Circuit of Heaven

Circuit of Heaven is a science fiction novel by the American writer Dennis Danvers, published by Avon Eos in 1998. It imagines a twenty-first century in which most of humanity has abandoned the body for a virtual world, and follows the young man whose parents did exactly that.

Nemo's mother and father uploaded themselves into the Bin, the virtual society that holds twelve billion personalities in conditions free of crime, disease and death. They left their son behind, and he has come of age on a nearly empty planet among the people who refused the Bin or were refused by it: religious fundamentalists, rebels, and the people the novel calls the creeps and the crazies.

At twenty-one he makes a rare and reluctant visit to his parents and meets Justine, a new arrival in the Bin, a singer who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night. Their attraction immediately raises a problem with no clean answer, because Justine has no body left to return to and Nemo has sworn he will never give up his own. The novel turns on the choice between a digital eternity and a mortal life on a damaged world.