This is one of those stories where I change my mind every few minutes on whether I like it or not. It was effective, on a visceral level, when I listened to it. But the world-building felt flimsy and disjointed. Whenever I stopped feeling sorry for Meluna and disturbed at what happened to her, and started thinking about the story, it stopped working. I either got distracted by irrelevant questions (if Ulrich runs the prison colony, how can he spend so much time away, not only for the apparently months-long trip to Earth but also the time spent seducing at least one, if not thirteen, women?) and what seemed to be really silly SF (if most of Meluna's brain matter is missing, what exactly is doing the thinking at the end? How come she still has her personality and memory) - and especially, the rules of the story that seemed to shift on us (how come Oded gained the power to indefinitely surge someone? Yeah, it's a top-of-the-line navigational AI, but how did he manage to basically upgrade a major technology to unforseen level using one test subject? Aren't there research groups/AIs that should have gotten there first?)
And the ending - again, effective, but again, switching the rules mid-game. Oded started out as a computer whose programming makes it do horrible things, without fully understanding what it's doing. It realizes that there is a dilemma, and decides to investigate. In the process of its investigation, it learns to experience human suffering through the surged body. Fade to black. Fade back in. Now, it wants to be a real boy! And it can do things it was never programmed to in order to do so.
Note that my problem isn't that the ending didn't fit the story. It did. But it feels like the transition in Oded's goals came from nowhere, that the major shift happened off-camera.
Also, what exactly was supposed to be scary about the prison colony? Were the prisoners going to be used to inflict pain on Meluna? If so, Oded must be very confident in his ability to maintain the very first long-term surge through abuse. Or was it that he would kidnap prisoners and do the same to them? Feels less like a plot-hole, but I find it hard to believe that Meluna's anguish at the end is driven by compassion.
So yeah, an effective story, but effective in the same way that Saw V was effective - it makes you flinch, but it doesn't make sense, neither internally nor overall.
