Altered Carbon

Kristin Ortega is a police officer who is Kovacs’s ally and romantic complication. Ortega’s dedication to justice shapes her role in the novel. She is influential in Kovacs’s own pursuit of justice as she is the first to point out the discrimination and callousness embodied by the Meths. However, her primary motivation for helping Kovacs is that she wants to protect Ryker’s body and preserve it for when he can be downloaded back into it.

As Ryker’s girlfriend, she is confronted with the uncanny reality of seeing Kovacs inhabit her partner’s body, which creates a tense attraction between the two. Their interactions highlight The Instability of Identity Across Different Bodies. Ortega struggles to work with Kovacs, seeing Ryker every time they meet, though she knows it is really Kovacs. She embodies the complications and pain that resleeving can cause not only for the subject, but for their loved ones as well. Kovacs sees in her face “[t]he naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall” (164). Ortega feels anxious about the dissonance between mind and body that is caused by sleeving. While she is attracted to Kovacs, she is uncertain if she feels this way only because he is inhabiting Ryker’s body.

This highlights how regular people in this futuristic world are affected by resleeving in very different ways than the ultra-rich Meths. Whereas the rich, like Laurens, Miriam, and Reileen, have clones of their own bodies to maintain continuity when they resleeve into different bodies, others must adapt to a big shift in perception. Ortega is forced into a liminal state as she interacts with a man who looks like her lover but is not. Her character dramatizes how resleeving fractures intimacy and underscores how class divides magnify the psychological toll of immortality.

Laurens Bancroft is a rich and essentially immortal Meth who hires Kovacs to investigate his supposed suicide, believing he was actually murdered. In the novel, the term “Meth” is shorthand for Methuselah, a biblical figure who lived for hundreds of years. Meths have accumulated enough wealth and resources to achieve practical immortality by backing up their consciousness in stacks, maintaining banks of clone bodies, and resleeving whenever they die. Laurens’s primary role in the novel is to characterize the Meth worldview and represent The Impact of Immortality on Ethics.

His complicated relationship with his wife, Miriam, demonstrates how their extended lifespan has distorted their relationship. He tells Kovacs: “[I]f you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration, with the sordid desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time” (151). While the respect he has for Miriam is intense and strong, their centuries-old relationship has destroyed his sexual attraction toward her. As a consequence, he looks elsewhere to satiate his longings, and his wealth allows him to pursue his dark and cruel desires with no risk of culpability.

Kovacs sees Laurens as an arrogant and amoral Meth who does not care how his greed impacts others. For him, Laurens comes to exemplify the Meths, and as a result, Kovacs disdains them all. Miriam, however, challenges this view and asserts to Kovacs that Laurens is capable of remorse. She claims, “He paid for what he’d done. He judged and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who did not commit that crime, is living with the guilt again” (365). She sees his suicide as an act of guilt, seeing this act as proof of his enduring compassion and humanity. Kovacs, however, remains unconvinced since Laurens’s ability to erase troubling memories and resleeve nullifies his guilt and leaves him morally insulated. Even if he did feel remorse for his actions, his wealth allows Laurens to escape any responsibility. His wealth and power renders him untouchable even to his own conscience.

Reileen Kawahara is the primary antagonist of Altered Carbon. She is a villain from Kovacs’s past, having played a part in the attack on Innenin, where Kovacs’s friend, Jimmy de Soto, died. She is a Meth like Laurens, with unlimited resources and a long life. She acts as a foil to Laurens in some ways, representing the extreme ruthlessness her money and power provide her. Whereas Laurens hires Kovacs to work for him, offering him a fresh start, Kawahara threatens and extorts Kovacs into doing her bidding: She gives Kovacs a tight timeline to convince Laurens that he was not murdered, threatening to torture one of Kovacs’s loved ones if he does not succeed. She represents the immorality that Kovacs sees in the Meth class. There is no line Kawahara won’t cross, as she sees the world as adaptable to her liking.

Kawahara’s world view informs her ruthlessness and guides her behavior. She believes that the only way to be successful and protected is to be the most powerful and influential person, at whatever cost. She tells Kovacs during their final confrontation that everyone must fight for what they want and need: “None of us ask to be dealt in. You think I asked to be born in Fission City, with a web-fingered dwarf for a father and a psychotic whore for a mother? […] [W]e’re thrown in, and after that it’s just about keeping your head above water” (346). Kawahara is willing to do anything to succeed and does not shy away from violence and exploitation, seeing both as legitimate ways to accomplish her goals. Unlike Kovacs, she does not believe in justice. In her mind, might and strength dictate the world.

Miriam Bancroft is Laurens Bancroft’s wife and an antagonistic figure to Kovacs and his mission. Miriam coordinates with Reileen Kawahara for revenge against Laurens over his infidelities, and she tries to keep Kovacs from discovering the truth by beginning a sexual relationship with him. Unlike the other Meths in Altered Carbon, Miriam offers a different view of what immortal life can be like. She says that centuries of watching the world “sliding past” makes her want to “grab on, hold on to something, to stop it all from draining away’” (95). Miriam feels as though she has no control over her life and experiences. Everything around her fades and changes, and she desperately wants to stay in the moment. Her hyperawareness of how everything ends makes it difficult for her to enjoy anything. While other Meths look to the future, Miriam is mired in her obsession with the past.

This focus on the past leads Miriam to hold grudges, particularly against her husband, Laurens, for his many infidelities. The nature of their relationship has been transformed by their immortality, with Laurens seeking sexual relationships outside their marriage, Miriam feels wronged and consumed by jealousy. Yet, in seeking revenge, she exhibits no sympathy for the collateral damage inflicted upon innocent others, leading Kovacs to see that she is “[n]o different from Kawahara in the end […] with [her] carefully manufactured savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a puzzle” (366). Despite her veneer of vulnerability, Kovacs realizes she incapable of empathy, reinforcing the theme that extended life corrodes moral boundaries.