Billionaire Richard "Dodge" Forthrast is declared brain-dead after a routine medical procedure. Friends and family find his last will directs that his body be cryonically preserved for the purpose of future brain scanning and eventual revival. His wishes are fulfilled, his frozen brain destructively scanned, and his connectome saved in digital form. Several years pass in which portable augmented reality viewers become ubiquitous, social media echo chambers cause rural lawlessness, commercial quantum computing is feasible, and anonymous distributed ledger identification becomes popular in business. Dodge's grandniece Sophia animates the connectome as an experiment for her senior thesis at Princeton University on secure distributed computing. The connectome remembers nearly nothing but builds a virtual world with physical laws similar to what it does remember. Wealthy anonymous donors initially fund the datacenters running the world. Brain scanning gains general popularity after traffic analysis shows that virtual minds are achieving an afterlife in a medieval fantasy setting. However, all downloaded minds suffer extreme amnesia. An amnesiac Dodge calling himself Egdod founds a society. He is usurped by El, a terminally and mentally ill billionaire funding the computing process who believes Dodge lacked imagination when constructing the world and consumes a disproportionate amount of computing power. El conquers the world and isolates Dodge with the power of his mind augmented by his own private data centers. El subjugates the virtual population with a religion centered upon worship of himself. Sophia, murdered by El, enters the world to assist Dodge in disrupting El's power. She and several other characters embark on an epic quest, by means of which Stephenson is able to describe many aspects of this medieval fantasy world and the beliefs that El has instilled amongst its peoples. In the end Dodge and El have one final confrontation to determine whose vision for this virtual world prevails.
Philosophical and scientific content and influences
When attempting to explain why the virtual world created by connectomes of brain scans resembles the physical world so much, character Corvallis Kawasaki cites a claim by philosopher Immanuel Kant that the human mind cannot make sense of anything without a space-time lattice. Stephenson indicates Fall is indebted to David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality, as well as Paradise Lost.
