whether or not he should have a new human body. In Charles Platt's novel The Silicon Man (1997), an FBI agent who has stumbled on a top-secret project called LifeScan is destructively uploaded against his will. Realistically describes the constraints of the process and machinery. Tad Williams's Otherland series (1998–2002) concerns the activities of a secret society whose goals include creating a virtual reality network where they will be uploaded and in which they will live as gods. Otherland contains a very hard SF approach to the topic, but balances the hard approach with fantastical adventures of the protagonists within the virtual reality network. Gene Wolfe's trilogy The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001) features an old generation starship called the Whorl which is run by a group of uploaded rulers who have set themselves up as gods. Once the Whorl arrives at a star system with habitable planets, they send giant "godlings" to the humans on board to encourage them to depart the ship. In Abduction (2000) by Robin Cook, a group of researchers discover an underwater civilization which achieved immortality by transferring their minds into cloned bodies. In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe (2000–), a complete and functioning copy of the mind is described as an alpha-level simulation while a non-sentient copy of the mind based on predictive behavioural pattern of a person's mind is described as a beta-level simulation. In Eater (2000) by Gregory Benford, mind-uploading (or consciousness-uploading) is a "demand" of the major antagonist, which is a "magnetic intelligence" (composed of similarly encoded minds) anchored on the event horizon of a black hole. The major character's wife, who is dying of cancer, has her consciousness uploaded into a computer and mounts an attack on the entity, achieving a type of immortality in the process. Kiln People (2002) by David Brin postulates a future where people can create clay duplicates of themselves with all their memories up to that time. The duplicates only last 24 hours, and the original can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories back into himself afterward. Most people use dittos to do their work. Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon (2002) and other Takeshi Kovacs books, where everyone has a "cortical stack" implanted at the base of their skull, soon after being born. The device then records all your memories and experiences in real-time. The stack can be "resleeved" in