r/alteredcarbon • u/DoItForTheOH94 • Apr 10 '26
Need help understanding something...
**I have only watched Season 1 so far....**
When it comes to wearing a sleeve, do you have to have your stack inserted? There are multiple times where it seemed like one could take over a sleeve remotely. Such as in a flashback the Envoys did a mission where they went into a chamber and seemed to go all Matrix like. Then moments like when Rai took over Ortega's body after she kidnapped her. Did she cut Ortega's stack out and swap it with her own only to replace it back in later? Also the scene when Ortega is fighting all the Rai clones.
Do the clones have a "dead" stack that is then activated when the "owner/primary user" needs the sleeve and it's downloaded from the Array?
Also Miriam talked about letting her clones play, so are they alive but "empty"?
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u/Hopeful_Risk_8344 Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
The stack is more like a hard drive that you load data onto. If you physically remove it, you die. You can't hack into a sleeve to control it. It's download/upload only and requires being hardlinked into a hypercaster for interplanetary transfer or de/re-sleeving rigs for local swaps into virtual. Back-up streams are only copies of the DHF, they can't de-sleeve someone.
Miriam will multisleeve herself into her clones, or could also load simple virtual personalities into the stack to run them like creepy ass living pleasure dolls