While most people can afford to get resleeved at the end of their lives, they are unable to update their bodies and most go through the full ageing process each time which discourages most from resleeving more than once or twice. A sleeve a deceased Catholic woman temporarily to testify in a murder trial. This makes Catholics targets for murder, since killers know their victim will not be resleeved to testify. Catholics have arranged that they will not be resleeved as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their memories. In the novel's somewhat dystopian world, human personalities can be stored digitally and downloaded into new bodies, called sleeves. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.Įx-U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself.

Twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N.

Altered carbon novel by richard morgan