SOLVED. Dystopian Sci Fi Noir - Topics include, Cloning, Mind backup, Mind altering, Future Technologies, Division of class. [s]

[James]

Set in the future where cloning is common place, people back themselves up in cloning facilities and when they die (if their body is discovered) they are brought back from their most recent backup. There is a strong anti-cloning religious movement that is happening during this time.

The main character in an assassin, in a world where death is now meaningless murder is used as a form of humiliation or inconvenience. The main character use to be a mind hacker, editing peoples memories or changing their opinions. She is hired by a wealthy benefactor on retainer to perform certain duties.

Read between the years 2013-2017

What follows is my memory of part of the plot.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

(view spoiler)[ Book plot is as follow, the main character works as an assassin but previously worked as a dna or mind hacker. Editing peoples opinions or decisions In this book she is hired to kill someone at a party. With the rise in cloning, death is just an inconvenience and assassination is used as a means to humiliate people. After the main characters target talks to her before she is killed at a party the main character is hired by the person she is sent to kill.

The main character lives in a reasonably dilapidated apartment but inside she has it made up extremely well, her logic is that no one is going to break in if it looks like she doesn’t have much.

Her new employer was one of the original people who advocated cloning wants the main character to change her husband (who does not want to be cloned and wants to live a natural life but is dying of some disease or another) ’s mind (this is now illegal in this world).

Jump forward and the main character wakes up with no memory of how she got back to her cloning facility in a new body. Her body turned up dead somewhere and the facility she kept her back up in put her into a new body. This happens a few times and she is beginning to get suspicious of this.

While she is kidnapped she is forced to experiment on someone in order to turn a man against his own point of view (he is a religious and very anti cloning advocate), they constantly kill him then bring him back as a clone as a means of changing his mind, when this doesn’t work they involve the main character, she realises her captors are going to kill her again and she will wake up in the cloning facility with no memory of these events its at this point that she codes an AI and encodes it into her own dna with a trigger set to fire when she thinks of her grandmother or aunt or something of the sort.

Turns out the main character's boss is actually a bad guy and has been killing her off periodically after she commits various crimes for her.

Not sure if this is form the same book but I think at one point there is a plot featuring a man who is cloned and has his mind split into two bodies. One kind quiet guy and the other a serial killer. He is reintegrated into one body and is driven slightly mad by this. This may also include a subplot involving a policeman but I may be wrong. (hide spoiler)]

And that's all I have.

[Bargle]

Aaarrrgghhh! I know I've read this one in the last couple of years and I apparently either mis-shelved or forgot to catalogue it 'cause it's not in my SF shelf.

I think someone asked about it before, so it's somewhere in the group bookshelf.

[Kris]

James, what type of duties does the female assassin perform for the wealthy benefactor? Who is her benefactor? (Thanks for the spoiler alert.)

What's the location?

Female or male author?

[Bargle]

Here we go. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty.

Note to self: correct answer.

[James]

Hey Bargle, thats it! Awesome, thanks!

I was rembering part of the subplot rather than the main story. Misremembering the space travel part definitely threw me off!

[Bargle]

You're welcome.