Marie Moe is a cyborg who runs on proprietary software she can’t trust. She’d like to change that.

From Peter Watts:

Brüks is therefore the only "baseline" human aboard a ship full of various kinds of posthuman. Unlike most depictions of posthumanity, Echopraxia does not simply take the line that modified is better. Watts is a biologist himself and employs an evolutionary perspective. His posthumans have modified themselves (or been modified by evolution, in the case of vampires) to be be better at a particular set of tasks, but the human mind is a sufficiently delicate machine that there are negative side effects to any modification. Vampires have brains that are able to plan and anticipate the actions of others to an unparalleled degree, for example, but they have fatal epileptic fits if a right angle (i.e. a cross) takes up a certain part of their visual field. In a more dramatic tradeoff, the Bicamerals have used insights impossible for ordinary humans to win many Nobel prizes, but they can no longer communicate with the outside world except via interpreters who themselves are neurologically modified into "synthesists" like the protagonist of Blindsight. As a smart baseline human scientist, Brüks is the least intelligent person on the ship, but he doesn't have any crippling disadvantages either. The ship's pilot calls him a "roach," which Brüks takes as an insult only to be told:

"you're also field-tested. We've had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn't even exist a few months ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there's probably another upgrade they can't afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything, roach connotes a bit of envy."