altered carbon summary part 1

So some background from the books that was butchered in the show.  You might notice how some of this made its way into the show and was utterly mangled.  You might also notice how some of the stuff in the show makes sense in the way it was originally laid out in the books, but not as it was presented in the show.  Also, long post because this is something I feel fairly strongly about, apparently.  didn't realize I had this many words for the books in me...

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First thing is that interstellar colonies are extremely slow to visit in person.  the ships that colonized worlds like harlan's world were all automated carrying DNA and machinery for creating babies from that DNA once they got to the target planet and prepared it for colonies.  The main way of getting around the colonies is by Digitized Human Freight, where your consciousness is digitized and needlecast (FTL quantum magic information transmission- the exact mechanism isn't really discussed nor is it especially cogent to the plot in any of the books) to the other planet, where it gets downloaded into a different meatsack that currently lacks an inhabitant.

The second thing is *Martians are real*.  They were real, really.  They once flourished throughout the galaxy, and then went extinct.  We found the remains of their cities and technology on Mars, including an altered form of carbon (hence the title) that enabled all kinds of wondrous nanotechnology including the cortical stack, which is a grape-sized device that is implanted at birth at the base of your skull where the brain stem and spinal cord meet, and continually creates a copy of your brain-state stored on the device.  The remains of the martian civilization gave us pointers to habitable planets, which enabled us to send out fleets of automated colonization ships to start creating interstellar colonies like Harlan's World.

Third, all human interstellar colonies are built on the ruins of Martian colonies.  Every single one.  We used their charts to find the worlds that we can live on, and it turns out they have very similar requirements for life that we do.  So technological artifacts of the Martian civilization exist on every world we have colonies on, and Harlan's World is no exception (fossilized remains however are in short supply, so we have to theorize what they looked like based on their devices and other things they left behind).  In the case of Harlan's World, the artifacts left behind are orbital platforms that vaporize anything over the altitude of about 400m above ground level.  The landing of the automated colony ships on the planet was fairly disastrous as many of them were destroyed while attempting to land, but enough got through that colonization could begin and a DHS needlecast center could be constructed removing the need to transit the orbital platform gauntlet.

Next, it's hard as heck to have in person control over the disparate colonies.  Sending someone out there in person takes hundreds of years because the laws of physics must still be obeyed.  the UN protectorate controls the colonies, but for the most part the local governments are left to self govern as long as the necessary obeisance are made and various taxes are fulfilled.  In return the UN Protectorate supports the government in power as long as they toe the line.  Sometimes this means dispatching cryogenic carriers full of troops that arrive a generation after the revolution has taken place and the old ruling party's grandchildren are now paupers on the street, which is terrible for overall stability and control.

The Envoy program was created to counter this.  Normally downloading a personality into a new body is a fairly traumatic event.  It takes people several days to adjust to the new senses and different proportions and everything else.  This can be mitigated by downloading into a clone of yourself, but for the most part that's an incredibly expensive and time consuming operation - clones take *years* to grow to a useful level of development.  Having soldiers download to a problem zone and then take several days of being pretty useless while they get used to the new bodies is a recipe for disaster.  The main training the UN Envoys went through involved improving the hell out of their integration abilities so that they can download into a new body and be ready to fight immediately. They also got intensive training in various methods of manipulation, superior mind-body control, etc to essentially turn them into super spy types.  For this reason Envoys are prohibited from holding political positions, corporate leadership positions, most leadership positions in general, and are prohibited from setting foot on Earth where the UN is headquartered (along with the main oligarchs who run the show).  This leaves very few career paths for ex-envoys, so they tend to either stay in the service as Envoys, or go into crime.

To be clear: The UN **Envoys are the UN's Bully Boys (and girls) who enforce the regime's iron boot, root out dissidence, and manufacture regime change when a local government starts acting like maybe they aren't cool with the UN Protectorate calling the shots**.  They are *not* hippy-dippy free love terrorists hiding in the woods and fighting against The Man.

Next, Quellcrist Falconer.  So about 200 years before the criminal known as Takeshi Kovacs was born, the upper-middle-class daughter of a merchant family on Harlan's World named Nadia Makita took a trip around the archipelago as is tradition for people in that class, on that world, around her 16th birthday.  The purpose of this pilgrimmage is to look around and say "boy am I lucky to be where I am today, and not one of those poor shits working the belaweed mills or butchering stinking rays at the docks".

Instead of coming to this conclusion Makita said "Holy shit, this is a terrible system and needs to be changed"

At some point after this revelation, she took on the name Quellcrist Falconer (based on a local seaweed, the quellgrist, that spread quickly by spores, and falconry which had some significance that I totally forget now), and then an armed revolution happened.  The local oligarchs headed up by the Harlan family who had initially funded the colonization expedition on one side, and the rebels lead by Quellcrist Falconer on the other.  The oligarchs liked things the way they were with them at the top and everyone else not, while the Quellists wanted things to be a little more equitable.

The war between the ruling power of Harlan's World and the Quellists went on for about a decade, in full futurewar mode.  Automated weapons platforms, DNA targeted viral attacks, all sorts of face-melting shit.  At one point the entire southern continent of Hokkaido had to be abandoned as automated war bots sought to murder _everyone_ there and couldn't be turned off.  Eventually though the Harlans tried to conceal the uprising, the UN Protectorate caught wind of it and decided that this anti-authority pro-egalitarianism movement couldn't be allowed to take control of Harlan's World and could definitely not be allowed to spread to other worlds, and they started sending in lots of support to bolster the Oligarch forces there, and they started winning battles.

When the Quellists were forced back to their last stronghold, Quell and her personal jetchopper pilot attempted to escape, when they flew too high and got blasted by a martian orbital platform, being deleted from existence.  Without Quell, the insurrection was finished and the Oligarchs quickly put things back to the way they were.  That's not the end of the story of Quell though- enough Quellists escaped the death squads and got off planet that the Quellist movement was able to spread and continues to pop up throughout the Protectorate but has not been especially successful in taking as strong a hold as it did on Harlan's World.  It does continue to be a thorn in the side of the UN Protectorate however.

So Takeshi Kovacs.  His name might sound kind of funny; this is because the first wave of colonists to Harlan's World were mainly Japanese and Czech.  Some cultural blending later, you have a guy with a Japanese first name, and a Czech surname.  He was the only child of a poor-ass Belaweed mill worker (belaweed being a local sea weed that can be processed into a fairly silky textile), who quickly ended up in gangs and crime at large.  One heist gone wrong later, he was given the choice between being digitally stored for about a hundred years, and thus severing any family and friend connections, or joining the UN Marines.  Kovacs chose the latter, where on induction it was found he fit the profile for the UN Envoy Corps to a T, and was given the chance to join.  As expected, Kovacs lept at the chance for power and respect, and went through training.  After this over the course of about 120 years objective time (or about 20 subjective) he was deployed covertly and less covertly to multiple hotspots and war zones to deploy a little regime change here a little dissident assassination there, and some outright enforcing the will of the UN Protectorate as a zen super soldier against the Sharyan zealots of the planet Sharya, where the Rawling 4851 virus was deployed, decimating the forces on both sides with unrecoverable Real Death.

You have to understand that when you're basically immortal with government-guaranteed resleeving into new top-of-the-line bodies, the possibility that you'll really die and never open someone else's eyes again is a _terrifying_ thought.  The Rawling Virus didn't just destroy minds, it also got into your stack and scrambled that too.  If you managed to not go mad from the virus in your brain, you'd still be a dead man walking because you could never be downloaded into a new body.  At best you'd be stuck on the same shithole world with one life to live, at worst you'd be really dead.  It was bad juju and something that the elite UN shock troops should have been prepared for, but they weren't.

In the fallout, the commander of the UN forces on the scene took no responsibility for the multitude of Real Deaths that occurred under his watch, and a (conveniently dead) scapegoat was established.  Later however, the General was assassinated, presumably by a disgruntled soldier (heavily implied to be Kovacs, but he's not the most reliable narrator and it might have been someone else- the general had no shortage of people who wanted him to also be really dead), and Kovacs left the Envoy Corps, his term finished several times over, for a life as a civillian.

From this, he returned to a hedonistic life of crime as there was really nothing else open to him.  Along the way he did work for yakuza boss Reileen "Rei" Kawahara.  Kawahara was not related to Takeshi in any way.  She started out as a Water Carrier for a yakuza underboss outside of Fusion City (on another world I can't remember the name of - maybe earth?).  Water Carriers carried around a shielded flask of irradiated reactor coolant water for their boss, who would make deadbeats consume some of it to drive home the importance of paying off their debts before the reversible cancer from the liquid radiation that they just consumed killed them.   It was a brutal, heartless job and Reileen liked it that way.

Anyhow, Takeshi Kovacs is a long-lived motherhecker and relatively wealthy thanks to his Envoy training working really well in pursuit of crime, so over the course of another hundred years or so he winds up back home at Harlan's World where he meets Sarah Sachowski and they go on a huge crime spree that is eventually stopped by elite tactical police squads with prejudice, basically as shown in the tv show.  Kovacs and Sachowski are sentenced to several hundred years on ice each and that's that.

Eventually being the brutal heartless bitch she is, Reileen Kawahara climbed the ranks of the Yakuza and eventually managed to start making appearances in the most rarefied strata of society, with the autocrats and oligarchs who run the show from Earth.  This means that she is a) mind bogglingly rich, b) mind bogglingly powerful and c) mind bogglingly influential.  She was able to use this influence to first, obtain the mind of Kovacs beloved Sarah Sachowski and have it transferred to her possession on Earth from its incarceration on Harlan's World (not cheap at all) and second she was able to influence her good friend and eternal oligarch Laurens Bancroft to have him bring in her pet Envoy Assassin from offworld incarceration as well (which is even more expensive and requiring even more influence because Envoys are scary, scary motherheckers to anyone with a sliver of power).

  There's even more, but I think I'm running out of room, so I'm just going to cut it off here.

I should really get down to reading the Witcher books so I can be similarly bitchy about the netflix adaption of the witcher as well.