Qoheleth/synopsis

RJ Brewster is a sound technician for a theater and pioneer of a type of virtual reality that involves integration with a system in a non-human fashion - when ey works sound for the theater, ey is essentially the room. When not working, ey spends much of eir time online with friends, also in VR, where ey is a genderless fennec fox. Recently, Cicero, one of eir friend group has ‘gotten lost’: while he was interacting with the VR system, the system crashed and, even when removed from it, he was left still ‘inside’, with no way to remove him. RJ (AwDae when online, due to the limitations of a canine muzzle on pronouncing letters), eir best friend and ex Sasha (a skunk), and Cicero’s partner Debarre (a weasel) have been trying to figure out what they can about Cicero’s circumstances and how he can be rescued. After digging into the research, RJ emself gets lost during that night’s rehearsal at the theater.

Dr Carter Ramirez is a scientist at the University College of London working on studying the lost. She is head of the research team and focuses specifically on the statistical, psychological, and data science side of the research. Her coworker, Dr Sanders, leads up the neuroscience side of research. When RJ gets lost, Sanders mentions that ‘another furry’ has gotten lost, and Dr Ramirez gets a hunch that there might be some social vector to the lost. When she starts investigating along those lines, however, she meets strange amounts of pushback from both Sanders and the grantors funding the research. She pushes on with a reduced team of Avery, a nonbinary statistician, and Prakash Das, a neuroscientist. Avery discovers that RJ’s case may be unique in that eir marketing trail has been influenced by eir nonbinary gender as well as eir aromanticism, meaning that ey is both easy to track and unique in eir social circles.

Nearly two hundred years in the future, Ioan Bălan, an historian living as an upload in a computer system, is contacted by an enigmatic fennec fox named Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, who is looking to hire em as an amanuensis, someone to help both investigate and to witness the investigation into a problem that its “clade”, the Ode clade, is running into. A clade is the set of individuals in the system forked from a common ancestor, with “forking” meaning that the individual makes a copy of themselves who is unique from that point on. Some unknown person has allegedly spilled a secret of some importance to the Ode clade, namely the name of the author of the Ode to the End of Death after which they are named, someone who died before uploading. While Ioan is initially skeptical of being used as a private investigator, ey quickly becomes interested in the strange intricacies of the Ode clade and the mystery itself, which primarily takes place as a playful puzzle using various forms of encryption set forth by someone who will only identify himself as Qoheleth.

When ey gets lost, RJ/AwDae awakes in eir old high school as a fox, rather than as eir human self. While there, ey struggles with the loneliness and maddening features of the ‘sim’ in which ey has found emself. Ey hunts around and eventually finds a set of clues related to Cicero’s disappearance. After struggling with various aspects of the sim such as doors being locked, a ‘fog of war’ that keeps em from seeing more than a hundred or so feet while ey is outside, words in books refusing to stay still on the page, and nauseating ‘skips’ when ey travels through places ey has never seen before, ey deduces that ey is not actually in a sim as it exists in the waking world, but trapped in eir own mind with the VR technology (which takes the form of implants in eir hands, forehead, and a column along eir spine known as an ‘exocortex’) mirroring eir experiences back to em through the technology already in place. Notably, the information ey was exposed to before getting lost has been cached in eir exocortex, and ey has full access to it. Realising that ey are stuck in something more akin to a dream than a sim, ey begins treating it as such, molding the world to eir whim, all while eir sanity seems to erode from the effects of this setup.

The pressure against Carter continues to mount, and she eventually gets in touch with Johansson, the director of the Soho Theatre Troupe where RJ worked. He agrees to help her and her to help him in turn. Meanwhile, Sasha gets in touch with Caitlin, the light tech with the STT, who provides her with some information, including the name and contact information for Carter. When she contacts Carter, however, Carter seems very spooked and will only meet up with a ‘throwaway’ account and location. Sasha questions why Carter is receiving so much push-back when her team has yet to publish any information on this new tack of investigation along the social vector, and Carter panics, deducing that there is a plant on the team, likely Sanders, who is passing information up to the grantors, who are mostly government types.

Carter, Sasha, and RJ independently deduce that there was an event in the recent past involving the Direct Democracy Representative (or DDR), a gamified system by which every citizen may vote and comment on legislation, a vote which has gone missing with many of those who did vote on it (and some who were investigating it such as RJ) getting lost. Carter and Avery are discussing the data showing this when, before their eyes, the data starts to change. Carter has Avery pull her from the system, an act which will cause the data that is cached in eir exo to be backed up as a ‘core dump’. She goes for a walk to clear her head and gets several frantic messages from her team that security and the police have showed up and are looking for her. Prakash tells the police that he will go find Carter, and is revealed to be a spy for one of the other two superpowers in the world, the Sino-Russian Bloc (with much of Europe and the Americas being part of the Western Federation). He retrieves the core from Carter’s exo and tells her to head to the University Medical Center where RJ is being kept, with the reasoning that if she were to run now, she would be seen as guilty of evasion, while if she goes to the UMC to see a patient who should be anonymous, she is merely guilty of an ethics violation.

In the future, Ioan and Dear have tracked down Qoheleth, the one who spilled the Name and find, to their surprise, that he is Life Breeds Life, But Death Must Now Be Chosen, another member of the Ode clade. Qoheleth wants to bring together the entirety of the Ode clade, which Dear struggles to do. When they finally manage to gather together, Qoheleth explains that the inability for uploads to forget is slowly driving everyone mad and that something needs to be done to change it. When he gets cocky and mentions that he said the Name to get the clade’s attention, an analyst that one of the members brought with them runs up and assassinates him. It turns out that part of the clade, known as the conservatives, simply wants to keep their secrets and does not care for any new information.

Carter makes it to the UMC and, taking a risk, logs in to meet up with Sasha and Debarre to pass on what has happened at her work and what she knows of RJ. Part way through explaining what is happening, Sasha falls over in pain and then her system crashes, and Carter and Debarre deduce that she has gotten lost as well and both log out immediately. When Carter goes to visit RJ, she finds both the police and Johansson and Caitlin there already. Johansson distracts the police while Carter sets up a ‘mirror rig’ with RJ, a training device for those who are learning to use their implants which allows an instructor to help control RJ, acting on a hunch from seeing Sasha disappear. She logs into the mirror rig with RJ and finds herself in a confusing, dreamlike place with AwDae at the center of it all, spouting lines from a poem that we now recognize as the Ode. Carter struggles to convince em to come with her, and eventually succeeds. She immediately dives back in and publishes via the DDR what she has learned as well as how to free the lost.

Debarre frees Sasha, finding that she is similarly affected by the mirroring experience, though to a lesser extent than RJ. All of those who were lost are forever changed, and few for the better. Cicero finds it to be too much and kills himself. Shortly after his funeral, Sasha receives a letter from RJ mentioning that ey must go back to that mirror world and has volunteered to be an early subject for uploading tech that will lead to the world Ioan and Dear inhabit, a process that will kill eir body and, unless everything goes right, ey will not be able to see her again. The letter includes the entirety of the Ode, and we learn that Sasha is Michelle Hadje, the basis for the common ancestor of the Ode clade. Sanders winds up in prison along with several who instigated the plot to remove that vote from the records. Prakash winds up back in the Sino-Russian Bloc (where, it is implied, RJ’s procedure will take place). Ioan winds up eir job as amanuensis with Dear and begins to write up eir report/essay on the subject but, on a whim, contacts Dear and its partner to ask if ey might create a long-lived fork (eir first), Codrin Bălan, to work with them both on the project.