Real death

"Real death" is a term used in some science fiction stories where a character who has died may be resurrected in some way. "Real death" precludes resurrection. Terms such as "permanent death" are also used.

The term was probably first used in Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. A certain technology allowed the essence, or "atman" of a person to be transferred to a new body, usually from an older or dying body. In this fashion anyone, not just those calling themselves "gods", could enjoy serial immortality, as long as their current body did not perish before the transfer could be effected. Some ascetics decide, for religious reasons, to give up the possibility of reincarnation, and adopt "the Way of the Real Death".

In The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley a kind of resurrection was possible using brain recording and cloning. If a person died, their last recording could be downloaded into a fresh clone of them, allowing a version of that person to continue to exist. Philosophically this would not be the "same person", especially as there would be no continuity of consciousness, but the characters regarded it as better than having only one life. In this society, crimes above a certain level, such as simple assault, were punished by "death with immediate reprieve", meaning that the current version of the person would be killed, and an earlier version from before the commission of the crime would be woken up, and then subjected to treatment to make sure that no such crime would be committed. For particularly heinous crimes - possession of nuclear explosives, experimenting on human DNA - the penalty is permanent death, with all copies of the person's brain erased, and his or her DNA code declared outlaw. In a society where DNA sampling is routine and used in place of passports and credit cards, this is an effective way of eliminating all copies of that person, even ones without the criminal personality. Later in the novel it becomes clear that, viewed four-dimensionally, all the versions of one person do form parts of a greater whole, and in the right circumstances may share a single awareness.

In the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, consciousness is something that can be digitized and downloaded into any body, thanks to a hardware insert called a "cortical stack". This can contain a "mind" and reflect that mind as it operates in the body's brain. The stack contents can then be uploaded to a virtual world, stored as a recording, transmitted to a new location in another star system, etc. Real death in this context comes from destroying the cortical stack in a body, assuming that there are no backup copies. People with enough money can "back up" their stack to a remote store on a regular basis, usually every day or so.

Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy trilogy revolve largely around the concept that a consciousness (the sum of a person's memories) is somehow transferred to a separate dimensional plane upon death. Though a series of unlikey events involving a murder and exploring extra-dimensional alien consciousness a conduit between this plane and the material world is established though which the dead can return to possess the bodies of the living, and in turn create more conduits to possess more people. One weapon developed to combat the spreading interstellar threat posed by the possessed was a "anti memory" weapon, that would permanently erase all the target's memories and thus also erase the person's consciousness completely from existence resulting in the real death of the target. It never saw widespread use though, intended mostly as a way to get rid of particularly dangerous individuals who would otherwise just come back if their host body was merely killed.