Headscratchers / Altered Carbon

New entries on the bottom.

Poe's human form

• In the TV series, what is Poe's human form? Synthetic body? Android? Hard light hologram? Signal beamed into people's brains? How does he, for instance, wield a shotgun or appear in the lift?
  • From the way he can appear and disappear, it seems like a hard light hologram.
  • No, Leung destroyed him with something called an electron destabilizer and there's a pile of what looks like metal shavings left over from where his body was, it's clearly made of some form of solid matter.
  • Sometimes when Poe appears at the bar his body forms in a swirl of metallic shards. So possibly some sort of quick forming nano technology, controlled by Poe's systems, and presumably limited to the hotel.
  • I believe that season two indicates that Poe's physical body is indeed a nanite swarm, and that he can also project a non-physical holographic form.

Arrested

• When Kovacs is arrested in episode 2, Ortega acknowledges that "...some lowlifes tried to mug you?" So she arrested him for the crime of defending himself?
  • Ortega, already shown to be willing to break rules, is having a hard time dealing with Kovacs being in that particular sleeve. Also she knows that Kovacs is dangerous and involved with a Meth family's weirdness. Ortega just wants to get him close and under some form of control. For her, Kovacs' rights aren't a high priority.

Final kill

• Did Kovacs really need to RD Rei? If his stack survived the crash, hers could too.
  • She said before that she will never stop her attempts, so it can be viewed that Kovacs decided that she's a lost cause, and it would be better to kill her.

Corrupt cop

• So Captain Tanaka suffers no consequences at all for corruption and falsifying Bancroft's autopsy report?
  • Maybe, maybe not. First off, he said there was absolutely no paper trail. If he didn't need to explicitly mention it in relation to the case, he wouldn't. Alternatively, he did get punished, just off-screen.

Ava's hair

• A little thing: Ava slicks back the hair of her male sleeve, presumably so it will resemble her preferred hairstyle. Wouldn't it also make sense to shave off the scruffy beard to minimise the sense of body dysmorphia?
  • Perhaps since she's familiar with slicking back hair but not with shaving a beard, she decided not to attempt the latter.
    • There's also the fact Ava may not want to make any 'big' changes to the body that might shock the original owner if/when he ever gets his body back. She might just have a stronger sense of respect for the fact this is a temporary sleeve. Shaving might feel too much like making herself permanently at home, or like taking something from the OG owner.

Ava's pardon

• Who exactly pardoned Ava at the end? And what will she do next? If she resumes her dipping career, what is to prevent her from being caught and imprisoned again?
  • Nothing really. Though perhaps her daughter becoming a Transhuman opened new legit opportunities her family didn't have before. As for the pardon, perhaps the UN made a deal in exchange for her family's testimony in the Bancroft case?

Stack prices

• How exactly is it possible for stacks to be cheap enough to install in every human being, yet backups of the personality stored in the stack are only available to the rich?
  • It's implied that it is not the backups themselves, but the specific technology behind a regular remote backup onto a satellite. Still the lack of backup versions of the personalities is strange. Although, in-universe that can be considered as "double sleeving", which is stated to be illegal.
  • The Meths are definitely manipulating things so that they are the only ones who can be immortal. With the limited number of available sleeves (also the Meths' fault), letting normal people back themselves up, even in an unreliable fashion, would just mean even fewer sleeves to go around.
  • It seems to be an issue of storage space rather than the stacks. The stack itself stores your personality. But the technology to copy and store ALL of the data on a stack seems to be extremely rare and expensive, especially when you are talking about a remote backup.

Stacks and brains

• Do the stacks completely replace a sleeve's brain for the purposes of retaining memories and personality traits? When Dimi is chased by Leung and jumps into the sleeve Carnage had in storage, the neo-nazi sleeve he was using goes completely limp. What happens if you resleeve a brain-damaged or otherwise mentally disabled person into a sleeve in perfect health?
  • They aren't a complete replacement, as seen by the serial killer that was re-sleeved as a snake and was subsequently comatose every time he was re-sleeved into a human. And it is noted that muscle memory is retained by sleeves.
  • The snake guy was explicitly an extreme situation. That being said, it does seem that stacks cover most of the important stuff. In essence, the stack is the hard drive—all the information and programs and so on. The brain is the graphics card and CPU and everything else needed to make that stuff work. It would be interesting to know what happens to brain damaged minds in healthy sleeves and vice versa; Rei mentions that shock wands can cause "mental damage" if they hit a stack, but that could mean a lot of things. Perhaps we never see brain damaged sleeves because they are seen as unsuitable for use.
    • To push the stack = hard drive, brain = processor analogy further - you can corrupt data on a hard drive, and you can damage a CPU. Putting a hard drive of corrupted data into an otherwise functional machine won't fix the data - you'll still have issues accessing certain files. Similarly, putting a hard drive of clean data into a PC with damaged hardware will still cause issues, as the computer will run more slowly or be incapable of performing some tasks with the data. So a healthy stack implanted into a brain-damaged sleeve would find it hard to use the body and mind - if memory centres were damaged, presumably they'd find it harder to access their own memories. And a stack with corrupted data, implanted into a healthy sleeve, would still experience the behavioural issues resulting from their stack's problems.
      In this world though, it seems like it's rare for either issue to be a permanent fixture. The speed with which Ortega recovers from her surgeries after Leung attacks her, and the fact that a camera can be surgically implanted in someone's eye without so much as a scalpel, suggests a world in which physical brain damage can be repaired easily enough. Either that, or people just get resleeved. We also see that stacks with damaged data can be repaired in some cases via psychosurgery.

Quarantine

• About the quarantine zone: Kovacs explicitly mentions the possibility of resleeving the inhabitants into healthy sleeves. Given how routine that process is in this world, why haven't the authorities already done that instead of bearing the ongoing cost of containing them?
  • It is implied that Laurens maintains the situation to feed his A God Am I mentality. The sheer number of sleeves that would need to be provided wouldn't be cheap, and if he's willing to contain and provide for them on his dime instead, the government of this Crapsack World is happy with that.

Neo-Catholics and stacks

• Why are Neo-Catholics fitted with stacks at all? Is it impossible to remove one without making the body go inert? If there is a law ensuring that those who do not want to be resleeved will not be resleeved, why isn't there one against installing stacks unless the person or their legal guardian consents in the first place?
  • Tied in to that, why stacks of users who were against reinstallation for religious reasons are not simply destroyed? Same with criminals who get the infinite amount of time in the storage to never be pulled out, like Kovacs. It can't be analogous to lifetime imprisonment, since stacks outside of the body are completely dormant, akin to a coma state.
  • It's a sublime way of ending any and all controversy over the death penalty. As long as a stack isn't destroyed, they're not really dead. It's also a cheap and humane replacement for prisons. Hell, the first time someone convicted to stack removal was later found innocent and resleeved none the worse for wear — possibly with a hundred grand or so as compensation — everyone except the fundies considered cortical stacks to be no different from indoor plumbing; an essential component of basic human needs. Take That!, QF.
  • In a world where stacks are so fundamental, society would insist that all babies receive stacks so that people can make the choice of being a Neo-Catholic and never getting resleeved for themselves, not have that choice made for them by their parents at birth.
  • The stack is at the base of the skull, likely attached to the spinal column and brain stem. It might not be possible to remove one without killing or at least paralyzing the person.
  • Stacks can evidently be installed in fully adult humans, as Quell invented them and she has a stack of her own. So giving babies stacks doesn't seem like it's strictly necessary compared to letting them grow up and make the choice themselves.

Quell

• Why is Kovacs convinced that Quell was backed up somewhere? After everything Rei has done, does he really think she'd be above lying to escape arrest?
  • The short answer is: no. But he feels compelled to search for Quell anyway.

A cortical stack's capabilities

• The stack allows for the preservation of someone's consciousness and memories, the usage of virtual constructs, and needlecasting. But does it have other facilities? If it saves someone's memories for example, does that mean that someone would have perfect recall?
  • We don't know exactly how they work (Elder technology and all), but most likely they store all the data one would need to turn a blank brain into you. This is most likely data like the connections between all the neurons in your brain, positions of neurons, etc., at the exact time the copy of your consciousness is saved. They could then take the data and rearrange a different body's brain to match that exactly. It shouldn't have any ability to recall things any better than any other brain could.

Kill and replace

• Doesn't the setup leave people extremely vulnerable to this? What is stopping, say, an assassin, from abducting his mark's maid, inserting his own stack into their sleeve and thus approaching the mark under a perfect disguise? Or use one's sleeve to access their funds and such? How can people trust each other at all if they have no certainty who they're talking to at any given moment. I think Kovach even lampshades this at some point, but that's it. Sure, maybe it is an issue, adding to the general dystopian feel, but characters don't seem too concerned. Hell, Isaak does exactly that and impersonates his billionaire father for an important business negotiation, and there're no countermeasures, especially in the world where cloning is available?
  • Security exists to quickly scan stacks and identify people by DHF; we see this happen with Oumou at one point, and it even shows all her past sleeves (presumably if she was walking around in an unregistered sleeve this would be the part where she got in trouble). Isaak probably just managed to avoid all those security measures; he's a lot smarter than anyone suspects, and presumably no one thought anyone would be stupid enough to try to impersonate a meth anyway.

Bancroft's fate

• Am I the only one who thinks the show is being a bit unfair to Bancroft? He was drugged up to the nines against his will and placed in that specifically arranged situation. If someone pumped you full of acid against your will and handed you a loaded gun, would you culpable for shooting people? He might have physically done the deed, but he was basically framed.
  • He was just being arrested. It's quite possible that he would have been acquitted on that charge. However, the bigger sin that both he and the show are blaming him for is covering it up. He let Rei blackmail him to stop that one law because it would cover up his crime, and then he killed himself before his backup so that he wouldn't remember. Basically, he failed his What You Are in the Dark moment, tearing down his self-image of "a good man with some Byronic flaws." And if he's not a good man... then what of all the other things he's been doing?
  • But the only reason he has to cover it up is if we (and him) are to believe he's culpable. But he isn't. He was entirely manipulated.
  • I don't feel that the show was especially unfair to him in the matter of RDing that poor girl. Head in the Clouds offers a package that allows wealthy enough people to RD sex workers, consequence-free. In the final episode we see a man who has done just that, sober and calm. By contrast, it took being drugged with a violence-inducing narcotic, and expertly manipulated by powerful people to put Bancroft in an angry enough frame of mind to murder someone. And when confronted with the truth of his actions, he surrenders to the police, horrified with himself.

Quell's Disguise

• So all it takes is a hood over her head and Quell can just walk around in public without being recognized by passerby or ID'd by cameras? Shouldn't she be one of the most recognizable faces on Harlan's World?

Quell's prison

• In Season 2 it's made clear that Reileen trapped Quell in a regeneration chamber and it's also implied that she'd moved it to the hidden chamber. How did she do that without anyone noticing?

Are natural twins illegal?

• In Season 1, as well as Season 2, we are informed of how "double sleeving", an act in which two copies of the same personality exists in two different sleeves, are illegal. However, there is a problem with this idea. What about natural born identical twins? Technically, if both are born, they are both individuals and are not identical in personalities. However, if they are both raised together and have some of the same personality traits, wouldn't that technically make them copies of each other? Where does the line between being natural identical twins and duplicate copies of the same stack get drawn?
  • No. Identical twins are not the same person twice. Having similar personalities does not make two people identical.

The Raven still up after fifty years

• Poe says Kovacs is his first customer in fifty years, which seems believable given the reputation of AI hotels. How did the place stay in operation for those fifty years? What money paid for the electricity and maintenance?
  • I believe it explains in the novel that AI's used their abilities to invest online and several of them became very wealthy.

Identification by body

• Why do people still use the physical biological body of someone as the primary means of identification? Not just in casual everyday situations, but even in financial and legal transactions they use things like DNA identification. The first season shows how extremely open to abuse this system is, and we are shown that stack scanners do exist which can provide a quick, non-invasive and apparently reliable means of identifying a person. Why aren't those used more widely?