You seem to want story movement right away. However, SoD starts by using a time-honored technique called "establishing the norm." Shakespeare was quite fond of this technique; see Act 1 of any of his plays, including the sword fight that kills Mercutio, giving him that great line, "Not as wide as a door, but 'tis enough." Tom Clancy, on the other hand, doesn't stand for that in his stories, largely because we all know his "norm" since we already live in it. SF like mine, however, extrapolates significantly from our world and requires the writer to set up the current rules, which The Reader won't be familiar with, before he gets into a story that challenges & changes those rules. Of course, that writer should make that set-up interesting, using, as you suggest, dialog plus interesting situations that illustrate the norm. My characters do interact a lot in all three sections of the first chapter, starting in the very first paragraph, in fact. I try to make their situations interesting by involving both Phoebe & Dain in life & death, a common enough tool in sustaining The Reader's interest. Weir's section is pretty short, full of emotion & impending changes, setting up the precipitating crisis that begins the story in Chapter 2. As for screenplays, they're an entirely different art form — no fair!

You ask for physical descriptions. Phoebe does tell us what Harlan looks like, right down to his "scat-brown eyes" & other perceptions tell us his height relative to her & so on. On the other hand, Phoebe herself remains undescribed in this chapter because point-of-view characters often do. Writers who feel it mandatory to describe their PoV characters — which I don't — resort to such gimmicks as mirrors &c, which were not available in her initial setting. The same goes for Dain & Weir. People just don't describe themselves. However, you — well, maybe not you, but others who continue on in the book — will find all these characters described by others in subsequent chapters. Sometimes, even that disappoints those Readers who prefer to conjure up their own images; this common tendency often leads to dislike of the films made from books.

More importantly, these initial sections show the characters' basic personalities (in Dain's case, more than one), giving the context for the book's conflict. In fact, I've read that a really good book illustrates its basic theme on its first page. The first 2 paragraphs of SoD told you what it's about. Perhaps you just aren't interested in what it's like to be trapped between serving the customer and management's focus on the bottom line. Some people aren't. Lots are, especially project managers, the core of Corporate America.

Lastly, you didn't like how I extended the English language. SF, of all the genres, is supposed to show us a possible future, & I think it quite likely that our common language will grow as it incorporates terms from other societies, especially when those terms are far more expressive than their English equivalents. For example, check out the definition of anshin; it definitely means more than "Department of Public Safety." Perhaps, you are just not that interested in other cultures & don't want to work to expand your own internal patterns. I do grant that people may need help learning & remembering these terms, so I have added "semantic support" for those special terms so you can look them up any time you need a reminder. That support also comes with the softcopy version of the novel.

Keywords: literary criticism, Corporate America, project managers, anshin, establishing the norm, point-of-view characters, extending the English language, multiple personalities, Shakespeare, Mercutio, Tom Clancy