One new thing I noticed on my latest play-through:
Outside Mahir's place there is some graffiti that reads "Aut Furit, aut Lachrimat, quem non Fortuna beavit." which means, "He whom Fortune has not blessed either rages or weeps." It's the epigram for a 17th century collection of instrumental music called "Lachrimae" (literally "Tears") by John Dowland. This is referenced one additional time, at the end of the hero-path (fighting your way to Khazeem), when Mahir removes the conditioning he uses the trigger word "fiLachrimae" - now my Latin sucks, but this looks like fi Lachrimae, the present imperative conjugation of factus - to become - and Lachrimae - Tears. So he orders Mezz to "become tears", clearly a reference to the earlier phrase.
What does it mean? I have no idea, exactly. Maybe just that Mahir is a music and Latin nerd, but it probably has longer-reaching implications. I'll have to think about it more.
Notably, John Dowland has another song that was reworked from a piece in Lachrimae called "Flow my tears" which is referenced in the book (and title) of the Philip K. Dick novel "Flow my Tears, the Policeman said". While this novel doesn't really relate to Cruel Serenade directly, I would observe that the setting of the game is pretty clearly inspired by Philip K. Dick's broader body of work, especially his use of unreliable narrators, memory alteration and generally just being trippy. And writing cyberpunk dystopias, of course.