“Listen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio.”

The novella begins with a forceful address from the narrator to her imagined audience. The first line issues an imperative to an audience of “zombies,” who are men obsessed with their stocks and shares. Zombies are numbed to reality, greedily pursuing only one base desire—not flesh, but wealth. If we see the narrator as speaking from a future back to a past audience, then they’re “zombies” too in the sense that her audience (from her own perspective) is already dead. While the narrator derides her imagined audience, she still needs their attention.

This passage introduces us to the distinctive style of the narrator and one of the key themes of the novella and this future world– money and profit. The reference to “silly hands leaking sweat” also introduces another crucial theme—the body, here presented in its unsavory light. The unconventional word choice, “leaking” creates an unfamiliar and objectifying effect—hands sweat, but they’re not usually referred to as ‘leaking’. Machines and objects leak, and this peculiar semantic blurring between machine and body is a hint of the way bodies and technologies can be intertwined in the future.