Virtual Ghost: Difference between revisions

* Jor-El in recent [[Superman]] titles, riffing off [[The Movie]] and ''[[Smallville]]''.

* ''[[Transmetropolitan]]'' has its usual unique take on this with foglets. When a person goes foglet tiny nanomachines eat his body for the energy to scan and download his brain. When it's done, the person is for all intents and purposes a ghost -- floating through the air, making himself visible or invisible at will, and performing spooky miracles by reassembling matter at the molecular level. Though society in general doesn't think of it as death, Channon does:

* The [[Crazy Prepared|Batman-like]] version of The Black Terror featured in ''[[Tom Strong]]'' and its spinoff ''Terra Obscura'' had created one of these before his death. Once activated, Terror 2000 manifests as a hologram projected from a swarm of floating golf ball-sized machines.

 

* A future human society in [[Stephen Baxter]]'s ''[[Manifold Space]]'' makes use of "limited-sentience projections" as messengers. Initially Nemoto appears several times via more ordinary holographic telepresence, making for an unexpected [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]] moment when another character asks the projection what exactly it is; Virtual Nemoto explains and then looks horrified before dissolving into light.

* The fairly transhumanist novel ''Newton's Wake'' has virtual ghosts as self-aware beings who happen to be susceptible to the same kinds of access restrictions and file system commands as regular bunches of data. Some characters treat owning and utilizing virtual ghosts as slavery. Others test the defenses of computer systems by throwing copies of ghosts at them.

* Calvin Sylveste in Alastair Reynolds' ''[[Revelation Space]]'' (and also, to some extent {{spoiler|Sun Stealer and the Mademoiselle}}).

* In Richard K. Morgan's ''Altered Carbon'' series, each person receives a "cortical stack" at birth that basically runs as a RAID 1 array in that person's brain. If anything happens to your body, your stack can be installed in a new body or copied to disk and allowed to roam the 'nets -- but only as long as someone's willing to pay to keep your disk image mounted. One major subplot in the first novel involves the common practice of allowing the dead to testify in homicide investigations -- just load the victim's stack and ask him or her who killed their body.