[1] Distress describes the political intrigue surrounding a mid-twenty-first century physics conference, at which is to be presented a unified Theory of Everything.

The action takes place on an artificial island called "Stateless", which has earned the wrath of the world's large biotech companies for its pilfering of their intellectual property.

The narrator is a journalist for a science channel called SeeNet named Andrew Worth who carries video recording software in an intestinal implant.

He journeys to Stateless through a series of convoluted flights to cover a presentation by 27-year-old South African physicist Violet Mosala, supplanting the preproduction by a colleague, Sarah Knight.

Worth becomes deathly ill and believes he has been infected with cholera by a faction of anthrocosmologists who wanted him to transmit the disease to Violet Mosala.

While seemingly helpless to do anything at first, they soon strike back at the invaders by having triggered microorganisms consume the cities structural underpinning, sinking it into the ocean.

Egan also uses the hypothetical technological advances in Distress to explore ideas about anarchism, especially when its protagonist, Andrew Worth, a journalist, travels to the anarchistic man-made island named Stateless.

Andrew meets some minor characters on Stateless who explain to him the relationship between anarchistic principles and various ideas such as quantum physics, information theory and independent spirituality.