Jamie Gray is the novel’s protagonist, a new KPS recruit, and one of the four new members of Tanaka Base Gold Team. Throughout the novel, Scalzi leaves Jamie’s gender ambiguous, never revealing their gender and using the first-person pronouns in Jamie’s point-of-view. Leaving Jamie’s gender ambiguous suggests that their gender has no impact on their day-to-day life or work, suggesting that the typically gendered activities in which they participate, such as rescue missions and defense missions, are equally performable by a person of any gender. For example, Jamie quickly learns how to use the KPS weapons and earns Tanaka Base’s respect after defeating the kaiju parasite. Jamie’s gender neutrality also makes their experiences more easily relatable to people of all genders. Jamie is a self-proclaimed nerd who wrote their master’s thesis on science fiction and refers often to science fiction novels, such as Neil Stephanson’s Snow Crash. Jamie’s love of science fiction makes them further relatable and suggests that they will have useful information in the science-fiction world in which the KPS operates.

Much of the narrative traces Jamie’s first KPS deployment, during which they become confident and self-assured, capable of protecting something more important than themself.