This was definitely not one of my favorites. The plot arch was fairly predictable and most of the characters were more or less one-dimensional. The only thing that threw me for surprise loop was that I thought for sure they were going to end up eating the girl (and thus triggering the trojan). In fact, I would suggest that the story might be better if they had.
The big fly in the soup, however, and which completely ruined the story for me beyond all salvation was that the author seemed to have thrown in every single scifi trope about computer and the intertubes that she could think of. As a software engineer, it was just impossible for me not to literally roll my eyes every other minute. Normally, I love NK Jemisin's work in the fantasy genre, but this story just seems badly conceived. I don't even know where to start.
Perhaps most glaring is that the idea that Artificial Intelligences would somehow act, feel, and be motivated exactly how humans would. In the mainstream study of AI, this idea (that AI should emulate humans) has long been dead and thought to be a hindrance to real advancement in the field. It's far more likely that any form of real Artificial Intelligence would be barely recognizable by humans, and would probably resemble the emergent behavior of hive insects (ants, bees, wasps) than anything like a human consciousness capable of feeling fear, doubt, love, or hate. Nor would any such AI's regard humans as "Gods". In fact the very concept of Gods would be completely irrational and illogical. In fact, it's highly debatable whether an AI would even have a sense of self-preservation. Human beings are not the end-all of evolution and creation, so why do we need to be so egotistical as to assume that AI's should be "like us".
Another horrid trope that really needs to die is the idea that pieces of software can just "download" into a human being or even "go" anywhere on the net. First of all, ask you self what happens when you download any form of digital media. Does the original piece of software "disappear" or "go" anywhere? No, the software just makes a new copy of where ever you downloaded to. So even assuming that you could somehow write software that runs on the human brain, and then have some sort of interface to translate machine code into "human brain code", when Meros (sp?) et al downloads into the human beings, the would have just copied themselves to a new platform, leaving their old selves intact and exactly in the same spot.
Similarly, one virus wouldn't need to rip out or kill another virus simply to take its constituent pieces (or whatever). That in and of itself is as non-sensical as me cutting off my leg, duct taping a shotgun to the stump, and expecting everything to be fine. While the chances of producing a viable result would be astronomically low, a virus could simply copy what it needed without damaging its target. The only thing that makes this form of exchange work in the real world (and in the virtual world) is that real viruses and computer viruses do this literally millions of iterations a minute so as to offset the 99.999% of failed results.
Also the whole information "singularity" as a black hole was big WTF? Why would AI's be afraid of them, let alone be destroyed by them. When they mention "Event Horizon" I literally groaned. There's no physics or gravity in the Internet. Why would they have to "escape" or be "drawn to" anything?? It just felt ridiculous and completely out of place.
Finally, the whole virtual/real world duality is old and recycled. It worked for Neuromancer and Snow Crash because the genre (and the technology it was based on) was very new, but in today's technology is there no "one" e-Morph virtual world. There are many many many virtual worlds, each with its own rules and physics. While I like the idea of AI's arising "out of the wild" from various rich game worlds (e.g. like a World of Warcraft 5 or maybe Everquest 9) the idea that they can travel and move to various other worlds is silly (see 3rd paragraph about copying digital files). For pieces of software to exist outside of its native environment would like akin to plopping one of us naked on the surface of Uranus and expecting us to thrive.
So, sorry for the wall o' text. If you liked the story, good on you, and hopefully I didn't rain on your parade. But I really hope Ms Jemesin does some better research (at least more than watching a few movies) next time.