Great story. The last two weeks' have been two of the best that Escape Pod has run, for my tastes.
There are details of Polity society that I think answer some of the questions people have about elements of the plot -- they were hinted at in the story but were easy to miss in audio.
Although the Polity is really big, you won't be able to lose yourself in it if you're on the run. All travel off-planet goes through the runcibles (teleportation devices) and is controlled by the AIs. (Try to take any contraband through a runcible and the AI will simply edit it out of the transfer: you will end up at your destination but the contraband won't.) After committing a serious crime, you're stuck on the planet you're on. And so much of daily life is mediated by AIs that you'd have to camp out in the woods to avoid detection. It's not intended to be a police state, but the pervasive AI involvement has near-total surveillance as a side-effect.
I imagine that this makes premeditated murder extremely rare. Most people premeditating murder will look at the 100% chance of being caught and think again. Most human-on-human deaths are probably accidental or crimes of passion. Destruction of the priest's head may also have been important in landing Deas with a death sentence -- I can't remember how well resurrection/reconstruction works in the Polity but the story certainly made quite a big deal of dropping the head into the volcano. It may be that death is only given for "murder with no possibility of resurrection".
As such, I concur with Thaurismunths that Daes was not chosen by Geronamid at random. I've got no idea how big a sector is, but presumably a Sector AI is looking after many billions of humans, so death sentences for crimes of passion may indeed be churned out every minute. But a cold-blooded killer with the moral sense to know that what he's doing is wrong, and the common sense to know that he'll be caught afterwards, with the deep sense of grievance to go through with it anyway? That's probably not something that passes through the courts every day.
And this is why it seems quite important to me that we see both the abuse and the revenge in unflinching detail. If the author waves it away with a line like "Daes was on death row for murdering the bully who'd abused him as a boy", the reader understands that there was a run-of-the-mill murder and the character has a
de rigeur unhappy childhood. But the reader needs to be more emotionally involved, to know the details that make this abuse personal and the murder unique. We need to feel that Daes didn't overreact to the rape, and that he wasn't insane or overcome with rage when he killed. This murderer is special.
At least, that's my strong impression from the way the story was structured. What I haven't quite been able to figure out is why Geronamid needed someone like Daes. The two obvious choices are that it's something in the way Daes's personality would inform/constrain the Csorians' reactions in dealing with Geronamid, or something in the way that he would influence their multi-thousand-year exile on the planet. If there are clues in the text, I missed them. Shame, I'll just have to listen again.
Also, Geronimid lands a shuttle on planet when he before was afraid to establish a direct comlink? Not really plausible.
I'm not sure that it was afraid. As the Csorians understood quickly enough, simply introducing an extra link in the chain didn't prevent Geronamid from having to make contact with the infected link at some point. It doesn't work very well as a firewall. I think the elaborate setup was a bluff to see how aggressively the Csorians would fight to subvert the AI: a way of giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. Asher's AIs tend to be devious like that, and
never let on everything that they know.