An Easy Guide to Altered Carbon’s Confusing Terminology
https://screenrant.com/altered-carbon-terminology-guide-glossary/
653 - A proposition that would allow murder victims to be spun up so they can testify against their killers, even if they have Neo-C coding.
Aerium - A city in the sky, where Meths live.
Construct - A virtual environment.
CTAC - Colonial Tactical Assault Corp. A Protectorate force who needlecast into many different sleeves on many different worlds.
DHF - Digital Human Freight. The code that makes up a person’s consciousness β usually stored on a stack.
Dipper - A hacker, specializing in hacking DHF code and stealing memories.
Elders - An extinct alien race.
Envoy - An elite rebel soldier with heightened intuition, senses and reflexes.
Grounders - People who live on the ground, as opposed to the Meths who inhabit Aerium.
Meth - Someone who has achieved immortality by amassing clones and back-ups of their mind. Named after the Biblical figure Methusaleh, who was said to have lived for 969 years.
Multi-sleeve - To have one’s DHF in multiple bodies at once. This is illegal.
Needlecast - To transfer DHF code remotely from one body to another.
Neo-C - Neo-Catholicism. A religion that holds the belief that humans should not be brought back to life after death.
Neo-C coding - Religious coding in a person’s DHF that indicates they do not consent to be placed in a new body upon death. Effectively a βDo Not Resuscitateβ order.
Organic damage - Damage to a sleeve, which is viewed more like property damage than real harm.
Portable 3D Bio Organic Printer - A machine for printing clones.
Protectorate - The military force of the UN, which maintains order across all the Settled Worlds.
Psychosurgery - A method of repairing DHF that has been damaged by emotional trauma.
Real death - The destruction of a stack, resulting in the obliteration of a person’s consciousness.
Reaper - A drug that can be used in small doses to lower body temperature and dampen emotion, or in high doses to kill.
Resleeving - Putting a stack in a new sleeve.
Settled Worlds - Human-inhabited planets
Simulspace - Virtual reality.
Sleeve - A body.
Sleeve death - When a body is killed, but the stack survives.
Songspire - An alien tree with hanging blue ornaments β a relic of the Elders. No one really knows what they are, but they’re pretty and they make nice sounds.
Spin up - Temporarily put a stack into a new sleeve β for the purposes of questioning, or just to spend time with the person.
Stack - A disk upon which a person’s consciousness is stored. Implanted in everyone when they are a year old.
Stronghold - The home base of the Envoys.
Synthetic sleeve - A silicone-based body that looks perfectly human, but can be enhanced with different abilities.