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This was the most bored I've ever been while reading a balls-to-the-wall constant action shoot-'em-up sci-fi thiller. I just could not get my head into this - Jack is a boring clone who gets routinely disemboweled and whose personal motivation is 'slavery bad' (a hot take, that one) after discovering he is the only clone in a batch of 20 with anything resembling sentience. He invokes a righteous moral outrage over murder and delivers swift justice with glorified mass murder of the obviously evil one-dimensional baddies. Before he commits his first murder, he wonders whether he can really do it, given how sacred life is, but then he pops that top and it's nonstop rampage with blood and guts flying. Eh, introspection is for nerds, anyway.

The whole book is a non-stop conga line of cliches from action films, video games, and other sci-fi novels replete with convenient air ducts for sneaking, a protagonist with instinctual knowledge of all things spy-craft, shock-horror torture, an instant sexual connection with the antagonist, enforcers who need their underlings to 'leave this one to me', villains who are comically one-dimensionally cruel and evil, and, of course, faux moral conundrums. It seems that no character has a single motivation beyond capitalistic greed or righteous justice, all of which is so dull, so there's no need for words spent on 'whys' and instead the space needs to be filled with a constant stream of 'stuff happening' to keep the reader entertained.

The language was also just... weird. Guards don't 'patrol', they 'perambulate'. Sometimes they even perambulate towards Jack. Not because they want to get him, apparently, just because they're out having a grand old time. If there's a structure in this book, you can bet your ass it's going to be 'geodesic'. Domes apparently don't come in any other variety, but if a dome is mentioned, you will be reminded every time that it's a geodesic dome. There were many other times I would read something and just feel it was overused or an... odd choice.

A terrible introduction to 'The Polity' and I don't see myself returning to this universe any time soon. I'm ok with my protagonists getting disemboweled once in a while (I'm looking at you, Axiom's End), but you know what they say, if your character doesn't have a bowel, they had better have a brain.