Quarantine, Greg Egan

A simple idea unpacks into one of the most thought provoking Sci-Fi books I've read in years and a more than passing wonder of which computer systems would be able to handle 2^36 permutations in parallel for dice rolling! Greg is both a writer and a computer programmer, you can see some of the simulations he has written at GregEgan.NET or check out Quarantine over on Amazon.

<SPOILERS> but at its heart, it felt like a sci-fi world example of the Spectre Bug, creating a reality where you could tunnel information using something like branch prediction to get access to data and state you really should never be able to be near to. There aren't many books with which you get to explore collapsing wave states, uncertainty, failed branch predictions, and parallelism applied to life.</SPOILERS>