4 ideas
Motl is a robotnik, a Jewish soldier rebuilt as a cyborg for wars that have since ended, who now survives by begging and scavenging parts around the old Central Station. He falls in love with Isobel Chow, a young local woman, and the story turns on whether a body built as military hardware can still be a person and a lover. A state manufactures a weapon out of a human being, then leaves the discarded human to live on the street.
Almost everyone carries a node that plugs them continuously into the Conversation, a planet-wide network. Memory, language, games and social presence are all partly stored and processed there rather than in the head. Selfhood becomes distributed, and the network is the medium people think in rather than a tool they pick up.
Once connection to the network is the default condition of personhood, the few who cannot connect, like the bookseller Achimwene, are experienced as impaired and marginal rather than merely old-fashioned. Read this way, analog life such as paper books and unmediated memory shows up as a social handicap. That handicap also becomes a private refuge and a form of attention the connected have lost.
Carmel is a strigoi, a data-vampire who feeds by draining the information and self that flow through other people's nodes. The monster exists only because minds have become permeable and externalized, so any universal interface also creates a new way to consume a person. The stigma, fear and quarantine directed at her mirror older treatment of migrants and the contagious poor.