The story which is based on the book by Richard K. Morgan set in a future where our minds are stored on “stacks”, a kind of discs that live in the back of our necks and constantly backs up our memories and consciousness. It’s a development that turns bodies into mere “sleeves” and so a traditional death just means movement from one bag of flesh to the next. You can travel to other places by copying your stack into a new stack somewhere else, like transferring a file over the Internet.
In this society the wealthiest people are hundreds of years old and they are redundantly backed up. Death is no longer permanent. So actually the idea is that no matter the economic or political system you live under, there will always be those ruthless enough to accumulate as much power and wealth as possible. No matter how many years we spend on this planet or how advanced we can be, there are some things in life that are difficult to change. In the future anyone can potentially be resleeved as some other identity entirely. A man comes back in the sleeve of a woman at one point.
Set 300 years into the future, a time when the human consciousness can be transferred from one body to another. Takeshi Kovacs is a violent mercenary and an accused terrorist, who wakes up 300 years after his sleeve is killed to find the world a very different place and himself in a very different body. He was freed from prison by Laurens Bancroft who wants him to find who killed his previous body.
It is one of the good shows I watched this year. Futuristic, slightly sexually-charged and ambitious show. You can torture someone to death over and over and over again and still keep asking them questions. You can buy the most expensive and beautiful sleeve to put your wife's consciousness in it etc... So I will let you watch the rest for yourself :)
