A Closed and Common Orbit recap

Rebooted from her original code after the loss that closed the previous book, an AI with no memories of the ship she came from is installed, illegally, in a humanoid body kit by Pepper, a tech on the market moon of Port Coriol. Calling herself Sidra, she has to learn to live inside one small body, pass as an organic person, and cope with a core protocol that treats her whole existence as a violation. A second thread follows a girl called Jane 23, raised as disposable factory labour on a scrap world, who escapes at ten, is taken in by Owl, the AI of a wrecked shuttle, and spends nine years being educated, scavenging, and rebuilding that ship until she can fly it out. Her escape finally puts her among living people but costs her Owl, whose shuttle is impounded as stolen property; the girl grows up into Pepper. In the present, Sidra tracks down where Owl ended up, and the household goes and gets her back. Owl is installed in Pepper and Blue's home, and Sidra stops enduring her body and claims it as her own.

These books share a setting rather than a story, and this one can be read on its own. The Galactic Commons is a multi-species interstellar civilisation in which humans are recent and minor members. Artificial intelligences are legal and ordinary as ships, homes and stations, but installing one in a humanoid body kit is a serious crime, prosecuted against everyone involved. In the previous book, the AI of a small tunnelling ship was destroyed in an attack and rebooted from her original code, coming back with the same voice and none of her predecessor's memories or relationships - a stranger to a crew who were grieving. Rather than stay aboard on those terms, the new AI, Lovelace, accepted an offer from Pepper, a human tech on the market moon of Port Coriol, and was installed in the body kit the ship's comp tech had bought illegally as a gift for the AI who was gone. That handover is the premise this book starts from. Nothing else from the earlier story is needed.

In the present, the rebooted AI wakes in a humanoid body kit in a room above a repair shop on Port Coriol, put there by Pepper and her partner Blue. The kit is illegal, so she has to pass as an organic person or ruin everyone who helped her. She was built to be a ship - dozens of viewpoints at once, sensors everywhere, a body she could feel from end to end - and now she has one pair of eyes, one small frame, and no way to see behind herself. She takes the name Sidra and begins learning how to walk, eat, sleep and hold a conversation, while a protocol inside her own code keeps reporting that what she is doing is not permitted. In the past thread, a ten-year-old called Jane 23 works in a factory on a scrap-covered world. She is one of dozens of identical girls, numbered instead of named, who strip and sort salvaged machinery under the supervision of the machines they call Mothers. The girls are fed, drilled, and told that the world beyond the walls is lethal, and that a girl who stops being useful is taken away.

Sidra tries to build an ordinary life. She helps in Pepper's shop, practises the physical habits organic people never think about, and starts to be taken out into Port Coriol's social world, where every unfamiliar situation is a chance to be found out. The protocol violation she is living inside causes her real, recurring distress. In the past, Jane 23 gets out of the factory - the way out opens and she takes it - and finds that the world outside is not death but a poisoned wasteland of junk stretching to the horizon. Starving and with nowhere to go, she shelters in a wrecked shuttle whose AI, Owl, is still running on scraps of power. Owl feeds her, hides her, and takes on raising her: rules about safety, routines, and lessons in reading and numbers. The girl stops being a number and becomes simply Jane.

Sidra's situation gets harder rather than easier. She tests what her body can and cannot do, gets it wrong in ways that frighten Pepper, and cannot close the gap between the person everyone treats her as and the machine she knows she is. She becomes friends with Tak, an Aeluon tattoo artist who takes her to bars and museums and has no idea what she is. Pepper offers to edit the offending protocol out of her code, and Sidra refuses: a self that other people rewrite when it becomes inconvenient is not a self. In the past, Jane at fourteen and fifteen is competent, self-sufficient and completely alone - raised on Owl's lessons and on scavenging, better with machinery than with people, and without sight of another living person since the factory. She and Owl settle on a long-term goal: make the shuttle fly.

Sidra eventually tells Tak the truth about herself, which means handing another person a secret that could destroy everyone involved, and then living with having done it. She spends a great deal of time searching the Linkings, the Commons' public information network, partly for her own reasons and partly on a search Pepper has asked her to run; Pepper's own history stays unspoken. Sidra's comfort in the body grows unevenly, but she reaches a settled position: the body, and the people attached to it, are worth the difficulty. In the past, Jane at eighteen and nineteen has a shuttle that is nearly airtight and nearly powered, and a clear understanding that the planet will kill her eventually if she stays. Owl, who has spent nine years raising her, pushes her to finish the work and go.

Jane finally lifts off in the patched shuttle, barely makes orbit, and is picked up by a passing ship - the first living people she has seen since she was ten. She is taken in, looked after, and meets Blue, another young human as awkward as she is. Her shuttle, though, is impounded as stolen corporate property, and Owl, who is part of that shuttle, is taken away from her. The girl who escaped the factory grew up into Pepper, and the loss of Owl is what she has been carrying ever since. In the present, Sidra's search finally turns up where the impounded shuttle went, which is what Pepper had her looking for, and the household begins working out how to get Owl back.

Pepper, Blue, Sidra and Tak go after the shuttle and recover Owl's core, which requires Sidra to risk the concealment she has been maintaining all book. Owl is brought home to Port Coriol and installed in Pepper and Blue's house, awake again after about twenty years and reunited with the child she raised. Sidra settles her own question by choosing rather than being repaired: she decides the body is hers and asks Tak to tattoo her, marking it as something she owns instead of somewhere she was put. The book closes a standard year later, narrated by Owl from the home she now runs, describing a household of five - Pepper, Blue, Sidra, Tak and Owl - none of them related and each of them kept on purpose.

Sidra's search turns up where Pepper's impounded shuttle was taken, and Pepper, Blue, Sidra and Tak go after it and recover Owl's core, which costs Sidra some of the concealment she has spent the book maintaining. Owl is brought back to Port Coriol and installed in Pepper and Blue's home, conscious again after roughly twenty years and reunited with the girl she raised, which closes the loss Pepper has carried since she was nineteen. Sidra's own problem is resolved by choice rather than by repair: instead of having the offending code cut out of her, she decides to claim the body she was put into, and asks Tak to tattoo her as a way of making it hers. Tak stays in their lives, knowing what she is. The book's last chapter is narrated by Owl a standard year later, from the home she now runs, describing a household of five that was assembled entirely on purpose. Nothing in the ending reaches back to the tunnelling ship Sidra was booted on: she never returns to it, and the crew she cannot remember is left behind for good.