New (Cloned) Bodies for Old: Biopolitics in Altered Carbon

New (Cloned) Bodies for Old Biopolitics in Altered Carbon Aline Ferreira Altered Carbon (Lenic & Kalogridis, 2018–) is centrally about the fantasy of eradicating death, as well as the survival and negotiation of identity in a new body. This fantasy, coupled to that of extending the human life span, has been a long-standing, persistent dream, given recurrent expression in mytho- logical and Biblical accounts, in early epic narratives and in art. A consider- able number of recent works, both literary1 and cinematic,2 engage with the possibility of almost infinite life extension, usually by being reborn in a new body. This lengthy list of visual and fictional narratives dealing with the age- old ambition of quasi-immortality bears witness to a genetic, transhuman- ist imaginary that is taking the goal of progressively abolishing death more seriously. Altered Carbon can be inscribed in this increasingly emphatic the- matic cluster that envisages novel ways of prolonging life, offering its own solutions to the inevitability of death, including new (cloned) bodies for the extremely wealthy. The premise of erasing death is not new, of course, neither is the concept of body hopping or body swapping,3 but the extent to which it is applied in Altered Carbon, where it is valid for everybody, is unprece- dented.4 These fantasies have been updated by envisaging the possibility of avoid- ing or postponing death by being reincarnated into a new body or, more rad- ically, by always having cloned versions of one’s body ready to receive one’s memories, kept in a “cortical stack,” as is the case in Altered Carbon. These cloned versions can only be afforded by the extremely rich, which yet again introduces dystopian capitalist hierarchy and selection into this transhuman- ist scenario where death has been all but eliminated. While Altered Carbon 90  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 91 has given articulation to that ancient dream of quasi-immortality, it also points out some considerable drawbacks of the realization of that dream. Altered Carbon revises radical life extension scenarios by taking them to the next level, that is, by almost completely eliminating not only death but also the fear of death. The series takes place in the year 2384, in a futuristic version of San Francisco named Bay City, whose atmosphere, cityscape and weather are reminiscent of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, probably due to the effects of global warming. Although babies are still being born, the series predominantly shows alternative birthing scenes consisting mostly of adult bodies either being “resleeved” or emerging from cryonic preserva- tion or a type of suspended animation. We first see Takeshi Kovacs, the main character, floating in an amniotic-like fluid and then emerging from a womb- like tank, covered in slime, a (re)birth called decanting, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This is a scene reminiscent of many other birthing scenes where people come out fully formed as adults from an artificial womb, as in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Andy and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix (1999) and Dennis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). It has been 250 years and Kovacs has been given a new “sleeve.” At first, when he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees his last sleeve’s face and then his new one gradually takes over in an uncanny fusion, while a mixture of panic and fury mingle and are reflected in his expression. He soon learns that he is now the property of Laurens Bancroft, who has hired him to solve his own murder. “Guaranteed immortality” Laurens Bancroft is one of the founding “Meths,” the New Methuse- lahs, with a virtually endless lifespan given the availability of ever new clones. He is over 360 years old and fully intends to reach and surpass the Bib- lical Methuselah who reputedly lived for 969 years. His wife, Miriam Ban- croft, who is also over three centuries old,5 has a secret island with a clone tank and resleeving facilities, apart from those in the Bancroft family vault. In this society, every citizen has a cortical stack, a small device that con- tains one’s consciousness, coded and stored as DHF: Digital Human Freight, implanted when they are one year old. As a technician explains: “Your con- sciousness can be downloaded into any stack, in any sleeve. … A sleeve is replaceable but if your stack is destroyed you die. There’s no coming back from real death” (AC 1, “Out of the Past”). In his Introduction to the novel Altered Carbon, on which the series is based, Richard Morgan explains he wanted to explore the notion of “digitised human consciousness” (Morgan, 92 Sleeves 2002, p. vi).6 The altered carbon technologies in this future world mean that death was rendered “if not wholly obsolete, then certainly negotiable” (p. vii), while people with greater wealth have at their disposal better bodies to be resleeved into. In the novel and also in the series, Laurens Bancroft’s cortical stacks are stored remotely and updated every forty-eight hours at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz, while his clones are kept on ice in the same facility, which means that he has virtually “guaranteed immortality” (p. 37). Cloned Bodies What if you could have a clone that was built from your own cells and then rapidly grown and kept in a type of suspended animation, ready to serve as your new body and receive your cortical stack? This is what Psychasec, a powerful biotech corporation, promises to do for those clients with enough money, providing designer-enhanced sleeves to an elite clientele. Their pri- mary business, however, is the creation of clones, costing more than an aver- age person would earn in their lifetime. The major retrieval and resleeving insurance companies, like PsychaSec, have clone banks of their very wealthy customers, where they can download the cortical stacks into the waiting sleeves. When Kovacs visits the Bancroft family vault where their clones are kept, a huge space, the size of a “temple” (p. 80), lit by a “womb light” (p. 81), he is in awe, as the novel states: The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods … suspended from the ceil- ing by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, foetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; towards the top of the dome I could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cul- tured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analogue of womb lining, and they would grow with the foetus within to become like the metre and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault [p. 80]. The clones are grown in organic versions of an external, artificial womb. There are also sophisticated metallic cylinders that function as “full life sup- port suspension chambers” (p. 82) with basically the same “environment as the pods … where all the resleeving is done” (p. 81). The process is described as follows: “We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free” (p. 82). In addition, PsychaSec have been instructed by Mr Bancroft to always “hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting” (p. 82).7 Reileen Kawahara, another Meth, also keeps her clones in similar vaults, in womb-like sacs.8  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 93 (Un)Ethical New Bodies for Old Can all these cloned bodies, built purposefully to become hosts for the cortical stacks and neural nets of other people, ever be regarded as ethical? In the recent film Replicas (Jeffrey Nachmanoff, 2018) the process is still in an experimental phase and in Altered Carbon, although not illegal, only those who can afford the very expensive procedure, as well as the upkeep of the clones in a closely guarded and regulated environment, have access to it. This question, however, may be at the forefront of the bioethical discussion that will precede the possibility of neural uploading and transfer, since transplant- ing a brain to a cloned body, with chemicals accelerating its growth, seems medically more feasible in the not too distant future than the former method. Opinions will differ, but shopping for new bodies to move into when one no longer feels comfortable in one’s original body, a vision dramatized in Hanif Kureishi’s The Body (2002), or indeed having a cloned body-in-waiting like the elite in Altered Carbon, may become a reality sooner than we think. The protagonist of Kureishi’s novella chooses a new, young body to become the receptacle of his brain by going to a shop where he can select and buy his favourite body, a scenario that might become common practice in the not too distant future. The Newbodies, as they are called in Kureishi’s novella, will constitute “a new class, an elite, a superclass of superbodies” (Kureishi, 2002, p. 97), like the Meths in Altered Carbon. As is explained by a character in the series, the clones, kept in cryopreservation, “are not aware. Their brains are blanked, stacks are empty. The bodies are electrically stimulated period- ically so they don’t lose muscle tone” (AC 2, “Fallen Angel”). If no harm is done to these insentient bodies, which will only be revivified with the trans- ference of neural information from the deceased or the living person wishing to abandon their body, then it can be argued that they did not suffer from not being fully alive before. The world of Altered Carbon can be broadly described as having moved to a version of post-humanism or transhumanism. As Altered Carbon makes abundantly clear, however, class structures still mean that it is the very wealthy who get all the privileges and the best bodies. If you are not wealthy you get “what is available in the inventory” and cannot choose a sleeve either for yourself or members of your family. As detective Kristin Ortega explains, “prisons lease out the good sleeves for profit” (AC 1, “Out of the Past”). Class and socioeconomic forces are still very much at play in this future society. Although the almost complete eradication of death brings numerous benefits to countless people and erases the perennial death anxiety present in human societies, it also introduces numerous further complexities to the social fabric, as well as huge class divisions between the Meths and the non– Meths, the Catholics and the Neo-Catholics. Indeed, religion still shapes the 94 Sleeves decisions of many citizens, with Catholics in particular resisting or refusing the elimination of death by resleeving, especially when there is often no choice regarding the body.9 After all, the world in Altered Carbon is only giv- ing visual and speculative expression to widespread religious views such as the Christian faith in an afterlife where the dead will be resurrected and reunited, or the Hindu and Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In this respect the refusal of many Catholics to be resleeved, choosing “real death,” contrasts with John G. Messerly’s confident assertion that “technologically guaranteed immortality will end most people’s opposition … when immortality is real, most will choose it rather than dying and hoping for a heavenly reward” (2013, p. 278). In this future society Catholics often get killed because their murderers know their victims will not be able to testify against them since they do not believe in resleeving. However, if a new law were to be passed, Proposition 653, then being considered in the UN Courts, which would allow victims of violent crime to be brought back to life in order to give evidence against those who murdered them, even if they have Neo-C (Neo-Catholic) coding, many would be brought to justice and their victims vindicated. This is pre- cisely what Reileen, the owner of Head in the Clouds, an elite sex club, fears most, since some very unorthodox practices perpetrated by a few of her clients, such as killing sex workers, might become known under the new law. Reileen, who has illegally changed some of her workers’ codes to Neo-C, is particularly worried about the death of a young woman with Neo-C coding who was murdered by Bancroft under the influence of a drug; if Proposition 653 became legal, she would be resurrected and accuse Bancroft, who does not know he was the perpetrator, since those crucial hours were erased from his stack, of her own murder.10 Reileen needs her brother to solve Bancroft’s murder so that he can remember what he did and use his influence to stop Proposition 653 from going ahead. This is the mystery that drives the plot. “Your body is not who you are” Altered Carbon also centrally engages with the question of identity, inti- mately associated with the cortical stack, enshrined as the recipient and con- tainer of an individual’s consciousness. Indeed, only the destruction of the cortical stack would result in “real” death, since otherwise it can always be transferred to another “sleeve.” In a world where death is not the end and rebirth in a new sleeve is practically taken for granted, the question of what makes us who we are, as unique individuals, is crucial. Toward the beginning of the first episode we are unequivocally told: “Your body is not who you are. You shed it like a snake sheds its skin. Leave it, forgotten, behind  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 95 you” (AC 1, “Out of the Past”).11 In this society, your body is indeed not who you are, since you can change bodies as many times as you die. As Kovacs puts it: “How do I know you are who you are? Before stacks, yeah, a face is a face, but now it could be anyone in there” (AC 5, “The Wrong Man”). It is your cortical stack, where your memories are stored, that contains who you are. So are you your brain, where your memories are stored? But your body is an integral part of who you are and of how your brain functions, since a disembodied brain cannot work. In the world of Altered Carbon you are your cortical stack, where your memories are stored. Thus the idea is that when your cortical stack is implanted in another body your consciousness will also have been transferred. This concept can be inscribed in a long line of philosophical discussion of the mind/body dualism question. Seemingly in Altered Carbon mind and body are separated, since the cortical stack is moved across different bodies that will house one’s mind. This procedure partially reinstates or reinvents Descartes’s dualistic separation of mind and body, questioned by many philosophers and neuroscientists, such as António Damásio, who argues that emotions are a necessary part of rational thought and that the former are inextricably bound up with the body (Damásio, 1994). Will whole brain emulation ever be possible? It is very unlikely. Asked whether it will ever be possible to upload our minds into other bodies, Anders Sandberg (2018), a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is very skeptical: Scanning a living brain is likely much harder than scanning a neatly frozen brain since everything is moving about, there is an active immune system that tries to interfere, and the scanning method better not interfere with function. I think it is physically possible but likely much harder. We need not just great nanotechnology but also a fine understanding of how to interface brains to electronics on a truly vast scale: it is going to take much longer than getting the first uploads to work from frozen scans [2018]. Clone duplicates, on the other hand, will probably be created, even some that can grow extremely fast, given the use of growth hormones and other stim- ulants. Kovacs himself is double-sleeved at a particular point in the narrative, where a fully-grown clone of himself, with a copy of his stack, is developed as we watch, with recourse to Bancroft’s son Isaac’s illegal portable 3-D bio- organic printer, which he keeps hidden at home, as well as a 3-D printed sleeve of his own father, to pass as his progenitor when convenient. Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan (2018) believes that it will be possible to bring back people from the dead with recourse to 3-D printing technologies. After all, entire organs are already being printed, so why not whole bodies? The field of quantum archaeology is progressing apace and technological res- urrection seems possible in the not too distant future. But Istvan goes even 96 Sleeves further, suggesting that with quantum archaeology the humanitarian aim of overcoming death could be extended so that it might be feasible to bring back those who have died, especially those whose death was premature. As Istvan points out, however, some people might not want to be resurrected and have to cope with a very different world than they were used to,12 not to mention overpopulation and the sustainability of social security. Altered Carbon also effectively disrupts entrenched ideas about gender by having poorer people resleeve into new bodies that may be of a different sexes, as when Ortega’s grandmother is resleeved into the body of a young man covered in tattoos or when Lizzie’s mother reappears as a man. This enforced gender fluidity will presumably have had some impact on sexual politics and may have changed stereotypical perceptions about gender roles by making people more accepting of the characteristics of the other sex, since they may be resleeved into a differently sexed body, but the general narrative drift belies these assumptions. Holograms of near naked women in seductive poses are scattered around the cityscape, strongly reminiscent of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. Head in the Clouds, an upscale brothel, even though it is run by a very powerful woman, Reileen, caters to an elite, mostly male, clientele. At Psychasec, the biotech corporation that provides sleeves for the rich and powerful, the advertisements are mostly directed to men. While a naked woman behind glass seductively advertises her body as the “Best sleeve money can buy. Put your wife in me” (AC 2, “Fallen Angel”), there is no young male enticingly and persuasively suggesting to (potentially a woman) to place her husband in that sleeve! Another sleeve, a young man, advertises sleeves saying: “You deserve to feel on the outside the way you feel on the inside. You deserve this sleeve” (AC 2, “Fallen Angel”). Male and female stereotypes thus continue to operate in this society. The Meaning of Life and Death How does the almost radical abolition of death impact human existence? Is a life that is no longer finite still considered meaningful? Altered Carbon crucially revolves around these questions. Even though the traditional philo- sophical view has been that the inevitability of death precludes rational spec- ulation on “what if ” scenarios, advances in medicine and longer lifespans, as well as transhumanist visions of ways of postponing or even reverting physical death, such as cryonics, have meant that pondering the very possi- bility of avoiding death has been receiving increased attention. Indeed, Michael Cholbi argues that we are now living through a renaissance of philo- sophical inquiry into death (2015, p. viii), a second “golden age” in probing the meaning of death after some Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato,  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 97 Epicurus and Lucretius. Until relatively recently, very few studies in philos- ophy had been devoted to the topic of immortality or the prolongation of life, a theme, in Gerald Joseph Gruman’s words, “relegated to a limbo reserved for impractical projects or eccentric whims not quite worthy of serious sci- entific or philosophical consideration” (2003, p. 2). In addition, the predom- inant view in these commentaries has tended to be critical of the prospect of life extension. According to John G. Messerly, the issue of life’s meaning is the “most important philosophical question, and possibly the most important question of any kind” (2013, p. 6) (emphasis in the original). Sigmund Freud famously states that “the aim of all life is death” (1991, p. 311), while Martin Heidegger similarly maintains that since life is finite and we are “Being-towards-death” (1962, p. 243), it is essential to be prepared for death as the fact that leads to authentic, meaningful existence. Deprived of this sense of the unavoidable finitude of life, the citizens in Altered Carbon develop a different attitude toward interactions with others, apparently more selfish and egocentric, since there is always more life and time to redeem past mistakes. For Bernard Williams in related vein to Freud, “immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless … in a sense, death gives the meaning to life” (1973, p. 82). He goes on to clarify that given the facts of human desire and happiness, “it follows both that immortality would be, where conceivable at all, intolerable, and that [other things being equal] death is reasonably regarded as an evil” (1973, p. 82); an “eternal life would be unliveable” (1973, p. 100), since the individual would be assailed by the tedium of immortality. Mark Rowlands, in turn, argues that we are “essentially beings-towards-a- future. But death is the ultimate horizon against which the things in our life that make us what we are stand out. We are beings-towards-a-future, but we are also, even more fundamentally, beings-towards-death,” since death is “what gives our life meaning” (2004, p. 258). I take issue with this view for I do not think many of us would be at a loss to supply meaning for our lives if we had much longer lifespans and pro- vided we could stay reasonably healthy. New projects would keep presenting themselves, demanding our attention and offering physical and mental stim- ulation. Grace Jantzen, for instance, addresses the fear of perpetual and unas- suageable boredom that some critics believe would make the prospect of eternal existence unbearably tedious, suggesting that since “one enterprise leads to another, and provided endless progress were possible, we might pur- sue an endless series of challenging and absorbing tasks, each one developing into another, without any risk of boredom” (1994, p. 267). In related vein, Adam Buben (2015) defends the proposition that greatly extended life spans can be a source of fulfilment. In Messerly’s summary, “we may become bored with eternal consciousness, but as long as we can end our lives if we want, 98 Sleeves as long as we can opt out of immortality, who wouldn’t want the option to live forever?” (2013, p. 241). Indeed, most commentators argue that death can be regarded as a harm to the person who passes away. For Nick Bostrom death is evil and all efforts should be made to extend the “human healthspan” (2005, p. 277) (emphasis in the original) as long as possible. Jack Li finds the Epicurean argument that death cannot harm someone who has passed away to be defective and con- cedes that death can be a harm to the person who dies (2010, p. 131). Messerly, in turn, summarizes this issue by stating that “almost everyone does think that death is an unmitigated disaster, and the Epicurean argument is of limited value” (2013, p. 238). John K. Davis extends this inquiry by asking whether extending life can harm others, arguing that life extension is “on balance, a good thing and that we should fund life extension aggressively” (2018, p. 4) (emphasis in original)13 if there is equal access to it and measures are taken to prevent a Malthusian crisis. What Davis finds more worrisome in the whole inquiry into the ethics of life extension is not whether it is desirable or not, but the question of unequal access to the technologies necessary to achieve it, which could divide society into “castes of mortals and near-immortals, making inequality worse, allowing dictators to live forever” (2018, p. 3) and other, related concerns. Questions of distributive justice are also crucial in Altered Carbon, where only the wealthiest have access to the best sleeves, which are often their own, cloned bodies. There seem to be drawbacks to practically every model of immortality depicted in fantasy and fiction, which suggests that the utopian dream and desire for immortality might indeed turn out for many to be a dystopian nightmare. “The Darkest Angels of Our Nature” In Altered Carbon Quellcrist Falconer (formerly known as Nadia Makita), a leader of the Envoys and the inventor of the cortical stack, also reflects at great length on the consequences, practical and philosophical, of her discovery. She considers that the creation of stacks was a miracle but also the beginning of the destruction of the human species. She believes humanity will become a new class of people, so wealthy and powerful “they answer to no one and cannot die” (AC 7, “Nora Inu”). As she remarks during her con- versation with Kovacs, in his former body: “Now the monsters among us will own everything, consume everything, control everything. They will make themselves gods and us slaves” (AC 7, “Nora Inu”). Significantly for Quell, to die is to be human. She considers that humans are not created to live for- ever, since that possibility would corrupt even those with the highest moral  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 99 standards. As she observes: “If we do not stop the curse of eternal life in our realm our children will inherit despair. The ebb and flow of life is what makes all equal in the end” (AC 7, “Nora Inu”). Quell has written a program, called Acheron, which allows every person to live 100 years, making death no longer optional. She defends that the Uprising must end immortality, since “eternal life for those who can afford it means eternal control over those who can’t.” Quell’s connections to the Bible and Abraham Lincoln are also revealing. She tells Kovacs that death was the “ultimate safeguard against the darkest angels of our nature” (AC 7, “Nora Inu”), a phrase she partially borrowed from Lincoln in his inaugural speech, where he refers to the “better angels of our nature,”14 stating that “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature” (1991), an exhortation to life in harmony and egalitarianism, unlike the selfish, narcissistic society in Altered Carbon. The reference to the Biblical Enoch is also meaningful. It appears in Episode 7, where Kovacs is seen writing a poem in Quell’s diary, above which is visible the following passage from Genesis 5:23: “And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years.” Not only did Enoch, Methuselah’s father according to the Old Testament, live for three hundred and sixty-five years, but he never died, according to some interpretations of Genesis, for he was taken by God and entered Heaven alive: Enoch “walked with God: and he was no more; for God took him” (Genesis 5: 21–24).15 Quell can be described as the “mother” of the New Methuselahs in Altered Carbon, a sit- uation she now regrets and wishes to change with the Acheron program.16 Quell’s vision is a lot closer to Hayles’s (1999), Braidotti’s (2006) or Vint’s (2007) beliefs in the importance of an embodied, ethical existence, rather than an indefinitely long or virtual life. For Braidotti “thinking through the body, and not in flight from it, means confronting boundaries and limitations and living with and through pain” (2006, p. 216). Jeff Noonan, in related vein, argues that the limits to our existence and to the realization of all desires, which he calls “frames of finitude” (2018, p. xii), are actually fundamental to the “good it is possible to realize in life” (p. xii), a view Quell would certainly endorse. It is against this vision that the transhumanists defend the concept of a potentially immortal posthuman being, like the Meths in Altered Carbon. Conclusion Altered Carbon is centrally about death and identity. It taps into the widespread human desire to avoid dying, given added impetus by biotech- 100 Sleeves nological breakthroughs. It also crucially addresses questions of distributive justice and access to the resleeving and cloning technology, which allows only the Meths to pay for an almost endless life in an identical, younger body. For the others, the sleeve they are assigned after death basically depends on what is available, without consideration to matching sex or age. This is far from a utopian posthuman, transhumanist scenario of an egalitarian, highly advanced society, but one with appalling inequalities. Altered Carbon is then a cautionary tale about fair access to medical technologies and the desirability of almost indefinite life extension, as well as whether building cloned bodies to have at one’s disposal could ever be legal and ethical. For philosopher and transhumanist John G. Messerly, death should be optional (2014), a state of affairs basically achieved in Altered Carbon, even though society is profoundly asymmetrical. Messerly argues that eliminating death is “perhaps the fundamental imperative for our species” (2013, p. 241). The huge social impact of such a massive paradigm change is hard to envisage. The way it was implemented leaves a lot to be desired in the future world of Altered Carbon, which can serve as a forewarning to ensure that future med- ical advances will be introduced and implemented gradually and justly. Altered Carbon also implicitly addresses the philosophical idea of free- dom. I would argue that there can be no complete freedom without immor- tality, freedom from death, or at least the prospect of a very long life span. There exists a fundamental contradiction in the belief in human freedom, or at least a measure of human freedom, and the unavoidable limit which is imposed on human life, that is, death. In that sense, human beings can never be totally free because their lives are always already curtailed by death. Free- dom is the will to live, and it is also the freedom to choose to die, but there is no freedom to carry on living if you wish to postpone death beyond what medical science can now achieve, and it is precisely that unfreedom that goes against the traditional philosophical concept of freedom and removes the possibility of a wholly fulfilled life, a point also made by Messerly who states that “death eradicates the possibility of complete meaning for individuals,” while also maintaining, as I have argued, that “only if we can choose whether to live or die are we really free” (2013, p. 241). As suggested at the beginning, Altered Carbon can be placed alongside a substantial list of recent films, television series and fiction that address the perennial fantasy of a longer life, achieved with recourse to medical advances, whose sizeable number is strongly indicative of the increased attention and visibility of this ambition, fueled by a genetic, medical imaginary. The cloned bodies in Altered Carbon, peacefully waiting to be awakened from their cryo- genic, suspended animation are quickly becoming cultural, bioethical icons, with their heightened promise of continuity and infinitely longer, healthier lifespans. After all, provided all bioethical advice and care is followed through,  Biopolitics (Ferreira) 101 why not? These fantasies are only anticipating and engaging with the multiple facets and ramifications of a future where death no longer rules and Altered Carbon constitutes an integral part of in this thought-provoking conversa- tion. NOTES 1. An early example of a novel in which the brain of a person can be duplicated and stored as a backup in a “restoration bank,” so that that person can then be restored when they die is Altered Ego (1954) by Jerry Sohl, a novelist and scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek and other shows. In the event of death, their biological body is healed and rejuvenated, with their mind and memories restored to the last moment when they had a backup. The hope is that eventually technological advances will enable a person’s “brain record” or duplicate to be installed in a different body. Another version of this scenario is also present in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956), where memories are trans- ferred to new bodies. Recent versions of this scientific imaginary where dead bodies are brought back to life or their consciousness is transferred into cloned bodies include Lois McMaster Bujold’s Mirror Dance (1994) where the brains of the very wealthy are transferred to cloned bodies which allow them start again, as in Altered Carbon. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, in turn, provides an interesting counterpart to the world in Altered Carbon since it portrays a society in the far future of very long-lived people, where death is an option. In Banks’s Feersum End- jinn (1995), for instance, the minds of the citizens are uploaded into a computer network, a procedure that enables them to be reincarnated. Unlike in Altered Carbon, however, they appear to lead fulfilled lives in an egalitarian, post-scarcity society, described by Banks (1994) as space socialism, unlike Altered Carbon, which seems to be predicated on rampant capi- talism exacerbated by environmental decay and ecocide, probably due to global warming. Indeed the ethical and moral questions surrounding who has access to the better bodies (“sleeves”) permeate Altered Carbon. Jenna Black’s Replica (2013) is another representative instance of this trope. In Black’s novel, in a future dystopian society, a very sophisticated AI program has developed the skills to replicate people, so that a Replica can be created in a few hours when the original dies. The AI, called Thea, is now working on creating backups of a person’s brain separate from the body, a feat which has been eluding it. However, if Thea manages to develop that tech- nology, then “she can create the Replica of a human mind in any body she wants” (2013, 329). Jessica Chiarella’s And Again: A Novel (2016) dramatizes the trials and tribulations of waking up in a new cloned body and memory transfer after life-threatening diseases, being granted a second chance at life. 2. This fantasy has also been abundantly addressed in filmic representations, such as Roger Spottiswood’s The 6th Day (2000), where consciousness can be downloaded through the optic nerves and transferred to cloned bodies. In Damir Lukacevic’s Transfer (Germany, 2010), an elderly couple arranges to have their minds transferred into the young bodies of two African-Americans paid to go through this metamorphosis. The latter, however, can regain their own consciousness for a few hours every night. An interesting comparison could be established here with an episode of The Twilight Zone “The Trade-Ins” (Season 3, Episode 31, 1962), where an elderly couple is also offered the possibility of trading their bodies for younger models. Questions of identity, romantic love, distributive justice and human rights are at the core of the movie Get Out (Jordan Peele; 2017), which can be watched as a companion film to Lukacevic’s Transfer. Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous (2015) is another instance of the trope of having a person’s consciousness transferred to a new, cloned body. In this case, however, the technology is still at the experimental stage and the transfer does not work out as planned. In John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (U.S., 1966) a man is given a new body and a new chance of life. Tarsem Singh’s Self/less (2015) provides a related instantiation of this topic, where a wealthy man near death is given the chance to have his consciousness transferred to another, 102 Sleeves genetically engineered body, through a medical procedure named “shredding,” with unpre- dictable consequences. In Transferts (TV series, France, 2017–), in turn, a man who was in a coma for five years has his mind transferred to the body of another man, thanks to new technology that, despite being illegal, is used by wealthy and influential people to prolong their lives or their loved ones.’ Ironically, however, his new body belonged to an officer of the BATI, the unit that fought against transfers. Significantly, in both Transferts and Altered Carbon there are effusive demonstrations against bringing back the dead. In the latter, demon- strators outside the Bay Area prison hold banners stating “Spirits not Sleeves,” “No resleeving,” telling the resleeved people “Shouldn’t have come back!,” shouting “Justice! Let the dead speak!,” and calling for Resolution 653 to be passed. Analogously, in Jeffrey Nachmanoff ’s Replicas (U.S., 2018), a neuroscientist who has been working on neural transfer to an android, devastated by the loss of his family in a car accident, decides to try and bring them back with recourse to copies of their neural maps and new cloned bodies, grown in seventeen days, that would replace their dead ones. 3. A whole body transplant, or transferring the contents of the brain to a different body, are other variants on this persistent dream of a longer life and/or immortality. 4. While Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) portrays Mr. Hyde as a younger, more energetic and alive version of Dr. Jekyll, albeit uncannily repulsive, H.G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham” (1896) and Kureishi’s The Body (2002) more specifically describe the fantasy of moving into a younger body, articulating a desire for a reversal of time, of rejuvenation. 5. In the novel she is in her eleventh body (p. 49). 6. See Huberman’s (2018) discussion of digital immortality with recourse to mind cloning. 7. The term decanting is also used in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to refer to the process of “birth,” where the clone babies are extracted from their “bottles.” 8. In the novel they are described as having bullet-proof, impact resistant lining (286). 9. As for the Catholics in Altered Carbon, Dickson (2018) ponders to what extent “Can, or should, Christians endorse pursuing the sorts of technologies that are proposed by tran- shumanists” (99); in his view, “from a traditional Christian perspective, the value of a human life does not depend on its length” (100). 10. In this particular context Altered Carbon can be aptly compared with another Amer- ican TV series, Westworld, where the guests in a kind of theme park can do what they please, including killing the hosts, since they are androids whose memories are erased every day so that they can start anew the following day. 11. The symbol of the Uoroborus that appears during the credits, a snake biting its tongue, may suggest that the end is a new beginning. 12. Some of these issues are addressed in the recent Australian TV series Glitch (2015– ), where a group of people inexplicably rise from their tombs, seemingly healthy, even though some have been dead for decades or even centuries. 13. Zoltan Istvan, who ran for president of the U.S. in 2016, also believes that as much money as possible should be channeled to extend life and find cures for diseases. 14. 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