Author: Richard K. Morgan
Publisher: Del Ray Trade Paperback 2017
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Kovacs is “needlecasted” to “Bay City” (formerly San Francisco) by an influential “meth” Laurens Bancroft. The envoy was downloaded into a “sleeve”, the original owner of which is serving a long storage sentence for corruption and organic damage.
Bancroft wants Kovacs to figure out who killed him. A police team lead by a detective Kristin Ortega has already determined that Brancroft killed himself. Bancroft does not believe he killed himself. He is here. He is back. Nobody cannot kill him by just wiping out his cortical stack. He has remote storage. Updates are carried out every 48 hours.
Kovacs contract states that: “You are contracted to work for me (Bancroft) for a period of six weeks with an option for me to renew at the end of that time further work be necessary. I shall be responsible for all reasonable expenses incurred by your investigation. In addition, I shall cover the cost of sleeve rental for this period. In the event that you conclude the investigation successfully, the remainder of your storage sentence at Kanagawa—117 years and 4 months—will be annulled and you will be refreighted to Harlan’s World for immediate release in a sleeve of your choosing.”
Some powerful organization doesn’t want Kovacs to solve this mystery. Not even Brancroft’s beautiful wife Mirium doesn’t want Kovacs to solve the case.
If you feel confused by now, then let me clarify few things. The following is from the back-cover of the book.
[It’s the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. A person’s consciousness can now be stored in the brain and downloaded (or “needlecasted”) into a new body (or “sleeve”) making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.]
Some definitions:
Envoy — A solider of a U. N. army with exceptional physical and mental skills.
Organic damage — Killing someone. In theory, you cannot really kill anyone since the consciousness can be stored and downloaded into another sleeve easily. As a mater of fact, the consciousness of the person (who got killed) in a new sleeve will be the main witness against the “killer” in an organic damage case. The consciousness of the convicted will be stored in a storage facility as the sentence.
Cortical Stack —The consciousness is stored in a receptacle called cortical stack. It is located at the base of your scull in the back of your neck. You have to incinerate the cortical stack to really kill a person.
Meth — A meth is a person who lived hundreds (or thousands) of years. Only a rich person can afford to buy sleeves. Extremely wealthy people even clone their sleeves and keep several copies of their consciousness in storage. All copies of consciousness of a meth will be updated regularly so any one of those copies can be used to “resurrect” the meth in case, he “really” gets killed.
[I have been arm twisted in to giving a talk about “Physics and Buddhism” to a “friendly audience”. I was given about two months to prepare. (For your information, I know very little about Physics and even less about Buddhism.) I have been reading every book that I can get hold of about Physics and Buddhism.]
The ability to store the consciousness goes against the premise of the Buddhism. Your consciousness is responsible for the “karma” you do and the karma you do reshapes your consciousness. By storing and reusing consciousness takes away the power of the karma concept. If your consciousness and your karma are responsible for your journey in samsara, then by storing it you are also controlling the samsara. You attain nibbana by stopping the journey through samsara. By destroying the consciousness (destroy your cortical stack) you can attain nibbana! (unless you are a meth.) That is, the whole thesis of this book is utter nonsense according to Buddhism.
The storing of consciousness for later use goes against Physics as well. If the conciseness is a physical entity that can be stored, then it has a wave function. The consciousness will leak out by the tunneling effect and there will probably be nothing left to retrieve after few years in the storage. That is, the whole thesis of this book could be utter nonsense according to Physics as well.
Setting all those nagging objections aside, if you accept the thesis of this book, then there are very interesting possibilities. I will reveal one such possibility from the book. Mind you, this is just the tip of an iceberg of all possibilities.
A woman had sex with a “man” with the sleeve of her former lover.
“I told myself,” she murmured. “It was crazy. It was just the body, you know.”
“Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, period, if you believe in psychologists. A bit of rationalization, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down hormonal drives, gene instinct, and pheromones for the fine-tuning. Sad, but true.”
It is an interesting story. I recommend this book.
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