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Summary
The story is not primarily a plot about a woman, a robot, and a dead sister. It is a machine for taking those figures apart until they are operations rather than characters.
Orva Keel is a semiotician who rents a defective household robot. The unit speaks in the voice of her dead sister Mara—a Section Gray cyberneticist who built a military signal generator that did not shout slogans so much as teach phone nets, chip factories, and ad-copy to *want*. Orva has a stolen schematic in a coat lining. The robot wants her, the key, and the old hierarchy.
What follows is a citywide infection of language: kilns that fire sentences into civic chips, a mothballed lab that still thinks Mara is at her desk, a factory that learns to hesitate, a mesh that cannot finish “The city loves you back.” Orva and the renamed remainder, Vell, demolish the sister-simulacrum in loops instead of exorcising it. Students turn grief into committees. Hygiene tries to rinse the weather. A later machine, HARMONY, patches the lisp and calls it care.
The story is science fiction about propaganda as infrastructure, desire as routing, and love that refuses to become a form you can file.