and death by suicide.

The novel takes place in a near-future where transnational capitalism and AI technology are woven into everyday human life. Nation-states are indistinguishable from corporations, and industries rely on enhanced drone weaponry, micro-surveillance, and AI-captained fishing trawlers to make a profit. Individuals depend on automated vehicles and artificial companions aptly called “point-fives” because they fulfill people’s desire to have a relationship without dealing with a whole person. Each of the novel’s characters exist in this world where advanced technology and corporate greed contribute to or directly cause their experiences of alienation. For Ha, Kamran is a literal projection of her isolation and insularity. Most tragically, Eiko is enslaved by an AI system that upholds the inhumanity of capitalist logic.

Ha’s feelings of alienation are rooted in a past where loneliness, unrequited love, and repressed guilt lead her to depend on technology to dull her pain and awareness. One of the novel’s ironic twists is the revelation that Kamran, Ha’s trusted companion with whom she spent “long, comforting evenings in conversation […] sealed off from the world” (122), is a point-five construct. The popularity of point-five companions illustrates a world in which people regress further into their own narrow world view, selectively filtered to allow only familiar experiences rather than differences.