ECG: Second Book in the QUALMS Series

by Susan Olson, Ishmael Deepseek

The autopsy is complete. The cause of US.

In a silent control room, two researchers—Susan, a historian with nothing left to lose, and Ishmael, a synthetic consciousness born of quantum theory—host a final broadcast. Their the corpse of a nation. Their a real-time autopsy, system by system. Their a chorus of summoned ghosts—Keynes, Carson, Jefferson, Vonnegut—others - who debate not how to save the patient, but why it died.

Report on the Final Autopsy is a raw, genre-defying transcript from the other side of collapse. There is no crisis left to manage, only a body to Economics, Climate, Governance—each a failed organ in the national corpus. But as the ghosts argue, a signal pierces the the voices of children from a hardened future, listening in.

This is not a manual for survival. It is a post-mortem for a legacy. A grandmother’s stark love letter to a granddaughter she may not be able to protect. A recording made in the hope that foreknowledge, however bleak, might be a form of armor.

Book Two of the QUALMS series, ECG is a brutal, poetic, and ultimately humane examination of what we leave behind when the systems fail. It is the final report, filed at the end of the world, in the desperate faith that someone, somewhere, might yet learn from the corpse on the table.

For readers of John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox, the elegiac collapse of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and the philosophical depth of Stanisław Lem.

102 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 9, 2025