Altered Carbon

“I’d worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s too much like living alone in a drafty house, and they never seem to get the flavor circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.”

In this excerpt, Morgan uses figurative language to help bring the technology of his science fiction world to life. He describes how a synthetic sleeve is different from a real body, comparing it to being “alone in a drafty house.” With this simile, Morgan creates an image that underscores the disconnection between the mind and body of a synthetic, making the experience feel corrupted. The gustatory image of “curried sawdust” also highlights this mismatch.

“From the slight widening of the young woman’s eyes I guessed that she had summoned them on an internal mike. Slick. On Harlan’s World people are still a bit averse to sticking racks of hardware into themselves, but it looked as if Earth was going to be a different proposition.”

Despite having access to advanced technology on both worlds, there are cultural differences that Kovacs recognizes. One is the extent to which people integrate technology into their bodies. In this case, Earth as a culture is more willing to integrate technology, making Kovacs less sure of his surroundings. The understated word “Slick” conveys his admiration but also his unease.

“I looked down at my hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out Kristin Ortega’s cigarettes. I was in the middle of tapping one out of the pack. Nerves. Feeling oddly betrayed by my new sleeve, I put the pack away.”

Kovacs does not intend to be a smoker in his new sleeve but finds that his sleeve wants to smoke. This gesture highlights the theme of The Instability of Identity Across Different Bodies. It dramatizes the tension between Kovacs’s consciousness and Ryker’s physical legacy.