She valued her guilt. It was a hard-won higher function. It was a vital barrier between her nature and things going bad again.1
The incomprehensible-series-of-disorienting-events portion of this book lasts way too long. But the payoff is pretty good. I liked how the question of whether the corvids’ intelligence counts as sentience was used to raise the question of whether larger systems (like the simulation in the story) have sentience. I also enjoyed the exploration of the ethical dilemma posed by beings who had never existed except as part of a simulation.