Refresh

The idea of refresh/restoring from backup is similar to the concept of coming back to life after death. Before you die, you can go to a clinic and create a backup image of your brain. After you die, a new body is created and your backup image is stored in the body. The process can be completed as many times as the user would like, but they will mentally be the same as their backup, so if they made one backup ten years before their death, they would know nothing that happened in the past ten years.

"In the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year." (Page 32). Restoring from a backup changes society because people will be more likely to kill take a chance because they will not have to worry about being permanently dead.

"The first time I died, it was not long after my sixtieth birthday... I don't remember the incident." (Page 32). Jules' most recent backup before his first death was a few weeks earlier, so he had no recollection of the events leading up to his death.