A strange sort of second hand immortality your memories survive your though processes but it is a different body leaving out questions of the soul it is the same thing that makes me question star trek style transporters. Do they give birth similarly to humans? Did they preserve other essences or did they just eliminate humanity through superiority without someone starting a war I can't see it happening in just 2 generations there are too many groups who would hold out longer than that on stubbornness and ignorance alone.

Rather chilling, as I read it. (Spoilers ahead...)

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My impression was that Robbie seemed quite willing to modify Brian's psyche if need be in order to create the threesome she was looking for. Sophie could be manipulated without hardware adjustments, so to speak, but I'm not sure that Brian saw things Robbie's way until after he got "processed", since he provided us with two asides saying so,

There's a similarity here. IMO, to Fred Pohl's Heechee series: the protagonist there, having been preserved electronically after his physical death, finds his new capability so obviously superior to his human limitations as to make the need for "meat people" disappear once more have been transferred. (They're immortal in their new form, but it appears that couples can still merge virtual gametes to reproduce if they're so inclined.) As in the story here, my sympathies -- unlike the author's -- stayed with humanity enough to at least want to see them, if not survive, get vanquished in a fair fight rather than falling into irrelevancy. (Or, here, first dying en masse via Robbie's not-quite-salient but more efficient soldiers, assuming they're produced and play a significant part in humans "killing each other off" as mentioned in the epilogue.)

Does this version of humanity deserve what it gets? Perhaps. But even if they haven't gotten past the Binary (yet?), there seems to be more acceptance of alternatives to tradition; Brian serially marries a woman and then a man without losing his security clearance or his credibility. The government, as represented by the chairman and Jane, seems to be predictably ruthless. But Robbie's countermoves seem to demonstrate that the new order can be equally so if they feel the need.

I'll admit that I may be overlooking much of the emotional interplay in interpreting the story along these lines. (In the back of my head I'm presently hearing a curmudgeonly voice snarling at me: "It's a love story, dammit.") And yes, it's nice to consider a human-descended race whose members "could switch back and forth as they desired ad nauseam [since] the form was no longer of importance." (Though that seems to me to be an oddly binary way of looking at things, especially since Robbie's preferred form at the start involved male reproductive organs and a female appearance.)

Eric