Dan leaves Lil, Julius is kicked out of the "ad hoc" and his Whuffie hits rock bottom — low enough that others take his possessions with impunity and elevators don’t stop for him. Then comes the revelation: a few days before Dan's planned suicide by lethal injection, Dan reveals that it was in fact he who had arranged to kill Julius, in collusion with Debra, in exchange for the Whuffie that her team could give him. Dan had asked one of his converts from his missionary days, a young girl, to do the dirty work. Debra then had herself restored from a backup made before this plan, so that she would honestly believe that she wasn't involved. He makes this public; Debra is thrown out, Julius gets sympathy Whuffie and develops a friendly affection for his sweet young murderer. He never restores himself, because doing so would erase his memories of that entire year, his last with Dan, but lives with his damaged interface. The book is his attempt to manually document the happenings of the previous year so that, when this incarnation is eventually killed by age or accident, his restored backup will have a partial record of the transpiring events. Dan decides not to take a lethal injection, but to deadhead (putting oneself into a voluntary coma) till the heat death of the Universe.