Altered Carbon 2018

@w13rdo The series doesn't convey any of this well,

• probably because we never leave earth, everything feels quirky and odd in terms of tech development.

Earth culture has been repressed, intentionally by the Meth's and the UN Protectorate.

This is brought up by Quell as to why she wants to corrupt or destroy the endless lifespans, and attacks various needlecast system to introduce the virus of stack decay to a hundred years lifespan, and stop the empire/needle system from being used to enslave worlds by the protectorate and let the colonies exist by themselves without being suppressed or controlled from earth.

The legal implications are covered in some depth in the book series, but the first book, Altered Carbon is mostly covering the idea of legal responsibility of each stack, being the soul / legal entity, not the body itself. Crimes, apply to the stack persona, as it is what stores the personality and thus the ethical responsibility for a crime.

There's a few things that are not clear to the TV show.

• Cortical Stacks can be modified. It's intentionally unclear how it's supposed to work, but it has to rewrite the brain on a regular basis in order to record and interact with the AR/VR world as well.

The advantage of a more 'processed mind' is that you could add in software tweaks to enhance and synthesize a 'smarter' brain, which is what the UN did with the CTAC and Envoy soldiers to give them a leg-up in combat.

illegal, but they made the rules, and they enforce them.

So can sleeves, i.e. host bodies that have empty stacks, or even occupied bodies. The process of modifying traits is likely highly immoral and illegal, since it would be desirable to splice traits, implant desires, neuroticism, edit out defects or perform 'mental surgery' on people in society en-masse.

"religious coding" , denotes a tag that the system will refuse to alter some traits when copied from one host to another host.

This comes up in the books, more than one personality can be embedded into a stack, which has deeper repercussions. but, due to the conforming process, it needs to 'operate' inside a stack for it to interface with another person or VR environment. and, There's some arbitrary line between a stack consciousness and an AI,

so it doesn't work like in Avatar, where you can become part of the trees and swap bodies (remember that movie ...)

• double-sleeving or cloning is only illegal in UN worlds. For those with permission double-sleeving is likely and probably regarded as normal, i.e. working in lethal environments, or hiring a 'brother' personality/clone that thinks and acts identically, and can work on the same problems with the same experiences, etc. It's also common for the 'black ops' of the UN, CTAC to reuse 'backup' soldiers on expendable missions, and keep their identities in rotation so they don't meet their clone or older self.

Cross Sleeving and duplicate sleeves are likely taboo, to prevent people from diminished responsibility for their actions,

i.e. arguing that their actions should be divided rather than shared, i.e. having a clone serve a prison sentence for their actions, etc and living off-world with a backup and then merging, or not merging the consciousness of those 2 split identities. or swapping bodies to blame someone else for a crime, etc. There are also other murky issues that might come up, i.e. mixing genders and ages, etc. which don't seem to be quite as Taboo.

Cross-Sleeving i.e. male in a female body, etc. would likely introduce a very large 'shock' to the host/sleeve as it has to interpret or rewrite large chunks of the stack into the host body. it doesn't seem like a viable idea, but it's likely not illegal, just uncomfortable and uncanny.

• consider that perhaps earth, isn't the most decadent in the 'empire' setting in the kovacs universe. If you want a metaphor, It's more like Microsoft won the tech war instead of Apple or Google, and it became corporate instead of driven by new ideas.

So instead of a marxist utopia of plenty (fully automated luxury space communism i.e. Star Trek/ The Culture), resources went to those in power and they restricted access to technology to get off-world and to survival for those that could afford it. regulation, religion, rebellion, anarchy all tried to take a stake. To a degree, the shunning of the more extreme features might be akin to earth being in the 'dark ages' of a dystopia that has censored and forgotten how stack/casting is supposed to work, given that it has lead to a sprawling underworld that feels more backwards than it should.

Colonies have to travel by FTL ships to new planets, and workers can be cloned into bodies to build or terraform planets. it's likely easy to grow / print bodies on these colony ships, and grow/age clones with the skills needed, then have them travel to the next planet being settled or terraformed.

• The books, and Quell's Speech/rebellion also lead into the other concept that the entire legal system is all meth-driven to ensure stability and power rather than AI control, so laws are based on preventing large scale changes, uprisings, rebellions and so on from impacting citizens. they would censor and restrict technology on earth to prevent rebellion, like the envoys and other resistance movements that would creep up inevitably every 10-20 years.

• Drugs affect the host/sleeve, and the mind. drugs would continue to work, as would pain. However, if that stack is modified, they might be able to withstand some combinations of effects, in combination with enhanced hormone and immune responses in a military modified sleeve.

• The cortical stack isn't a brain, it's an interface that alters the brain's responses and limits or enhances the senses, but it also records everything that takes place.

As an afterthought, it likely enhances memory and speed as well, but it would be susceptible to hormones and biological processes like hunger and sleep, depression, anxiety, addiction, etc. the mental side might be avoidable, but the hormones would still be there.

• The process of 'casting', reads and rewrites the brain itself, which is why it's likely messy if you tinker with the process. it also requires a lot of work to 'rewrite the brain' of someone who has vastly different neural pathways, hence sleeve shock, as muscle and nerve connections have to be rewoven and integrated to the cortical stack.

If it's a clone, the brain is mostly intact, allowing for a faster re-entry.
Envoys likely have all of the safety's turned off, as they run more on software than hardware,
they get all of the lootboxes and advantages in life.