Near future, 2055. A world in which the dead can testify, journalists turn themselves into living cameras, genetic engineering saves millions from starvation but condemns entire states to slavery, and people fleeing civilization are able to create their own island - an anarchic utopia called Statelessness - This is the setting of the novel Despair. After a long period of filming speculative and dark science documentaries for the ZRInet channel, reporter Andrew Worth feels completely exhausted. So exhausted that he voluntarily abandons a potential sensation - filming a film about a mysterious new mental illness called Despair. Instead, he takes on less prestigious work - material about the brilliant female physicist Violet Mosala. Mosala won the Nobel Prize at age 25 and is about to announce her theory of everything, which attempts to unify all other existing scientific theories. Worth does not yet know that Mosala is being hunted by a mysterious and influential sect and that, perhaps, the theory she created is capable of destroying the usual world order. The task Worth took on to relieve himself suddenly doesn't seem so easy...