The protagonist of Distress is a cyborg (?), pseudo journalist named Andrew, tasked with reporting on an academic conference where physicists will present their Theories of Everything.

One of the previous films that he had been tasked with recording and editing, was on gender. In the future, there's several other genders, and he gets into a philosophical debate with his girlfriend about whether or not there are now simply seven pigeon holes instead of two, and the ability of one person to speak on behalf of a whole group since that's what several of the asexual genders seemed to be trying to distance themselves from. She compares his involvement in the media of platforming people who seem to speak on behalf of everyone and he points out that that is sometimes been necessary for for example, the civil rights or women's liberation movement.

It's kind of a hilarious –but serious– theme in the book where the cyborg (and I don't know if I attribute this more to him being robotic or just being autistic), operates within his relationship with his girlfriend according to a rigid set of rules, and when she still gets upset at him for their very human conversations, despite the futuristic subjects, he has to replay the set of rules to try to figure out where he went wrong. Even in the future for robotic, super computers, women are still fickle.

After the autistic robot inevitably is incapable of meaningfully caring for his girlfriend, and she has an affair with him, breaks up with him, and blames it on him for not even being able to notice that she feels neglected. He resigns himself to a life of solitude and chalks it up to the Hippocratic oath saying 'do no harm,' which is about the most autistic cyborg thing that you can do kind of proving her point.

More detective work as various cults of ignorance try to tamper with conference proceedings since they fear that one of the theories will result in the creation of everything, kind of like a second big bang speaking itself into existence and hinging on the lynchpin presenter.

So Andrew ends up being the keystone about which the entirety of creation comes into being retconning himself into existence in the only thing that prevents everything from unraveling, as predicted by the moderate and through cosmologists is the fact that he does not think that he can fully know his friend who is the asexual South African. Very peculiar.

related