Fifteen-year-old Ada Reed doesn’t understand people. She doesn’t know how to talk like the other girls in class, how to deal with prying eyes without feeling like someone is out to get her, or how to make it through one day without convincing herself that every bad thing is somehow her fault.

But it’s all fine. Because she has her friend, Samantha. And sure, Samantha committed suicide, but she’s alive and well on the internet. After all, everyone who visits RabbitHole.run lives on in the virtual afterlife. Ada could think about it logically, that it’s only the grief playing tricks on her brain chip, but why would she?

In the world of the internet, she’s happy as the famed anonymous hacker, Loveless, who open-sourced the code for emotIV, a brain chip that allows SELtech to regulate emotions and record memories to the cloud, only to sell them back to people as a monthly subscription. 

So when Samantha says Ada was to blame for her death, it’s obviously lies. The guilt she feels must only be a glitch in her brain chip. Because Ada was always a good friend. And as long as she doesn’t confront her deleted memories, she can continue to believe it.