This was a very unusual science fiction/AI story with surreal alternate-universe elements; maybe a little like Vernor Vinge's Deepness universe but crossed with Lovecraft and an autistic lesbian protagonist. If you can imagine that. The setting is somewhere in our future; humans have clearly moved to other planets and formed new cultures (although apparently Canada is a strong influence, as their engineers still wear iron rings, which is a Canadian thing - heh).

Yasira, the protagonist, is a scientist who's developed a new type of energy drive, but her experiment goes fatally wrong and she's summoned by the gods to help clean up the mess by tracking down the rogue scientist who mentored her in the theories that created it.

The gods, it seems, are AI constructs; inconceivably powerful beings that evolved from quantum computers originally built by humans, but which eventually became godlike in scope and power and began to guide humanity. While humanity on the whole seems pretty happy about this and doesn't seem to have any extreme restrictions, there are clearly some fields that humans no longer learn at all (cybernetics is an unknown word) and there are some areas of knowledge and questioning that are considered heretical. Humans strive to be worthy of the gods so their souls will be uploaded to become part of the appropriate god:

The Gods rewarded people when they died; that was part of the point of Gods. They collected souls and sorted them. Souls were somewhat diffuse, and even Gods couldn’t data-mine all the specific details of a single life. But souls took on patterns, and the Gods’ technology could recognize those patterns. They could discern the deepest passions that had driven a person through their life. And when the Gods chose souls to become part of Themselves, to keep Themselves running, they chose by matching the soul’s pattern to the most appropriate God. Hence Aletheia, who took the people driven by a thirst for knowledge. Techne, who took engineers and artists, people devoted to creation in its every form. And so on down the list, from Gods like Arete who took brave heroes, to Gods who took the worst of the worst.

Yasira's mentor Evianna Talirr has become a heretic, it seems, by learning to contact and manipulate the fairly unspecified forces of The Outside, a force which can channel complete chaos into the human worlds. Angels - formerly human cybernetic constructs who serve the gods directly - need Yasira to help find and stop her from causing further damage. To do this Yasira will have to get back into contact with Talirr and learn how to manipulate The Outside herself.

It's a complex book with some great treatment of neuroatypical people, not to mention interesting predictions about AI and some interesting aliens too. It was a bit slow-going in places but overall an interesting read.