Thus, while people can live indefinitely in theory, most choose not to. While most people can afford to get resleeved at the end of their lives, they are unable to update their bodies and most go through the full aging process each time, which discourages most from resleeving more than once or twice.

Dual-sleeving, or controlling two bodies with one personality, is strictly prohibited by U.N. This proposition reverses precedent and would allow authorities to temporarily re-sleeve a deceased Catholic woman to testify in a murder trial. At the start of the novel, UN Resolution 653 is being debated. This makes Catholics easy targets for murder, since killers know their victim may not be re-sleeved to testify. Roman Catholics do not allow their stacks to be re-sleeved after death, as they believe that the soul goes to Heaven when they die, and so would not pass on to the new sleeve. Their stacks can be downloaded into new bodies, or 'sleeves', after death. If their body dies, their stack can be stored indefinitely. Most people have cortical stacks in their spinal columns that store their consciousness. In the future, humans have achieved virtual immortality.

In 2019 a graphic novel was created with Dynamite Comics. The book was adapted as a Netflix television series, also titled Altered Carbon, in 2018. It is followed by the sequels Broken Angels and Woken Furies. elite soldier turned private investigator, to investigate a rich man's death. Set in a future in which interstellar travel and relative immortality is facilitated by transferring consciousnesses between bodies ('sleeves'), it follows the attempt of Takeshi Kovacs, a former U.N. Altered Carbon is a 2002 cyberpunk novel by the English writer Richard K.

Altered carbon novel by richard morgan