Altered Carbon

Kovacs visits Ortega at the police station. She initially tries to brush him off, threatening him with the footage of his attack on the facility, Wei’s Clinic, where he killed multiple people. Then, he admits that he now knows who Ryker is, and he says that the faster he concludes the investigation, the faster Ryker’s body can be preserved. He asks about the tail, and Ortega admits to tracking him. Kovacs asks to speak with Kadmin.

Ortega and Kovacs upload themselves into a virtual interrogation room with Kadmin. In virtual reality, self-perception plays a role in how people appear. Though Kovacs looks like Ryker, Kadmin, who frequently splits himself, looks like a collection of people. Kadmin admits nothing, and Kovacs angers him. Kadmin threatens Kovacs, saying that though he was not hired to kill him, he will now.

After the interrogation, Kovacs believes that whoever hired Kadmin wanted to talk with him and make a deal about Laurens’s case, rather than kill him. He uses this to convince Ortega that the case is real and asks to see Kadmin’s lawyer, Rutherford. He convinces Ortega to go with him and introduce him as Ryker to keep Rutherford from recognizing him. Ortega reluctantly agrees, and Kovacs realizes that it is difficult for her to see Ryker’s body without Ryker in it.

Kovacs and Ortega arrive at Kadmin’s lawyer’s office and demand that Rutherford leave his virtual meeting to see them. Before walking in, Kovacs asks if he can bug the office, and Ortega tells him he can, advising him to say little, just as Ryker would. When they meet with Rutherford, they inform the lawyer that Kadmin threatened Kovacs. Rutherford is not concerned until Kovacs tells him of a law that will not only punish Kadmin for what he did, but anyone else involved, and that Kadmin is close to talking. Rutherford seems nervous.

As they leave, Kovacs tells Ortega that he does not think Rutherford believed the fake law Kovacs made up, but his reaction likely means he knows more than he is saying. Kovacs also managed to successfully place a bug in the office. Before they leave, the bug picks up three calls made by Rutherford before someone finds the bug and destroys it.

Ortega takes Kovacs to the Flying Fish, a floating restaurant. The cuisine reminds Kovacs of his home world. As they finish their meal, Ortega gets a call with the location of two of the calls Rutherford made. They are traced to a fight dome Ortega knows and to Suntouch House.

Ortega and Kovacs arrive at the fight dome, the Panama Rose, which is a recommissioned tanker moored in the bay. The fights that occur inside are not recorded and tickets are expensive. They find the place empty, though a large fight is planned for that night. They venture further inside and meet Emcee Carnage, who runs the fights. Carnage is in a synthetic sleeve: His body is mishappen and clearly fake.

When Carnage asks why they are there, Ortega lies and tells him that they received a bomb threat and must do a routine sweep. Carnage allows them to do this, and the group ventures to the tanks, where fighters’ sleeves are prepped. Carnage, who knows Ryker, seems wary of how little Kovacs speaks. Ortega and Kovacs find nothing of importance in the tank room and spend the next hour sweeping the building, finding no helpful evidence.

Ortega drops Kovacs at the Hendrix and asks him to stay there the next day, as she wants to set up a meeting for him to speak with someone. She also asks if Kovacs thinks Carnage was hiding something. Kovacs believes he was. As he approaches the front door, Kovacs sees Laurens’s limo outside. As Kovacs approaches it, Curtis jumps out and asks to speak with him privately.

Kovacs and Curtis go to the Hendrix’s bar, where Curtis asks Kovacs for his decision on Miriam’s offer. Kovacs senses that the offer annoys Curtis and realizes that he must be sleeping with Miriam, too. Kovacs tells Curtis to calm down because he will not take the deal. However, Curtis is agitated and tries to fight him. Kovacs quickly overpowers him and finds hormone enhancing drugs in the driver’s pocket.

A police officer walks into the bar and interrupts Curtis and Kovacs. The officer introduces himself as Rodrigo Bautista, Ortega’s sometime-partner. Curtis leaves, and Rodrigo sits with Kovacs, telling him that it is hard for Ortega to work with him while he is in Ryker’s body. He then tells Kovacs the real story of what happened to Ryker.

Before Ryker worked with Ortega, he uncovered some improper sleeve use that led to the discovery of mercenary work. The scandal went to the highest levels of government and turned Ryker into a hero. He leveraged this new status to join Ortega’s team, Organic Damage. Soon after, the two became romantically involved. When Ryker was arrested by Internal Affairs, Ortega began paying his sleeve storage fee and began searching for evidence that Ryker was framed.

Ryker was accused of going into a clinic and shooting some of the workers, like Kovacs had done. He was investigating the death of a Catholic girl who washed up from the sea, possibly after falling from an airship. When two individuals escaped, Ryker chased them and shot them down. Both bodies were Catholic and had documents barring them from being brought back from the dead. These were soon discovered to be fabricated, and the person who forged the documents admitted to Ryker paying him, though Bautista believes this was virtually faked. Both he and Ortega think that, despite his flaws, Ryker was a good cop and that he was framed for something. Before leaving, Bautista asks that Kovacs be gentle with Ortega. Kovacs takes Curtis’s drugs to have the Hendrix analyze it.

Kovacs and Ortega wait on a virtual beach for a meeting with Ortega’s contact. Kovacs asks about synamorphesterone, which was the drug he found on Curtis, and which was analyzed by the Hendrix. Ortega explains that it is a male response enhancer drug that causes aggression, confidence, and sexual libido.

A car arrives at the beach, and Leila Begin joins them. She takes Kovacs for a walk, and Kovacs asks her if she believes Miriam killed Laurens. Leila believes Miriam is a psychopath who attacked her, killing her child out of jealousy; she would be capable of doing the same to Laurens. Kovacs does not believe Miriam did this but promises she will pay if she is guilty. Leila reminds him that Meths are above the law.

Ortega and Kovacs wake from the virtual beach at a facility in Chinatown. Ortega suggests that Leila may have a point about Miriam, but Kovacs disagrees, citing how Miriam passed a polygraph test. Ortega tells him that she has genetic enhancements that could help her to lie with no physical reaction. Ortega says that when she first arrived at the scene, Miriam demanded the test immediately and showed no emotion.

They walk out into the lobby and notice that the receptionist is dead. A few people in the waiting room attack Kovacs and Ortega, and Kovacs kills them all, though Ortega’s shoulder is hit in the fight. Suddenly, Ortega shoots the ceiling, and the glass shatters, dropping a synthetic sleeve down. When the sleeve gets up, Kovacs shoots it, but it doesn’t die. Instead, it begins laughing, calling Kovacs’s name. Kovacs grabs Ortega and rushes out of the building as the synthetic sleeve explodes.

Kovacs and Ortega sit outside on the street as the police descend. Kovacs tells Ortega that he believes the synthetic was Kadmin and the others were hired criminals. Ortega is incredulous since she believes Kadmin is still on the servers at the police station.

Kovacs tells Ortega of a myth from Harlan’s World, about a mother who killed her children for being lazy. When she realized that she needed them to do work, she stitched them together and imbued them with the soul of a demon. This demon, however, killed the mother after becoming trapped in the body. It began to rot, so it had to keep hunting for new parts. It became the Patchwork Man.

Ortega listens as Kovacs points out how there was a glitch when they met Kadmin earlier, and he believes that this was an AI helping him to escape. He believes that Kadmin, now free, is no longer working for anyone but himself, hellbent on killing Kovacs. Kovacs tells Ortega to check at the station for Kadmin and then lay low for a few days while he tries to discover more. She gives him a safe location to meet and promises to be there for the next two nights.

Kovacs calls the doctor he met at Bay City Central and asks her to meet him at the Golden Gate Bridge. He also calls Suntouch House and leaves a message saying he will be in Seattle for a few days. Kovacs then hires a driver from a bar to drop him at the bridge and pays the driver to go to Seattle to wait for him. Kovacs doesn’t plan to follow, but he pays the man to cover his trail.

He meets the doctor on the empty bridge and asks when they tagged his stack, which would allow for someone to track him and for an AI to piggyback off of him in a virtual reality and free Kadmin. She explains that the warden, Sullivan, is corrupt and allowed Trepp to implant the tag in Ryker’s stack a few days before he was resleeved. The doctor followed Sullivan’s orders because he convinced her that Kovacs was a criminal who could not be released undetected. She agrees to help him, giving him a code to neutralize the tag. Finally, Kovacs asks when Sullivan will leave Bay City Central later that day.

As Kovacs waits outside Bay City Central for Warden Sullivan, he sees a family reunite with their patriarch, who is now in a new body. He witnesses as they struggle to take in his new body. He remembers when his own father was resleeved in a new body and walked out of the center past Kovacs and his mother. They did not recognize him, and he disappeared from their lives.

When Sullivan walks out, Kovacs follows him, traps him, and threatens to kill him if he does not follow orders. Kovacs then brings Sullivan to a noodle house and begins his interrogation, hitting him when Sullivan tells him he does not know who Trepp works for. To Kovacs’s surprise, Trepp walks in in a new sleeve and sits down with them. Kovacs warns her to keep her hands visible and listens as she tells him that Sullivan knows nothing, and that because she cannot remember Kovacs killing her, she holds no grudge.

Trepp informs Kovacs that the person behind the scenes, “Ray,” wants to meet with him. This is who Trepp was bringing Kovacs to see initially, though this time, the invitation is voluntary. Kovacs agrees to go as long as Trepp promises to be honest. They leave Sullivan at the table and fly out to Europe from a private terminal at the airport.

In Europe, they arrive at a building with ancient and severe architecture, and Kovacs sees small gray sacks lining the walls. When Kovacs hears “Ray’s” voice, he realizes that he is meeting Reileen Kawahara and that the gray sacks are her clones, held in bulletproof lining. Kawahara reveals that she wanted to meet with Kovacs sooner, but he kept killing everyone meant to escort him to her.

She also admits to freeing Kadmin, saying that he was threatening to turn on her while in custody. Now, Kadmin wants to kill Kovacs. Kawahara recommended Kovacs to Laurens, and now she wants Kovacs to convince Laurens that he did indeed die by suicide. Kovacs is furious, but when he tries to attack Kawahara, Trepp stops him and puts a gun to his head.

To provide incentive, Kawahara reveals that she transferred Sarah from Harlan’s World and will use her to test new virtual interrogation and torture methods if Kovacs refuses or fails. She promises to send Sarah back and pay Kovacs if he does what she wants. She gives Kovacs 10 days.

Kovacs is too overwhelmed to think, and Trepp wants to enjoy the nightlife around them. They go on a bender, and the next morning Kovacs wakes in a park, only remembering glimpses of what happened. They jumped from club to club, drinking and doing drugs. Kovacs remembers looking in a mirror and his reflection fracturing. In a different bathroom, later, Jimmy de Soto appeared, and Kovacs watched in horror as Jimmy failed to wash the blood from his hands. He asked Jimmy what to do, and Jimmy said, “viral strike.” In the morning, when Trepp asks him what he is going to do, he tells her he will do what Kawahara tells him to.