BABYLON DREAMS

A badly tainted entrepreneur lands in an idyllic, virtual reality afterlife run by his company—but hostile takeovers and vengeful avatars threaten his control of this digital heaven.

This offering by SF/fantasy author Noble takes the shape of dossiers of recorded transcriptions and documentation spanning the 22nd century, obtained via private investigators and the “Library of Congress VR Division.” They cover, not always chronologically, the rise, fall—and resurrection and fall—of Gunter Holden, scion of a venal businessman father. Gunter sought dad’s favor, among other self-serving relationships, by creating (partially by the theft of technology) a VR afterlife for paying customers. Dubbed Bali Hai, the heavenly realm grants the wishes and fantasies of the deceased dwellers in a cyberscape. Many “bio” (living) individuals even kill themselves to gain early admission. Such was the case with Gunter—only for him, it was a murder-suicide, his way of resolving a love triangle in which he saw his wife (the latest of several) leave him for a black-sheep musician brother, whose finer qualities she more admired. Now the “transitioned” digital Gunter still bids to run his business from Bali Hai. But in the bio world, rivals move in over the decades. They include a Christian-operated, VR-afterlife competitor, who’s not averse to “deleting” millions of virtual people in a show of power, including a self-identifying-as-animals nature cult founded by a former “holo-porn” kingpin. Enemies like these almost make the criminal Gunter seem like a good guy. The fragmented time/space/hard-drive series opener may tax the patience of some readers, especially those seeking straightforward causality. The Holden family tree becomes torturously tangled with each new revelation of Gunter’s hidden early life. Meanwhile, the semi-redacted, digital evidence file presentation approaches the techniques of experimental fiction (or Max Headroom getting buggy), with abrupt “memory breaches” and a Citizen Kane–type mosaic of the tormented antihero. The result is a challenging but compelling vision of a privatized, synthetic heaven slowly eaten away by ungodly capitalism, cupidity, and the sins of its founder. Noble credits futurist Ray Kurzweil as a particular inspiration.    

A keen and absorbing what-if tale about VR and a digital afterlife.