The story about the nature of consciousness follows Ana & Derek as they raise digital creatures (Jax, Marco & Polo) from pets to almost-human intelligent creatures.

The core idea is that consciousness can not be programmed but evolved: "it takes at least twenty years of steady effort to produce a useful person, & I see no reason that teaching an artificial being would go any faster." AI needs to be raised like children. Being a parent raises some heavy issues: what is love and how do we get it? Why does the world contain evil pain and loss? How can we discover dignity? Who is in power and why?

if we want to give an AI any responsibilities then it will need good answers to these questions. That's not going to happen by loading the works of Kant into the computer's memory.

A story about the relationship between our interpretation of reality and written text:

In the future, a journalist observes how the world, his daughter, and he himself are affected by "Remem", a form of lifelogging which grants its users perfect memory through recording. He notices how his memories are inacurate when checked. 

In a parallel narrative strand, a Tiv man is one of the first of his people to learn to read and write, and discovers that this technology not be compatible with oral tradition. As the oral version sustained the culture his people decides not to use it.