A lean, grey-haired man in a dark jacket lights a cigarette on a rainy waterfront at night, a rusted suspension bridge and a city of towers behind him. — Bay City, the twenty-fifth century: Takeshi Kovacs in the sleeve of Elias Ryker, a cop he has never met.

Altered Carbon · Book I · 2002

Altered Carbon

A convicted ex-Envoy is shot dead on Harlan’s World, downloaded into a stranger’s body on Earth, and hired by a rich man to find out who murdered him.

Altered Carbon (Gollancz, February 2002; Del Rey, March 2003) is Richard K. Morgan’s first novel and the book that made Takeshi Kovacs. It is a hard-boiled detective story in twenty-fifth-century clothes: a dead man hires a convict to solve his own murder, in a world where a mind lives on a cortical stack at the base of the skull and a body is a sleeve you can buy, rent or lose. It won the Philip K. Dick Award.

It is told in the first person by Kovacs, an ex-Envoy — a soldier conditioned to wake in any body on any world and function — who has drifted into crime. The book runs from a Prologue on his home planet through five parts with software-flavoured subtitles, “Arrival (Needlecast Download)” to “Nemesis (Systems Crash)”, to a short Epilogue. One reviewer read it as The Big Sleep with stacks: the rich old client, the dangerous wife, the cop, a city that sells everything. What Morgan adds is the body as the subject: who you are in rented flesh, and what murder means to a man who can buy another life.

Everything here happens on Earth except the Prologue and Kovacs’s memories. The Envoys, Innenin, Virginia Vidaura and Harlan’s World all return later in the series; Netflix’s first season (2018) adapts this book.

Part 1

Arrival (Needlecast Download)

Two hours before dawn in Millsport, on Harlan’s World, Kovacs sits in a peeling kitchen, high on tetrameth and smoking Sarah Sachilowska’s cigarettes, with their hardware laid out on a scarred wooden table: her shard pistol, his big silver Smith & Wesson, hallucinogen grenades. Out in the Reach the maelstrom roars, and one of the planet’s orbital guardians test-fires into the night. A helicopter, limpet mines through the bedroom wall, commandos in gas rigs: Sarah dies under rifle fire, Kovacs smashes one attacker’s head against the tiles, and a young man in a police uniform shoots him through the chest from behind. He reaches for the revolver anyway. The Prologue ends there.

For Kovacs, Sarah died last night. He wakes thrashing in a tank at Bay City Central — the gravity wrong, his name said with the wrong consonant — and learns he has been needlecast a hundred and eighty light-years, off a storage sentence of 117 years and 4 months at Kanagawa, to Earth. His sleeve is a man in his early forties: a swimmer’s build, a military neurachem upgrade, a smoker’s lungs, grey-shot black hair and a faint scar under the left eye. Warden Sullivan releases him on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft for up to six weeks; solve Bancroft’s murder and his sentence is wiped. Lieutenant Kristin Ortega of the Organic Damage Division meets him to say the case is closed as suicide, while Catholics outside protest Resolution 653, which would let a dead Catholic be resleeved to testify. Hold onto that. Ortega flies him up the coast in a police cruiser and tosses him a pack of cigarettes as she leaves.

At Suntouch House there are Martian artefacts, a songspire tree in the hall and, beyond the tennis courts, a seven-hundred-year-old tree Bancroft calls himself. He is a Meth — centuries old, living in clones bred at PsychaSec on Alcatraz — and his stack is backed up remotely every forty-eight hours. He died just before an update and woke in a fresh clone missing two days. The police account: home from a day in Osaka — by needlecast, into a transit clone kept there — he opened a safe only he and Miriam can open and shot himself. He insists that, had he wanted to die, he would have managed it properly. Miriam, three centuries old in a young woman’s body, also believes he was murdered.

The chauffeur, Curtis, drops Kovacs at the Hendrix, an AI hotel on Mission Street with no other guests. At check-in a man and a woman put a gun to his head; the hotel’s ceiling guns kill them both. Both bodies, Ortega finds, were worn by one assassin, Dimitri Kadmin, illegally double-sleeved; she digs the stacks out with a knife. She despises Meths but gives Kovacs a lead: ask Bancroft’s lawyers about Leila Begin. He dreams of Jimmy de Soto at Innenin, the Envoy beachhead on Sharya where a virus made soldiers tear at themselves, and Jimmy clawed out his own eye.

The lawyer, Oumou Prescott, shows him PsychaSec, where footage has Bancroft walking in in one clone and out in another, and tells him the Begin story: fifty years ago, at a function in San Diego, Miriam beat up Leila Begin, a prostitute Laurens had been seeing; Begin was pregnant and lost the baby, and Laurens bought everyone off, Begin included. In Ember, a seafront town that grew up around the beached aircraft carrier Free Trade Enforcer, Kovacs finds Victor Elliott, who sent Bancroft a death threat. Victor’s wife Irene, a dipper — a hacker — is on stack, her body rented out; their daughter Elizabeth worked as a prostitute to buy it back and was murdered by a client. Victor is sure the client was Bancroft. Kovacs judges him harmless.

A dark-haired woman pulling on woollen socks on the edge of a bed looks up at a man in the doorway who holds a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other, mist against the window. — **I · 1 Black or Green?** The Prologue, in Millsport on Harlan’s World: Kovacs hears rotors and goes to Sarah Sachilowska, his partner in crime. Black or green? Black, she says — spider venom rather than sleep — and he loads her shard pistol in the kitchen. Moments after he tosses it to her, limpet mines blow in the bedroom wall. Sarah is the first thing this book takes from him; later Kawahara will hold her stack as a hostage.

In a kitchen lit by blue flashes, a wounded man braced against a table reaches for a silver revolver as a young policeman aims a pistol at him from the doorway. — **I · 2 Don’t Make Me Do It** The raid ends the Prologue. Sarah is dead, a commando lies on the kitchen tiles, and a trembling young man in police uniform has shot Kovacs through the chest from behind: “Don’t make me do it, Kovacs.” Kovacs reaches for the silver Smith & Wesson anyway. Out over the Reach, power lashes down from an orbital and turns the kitchen blue; it is the last Kovacs sees of Harlan’s World.

A huge scarred attendant hauls a gasping grey-haired man out of a tank of gel in a bare concrete room under harsh tube lights. — **I · 3 Coming Back from the Dead** “Coming back from the dead can be rough.” Chapter One’s first line: Kovacs thrashes up out of a tank, hand on his chest for wounds that are no longer there, into the wrong gravity and a mispronounced name. He has been needlecast a hundred and eighty light-years off a Kanagawa storage sentence into a stranger’s body. The attendant spells it out for him: Bay City. Earth.

A grey-haired man sitting on a bench in a bare concrete cubicle buttons a pale shirt and touches the scar under his left eye, a folded jacket, a steel watch and an envelope beside him. — **I · 4 A Speculative Shade of Blue** His first look at the sleeve: a weather-beaten face in its early forties, a white man’s face for once, black hair shot with grey, blue eyes and a faint scar under the left one. It comes with military neurachem and a smoker’s lungs. Someone chose this body on purpose; whose it is, and why, he will learn only piece by piece.

In a sunlit hall with a glass roof, a woman in sunglasses sits on a wooden bench with her arms folded, looking up at a grey-haired man in a pale suit. — **I · 5 Bancroft Was My Case** “I’m Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.” Ortega is waiting in the release hall, tells him the case is closed as suicide, and offers him a lift to the Bancroft residence. Who this lean, grey-haired body belonged to is something she does not volunteer. Outside, Catholics protest Resolution 653, the U.N. test case that would let their dead be resleeved to testify.

In a high, sunlit stone hall, a tanned blonde woman runs her fingers down the upright branches of a slender, strange tree while a man in a pale suit watches. — **I · 6 The Songspire** At Suntouch House Miriam Bancroft trails her fingers down a songspire, a tree from Mars that sighs when touched and smells of cherries and mustard. She looks young; she is three centuries old, as she tells him later in her study: “Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.” She is cold to the police who brought him, and sure her husband was murdered.

A slim grey-haired man in a linen suit points from a stone balcony toward a huge gnarled tree beyond tennis courts above the sea, a second man beside him. — **I · 7 I Am the Tree** Laurens Bancroft points past his tennis courts to a gnarled tree more than seven hundred years old: “I am the tree.” He is a Meth, centuries deep in cloned bodies, backed up every forty-eight hours, and he cannot believe he shot himself. He has hired the one man he thinks can prove it — an Envoy, with a stranger’s face, on a six-week lease.

In a vast, empty hotel lobby a man in a dark coat holds a pistol to the head of a man at the check-in screen as black automatic guns unfold from the ceiling. — **I · 8 The Hendrix** The Hendrix is an AI hotel with no other guests, a lobby with a cathedral hush, and a past: it once stood trial for organic damage and was cleared on self-defence. At check-in a man and a woman put a gun to Kovacs’s head, the man calling him by name. He pays, the hotel wakes, and its ceiling guns unfold like spiders. Both bodies, Ortega finds, held one assassin: Dimitri Kadmin.

In a ruined, smoky beachhead of broken concrete towers, a soldier in olive fatigues puts a hand on the shoulder of another soldier seen from behind. — **I · 9 Innenin** In Bay City Kovacs dreams of Innenin, the Envoy beachhead on Sharya where a virus made soldiers tear at themselves. Jimmy de Soto steps from behind a shattered tower stub, grins with what is left of his face — he clawed out his own eye — and puts a hand on Kovacs’s shoulder. Jimmy will keep coming back, in dreams and hallucinations, every time the book turns.

An old man grips a wrought-iron sea railing on a seafront street at sunset, a man in a pale suit behind him and a huge beached aircraft carrier tilted on the shore beyond. — **I · 10 The Old Man on the Rail** In Ember, a seafront town grown up around the beached carrier *Free Trade Enforcer*, Kovacs finds Victor Elliott, who sent Bancroft a death threat. His wife Irene is on stack for dipping, her body rented out; their daughter Elizabeth sold herself to buy it back and was stabbed by a client Victor is sure was Bancroft. Kovacs pins him with neurachem speed, and decides he is only grieving.

Part 2

Reaction (Intrusion Conflict)

Pictures tell Kovacs that Leila Begin and Elizabeth Elliott both resemble Miriam. At Jerry’s Closed Quarters in Licktown, a brothel with a many-armed robot on the door, a Catholic girl who calls herself Anemone — her name is Louise — promises to ask about Elizabeth’s regulars. A big man watching outside leads him on a chase through Licktown’s streets that ends when the man fires on a hovering police transport, hits an engine and escapes; the transport settles above the street and Ortega stands framed in its hatch. She has been tailing him.

Back at the Hendrix, Miriam is waiting in his room. She asks him to drop the case; he refuses; her sleeve secretes a pheromone drug, Merge Nine, and they sleep together. She offers him her private island and its spare bodies, and is gone by morning. He buys clothes, two guns and a knife, then feels himself fragmenting in the mirror and leaves the guns behind — Envoy doctrine says weapons are a weakness.

At Jerry’s he finds Louise dead. Armed men call him “Ryker”, knock him out, and he wakes in a virtual construct in a woman’s body, where he is tortured, killed and restarted again and again, holding on by thinking of Jimmy. After a reboot he climbs onto a fishing skiff on a bright sea, where a woman in linen tells him she doesn’t believe he is Ryker. In the real world that woman, Trepp, gives him back his clothes and puts him in a limo to meet someone who can confirm his story. Blindfolded, he hears Jimmy’s voice tell him to get out; he kills Trepp with her own blaster and forces the driver down.

Before dawn, re-armed, he goes back for Jerry and gets two answers. Elizabeth tried to blackmail a Meth client, so Jerry had her killed. And Ryker is a cop — Ortega’s lover, stored for killing suspects — whom the street thought was out. Kovacs is wearing him. Under threat of real death, Jerry leads him to the Wei Clinic, where he was tortured. Kovacs kills everyone there, Jerry included, finds Louise’s body under a surgical machine with an audience still watching, and leaves with the surgeon Miller’s head — his stack — before the police arrive.

In a run-down, neon-lit alley in the rain, a man in a pale suit holds his arms out as snaking steel arms reach around him from a steel doorway, shadowy figures loitering behind. — **I · 11 Jerry’s Closed Quarters** Elizabeth Elliott’s trail leads to Licktown, a district reckoned unsafe from end to end, and to Jerry’s Closed Quarters, where a robot doorman frisks Kovacs with snaking arms. Inside, posing as Elizabeth’s mother in a man’s body, he meets a Catholic girl who calls herself Anemone. Her real name is Louise, and her faith means that if she dies, no one can wake her to say who did it.

On a wet night street, a woman stands in the open hatch of a hovering red-and-white striped police craft dripping extinguisher foam, as a breathless man in a pale shirt stands in the foreground. — **I · 12 Out of the Wreck** A big man watching Jerry’s leads Kovacs on a chase through Licktown, over a parked car, in a suit and thin-soled shoes not made for it. It ends when the man fires on a hovering police transport, hits an engine and gets away. The transport settles above the street, a hatch whines up, and there is Ortega. Wherever Kovacs goes in this city, it seems, the police are not far behind.

A blonde woman sits upright on a broad window ledge in a dim hotel suite above city lights, looking toward a man standing just inside the door. — **I · 13 Miriam Waiting** Back at the Hendrix, Miriam is waiting in his suite above the city. She asks him to drop the case; he refuses. Her sleeve secretes Merge Nine, a pheromone drug, and the night goes where she means it to. She offers him her private island and its spare bodies, and is gone when he wakes. The next morning he dumps Bancroft’s suit in a bin.

On a small fishing boat on a bright, unreal sea, a dazed woman climbs up onto the deck while another woman in a linen suit claps her hands in the stern. — **I · 14 The Skiff** Louise is dead, Jerry’s men call Kovacs “Ryker”, and he wakes in a virtual construct, in a woman’s body, to be tortured, killed and restarted again and again. He survives by holding onto Jimmy. After one more reboot the program puts him on a fishing skiff on a glassy sea, where a woman in a linen suit claps her hands, greets him as the dreamer, and tells him she doesn’t believe he is Ryker.

A man in a dark jacket stands alone with a pistol in a stark white clinic corridor, chairs overturned, police lights flashing at the frosted doors. — **I · 15 The Wei Clinic** Freed to meet someone who can confirm his story, Kovacs hears Jimmy’s voice in the limo, kills Trepp with her own blaster and makes the driver land. Before dawn he makes Jerry talk — Jerry had Elizabeth killed for blackmailing a Meth; Ryker is a stored cop, Ortega’s lover — then makes Jerry take him to the Wei Clinic and kills everyone in it. He leaves with the surgeon Miller’s stack.

Part 3

Alliance (Application Upgrade)

At Suntouch House Miriam plays tennis against Marco Kawahara while Bancroft’s guests watch — among them the chief justice of the U.N. Supreme Court — and a look passes between her and Kovacs. Laurens admits he chose Ryker’s sleeve himself, to spite Ortega, and that centuries have cooled his love for Miriam into something like veneration — so he pays for women instead.

Ortega threatens him with footage of the clinic killings, then takes him into a virtual interrogation room to face Kadmin, a habitual splitter whose self-image is a patchwork of the bodies he has worn — the Patchwork Man of the Harlan’s World nursery threat Kovacs grew up on.

“An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon”

Kadmin says he was not hired to kill Kovacs, though he will now. Kovacs hears what that means: whoever hired him wanted to talk. A bug Kovacs plants in the office of Kadmin’s lawyer catches calls to a fight venue and to Suntouch House. The venue is the Panama Rose, an ancient bulk carrier moored at the north end of the bay where fights go unrecorded, run by Emcee Carnage in a slightly wrong synthetic. Curtis picks a fight with Kovacs over Miriam, who sleeps with him too, and loses. Ortega’s partner, Rodrigo Bautista, tells Ryker’s story: a hero cop, framed for shooting two clinic staff whose bodies carried forged Catholic do-not-resleeve papers, while he was investigating a Catholic girl washed up from the sea — possibly fallen from an airship. Ortega pays for his storage.

On a virtual beach, Leila Begin calls Miriam a psychopath who killed her child and says Meths are untouchable. Waking from it in Chinatown, Kovacs and Ortega are ambushed; Ortega is shot in the shoulder, and a synthetic drops through the ceiling glass, laughing Kovacs’s name, and blows itself up. Kadmin is out. On the empty Golden Gate at night a doctor from Bay City Central admits that two days before Kovacs was freighted she planted a tracer in Ryker’s body, along the old stack incision. Waiting in Bay City Central’s release hall to snatch the warden, Kovacs watches a family fail to recognise a resleeved father, and remembers his own father walking past his waiting family in a new body and out of their lives.

He snatches Sullivan — who had the tracer put in — and in a Chinese restaurant Trepp walks in, resleeved from backup, with no memory of dying and no grudge. “Ray” wants a meeting. A private flight takes him to Europe, to a vast stone basilica under a cross — built, Ray remarks, by Franco — hung with grey bulletproof sacks: her clones. Ray is Reileen Kawahara, a Meth crime lord Kovacs knew on New Beijing. She hired Kadmin, to bring Kovacs to her alive, and recommended Kovacs to Bancroft; now he will convince Bancroft it was suicide, or Sarah, freighted from Harlan’s World, will be used to test her virtual interrogation techniques. He has ten days. He blacks out on a bender through Europe’s clubs with Trepp, sees Jimmy at a sink trying to wash his hands clean, and wakes in a park agreeing.

On a pink clay tennis court above the sea, a blonde woman in a white skirt looks up straight at a man by the courtside rail while her young opponent turns away. — **I · 16 Tennis at Suntouch** Miriam plays Marco Kawahara on courts of shell-pink dust while U.N. officials watch from deck chairs, and looks up through her hair to meet Kovacs’s eye. Laurens, meanwhile, admits that he chose Ryker’s sleeve himself, to spite Ortega, and that his long love for Miriam has cooled into reverence. The young man across the net is not who he seems; the book saves that for its last part.

In a bare grey virtual room, a towering figure with a face split into ebony, copper and white sits at a steel table facing a man across it, a woman standing behind with folded arms. — **I · 17 The Patchwork Man** In a police virtual, Kovacs and Ortega meet Kadmin as he sees himself: a towering collage of every sleeve he has worn, face ebony above, copper and corpse-white below. Kovacs knows him from a Harlan’s World nursery threat, the Patchwork Man who comes for children who don’t do their chores. Kadmin says he wasn’t hired to kill Kovacs — so his employer wanted to talk.

On the deck of a huge rusting cargo ship in a windy bay, a man with stiff black hair and a too-smooth face walks across the deck plates toward a waiting woman and man. — **I · 18 The Panama Rose** A bug in the office of Kadmin’s lawyer catches calls to Suntouch House and to the Panama Rose, an ancient bulk carrier in the bay where fights go unrecorded. Its impresario, Emcee Carnage, wears a synthetic sleeve that is a little too solid, with arms more like snakes than limbs. He lets the police sweep his empty dome, and watches “Ryker” — who says so little — with growing suspicion.

In a small lobby at night, a pale figure drops laughing through a shattering glass ceiling as a man drags a wounded woman toward the street doors. — **I · 19 Chinatown** Ortega arranges a virtual meeting with Leila Begin, on a beach, where Begin calls Miriam a psychopath who killed her child and says Meths are untouchable. They wake in Chinatown to a dead receptionist and an ambush. Ortega takes a beam in the shoulder; a synthetic drops through the shattered ceiling glass, laughing Kovacs’s name, and blows itself up as he drags her out. Kadmin is free.

On the empty deck of a rusted suspension bridge at night, a man with his collar up talks with a woman in a long coat, the towers rising overhead. — **I · 20 The Bridge at Night** A decoy driver heads for Seattle while Kovacs meets a Bay City Central doctor on the empty Golden Gate at night, under towers like the bones of some vast dinosaur. She admits that two days before he was freighted she planted a tracer in Ryker’s body, along the old stack incision, and tells him how to neutralize it. Someone knew which body he would wake in.

In a rain-dimmed hall with a glass roof, a woman and a boy search the faces of people coming through as a man walks past them, while another man watches from a bench. — **I · 21 The Waiting Family** Waiting in Bay City Central’s release hall to snatch the warden, Kovacs watches a family fail to recognise a resleeved father, who walks past them in his new face. It is his own childhood: his father walked past his waiting family when he was resleeved and out of their lives, and they never knew which stranger he was. The book’s argument about bodies, in one family.

In a small Chinese restaurant, a woman with cropped dark hair sits down across a booth table from two men, her hands flat on the table in plain view. — **I · 22 No Hard Feelings** Kovacs snatches Warden Sullivan and questions him over tea in a restaurant booth. Then Trepp walks in, slim and pale, and sits with her hands in plain view — resleeved from backup, with no memory of Kovacs killing her in the limo and, she says, no hard feelings: that wasn’t her. “Ray” wants a meeting, and this time Kovacs goes willingly, on a private flight to Europe.

In a vast dark stone basilica hung with grey sacks on cables, a composed woman in black faces a man who has stopped mid-lunge as another woman holds a gun to his head. — **I · 23 The Basilica** “Ray” is Reileen Kawahara, a Meth crime lord Kovacs knew on New Beijing, waiting in a basilica built into a rock beneath a cross, its gloom hung with grey bulletproof sacks: her clones. She hired Kadmin and put Kovacs’s name to Bancroft. Now he will persuade Bancroft it was suicide, in ten days, or Sarah’s stack will be used to test interrogation software. Trepp’s gun stops his lunge.

Part 4

Persuasion (Viral Corrupt)

Ortega’s safe house is a boat offshore — Ryker’s boat, it turns out. She is furious: the police have cracked the Hendrix and found footage of him with Miriam, and she knows about the head in his fridge. A fight over a remote control ends in bed, and Kovacs wonders whether she wants him or the body. In the morning he tells her about Kawahara and Sarah and sketches an illegal plan.

Then his Envoy intuition fires. Ortega in a Resolution 653 T-shirt; Head in the Clouds, Kawahara’s airborne brothel over Bay City; a Catholic girl fallen from an airship; Ryker’s frame; Bancroft’s appetites; the U.N. guests at Suntouch House. A house where Catholic women can be killed for pleasure because no one can bring them back to testify.

Kawahara supplies what he asks for: a cover identity, the Rawling virus — the weapon of Innenin, the thing that killed Jimmy de Soto — and Irene Elliott, released to do the dipping, but into a borrowed body, because her own is still rented out. Raw in a stranger’s flesh, she spends a night with Victor and says it feels like being unfaithful. In a rented apartment in Oakland she plants a fake infection in a cheap virtual brothel. At Suntouch House Kovacs shows Laurens the forged record: infected there, he went home and shot himself to keep the virus out of his remote backup. Laurens accepts it.

On the study balcony, a telescope nobody is supposed to have touched for centuries shows fingerprints and a set angle; through it Kovacs sees Head in the Clouds. Miriam watches from the garden; he whispers that he hopes she and Kawahara are happy. In a virtual run by the Hendrix he breaks Miller’s stored mind. Then Kadmin calls: he has Ortega, outside. Kadmin throws her from his car; Kovacs leaves his gun beside her and walks to the car unarmed.

On the deck of a small yacht at sea under a clear blue sky, a woman holds a remote control high out of reach as a man grips her raised wrist, the two facing each other. — **I · 24 Ryker’s Boat** Ortega’s safe house is a boat offshore, and she is furious — the police have cracked the Hendrix and seen him with Miriam, and she knows about the head in his fridge. A fight over a remote control turns into something else. The boat, she tells him, is Ryker’s, and Kovacs is left wondering whether she wanted him or Ryker’s body.

In a bare apartment at night, a woman sits at a bank of glowing screens and data decks while a man stands behind her, watching. — **I · 25 Irene at the Decks** Kawahara supplies the Rawling virus — the weapon of Innenin — and Irene Elliott, spun out of storage into a borrowed body because her own is still rented to someone else. After a night with Victor in a stranger’s body — it feels, she says, like being unfaithful — she sets to work in an Oakland apartment and plants a fake infection in a cheap virtual brothel: the cover story for a suicide.

A man bends to an old brass telescope on a tripod on a stone balcony above the sea, an airship hanging far off in the sky, while below on the lawn a woman in overalls among glider parts looks up at him. — **I · 26 The Telescope** Laurens accepts the forged record: infected in a virtual brothel, he went home and shot himself to keep the virus out of his backup. But the old telescope on the study balcony, supposedly untouched for centuries, has fingermarks and a set angle. Kovacs looks through it and finds Head in the Clouds, Kawahara’s airborne brothel. Below, Miriam looks up from her glider. He whispers that he hopes she and Kawahara are happy.

On a night street outside a marble-fronted hotel, a man crouches to lay a pistol on the pavement beside a woman pushing herself up on her hands, a long dark car waiting at the kerb with its door open. — **I · 27 Walking Out Unarmed** Kovacs breaks Miller’s stored mind in a virtual the Hendrix runs for him, and then Kadmin calls: he has Ortega, outside, and will trade her for Kovacs. Kadmin throws her from his car. Kovacs lays his gun on the pavement beside her, tells her to talk to the hotel, and walks to the waiting car without it. The book’s last part starts in Kadmin’s hands.

Part 5

Nemesis (Systems Crash)

He wakes on the Panama Rose. Carnage stages a broadcast humiliation bout for a crowd Ryker once wronged, and Kadmin fights in a Right Hand of God martyr sleeve. Kovacs realises Kawahara has set the two of them on each other. He goes down again and again, until the glass above shatters: Trepp, firing a frag gun, then Bautista and the police. Carnage burns. Kovacs puts Bautista’s gun to the back of Kadmin’s neck and gives him real death.

For Head in the Clouds he breaks one more law and double-sleeves. One copy stays in Ryker’s body; the other wears a tech-ninja sleeve, the body he dreamed of at fifteen. Two of him drink at the Hendrix and agree to compare memories later and keep only one; Ryker-Kovacs calls Miriam to apologise and goes to her island as a decoy. Irene, promised her own body back as her price, cracks the airship’s blueprints from a bubblefab settlement by a lake; a recording wire goes under his eye, Stiff will chill him below the heat sensors, and she finds Kawahara’s weak point — the update needlecast from the airship to her remote storage and clones in Europe.

Ortega takes a police transport up to the airship; Kovacs drops from it in a stealth suit and grav harness and works his way to Kawahara’s quarters. She doesn’t know him in the new body, and she isn’t afraid — she will wake in a clone — until he tells her Irene has put the Rawling virus in her update needlecast. Her remote storage is spiked; this body is the only one she has. So she talks. The Catholic girl was a snuff recruit who ran and fell into the sea; Kawahara framed Ryker; she wore her son Marco’s sleeve at the Bancrofts’ tennis while working to stall Resolution 653. Bancroft would not help, so after Osaka she brought him aboard where, chemically assisted, he killed a Catholic girl, then went home and shot himself to wipe the memory before backup. Of people, she says:

“They reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not.”

Trepp stuns him; Kawahara shoots Trepp, then rips the recorder out of his eye with pliers. Kovacs blows out the glass floor and they fall toward the ocean together, and in the air he presses a grenade to the back of her neck.

The narrator who comes back wears Ryker’s sleeve. The clone technician Sheryl Bostock admits that Miriam had her dose Laurens’s clone with an aggression drug while he was in Osaka. The two Kovacs copies, it emerges, settled which of them would live by scissors-paper-stone in a virtual forum in New York; the mind that went into the sea won, paper over stone, and the island copy was erased. At Suntouch House Miriam says Laurens killed himself from guilt, and throws her drink in his face. Kovacs gives her the only copy of the evidence against her: the erased copy asked him to protect her.

In the Epilogue, Irene is back in her own tall body in Ember, and Kovacs gives her eighty thousand to resleeve Elizabeth now. The U.N. inquiry into Kawahara stays secret; the rumours of Resolution 653’s forthcoming adoption finally break; he never speaks to Bancroft again. At Bay City Central, Ortega — whose lover will get this body back — takes Ryker’s cigarettes from him, kisses him half on the mouth, and watches him go in to be needlecast home.

In a ship’s hold turned fight arena, tiers of spectators all around, a battered man kneels in the ring below a hanging blade beside a heavily muscled fighter as a woman fires down through a shattering glass dome. — **I · 28 The Humiliation Bout** Kovacs wakes on the Panama Rose for a broadcast humiliation bout — Carnage has promised the crowd Ryker’s death — against Kadmin in a martyr’s fighting sleeve, a blade hanging over the ring. Kawahara has set her two problems on each other. Kovacs goes down again and again, until the glass shatters and Trepp fires down into the arena.

Two men share a bottle of whiskey across a small table in a dim room, one grey-haired and lined, the other seen from behind with long blue-black hair falling to his shoulders. — **I · 29 Two of Me** With Kadmin given real death and Carnage burned, Kovacs breaks one more law and double-sleeves. One of him stays in Ryker’s battered body; the other wears a tech-ninja sleeve, the body he dreamed of at fifteen. The two drink together at the Hendrix and agree to compare memories later and keep only one. Then Ryker-Kovacs calls Miriam, and goes to her island as a decoy.

At night high over the sea, a figure in a black stealth suit and harness drops from a police aircraft toward the vast hull of an airship studded with lit portholes. — **I · 30 The Big Chill** Irene has the airship’s centuries-old blueprints and its body-heat alarm net; a wire under his eye will record everything; a dose of Stiff will chill him below the sensors. Ortega rides a police transport up to Head in the Clouds, claiming to hunt Kovacs in a new sleeve, and as she is waved in he drops away in a stealth suit and grav harness that feel like samurai armour.

In a grey room with sloping windows and a glass floor, a seated woman with a rigid face glares at a hooded figure in black who holds a gun on her. — **I · 31 A Mask Cut from Tin** Kawahara doesn’t know him in his new body, and isn’t afraid; she will wake in a clone. Then he tells her Irene has put the Rawling virus in her needlecast to Europe. Her face becomes a mask cut from tin, and she talks: the snuff recruit who fled into the sea, Ryker framed, Bancroft drugged into killing a Catholic girl. Real death, she explains, comes cheaper than virtual.

Two figures locked together fall through a burst of glass over a dark ocean, a vast airship rising away above them. — **I · 32 Still Angry** Trepp stuns him, then balks at Kawahara’s orders, and Kawahara shoots her. Kawahara tears the recorder out of his eye with pliers. Bleeding and half-blind, he blows out the glass floor and takes her with him toward the ocean, a grenade pressed to the back of her neck. Before the glass gives way, he has an answer ready for anyone who asks how he died: “Still Angry.”

In a glass conservatory a blonde woman holding a glass faces a man in a dark jacket who holds out a small disk to her, as a young man walks away through the doorway behind. — **I · 33 The Only Copy** The Kovacs who comes back wears Ryker’s sleeve: the two copies settled who would live by scissors-paper-stone, and the one from the airship won. A clone technician confirms Miriam had Laurens’s clone dosed with an aggression drug. Confronted, Miriam blames Laurens’s guilt and throws her drink in his face, and he hands her the only evidence. The copy that was erased asked him to protect her.

On a seafront promenade above a rocky shore, a huge beached carrier behind, a tall blonde woman takes a small chip from a man in a dark jacket. — **I · 34 Ember at Low Tide** In the Epilogue Irene Elliott is back in her own tall body, working again, and she and Victor have bought Elizabeth a virtual condo in Bay City. Kovacs gives her a chip worth eighty thousand — enough for a custom-grown body for Elizabeth this year, rather than someday. He wants one good thing to come out of all this, and here, under the carrier’s gashed bow, it does.

Under a rain-streaked glass roof, a woman in an olive jacket stands with her arms folded, watching a man in a long dark coat look back as he walks toward the steps and the far doors. — **I · 35 Stormlight** Eleven days to authorize the needlecast; then Bay City Central, where the book began. Ortega’s lover is cleared and will get this body back, which makes goodbye awkward. Kovacs hands her Ryker’s cigarettes and asks her to keep him off them; she kisses him, half on the mouth. When he looks back from the steps she is standing in the storm light, holding herself tight, watching him go.

What the screen took from this book

Netflix’s Altered Carbon season 1 (2 February 2018, ten episodes, created by Laeta Kalogridis) adapts this book and keeps its spine: Bancroft hiring a resleeved Kovacs to solve his own death, the Ryker sleeve and Ortega’s tie to it, Miriam’s seduction, the AI hotel’s check-in shoot-out (Kalogridis called its ceiling guns “one of my favorite things in the book”), the Wei Clinic, the fight venue, the virus-in-a-brothel cover story, the double-sleeve decoy, Head in the Clouds and Resolution 653.
The Envoys change sides. In the book they are the Protectorate’s elite corps and Kovacs an ex-member; on screen they are Quellcrist Falconer’s rebels on Harlan’s World and he is the last of them. The novel’s Falconer is a long-dead revolutionary he quotes; the show makes her his trainer and lover — “I collapsed the timeline a little bit because I just wanted to see Quell,” Kalogridis said — and demotes Virginia Vidaura to a minor Envoy.
Kawahara becomes his sister. The book’s Reileen is a crime lord he knew on New Beijing, no relation; the show’s “Rei” is his younger sister, and owns the Wei Clinic as well as Head in the Clouds.
The Hendrix becomes the Raven, run by an Edgar Allan Poe AI, because the Hendrix estate does not license his image for violent work. The empty hotel and its turrets stay.
The Elliotts are renamed and rebalanced: Vernon, Ava and Lizzie. Ava comes out of storage into a man’s sleeve (Irene’s borrowed body is a woman’s); Lizzie, never met in the book, recovers from the Wei Clinic and fights.
Ortega grows: a Mexican-American family (“In the book, she doesn’t have this whole extended family,” said Kalogridis), a mechanical arm, and a stretch as Rei’s captive with Rei wearing her sleeve. Her book partner Bautista is replaced by Samir Abboud.
Cut and invented: Trepp is cut (season 2 has a different Trepp) and an invented assassin, Mister Leung, does much of her work; Kadmin, already “Dimi the Twin” in the book, becomes two separate copies; the prologue is set 250 years before the main story, kills Sarah for good and makes Kovacs a captured rebel rather than a criminal; his original sleeve, barely mentioned in the book, becomes a major flashback role.
The ending: in both, the double-sleeved copies settle which one survives by the same children’s game. On screen Vernon goes aboard Head in the Clouds while Ortega is Rei’s prisoner, the decoy is a printed clone, the airship comes down in the bay and both Bancrofts are arrested. In the book Kovacs and Kawahara fall into the ocean, and Miriam walks free with the only evidence.

Continuity notes

Kovacs leaves Earth as he arrived, needlecast, after eleven days’ wait; his stack goes home to Harlan’s World and Ryker’s sleeve goes back to Ryker, cleared. The tech-ninja sleeve died in the fall; the island copy was erased. Book II finds him in another body, at war on Sanction IV.
Sarah Sachilowska was freighted to Earth as Kawahara’s hostage and sent back to Harlan’s World before the climax, as Kawahara tells Kovacs in her last hour. Harlan’s World, Millsport and Newpest are home ground in book III.
Kawahara, Kadmin, Carnage and Jerry are dead — Kawahara and Kadmin by real death, Kawahara’s clones corrupted by the Rawling virus. Trepp is last seen shot by Kawahara aboard Head in the Clouds.
The Bancrofts go on: Laurens a guest of a U.N. Special Inquiry in New York, Miriam unexposed and holding the only evidence.
Ortega stays in Bay City with Ryker cleared and coming back to her; Irene has her own body; Elizabeth has the money for a new one; Resolution 653’s adoption is rumoured to be coming.
Carried forward: the Envoy Corps and Virginia Vidaura (remembered in book II, in person in book III); Innenin (backstory again); Quellcrist Falconer, here only a quoted author; the Martians — the songspire, star maps, Martian Baroque — who are the subject of Broken Angels.

Notes

Morgan’s first novel; the Del Rey paperback won the Philip K. Dick Award (the 2004 award, for paperback originals of 2003) and placed third in the 2003 Locus poll for best first novel. Joel Silver and Warner Bros optioned the film rights on publication; Netflix ordered the series in January 2016.
Chapter Fifteen opens with an epigraph from Quellcrist Falconer’s Things I Should Have Learned by Now: “The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political.” It is the book’s thesis, and Kovacs’s turn from a contract to a vendetta.
Much of the plot happens in virtual: the Wei Clinic, the Kadmin interrogation, Leila Begin’s beach, Miller’s interrogation, Kadmin’s desert call, the team’s briefing at the Hendrix and the two Kovacses’ game of scissors-paper-stone in New York.
The double-sleeve is told backwards: the reader rides with the copy that goes to Head in the Clouds and learns only after the fall that it is the one that survived, in Ryker’s body.
Spellings follow the text: Sachilowska (not -ski), Victor Elliott (not Vernon), the Rawling virus (not Rawlings), Ember.

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