Fall or Dodge in Hell

Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, the billionaire founder and chairman of video game company Corporation 9592, was last seen in Neal's Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde. Now middle-aged, Dodge lives a comfortable life in Seattle, managing myriad business interests and spending quality time with his grandniece, Sophia, daughter of his beloved niece Zula (also last seen in Reamde). As Fall opens, Dodge undergoes a "routine medical procedure"; when something goes horribly, irrevocably wrong, he is pronounced brain dead and put on life support.

As Dodge's family and friends gather and struggle to come to terms with this turn of events, his health directive comes to light: Dodge's remains are to be given to Ephrata Life Sciences and Health, a company founded and run by one Elmo Shepherd. Dodge's brain will be scanned, its data structures uploaded to and stored in the cloud.

What happens next is pure, unadulterated, mind-blowing FUN: a grand drama played out on an epic scale in digital space. For what is achieved, ultimately, is nothing less than the disruption of death itself. A new world, the Bitworld, is created - an afterlife wherein humans live on not as spirits but as digital simulations. But this brave new world is not the Utopia it might first seem...