Slavery as a symbol
In this novel, slavery represents extortion, because slavery is literally extortion, and since the economy that has grown from the novelist's imagination is specifically designed to exploit their laborers as efficiently and as corporately as possible. Without Lincoln's presidency to steer the nation away from slavery, the nation might not have decided that a free market cannot coexist with slavery and forced labor.
GGSI
GGSI represents corruption at the corporate level, especially in the modern age, because GGSI is the ultimatum of slavery in the novelist's imagination. Imagine a world America decided to tolerate slavery on a state's rights basis. Now, in the age of advanced technology, that would be unimaginably worse, because the slaves could be made the victims of other corporate injustices, and GGSI represents all of those initiatives. The clearest breach of humanity is to breed black people as slaves. The idea of a mega-corporation owning a fleet of cloned slaves may seem far-fetched, but it's not unimaginable.
Father Barton
This character is a symbol in this novel because of Father Barton's involvement with the government, with slavery, and with GGSI. As a character, he is fundamentally opposed to the workings of GGSI, but Victor takes a long time to warm up to him, because it's easy to tell that such a man might also be up to something. In the end, he fulfills his role by saving Victor at an opportune moment. Who is he? He is Victor's guardian in a way, which is the role he serves for the slave community in general.
The motif of corruption
Even just in theory, there is simply no way of defending slavery. It is inhumane to take a living person, a human, and to subject them to slavery, but on top of that, the novelist reminds the reader of all the various other ways that corruption could have made this problem worse. Because of the technological advances of the future, and because of America's long history of corporate corruption, it is not unthinkable to imagine that if slavery had been tolerated, corruption would have made it worse over time.
The motif of real social injustice
One can view this novel as a kind of metaphor for the real history of slavery, emancipation, racial reconciliation, and the current disenfranchisement of Black people, all these years later. One must wonder, does wealth distribution favor the establishment or the underdog? Historically, black people were forbidden from succeeding in the market, even after they were freed from the horrors of slavery, so how different is the real story from the fictitious one? The ideas of the novel relate to modern injustices in a symbolic way, encouraging the reader to take the plot as a metaphor for American racism.
