In spite most of the novel being told from the perspectice of one of the Syndicates, my questions weren't answered sufficiently. It seemed really hypocritical/bizarre that the syndicates broke away from the humans because they were treated as second class citizens while they themselves have an extremely rigid brave new world like class structure with classes of *slaves* that they contract out to the humans! And they also go through culling so they do not respect the lives of the clones themselves. They say that they will die out because of insufficient genetic diversity, so they WHY do not they stop culling themselves when some of the children do not fit the standard mold sufficiently?

In the novel, I thought the most interesting part was when on the syndicate scientist team, one of the women got pregnant, although all syndicates are gay and biological pregnancy is anathema. I was dying to see the fall out from that. Are they going to run away together to protect the child? What possessed them to have sex with each other in spite of their very thorough conditioning/culling? It seemed like a really big deal and it wasn't explored.

The syndicates are actually conditioned to sleep with only their own clone line- identical twins. Clones in the same line also work together. One funny line in the book was when Arkady assumed 2 (human) coworkers are lovers. They were all: "We work together". Arkady: "exactly"