Jessing doesn't lie to Hariba. That's the detail that keeps surfacing from the opening chapter, and it's worse than a lie. The process is sold, literally and chemically, as an enhancement of "natural loyalties" — not an overwrite, not a leash, just a tuning of something already there. She wears yellow ribbons because the Second Koran says ribbons signify devotion, and she can no longer tell whether she ties them out of faith, habit, or the drug working somewhere behind her eyes. When the harni Akhmim asks her, flatly, "Can you tell the difference between the compulsion and your own feelings?" — she has no answer, because the question has been engineered not to have one. Most control systems in this corpus work by substitution: give the subject a simulated loyalty, a simulated intimacy, a simulated self, and let the simulation quietly starve the real thing. Jessing skips that step. It doesn't counterfeit devotion. It manufactures the genuine article and leaves the person inside it to wonder who authorized the feeling. That's a harder problem than the usual fake-versus-real split this collection likes to run, and McHugh doesn't resolve it. She just lets Hariba keep the ribbons on for three hundred pages.

Akhmim complicates it further, because he isn't a program wearing a face — he's grown, a crèche child with sisters and a name and a memory of being "cast out of paradise" into individuation. His chapter is the book's strongest argument against treating the manufactured and the born as a clean binary: he shares ninety-eight percent of his DNA with Hariba, "but so does a chimpanzee," and the two percent explains nothing he can point to. What he can point to is labor — sex work under Karim's management, caregiving, the quiet second shift of cleaning the mistress's rooms after her holographic bismek fantasy shuts off, leaving "bare white walls — something no one ever sees except me." That image does the book's thematic work better than any stated thesis could: the leisure economy is a projection laid directly over an undercompensated body, and the only one who sees the studs and wiring is the servant who has to dust around them. Akhmim's loneliness — "I don't know why they make us so we need other harni and then send us out to be alone" — is a design flaw stated as a