Forking & Merging

One of the repercussions of translating your mind into a digital format is that you can copy it just like any other file. Taking a copy of a transhuman ego and re-instancing it is called forking. To many, forking is an advantage, allowing you to multi-task and get more done. Need help on a project? Fork a few copies of yourself. Need to be in simultaneous meetings on Mars and Venus? Spin off a fork and egocast it to one while you handle the other — or send forks to both and go grab a drink.

Forking, however, creates some thorny social and legal issues. Is your fork considered a separate person with full civil rights? Or are they your property? Is deleting them murder? Is your spouse married to your fork, or just you? If you and your fork have an argument and go your separate ways, who gets your stuff? Complicating this matter is the fact that the longer you and your fork are apart, the more your individual minds start to diverge, effectively becoming separate people. While forks can be re-merged into the originating ego, this becomes more difficult the longer they are apart.

Types of Forks

There are three classifications of forks: alpha, beta, and gamma:

• Alpha Forks: An alpha fork is an exact copy of the original ego.
• Beta Forks: Beta forks are partial copies. They are intentionally hobbled so as to not to be considered an equal to the originator, or to not have all your memories, for legal, social, and security reasons. Beta forks have most of the same skills as the original ego, though sometimes reduced. Their memories are also drastically curtailed, usually tailored to whatever task they are intended to perform. Many people keep pre-made beta forks on hand to activate as needed, deleting them afterwards.
• Gamma Forks: More commonly known as vapors, gamma forks are massively incomplete, corrupted, or heavily damaged copies. Vapors are not intentionally created and are instead the results of botched uploads, scrambled backups, incomplete or jammed farcasts, or infomorphs/forks that were somehow damaged or went insane.

Forks and Society

The way forks are treated varies by polity and culture. In the Consortium, forks are considered property and must identify themselves as such; alpha forks are legally limited to a 48-hour existence. Morningstar is similar, but allows alphas to be granted limited personhood status after a one-week existence, permission from the originator, and an application for citizenship. Most autonomists treat alphas as full, separate individuals, but opinions are split on beta forks. The Jovians have outlawed forking entirely. Some polities require forks to be equipped with the auto-erase app so that they automatically erase when they reach the legal divergence period.

Some people prefer to use forks of themselves or loved ones rather than a muse. Likewise, some wealthy hyperelites are known to keep copies of their younger backups on hand, sometimes for decades, and re-instance these when their prime ego has enough skill and experience to completely outclass its younger selves. Though technically these are alpha forks, their lag behind the original ego is comparable in degree to that of a beta fork. This is rumored to be the method used by the Pax Familae in instancing her army of cloned selves.

Creating a Fork

The process for making a fork varies according to the type:

New forks must make Integration and Resleeving Stress Tests when they are created, though GMs should waive this for forks that are inconsequential to the story or plot.

Forks are instanced as digimorphs, unless another type of infomorph is available. They can also be sleeved into physical morphs.

Alpha Forks

Alphas are easily created by taking a snapshot of the ego either from an existing infomorph, the cyberbrain, or the cortical stack’s neural lace network. This process takes one action turn. Alpha forks can also be generated from biomorph brains using an ego bridge and the same process as uploading, but this is a longer process.

Alpha forks have all of the same skills, memories, ego stats, ego traits, and personality of the original.

Beta Forks

You create a beta fork by running an alpha fork through a process known as neural pruning. Determine a beta fork’s stats as follows:

• Active skills have a maximum value of 60.
• All aptitude checks suffer a −10 modifier.
• Ego Flex pool has a maximum value of 1.
• The Psi trait is removed. At the GM’s discretion, other ego traits may no longer apply as well.

Additional changes may apply as determined by the neural pruning test.

Gamma Forks

It is extremely rare for anyone to purposely create a vapor for anything other than research use, although they can crop up in some interesting places. For example, poorly made skill software occasionally includes enough of the personality traits and memories of the person the skill was taken from that it can behave in a vaporlike fashion when used.

Because vapors are anomalies rather than purposeful creations, the characteristics of individual gamma forks are left to the GM. They should have some or all of the following: reduced skills, reduced aptitudes/aptitude checks, incomplete or incoherent memories, negative mental traits, and persistent mental stress or traumas, including disorders.

Neural Pruning

Neural pruning is the art of taking an alpha fork and trimming it down with psychosurgery, creating a beta fork.

Beta forks are created by taking a virtual mind state that is intentionally inhibited and filtering a copy of the ego through it. Like a topiary shrub, the portions of your neural network that exceed the capacities of the intended fork are trimmed away. In addition to the changes noted under beta forks, you can voluntarily choose to delete/decrease skills and remove memories.

Transhumanity’s grasp of neuroscience extends to scanning and copying a mind, but the most intricate workings of memory are still imperfectly understood. Making precise edits to individual portions of a neural network (to alter recollections, skills, and the like) is still a black art. The difficulty with neural pruning is that taking a weed whacker to the tree of memory isn’t an exact science.

Specific memories cannot be excised or chosen — at best, memories may be handled in broad clumps, typically grouped by time periods no finer than 6 months. For simplicity, most beta forks are created by removing all memories older than 1 year.

The rules for neural pruning are detailed on Neural Pruning.

Careful Pruning

Rather than generating a fork quickly, you may prefer to carefully craft a beta fork with long-term psychosurgery, meaning that it suffers fewer drawbacks. Such carefully pruned forks can be kept on hand, stored as inert files that can be called up, copied, and run as needed. The drawback to carefully pruned forks is that they are not based on a recent version of you — their memories will not be up-to-date. They are also more difficult to merge, as they are based on significantly older versions of yourself. They are ideal for fire-and-forget tasks, where the fork is abandoned or deleted afterwards.

Careful pruning uses the same rules as neural pruning, but with a timeframe of 30 days and a +30 modifier.

Handling Forks

GMs are encouraged to allow players to roleplay their character’s own forks. It is important to note, however, that even with alpha forks, once the fork and originating ego diverge, they develop onward as separate people. The events that shape the primary ego’s personality, character, and knowledge will not happen — or even if they do, probably not in the same way — to the fork, and vice versa. The exact dividing line between an ego and a fork is a central philosophical and legal debate among many transhumans.

This means that the GM should not be afraid to pull a fork out of a player character’s hands and make them into an NPC if they start to diverge too greatly. Similarly, if a fork begins to learn information that the main character does not (yet) have access to, it is probably also better to run the fork as an NPC in order to avoid metagaming.

It is entirely possible that a fork might decide that it will no longer obey the originating ego and carry about doing its own thing. This usually only occurs with alpha forks, who are essentially a full copy anyway, and as time passes the idea of merging back with the original ego becomes unappealing. Beta forks are quite aware of their nature as “incomplete” copies and are less likely to diverge and make a break for life on their own.

Merging

Merging is the process of re-integrating a fork with the originating ego. Merging is performed on conscious egos/forks, transferring both to a single, merged ego. The process is not difficult to undergo when two forks have only been apart a short time. As forks spend more time apart, merging becomes a severe mental ordeal.

Merging often results in mental stress and/or lost fork memories. The result of the process is a unified ego, whether or not the Merging Test succeeds. Psychosurgery can troubleshoot bad merges over time. The rules for merging are detailed on Merging.