avatar – Page 3 – A Piece, of the Sky

Altered Carbon (the Japanese version) posits something not seen before: the complete division of the mind and the body – which seems to also be the secret to immortality.

In Ghost in the Shell – except for a few individuals, like Major Motoko, with full cyborg bodies (shells) – most people in the world still have their own bodies and souls (Ghosts). Only their brains are enhanced by being cyberized, like having a powerful digital and electronic prosthetic, for the brain. You don’t need AI, if you can just use the creative benefits of a natural brain.

A cyberbrain is nowhere near as transferable as a stack – which is like the Ghost, of Altered Carbon: it holds the memories, the consciousness, the personality and the mind of the person.

In Altered Carbon, the stack – the soul, the Ghost, or the mind – is the only true marker of life. If the stack dies, only then does the person die – not when the body dies i.e. so-called “true death.” Isn’t a great deal of self-hood and identity tied to the body? Life isn’t an online role-playing game, where you can just change your avatar’s skin. Altered Carbon posits that the mind can live on, without the body, stored in the cloud or uploaded to a new sleeve (body), but what kind of existence would that be? I am not for or against; it is just a possible downside.

Have we already reached the limit of the body’s aging capacity, at 120 years or so? The rush to give up on the body has been at the heart of most major religions, for centuries. Only in the digital age can this neo-Platonic era desire finally inch closer to becoming a reality.

Regardless, Altered Carbon hypothesizes that immortality can be found in something medicine definitely cannot do yet: transplanting the brain from body to body, like a liver, a kidney or a heart.

The brain, in addition to the usually problems of genetic distance and immune rejection, has its own special considerations with the blood brain barrier and other central nervous tissues, such as the retina, the spinal cord and the cranial nerves, traveling the length of the body, and being decentralized throughout the body, not just confined to the head.

The brain in the vat experiment remains a figment of philosophy (Rene Descartes) – but since Source Code, and James Cameron’s Avatar, there hasn’t been a major fictional example of this thought experiment, until Altered Carbon: Resleeved.

If all of your consciousness gets uploaded to the cloud, why does destroying or damaging the stack equal “true death”? Memories must be the only thing in the cloud then, and the key essence of the person, his or her animating principle (soul) must only be able to be housed on the stack, not in the cloud or elsewhere.

Where Ghost in the Shell succeeds is that it deals with the philosophical, and digital problems of a cybernetic life – false memories, people with two ghosts, one ghost with multiple bodies, ghost or cyberbrain hacking, hive minds over the Internet, viruses and worms (like Stuxnet) and military networks. Altered Carbon’s plot seems to only deal with the usual quandaries of organized crime and powerful conglomerates.

If your only choice was to die forever or be uploaded to the cloud and have a chance at being plugged into a new body, even a cyborg body, of course one would choose reanimation. However, living completely on the cloud (San Junipero), existing as a hologram or in a video game, without a body – as a young, healthy person – is definitely not the first choice or ideal.

Look at Al, in Fullmetal Alchemist: he is stuck in the spirit world, beside the Gate, and he is like the steampunk version of having your soul stuck in the cloud. Yes, Al’s consciousness, in the physical world, is bonded to a suit of armor – a cyborg – but he desperately wants to get back to his real body. Such natural concerns cannot be so easily overcome.

Gravity’s Rainbow called organized religion the process of getting other people to die for you. Q: What would make a bunch of soldiers willing to die? A: The promise of being re-sleeved, of getting new bodies, from the spirit world or “heaven” – the cloud. Neoplatonic ideas, from the tail end of the Roman Empire and right after its demise, get a new life in cyberpunk probable future realities.

Usually these promises, of returning back from the dead, end with people coming back wrong – see, for example, the marionette army, animated by damaged souls, reaped by dark alchemy, in Fullmetal Alchemist – or the usual myths of vampires and zombies. The immortality potion, which creates zombies, in Kingdom, is another example. The myth of the undead super-soldier is not without major flaws.

Alli met Jeff on a bustling, hot, sticky night in New York, at the Blue Fin restaurant in Times Square. She was eating a few bar peanuts before Jeff arrived. Jeff was a djinn, specifically an afrit.

No one would have been able to tell, unless they were looking for the signs: the deep, ruddy color of Jeff’s tawny hair, the slight, maroon shade in his otherwise brown eyes. On closer inspection, his fingernails tapered into sharper points, than normal, and his teeth, beyond the front ones, seemed to be all canines.

Alli knew these details already and rose up to hug him, when he appeared, like a whirlwind coming through the door, all swirling overcoat and long, dark blue scarf.

“You look just like Aro said you would,” Alli exclaimed, “You look great!”

“So do you,” Jeff, the afrit, answered humbly, “It’s an honor to be able to meet the new Sky Avatar.”

Embarrassed, Alli waved the compliment off, “What are you having?”

They ordered a large set of California rolls to share, and a couple of glasses of Chablis.

“Where have you been recently?” Alli asked, before using the chopsticks to pop a sushi piece, with avocado, into her mouth.

“I am staying in the Yale Club, not too far from here,” Jeff mused, dipping his roll, in a minute dish of soy sauce, “You are right: I do look windswept. I have been jumping all over the Near East – Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Dubai, the Empty Quarter – what one might call ‘the Bible Lands.’ Old World deserts.”

“Your passport must have a ton of stamps on it,” Alli observed, as she dipped her roll in the smidgeon dash of wasabi, on her plate.

“Yes, I am originally from Bristol,” Jeff explained, “but I’ve bounced around for most of my life: India, Tanzania, you name it.”

“‘Jeff’ isn’t your real name, is it?” Alli commiserated, in a lower voice.

“No,” he confided, picking up a delicate sliver of sashimi, “The moment before a djinn is born, The One whispers his or her true name into one ear.”

“No one else can know that name, except trusted folks, because that name, can be used to bind you, correct?” Alli whispered.

Jeff nodded, eating another roll. He chewed thoughtfully and then continued, “Humans don’t know their true name, which, to me, is rather dangerous. Someone could call you and you would come hither, and you wouldn’t even know that you were being called.”

“It’s quite odd, indeed,” Alli agreed, “Aro says now that I know I am an Atevar, my true name will come back to me.”

“Yes, it will,” Jeff seconded, “and when it does – I can’t be too dramatic on this – guard it with your life.”

“Naming takes on a whole new importance, doesn’t it?” Alli looked up.

“Djinn have half a dozen different names at any given time. For example, ‘Jeff’ is the name only you will call me by, the moniker only you will know me by,” Jeff further explicated, “This is not a slight; it can happen even with long-running relationships. Did Aro tell you the real reason I am moving around so much?”

“No,” Alli shook her head.

“My ‘Reginald’ up and left, late last year. Just left,” Jeff growled, “The engagement didn’t matter or anything.”

“I’m sorry,” Alli murmured, taken aback. She set her chopsticks down.

“Don’t be, don’t be,” Jeff squeezed her shoulder, “‘Reginald,’ huh? Not ‘Reggie,’ just ‘Reginald.’ Very stiff, isn’t it? I should have known from the start.” He smiled, despite himself.

Alli turned around, on her stool, facing him front-on, “I recently broke up with someone too, someone who reminded me of an old flame, who was never coming back. I have grieved and mourned on my own, tried to not let my new girlfriend, Page, see.”

Jeff gave a rueful smirk, “We’re not too different, you and me? Aren’t you glad Aro introduced us?”

They raised their glasses and clinked them. Beyond the crowded restaurant and the storefront glass, taxi cabs whizzed by in the blue evening, throwing up jets of water, torn from puddles, left by the afternoon rain.