story identification - Trying to remember a book where a young man refuses to upload his mind digitally

A young man lives in an abandoned town where almost everyone has uploaded their mind into a network (which I think was based on crystals somehow?) so that they can live forever in peace and prosperity. His parents left him as a kid to join the network and left him in the care of a manufactured creature, which I believe was lizard/dinosaur like in appearance because that what the man liked as a kid. He occasionally visits his parents, who are always worried because they want him to "live" forever as they do, and they end up secretly creating a woman for him to fall in love with so that he will want to join them. Turns out that they did this by smushing together copies of his grandmother from a bunch of different times in her life. Apparently someone does this often, because I know the woman has a conversation with another being created the same way, who's basically enslaved

I have no idea when it was published, it could have even been in the last few years. I think the cover was mostly white? Any help would be much appreciated

Answer

This seems very close to Circuit of Heaven, and it has a sequel.

From Circuit of Heaven:

Plot Summary- In the future, most of the Earth's population have abandoned their bodies and permanently uploaded their personalities to "the Bin": a vast network of silicon crystals that supports a perfect, peaceful, deathless virtual society. Only the creeps, the crazies, the religious fundamentalists, and a few righteous rebels remain behind. One of these last is 21-year-old Nemo, forsaken by his parents' quest for cyber-utopia. Nemo is determined to live, age, and die in the bleak hell that the Earth has become rather than sacrifice his soul to a technological purgatory. But all of Nemo's hard-won convictions are shaken when, on a visit to the Bin, he meets his soul mate, a beautiful woman newly arrived in the virtual paradise who is struggling to recall her mysterious, dreamlike past.

Comments

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

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I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...

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