Blogocentric Formulations

Altered Carbon

"Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond"  PROMPT (DAY 3): Okay, time to interject a little fantasy into this. If you could put yourself into any TV show as an active character, which show would it be and tell us about the character you'd play. Would you prefer to be yourself or someone much more exciting?

It might seem a little weird to choose a dystopian science fiction setting as a desirable place to be, but per the prompt, I suppose I would choose to be one of the Meths... the wealthy elite who can afford to re-sleeve again and again as often as they wish. And some of the stuff in that last sentence didn't make any sense, please read on!

Based on the novel of the same name by Richard K. Morgan, the world of Altered Carbon is one in which people's consciousness is stored in a "cortical stack," a digital disc that's stored in the vertebrae near the base of the skull. The cortical stack can be moved from one body to another, and as a result physical bodies are called "sleeves." If you're poor, when you die your cortical stack is put into storage and most likely forgotten about. But if you're rich, you can afford to "re-sleeve" in another body, which means rich people (called Meths in a reference to the long-lived biblical character Methuselah) can effectively life forever by transferring their cortical stack from one body to the next.

I think the whole concept is fascinating. Obviously there's an incredible potential for abuse and sinful living (eat whatever you want and then just get yourself a new body once your old one is a three hundred pound, sky high cholesterol carrying diabetic mess... indulge in all kinds of depraved sexual activity until you contract some incurable STD... celebrate each 40th birthday by upgrading yourself to a physically perfect twenty-something in their prime), but what really appeals to me about the idea of transferring your cortical stack to another sleeve is twofold.

First, you could quite literally live a thousand lifetimes. You'd never run out of time to travel to the places you wanted to see, read the books you want to read, take up the hobbies you want to take up, etc. You could spend a decade traveling the planet and experiencing all it has to offer. And then another fifty years reading all the classics. And then another twenty years becoming a world-class pianist. And another fifteen developing professional-level aptitude in your sport of choice. There's something incredibly appealing about the idea of being able to live all the lives you've ever wanted to live.

Second, I'm fascinated by the idea of potentially experiencing the world from a different perspective. Imagine the lessons we could learn and the tolerance we could adopt if we literally spent the time in another person's skin. As a middle-class white male, try as I might to be understanding and sympathetic to the experiences of others, I'll never truly know what it actually feels like to live as someone else. What if we could all experience what it's like to be a female fighting for equal pay and recognition in the workplace? Or a black man interacting with the police? Or an undocumented immigrant trying to make a new life for themselves in a new country? Or an attractive person being objectified? Or an unattractive person trying to connect with someone?

The dystopian future of Altered Carbon is probably not an ideal world to live in... but the mechanism by which the wealthy people in that society are able to continue their existence and live many lives' worth of experiences would be a fascinating place to live for a while.