anyway it will be dystopian fiction, though i have this feeling that its more like 2 separate sorta-connected stories in one book. first half of the book involves corporations manipulating out almost every world government under the guise of "regulating the heccin' ai models," and then using neuralink, the destruction of prior services, forced hyperinflation to make people use their currency, and clever advertising to make almost everyone willingly live in a hyperconsumerist ready-player-one but the IOI won from the start-ass "metaverse" based on the 2022 nft-web3 hysteria, that is being used to keep record breaking profits for shareholders - forever. the main character here copes with trying to live unchipped in an increasingly squeezed world, snaps, joins the mexican cartels his job tells him to fight against, figures that its not because the rich are literally evil that were in the situation, but because they fear disobeying the weirdly efficient algorithms they created for money in fear that they will end up living in the very world they created. then ends up in prison, war breaks out, slated to be executed in the most painful manner ever known using neuralink.
part 2, shortly before the main character is meant to die, it is found out that an ai superintelligence (which is heavily implied to be an actual demon) was made by the atrophied government in order to save their own asses. due to some technicality in how it was prompted it ended up converting everything into VR-heaven pod worlds where you can do quite literally anything (even completely unthinkable things like eternal torture, because technically everyone you see isn't a real human but a projection of one) under the idea of "having experiences." the main character likes this infinite freedom greatly, until after some foreshadowing and a very, very long time in the order of septillions of years that its impossible to leave due to how quantum immortality works. it is seen that the very idea of endless living is a hell in its own right.
the story ends after learning that all possible configurations of sentient experiences (a massive amount) can be expressed as a time crystal, that the universe and its qualia holds itself captive by forever experiencing itself, and that eternal recurrence will occur and everything will happen exactly the order as it did in a loop. if one does not have free will because of this unchanging cycle, then you've been functionally dead from the start and escape is real. "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine" basically
