People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactio… - Adam Roberts

She didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.

It's not right. A human being is a human being. A human being is not a toy."
"We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love," said her two MOHmies, as one. "That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good."...
"If we are powerful," sang her MOHmies, "we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.

She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.