Picklejuice was only supposed to attend her Reintegration appointment, keep her housing, and make sure nobody got ambitious about reclassifying her Autism Service Dog, Bob. The Framework, an AI-run system with control issues, had other plans. After Bob gets Picklejuice out of the Reintegration Center, the Framework insists the situation was therapeutic. Picklejuice remains unconvinced, mostly because she was there. Bob was also there. His current clinical opinion is that several people in Reintegration need supervision, and none of them should be left alone with a policy manual. Now flagged, followed, and still inconveniently herself, she is pulled toward the underground resistance group that lives at the Commons. The Commons, a large community in East Sector, is an unmarked sanctuary of strange rituals, illegal Threadcards, and livestock with attitudes. It is occupied by people the city has been failing to misplace quietly for years. Enforcement misplaces people in East Sector all the time. Their operations have become the Commons' best recruiting strategy. The Framework does not lose people well. It has lost some of its own employees to the Commons. Including Sparky, who is a former Framework analyst with prophetic chickens, which sounds less useful than it is. The chickens have several concerns. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones because the Framework also has concerns. It sends Wrye Theron. Wrye is a Reintegration Liaison who is very good at finding the sentence the Framework wants in someone else's mouth. The Framework assigns him as Picklejuice's mandatory clinician, which would be easier if his client would stop saying things he is not allowed to know. The more Wrye tries to make her case make sense, the more the paperwork starts behaving like something that should not be left unsupervised. Oversight has protocols about that. Basil Voss is very good at identifying irregularities. Unfortunately, the irregularities now include a missing client, a worried clinician, an offended service dog, the Commons, and at least one chicken with better timing than Enforcement. Now Picklejuice is trying to stay free. Bob keeps updating his clinical notes. Wrye is asking questions the Framework did not approve. Meanwhile, Basil is discovering that "contained" is a bold word for a situation involving pancakes, which they would have known had they only thought to ask the chickens. Surveillance of the Commons is a darkly funny dystopian novel about institutional harm, neurodivergent survival, chosen community, and the hope of remaining a person in a system designed to call that noncompliance.