This came up yesterday in our game session. The problem: 3.5 million infugees stored in a server since the Fall needs to be brought online ASAP. Most had a *really* bad week before being uploaded - if they were just started up most would go mad from shock, grief and trauma when they discovered that the Earth was dead, they were 10 years into the future, most of their social contacts were dead or had diverged, and remembered the horrors they "recently" experienced. First, the recent memories could be edited away or at least blurred, and the simulated brains filled with software antidepressants and calmatives. But these people did need psychotherapy to hold together. Unfortunately there were not that many psychologists around, and AI psychologists are not up to scratch. One of the characters is a pretty good psychologist. He decided to try the banyan approach: he forked himself to have one instance helping one person (out of a first batch of 100 people) for a simulated day. Afterwards he merged together the copies... oops, total mental wreck. Discard. With some help from an experienced banyanist (yep, the ubiquitous Ramirez!) he instead started merging his copies pairwise, with another copy doing quick psychotherapy to keep the merged version stable, then merging the merged ones (and excess psychotherapist copies), and so on. I ruled that this system works on average - a lot of stress is generated, but it is also dissipated. Over time things get easier, especially since many of the individual episodes blur together. The character will literally have talked to everybody in the emerging nation and will have some pretty amazing sociological insights - at the price of maintaining an average stress level of about 2d10, hardening himself to continuity checks and merging to an unhealthy degree and probably evolving towards an exhuman state. But he *is* helping people. And installing a pro-Firewall social back-door into an entire society. Yep, quite a lot of egos turning insane and crashing around my campaign. One copy of the character got trapped in a simspace security system where it will remain alone essentially forever - and the main character and another character *know* about this and didn't even think about doing anything about it. Generally, massive forking and merging is not yet very safe. It might have frightening effects on individuality and societies. That will not stop people.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Generally, massive forking and merging is not yet very safe. It might have frightening effects on individuality and societies. That will not stop people.

From a Hindu point of view, individuality is an illusion, which is quite common around the Universe. Frankly, there's something to be said for the mass merging of all minds into one super-intelligence. Hmmm... That's a fun story. Gatecrashing PCs sent to a colony, to find that all the minds of the colonists have been merged into one rather insane entity and downloaded into a single body. The resulting individual is mentally unstable but incredibly intelligent, to the point of near-posthumanhood, and scarily capable at just about everything they put their mind to (if you can ever get them to stop freaking out like a heavily autistic child being pulled from routine). Alternatively, one of the Lost, who kills people, extracts their memories, and creates a beta or delta fork that they add to the multitude of voices stored in a few ghostrider modules stored throughout their body. [i]My name is Legion, for we are many.[/i]

Everyone should probably take a quick look at the bottom of page 214 in the corebook. That's where the Hardening rules can be found. If you want to play a character who's a soldier, or who just has a fetish for being violently killed, tell your GM that you're dropping points of Moxie on being hardened against violence and death. It should be acceptable for most stressors.

WHile I advocated using forks and resleeving to minimize training costs and maximize experience, I will admit there's a few problems. 1. the accumulation of stress on the egos involved. Possibly treatable with various means, like having some forks in a VR vacation/treatment facility while others on on the front. 2. The other possible problem is that you may begin to recognize the patters that enemy forces use. "No, they're hiding over there, not on the ridge!" "How do you know?" "That's how they always do it!" Getting predictable is a good way to get defeated.

Extrasolar Angel][quote wrote:

There is another problem with synthmorphs and forking-once one gets infected with Exsurgent virus all get infected. I think that's a major factor against using such strategy.

I love that idea. I can see it now - a habitat is invaded and put under control of a single person forked a few thousand times. The forks become uncommunicative and withdrawn, then vanish. As people start to take back their habitat they're suddenly overrun by psionic lizardmen.