Eight hours of jet-lag will do strange and spectral things to you – it’s not enough to wipe you out, but it haunts you just the same. You’ll find yourself, for example, wandering amidst late afternoon crowds but feeling like a man adrift in a city full of ghosts. Or perhaps, judging by the general sense of disconnect in your head, you’re the ghost around here and everyone else is just getting on with their lives. In either case, you don’t quite trust this bright winter sky overhead or the busy streets around you. They feel too much like a facade, hiding the night-time gloom and stillness your body clock insists is real. Big, unlooked-for waves of tiredness come racing up out of nowhere to find you, smack you in the head, leave you swaying, barely on your feet.

Where was I again? What time is it?

You find yourself, like some zombie apocalypse survivor, diving into the utterly still waters of a deserted hotel swimming pool at some insane pre-dawn hour because you just can’t fucking sleep, and the noise you make as you shatter the surface seems to violate the quiet like a ram-raid.

Then, in roughly this state of mind, you get taken on a week-long tour of your wildest dreams come true.

*

Altered Carbon was optioned for feature film development in 2002, more or less at the same moment it was published. In my then-state of innocence, I blithely assumed said feature film would hit the screens in, well, – y’know, the next year and a half, say. The next two to three years at the very outside – right?

I’ve been waiting ever since.

My blithe confidence evaporated long ago, became at first a more gritted kind of waiting, then the slow, resigned seep of disappointment. Then, as the option for Altered Carbon changed hands, a sudden fresh hope lit up inside me – followed by another five years of that same gritted waiting renewed. Over periods of time like that, you get used to the idea that it’s never going to happen. So when I finally took the confirmation call from Laeta Kalogridis and she told me Hell, Yes, it’s going to happen, the fact of that happening still felt, at some fundamental level, unreal.

At the end of February last year, a single week in Vancouver blew that feeling out of the water with Bikini Atoll force. Because that week I stood on cracked grey asphalt between big white movie production trailers, and I met Takeshi Kovacs in the flesh.

He looked pretty good, all things considered.

Younger than I’d imagined he’d be, and not as scarred. But he had the same blunt bulk in chest and shoulders, the same height and casual physicality, the same damaged stare. We had a chat about that, the damage, and both seemed to agree that it was axiomatic to who he was. Later on that week, I watched him kick the shit out of various hardened types, face down a roomful of weirdo Meths, and fall into the arms of a femme fatale. I watched him inhabit the sleeve of one Joel Kinnaman and make himself completely at home. Or wait – was that the other way around?

*

Jet-lag nothing – this, this was fucking unreal.

*

I met Kristin Ortega, I met Miriam Bancroft, both within about thirty seconds of each other. I met Quellcrist Falconer, albeit only for a snack lunch under canvas, eaten out of polystyrene containers with plastic forks. We talked about resistance, and how the slightest failure to comply on the part of the oppressed will always be read as aggression by the oppressor. We talked about some of the things she might wear in her hair. Later on, I watched Kristin Ortega wake up, check a tracking device and get herself a coffee – about seven or eight times, not including rehearsals, and her waking weariness was a spot-on pitch perfect performance of the real thing every single time. (A couple of days on, Martha Higareda doubled down on this laser-precise intensity and put genuine tears in my eyes with one particular scene that’s a quiet meditation on family and passing time and loss – you’ll know it when you see it). Later still, I watched and heard Miriam Bancroft speaking words to camera that I had written down for her some time back before the end of the twentieth century. Afterwards, she gave me a hug.

Dreaming, I found myself thinking repeatedly. I’m fucking dreaming.

*

Your jet lag recedes in fits and starts – you think you’re over it, then you’re not. Your energy hits peaks and troughs, still at inconvenient times, but with decreasing impact each time around. A more standard model of reality pulls up at the lights beside you, invites you into the passenger seat. You pull away smoothly on green; you start to wake up properly.

But this dream hasn’t gone anywhere on waking. It’s still right there, riding along beside you.

*

PsychaSec and the Bancroft family vault. The Fell Street station. A stately deserted AI hotel lobby. A lurid, multi-level city street, complete with shops and barrows. A seedy motel hideout, blown apart by automatic gunfire…..

Once, all these places existed only in my imagination – now they are actual physical spaces. I know because I’ve stood inside them and pivoted about, head tilted back like a tourist, lost in the jagged wonder of it all. A crew of intensely talented human beings have been in my head. They’ve ransacked it, carried out the best of the cool bits, added a whole mess of other cool stuff they thought of along the way. The results are literally dizzying, not least because the sets are stacked, jigsaw-like, inside other buildings they bear no relation to, and adjacent to each other in curious, counter-intuitive ways. Marched through them all by patient, ever hospitable members of the production team, I struggle to keep up and map it all out. Later, I get lost just trying to find the toilet, and then again, searching out sandwiches and a doughnut (there’s a lot of free food lying around in the interstitial corridors and gaps between these chunks of imagined world). Fortunately, there are a lot of other people around in those spaces, and either they’ve been warned to look out for a sketchy-seeming fifty-something author wandering in a state of hallucinatory shock, or they’re just nice. I get re-directed, shepherded about, introduced to crew.

Something becomes apparent very early on. Altered Carbon has attracted a slew of very high spec film-making talent. They haunt these spaces between the walls of the worlds they’re working to create, and they have the casual, self-deprecating vibe of people long at ease in their professional skins. They spill out into the sets between takes, hurry back and forth fixing things and changing things and checking things and then setting everything back up all over again. They check monitors and meters and tone and contrast and actor opinion and exactly how much dry ice is spewing from that muttering grilled thing out back. They confer, and then they re-deploy.

For most of my adult life, I’ve had a rough sense of what behind the scenes must look like on a movie set – turns out I was wrong by several orders of intensity. There’s just way more of everything than I’d imagined; more people, more stuff, more fine-tuning, more takes and angles, more bustle. And yet, there’s a grace under pressure to it all. I meet not one but two of the show’s directors in the course of the week – Nick Hurran whose myriad credits include Sherlock and Doctor Who, and Alex Graves of West Wing and Game of Thrones fame. Both are seasoned, highly sought-after award winners in the field; both are charming, incisive, and generous with their time. I meet DP (and fellow long-term Glaswegian) Neville Kidd, whose job it is to do things to the visual field that I wasn’t even aware were possible, and in-between doing those things, he still finds time to talk UK politics and Scottish independence with me. Up at the Skydance studio in Surrey, I’m shown into Costume, which occupies roughly the same amount of space as an entire floor of John Lewis or Nordstrom, and whose crowned queen is the much-feted Ann Foley, recently poached as costume designer from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and brought aboard trailing a comet tail of fans that is thousands long – and she wants my autograph? I spend some quality time with Gladys Tong, who makes things out of light that rightly belong in an art gallery – I watch her go through the lightning-strike moment of inspiration right there in the midst of pulling apart and re-dressing a set, and it’s a privilege to watch it happen; we still manage to make the space for talk about children and growing up and going to college. I hang out with writer and story editor Nevin Densham, some of whose story fixes I’ve had occasion to admire over the week, but mostly we just wax lyrical about other people’s movies. I meet an AD called Brandon Ng who on top of all his other duties kindly takes it upon himself to make sure I’m in the right place on set, and to chat easily with me about movie-making and culture while we wait. I run into a succession of other people’s PAs – Benjamin Schaan, Claire Walden, Kat Gillespie – who find the time to do me various small kindnesses, fixing me up with water and coffee and transportation when I’m at a loss for these things. I sit at a fold-out table on raw concrete in the loading dock level of a decommissioned central post office building, discussing line edits for an upcoming scene with Nick Hurran and a couple of others. That easy pro vibe again, coffee in styrofoam cups, and I don’t think anybody there ever realised quite how insanely stoked I was to be included in that conversation.

Like I tweeted sometime during this bright hallucinatory week – I’ve known for some time that Altered Carbon was in very good hands; I just never realised quite how many pairs.

*

The last night of my stay, I’m out to dinner with Nevin Densham and the woman who made all this happen – Laeta Kalogridis herself, writer, producer, show runner and long-term champion of Altered Carbon for going on seven years. It’s a rare opportunity to talk. For most of this week, I’ve had to content myself with watching Kalogridis rush from one place to another trailing a long list of things to get done and people to talk to. I’ve seen her take on everything from on-shoot scene feedback to budget meetings to physically clearing tables and moving furniture on a set she wanted to re-envisage – talk about your heavy lifting! Now she’s concerned that I may not like some of the changes the show has made to the original story and characters.

I try, not very soberly, to explain:

“Look, you’ve given me the keys to a Maserati here. And you’re worrying that the shade of leather the upholstery comes in may not be my favourite. But Laeta – it’s a fucking Maserati!!”

Laughter. More drinks, a lot more drinks. We end up talking about Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves and the sly influence it had on me when I was writing The Steel Remains. And why you really can’t call a movie Civil War when no-one on either side dies in it.

But late next day, as the plane tilts high over Vancouver and flings itself up over the Rockies to the east, as I head out into the marching gloom of an evening still on its way, I try to review the week I’ve just had and the impression it’s made. I try to put all I’ve seen into some kind of context, and my own words come right back at me.

It’s a fucking Maserati!!

Yes, it is. And I can’t wait to see it hit the track and snarl.