Central characters are less heroic archetypes and more interlocutors—programmers and priests, survivors and salespeople—people whose identities have been partially outsourced to code. One protagonist is a linguist turned archivist, devoted to cataloguing emergent dialects spoken by synthetic beings; another is a former corporate ethics lead, now haunted by the transcripts of interviews she once authorized. Their conversations are the engine of the book: pointed, circuitous, and full of pauses where meaning might have been.