Great book, but I don't think the treatment of virtual hells was very convincing. First of all, the characters in hell would have gone insane with agony, but they just kind of wince it off and keep chatting. It reminded me of Niven and Pournelle's awful 1976 adaptation of Dante's Inferno, in which, for example, the macho protagonist grits his teeth and swims across a boiling lake.
Anyway, secondly I don't understand where all the devil-with-pitchfork stuff comes from in Banks's hells. Why not just have everyone floating in blackness and experiencing the maximum possible amount of pain at all times? To prevent them from becoming catatonic you just keep resetting their brain state to the moment of their death, so they're always feeling the first shock of agony. And it scales fantastically; just copy that small simulation a billion times and run them concurrently.
Of course, there will be some philosophical problems (are two identical concurrent brain simulations really two distinct subjective consciousnesses? If so, what are the implications of error-correcting server memory that store everything twice? And does resetting someone's memory so that the same simulation plays out repeatedly actually cause the person to experience things multiple times, or is it immaterial how many times you replay it?) but that will be of no comfort to you when you wake up in the pain box hell.
"I don't understand where all the devil-with-pitchfork stuff comes from"
I assumed that it was all cultural (note the lowercase c there) - societies would construct, using technology, the Heavens and Hells that their religions had told people already existed.
Other writers have covered the idea that higher powers might use some of their resources tormenting virtual copies of lesser beings - I'm sure this is mentioned as something that some Transcendent Powers do in A Fire Upon the Deep. Not to mention Charlie Stross's excellent A Colder War:
You can wander in purgatory forever as a row in the database, or you can go to Hell, where you will be forced to hack on the codebase for Life - in Brainfuck. Fortunately you may be able to scrape together your wages after a while to purchase your way to a Tier 1 Life. Some find it worth the trouble, just to enjoy the real sky.
This. It's all but explicitly stated on the screen. Notice the notice informing you that your "simulated personality" will be terminated upon refusal to accept the TOS.
Not that it matters, clones don't have souls, like twins. [0]
Thinking about it, OPs concept may have potential for a game. Something in the style of Introversion's "Darwinia" (I highly recommend it btw.), but with first person gameplay. The linked video could perfectly serve as an intro to the game. It could have a very immersive effect, e.g. no menus or splashscreen or anything. The gameplay could adopt some elements from the "Myst" series. The setup for these games could easily be a passage of the player's character to the netherworld anyways.
sigh damn. Too many ideas, not enough time. Imagine if you could program in your afterlife. Imagine all the projects you could do with infinite amounts of time. Humanity's progress would get another exponential factor attached.
