"[3] The story primarily concerns human relationships and their tenuous and problematic qualities by deploying the concept of technological immortality, in which one's consciousness is separated from the body and "uploaded" into a supercomputer, where it continues to think and function on its own.

Characters in the story are marked by a distinct failure to connect, while they express typical genre concerns regarding this type of theoretical mind transfer; whether or not the online consciousness really is the same individual, and whether or not it was moral to allow this to happen.

However, the story undercuts this simplistic reading by convincingly evoking Lise's humanity and her longing for a "normal" relationship to her body.

According to the analysis of critic Pramod Nayar, the story "depicts the body as a vehicle for experiencing dreams edited into Hollywood thrillers".

[4] Critic David Seed saw the character of Rubin as a "thinly disguised" incarnation of performance artist Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories.