No, no. This part:
Story begins in the near future, when robots are much more advanced and common, and humanity developed technology that allows to create copy of person mind in computer (but it remains largely unused because of ethical, religious and legal reasons). One day, a mysterious neutron (or microwave, not really full explained) ray destroys all life on Earth. Some of the people 'survive' by uploading their minds to computers. Because most of them are more or less hardcore gamers, they form 'alliances' similar to alliances or guilds in today's MMO games. One of this alliances named 'Dwarfes', is described as being formed by nerd-fans of DF, and aims at restoring industry into working condition. It is not really important for the main character and his story, and is just mentioned from time to time as a back-story.
It happened rapidly enough and with so little warning that pretty much the only people who managed to upload were people already actively using the technology. It was a literal "Poof, everyone dies," day. What you highlighted is pretty clearly the same sort of thing as the continuity-of-self line of thought behind the people who want nothing to do with Star Trek style teleporters and cloning as a way of living past body-death.
I'm sorry to create this confusion. Let me explain some more of the story.
SPOILER:
The Death Ray is described as geographically flat, that is mostly aligned with meridian lines, and 'moves' as Earth rotates along the axis. This gives some people time to dig up hardware and do the mind upload. Mind upload hardware is described as an addon for a console game, that failed to reach wide market because of various reasons mentioned before. It wasn't made illegal and reached some following, mostly with hardware gamers. Main character is an IT guy that works in a company that wanted to use mind upload to interrogate it's employees, but this idea was struck down by legal department, but hardware remained in storage. With end of US west coast being hit first with the ray (then Oceania, Asia, etc.) he has enough time to set it up and make the upload.
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Topic: DF mentioned in SciFi book (Read 2486 times)