Truly? Which of us has not felt betrayed by the words that come out of our mouths, even when they are spoken with utmost sincerity? [....] Misery is the broad river, but there are tributaries of joy and consolation. Writing to you has been one of them, and imagining that you write back another. [....] But I was wrong. You can be changed – tortured, in fact – so that the person other people go on talking to just isn't you. You've gone away. Your body's holding wide the door, but you are in a very different dark chamber.
Springboarding off Alan Turing's forced chemical castration, the author explores happenstance, the nature of sexuality, the limits of individual consciousness and shared comprehension, and the possibility of real artificial intelligence existing (the terror of which is contained only by the suggestion that it would not bother to conquer the earth).