jame5 by Stefan Pernar

"The Singularity as written by Ayn Rand" should be this book's title. Pernar has the same manufactured drama interspersed with multi-page authors-point-of-view soliloquys as Rand, he even has the occasional oddly catching scene. Remarkable really. ;)

The best part of the book occurs when a techie is trying to convince his wife to upload herself and go completely virtual. Although the book's events transpire in the 2050's, I couldn't help but think what it'd be like if people could upload their brains and go all-virtual today.

Of course, initially only Google would offer this (I have invites!!!), and Orkut would start taking off. Facebook would freak out and after a weekend of beer-miling and frenzied PHP-hacking, FB would have their own, but it would crash periodically, putting early adopters on virtual ice until their caches achieved coherency again.

After several months of people shaking their heads (who wants to be on Orkut *for eternity*?) and the federal government threatening to prosecute FB for "false imprisonment of virtual citizens", Apple would change the Upload landscape by releasing iRock.

Originally target'd for celebrities to help handle their Fan load ("Of course you can go to the Oscars, do way too much coke and end up all over the tabloids; with iRock you can offshore the comment-handling, spin-making, and all those early-morning talk-shows to your virtual self!!!"), Apple opened iRock to the general public, subject to a secret metric of coolness, of which it was rumored that only Steve Jobs' virtual self knew the full details.

Families were torn apart: daughters cool enough to iRock, sons on Facebook, parents either Uploaded or not ("Kids, we never see your updates!", "Mom! You're embarrassing me! Why are you still on AOL!?!"). New Upload networks would occasionally splash onto the scene ("Eliot Spitzer Uploads to Adultfriendfinder!"), while old Download-only networks bewailed the balkanization of society as their stocks' tanked.

As they say: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times ( just like any other year, really ).