So there's this elderly silicon valley billionaire who got most of his money by making an MMORPG that is notWorld of Warcraft. He dies, and that's awkward, because he's the closest to a protagonist we're gonna get.
His executors, who are west-coast silicon valley millionaires, we'll name Nissan and Toyota, discover that the dead billionaire (let's call him Chevy) did something unfortunate with his will, putting a bunch of language in it saying he's to have some cryofreeze process done to his remains in the hopes of immortality. At this point in the novel there is a lot of detail of the legal issues, but this is a mislead that is basically wasting the reader's time, as they are irreverent. What is relevant is that an another silicon valley billionaire, Elmo, has learned about this and via fuckery gets the brain of Chevy to digitize. Elmo is going to be this novel's antagonist, but he's going to be a dumb, shitty one. Elmo also wants to live forever and is obsessed with the singularity.
So now with nothing better to do we get two short stories, first establishing the character of Nissan (aside from being into war reenacting he is definitely a Sentra, if you take my meaning) and the daughter of Toyota, Lexus. Nissan is the central figure in a mildly interesting story, where somebody invests a couple million dollars creating a social media fraud event, a nuclear explosion destroying a remote Utah town. This fraud, in addition to actors, fake video footage, and cutting off the telecommunications of this remote town, has a bunch of not-so-elaborately faked bombs in major urban centers, the point of which is the social media faking of a big event, then raking in the money via stock market fraud. This was done by Elmo. This really doesn't have any effect on the novel. The second short story is about the red/blue America in a "terminally facebooked world" where the red people basically become cavemen and have the most 'murica religion, where Jesus drops all that teaching stuff to become the American badass they all knew he was. Surprisingly for later plot events, this is the absolute last time religion is mentioned. This aside is also to establish the character of Lexus, daughter of Toyota, but Toyota is a completely anodyne rich person, and Lexus is the completely anodyne daughter of Toyota.
Then, a whole lotta nothing happens. Chevy's brain is digitized, axion by
axion. This creates the really obvious problem, that of the transporter
problem (which you can google) but TL;DR continuity of consciousness
matters, so if Capt. Kirk was killing himself every time he stepped onto
a transporter and a perfect copy was reassembled elsewhere, this would
be bad. Despite Star Trek TNG, not exactly Proust in French, explicitly
addressing this issue, this novel just asserts "continuity doesn't
matter." So just forget that this brain digitizing service for the
richest people on earth is creating software copies of these richers,
and the people who paid for this are stone dead. It is at this juncture
your humble narrator begins squinting at the text, wondering if this is
going to turn into a hilarious satire of the singularity. Lexus, now part of this immortality project, solves "how to make
this wad of shit you've digitized work as a human brain." We get zero detail about this.
So Chevysoftware does what comes natural and creates Heaven, the MMO. The amount of computational resources it takes to make a brain, let alone several, is vast, but there are hand-waved away via "cloud computing gets it done." Heaven the MMO rapidly IDs all the dead STEMlords, who thanks to their knowledge and ability to create, basically become gods in a new pantheon, with the mere enormously wealthy living as sorta-humans. Nobody at any point thinks this is kinda fucked. There is some mention as to how depression can cause you to self terminate when you are manifesting, so perhaps all those scruffy arts grads are just not getting into Heaven, the MMO. Fortunately your memories and your sense of self don't survive digitization, so the Heaven MMO is literally all you know. This is another part of the story that would break the whole thing if anybody thought about it for a second, since I'm sure the plutocrats of the earth didn't sign up to be reincarnated as a heavenly bootblacks. Further, despite soon having total mastery of how to express a sentient AI, nobody is like "hey what if we put these brains in the already-existing telepresence bots" Also nobody tries to communicate with the dead, that's "impossible", (another thing that would break the novel etc) but all of human civilization becomes obsessed with watching Heaven the MMO. At one point a STEMlord kills himself in a suicide machine he built himself so he can join the pantheon. The author nor does anybody in the book even blink an eye at how ghoulish and fucked this is, hand waving the excuse that "oh he had terminal cancer."
Well, I lie, Elmo thinks it is fucked. Elmo (once again, is this satire?) is wont to say things like "the dead are doing it wrong" and think the Heaven MMO is moving in the wrong direction. He comes off as an idiot, since even this book can reference Kant once or twice to explain why humans in human form behave human-ish-ly. In a book that is eye-rollingly unimaginative as it is, he comes off as extra-stupid. This is even moreso when he insists AIs created from nothing are just as important as other AIs that were made by zapping brain tissue. Which is unfortunate, because Elmo casts himself as God in Heaven, the MMO. He uses legal fuckery to give himself superuser status. He then murders Lexus to send her brain to heaven the MMO in 'the right sort of way." He then dies, shows up in Heaven MMO, and expels Chevy and his pantheon, to a place that Chevy makes on the fly, IE "hell", but only in the sense that it is not Heaven, the MMO, where software constructs have begun fucking and eating and shitting. It's never made clear why exactly Elmo does this, (take over heaven, not shitting) if he has motives or is just the Zuckerfucker of Heaven, the MMO, but the [vague] impression we are given is that Elmo is shouting at the simulation trying to make it work like he thinks it should. Elmo manages to lock Chevy out of MMO heaven, but the rest of his followers can schlep back in.
So Chevy, protagonist of MMO Heaven, is
dead again. Toyota is described as "being destroyed by grief" by the murder of her daughter but we
don't get any experience of that because it might because we might ask
why the fuck *anybody* is doing what Elmo wants. He's software at this
point, but the entire world (who once again are in love with Heaven the
MMO) have no issues with the God of the system being a crazy dickbag.
Toyota does nothing, Nissan does nothing, and in the real world we only see corporate board meetings and intellectual symposium.
So to summarize thus far, Heaven the MMO is a for-profit organization
that digitizes the richest people in the world, and basically the rest
of the world is totally passive and accepting of this, and are
universally in love with the idea and have no objections of any sort. Much like the human race in Seveneves, they exist only to suck and die.
So for the second time the protagonist is gone from the novel, and the author having committed to this bafflingly shitty structure, wastes our time again, this time with Digital Adam and Eve. Elmo made the first two digital people, and has been tearing them apart and rebooting them, over and over again to try to get them to act "less human". Frankly we don't know even that much; all we really know is Elmo is "displeased" that these human things with human drives and human appearances and human thoughts are acting human. Once again, is this satire? Anyway Adam and Eve get kicked out of the garden, and we get a ground level view of Heaven the MMO, and it has religion (worshiping elmo, obv) and people living at a medieval level, they've become NPCs in an MMO. This whole section is a small novel in itself and aside from establishing "this is a fantasy MMORPG setting, it's procedural generated yet completely generic!" it has zero importance in the novel. Things that definitely go into the satire basket, though: Elmo has American angels, essentially hot blonde people, as the ten foot tall enforcers with magic of his regime. Oh, another thing, we have AIs reproducing, so now "people" are forming with no real world ancestor, which should turbofuck things incredibly, since they take up the same resources and can multiply infinitely. We also learn that Elmo has retained his identity from the real world, and is clearly in constant contact with it. Furthermore, we establish that the software brains are now so well understood that Elmo can copy brains, and *modify them*, within limits. In software terms, this is circling the square of AI, with implications out the ass, but in the pattern of this goddamn novel, any, you know, thinking about any of this has to be locked down, because we're doing Heaven, the MMO, perfectly straight-faced. So none, zero of these are examined at all, In fact, this is why the character of Elmo exists only as "dumbass" and "asshole": if we were to examine his abilities in depth it would ask inconvenient questions.
So having locked itself away from literally interesting thinking, it must waste the readers time with misleads. So to cut a long story short, the thing that the author wants is to bring back Lexus as a magic princess, (literally, she's a super user) and have her go on a magic adventure to destroy Elmo, and bring back Chevy, rightful ruler of Heaven, the MMO, and here is where we get the failure - hundreds of pages have have been wasted establishing all this, and it is to tell a completely dull, generic fantasy adventure that the crew of a DND novel would know not to do. So guess what, Elmo is defeated, literally cast down. Chevy comes back. In the real world, the global economy has basically been taken over by MMO Heaven. People don't have kids anymore, they are waiting around to die. Robots do most of the work. The human population vanishes into the MMO. At that point (once again, is this fucking satire) the software people are beginning to research THE REAL WORLD. I want to scream this is so dumb. I have no idea what tone the novel wants at this point, I guess hopeful and happy, but it's so fucking stupid I have no words. Humanity goes singularity, robots take care of the "real world", the end. Oh, Oh Nissan becomes a wizard in the generic fantasy Downfall by Neal Stephenson
This novel is so dumb and low effort even in the title. "Downfall" is an almost impossibly shitty and generic name, which is why we get "Dodge in Hell" tacked on. They could have changed the title, like "Heaven as a MMORPG", but just slap that subtitle on. Also note that while a "Downfall" does happen, it doesn't describe the book at all, nor does 'Dodge in Hell.' Frankly if some evil Zuckerfucker took Dodge's brain, and then made him the admin in a MMO heaven filled with richers that would have been much more interesting than what actually happen
