Altered Carbon

Kovacs wakes from the dead in a new body. He has been taught to relax and let go before entering storage so as to minimize the shock, but his gunfight alongside Sarah makes him wake in a panic. A man who mispronounces his name calls him from the tank, and Kovacs deduces that he is no longer on his home planet of Harlan’s World. When Kovacs asks where he is, the man tells him he is in Bay City, on Earth.

A doctor walks Kovacs to the shower room, letting him know that the police are waiting for him outside, though she does not know why. Kovacs examines his new body, or “sleeve.” He is glad to be in a real body, rather than a synthetic sleeve. This body is Caucasian, in its mid-forties, athletic, and muscular. He feels a strength in the precision of the body, due to neurachem, which was installed to enhance his body. He adjusts, and his reflection in the mirror soon goes from that of a stranger to a familiar sight. His transfer is possible because of the “stack” in his neck. Every human has a stack, which is a small device embedded at the base of the skull that allows for consciousness to be downloaded and transferred.

Afterward, Kovacs meets the warden at the entrance of Bay City Central, who presents him with paperwork to fill out before he can leave. He is told that he is being discharged on lease to a man named Laurens J. Bancroft for six weeks. Any infraction will result in Kovacs being returned to storage to finish out his sentence. As he leaves, Kovacs laments that he must work for the police 180 light years away from his own home.

Kovacs walks into the release hall, where families wait for their loved ones to emerge in new sleeves. They will not recognize them, however, and instead, those in sleeves, like Kovacs, must identify themselves. For some, it will take some time adjusting to seeing their loved ones in new bodies.

Kovacs sees the police waiting for him and tries to avoid them. However, they quickly join him as he leaves the building. The leader of the police group is Kristin Ortega of the Organic Damage Division. She tells Kovacs that his employer, Laurens Bancroft, hired Kovacs to investigate his murder, though the police ruled it a suicide. When Kovacs asks why Laurens thinks he was murdered, Ortega is evasive.

Outside, Kovacs looks around at a city that looks like it is from the past. He also sees a protest against Digital Human Freight (DHF), the technology that allows consciousness to be uploaded virtually and then downloaded into new bodies, or sleeves. The protestors are specifically opposed to Resolution 653, which would allow for the redownloading of dead Catholics into new sleeves to act as witnesses in criminal trials. Ortega explains that many Catholics believe that downloading the human mind means killing the soul. Kovacs admits he has never heard of Catholics, and Ortega explains that because they refuse DHF, they do not immigrate to other worlds. Ortega offers Kovacs a ride to Laurens’s home, and Kovacs agrees.

In a letter to Kovacs, Laurens explains his reasons for hiring him. He says he will pay for Kovacs’s new sleeve and commute his sentence if Kovacs successfully solves Laurens’s murder. If Kovacs refuses the deal, Laurens will not pay for him to be transferred back to Harlan’s World, essentially stranding Kovacs on Earth. Laurens tells him to look for Curtis, his employee, and expresses excitement to meet Kovacs at Suntouch House.

Ortega takes Kovacs to Suntouch House, where they meet Laurens’s wife, Miriam Bancroft. Miriam questions Kovacs over why he did not wait for the car, only to discover that the driver was arrested. She accuses Ortega of conspiring to do this, showing hostility toward the police. Before Ortega leaves, she tosses Kovacs a pack of cigarettes.

Miriam escorts Kovacs inside, and though she looks young, Kovacs realizes that she is very old. She shows him the many artifacts in the house, including a songspire tree. These trees, which are from Mars, are ancient and gigantic. Then, they meet Laurens in his study. Kovacs warns Laurens that he may fail, saying that despite his training in the Envoy Corps, he cannot produce miracles.

The Envoy Corps began as a means of training military personnel to help the Earth-bound UN control their space colonies. Through advanced technology, people could be uploaded and transferred across space in an instant, to be downloaded into a new sleeve. This proved more effective than sending armies, as space travel to far planets takes generations. Instead, those in the envoy corps had access to enhanced bodies and instantaneous travel.

Kovacs asks Laurens why he disagrees with the police’s assertion that he died by suicide. Laurens explains that he has a neural link that uploads his consciousness every 48 hours. However, he died right before one such upload. He then woke up in a new sleeve and couldn’t recall the prior two days. The police say that after a virtual trip to Osaka, a car landed near the estate and that Laurens departed it, walked to the study, and opened a safe that only he and Miriam can open. He then took a gun and shot himself. Laurens assures Kovacs that if he actually wanted to die, he would’ve succeeded in dying permanently.

Laurens, who is centuries years old, tells Kovacs that he believes the police are antagonistic toward him because his wealth and influence put him in direct conflict with the law. Before he releases Kovacs to begin the investigation, he points him in the direction of Alcatraz, where Laurens’s sleeves are kept under the control of his company, PsychaSec. He promises to connect Kovacs with his lawyer, Oumou Prescott, on the island. Kovacs wants to interview Miriam, and as he leaves to do so, Laurens warns Kovacs that if he breaks the terms of their agreement, the punishment will be severe.

Kovacs goes to Miriam’s study and finds her looking over star maps. She explains that she collects them and is fascinated by artifacts. When Kovacs asks her where she was on the night of Laurens’s death, she assures him that she was asleep before Laurens even arrived home. It is normal for him to stay out late after business meetings, especially because he can attend to business virtually.

The more Kovacs pushes for answers, the more agitated Miriam becomes, feeding into Kovacs’s suspicions of her. Focused on the conversation, Kovacs does not even realize that he is pulling a cigarette out until Miriam tells him he cannot smoke there. Miriam says she believes Laurens was murdered. She also tells Kovacs that she is over 300 years old. Kovacs, still adjusting after his download, feels disoriented, thinking of how old everything and everyone around him is, like Laurens’s telescope.

Laurens’s driver, Curtis, drives Kovacs back into Bay City. As they fly over the Golden Gate Bridge, Kovacs is surprised to see how intense the bright advertisements are around them, outmatching even Harlan’s World. He asks Curtis to take down the ad shield, and the ads soon flood the car and Kovacs’s mind. He learns about the Houses, who run the high-end brothels, and the drug Stiff, which facilitates near-death experiences.

Curtis recommends the Hendrix Hotel, an AI hotel with no current guests, and drops Kovacs off. Inside, Kovacs books his room through a screen kiosk. However, when he is about to pay, he feels a gun against his head. A man is holding the gun, and there is a woman with him. Though Kovacs suspects it is a robbery, he is shocked when the man addresses him by name. He tells Kovacs that no one will find him where they are taking him, but before the man can act, Kovacs lunges at the screen, pays, and activates the hotel’s service. The hotel’s security system comes to life, and guns descend from the ceiling, killing the man and woman.

Ortega arrives at the Hendrix and questions Kovacs about the incident, though he lies and tells her the robbers did not know him. Her team discovers that both sleeves are occupied by the same person: Dimitri Kadmin, a high-profile criminal Ortega is thrilled to apprehend. Kovacs watches with slight horror as Ortega takes a knife and mercilessly digs out the stacks from the bodies’ necks.

Up in Kovacs’s room, Ortega explains that Kadmin obtained two bodies through fraud and bribery. He likely set up an insurance policy that downloaded his mind into a new body after an “accident,” while also obtaining a sleeve from the black market that his team simultaneously downloaded him into. The punishment for this kind of split is erasure.

Kadmin is an assassin, and this revelation leads Kovacs to believe that someone hired Kadmin to kill him and stop further investigation into Laurens’s murder. He pleads with Ortega that she must reopen the case because of the attack, but she refuses. She has no sympathy for Laurens, calling him a Meth. This refers to Methuselah, a biblical figure with an extraordinary long life. Ortega believes the Meths become jaded from their long lives and do not care for the young and poor; she is motivated to help the less fortunate. She insists that Laurens did die by suicide, but she tells Kovacs to ask Laurens’s lawyers about Leila Begin—she says this is a favor for helping bring down Kadmin.

Kovacs dreams of his friend Jimmy de Soto running through the ruined city of Innenin, his eye mutilated. Innenin was the site of a disastrous and mismanaged battle in which many, like Jimmy, died. Jimmy was infected by a virus, which caused him to self-mutilate and ruin his stack, resulting in permanent erasure. The hotel wakes Kovacs up, telling him that Laurens’s lawyer, Oumou Prescott, is there to take him to see Dennis Nyman, the director of the PsychaSec facility on Alcatraz where Laurens keeps his clones.

Nyman gives Kovacs and Prescott a tour of the facility, showing them the many clones of the Bancroft family. Kovacs asks Nyman about Laurens’s trip to Osaka and sees footage of Laurens entering in one clone but leaving in another. Nyman explains that they often switch clones to preserve them. After leaving the facility, Kovacs asks Prescott about Ortega. Prescott believes she is young and annoying for not taking Laurens’s concerns seriously.

They return to Prescott’s office, where Kovacs asks about any enemies Laurens has. Prescott assures him that no enemies pose any substantial threat to him, and he plays Kovacs some of the many threatening messages Laurens gets from Catholic groups and others. When Kovacs asks if Prescott picked his sleeve, like Laurens said she did, she reveals that Laurens picked the sleeve himself. Kovacs wonders why Laurens would lie about this detail.

In the midst of this conversation, Kovacs asks Prescott about Leila Begin, which takes her by surprise. She explains that Begin was a sex worker who Laurens saw 50 years prior. When Miriam found out about this, she physically attacked Begin in public, and this resulted in Begin, who was pregnant at the time, losing her child. Despite Miriam’s crime, she never saw punishment, as Laurens paid everyone off. Thinking that this could not be an isolated incident, Kovacs asks Prescott for any messages related to Laurens’s sexual indiscretions.

Kovacs makes his way to Elliott’s Data Linkage Brokerage in Amber, a town that is built in the shadow of an old, abandoned warship outside Bay City. There, he finds Victor Elliott, the man he means to question. Elliott sent a threatening message to Laurens, detailing how he would murder him for his crimes against Elliott’s daughter. Elliott’s threat is uncannily similar to how Laurens actually died. Kovacs suspects Elliott not only because of his message but because Elliott’s line of work grants him the skills to hack Laurens’s security.

Elliot admits to sending the message but denies having the skill to break through security. His wife, Irene, had such skills, since she was a dipper. Dippers hack into data channels between Earth and its satellites, piecing together moments from people’s lives in transit as they are uploaded and downloaded. This is illegal, and when she was caught, she was put under. Years later, Elliott saw her sleeve on TV, rented out by a corporate woman. Elliott’s daughter, Elizabeth, found out about this and became a sex worker in Bay City to make enough money to buy Irene’s sleeve back.

Elliott insists that Laurens visited Elizabeth often, but Kovacs doesn’t believe him, saying that Elizabeth likely worked in a place Laurens would never go to. Elliott swings at Kovacs for saying this, but Kovacs’s training and neurachem kick in and he quickly pins Elliott down. Elliott insists that a customer murdered Elizabeth and that he believes it was Laurens wearing a different sleeve. The trial uncovered nothing, and Elizabeth was put under to wait until Elliott earns enough money for a new sleeve.