I roll with the idea. Basically, the characters start 50BF, get sacked in, uploaded, forgotten. Forks will be made, experiments happen, their forks get full identity status and become loyal corporate citizens (as applicable). On the outside, they could even be used as a "look, we can rehabilitate criminals in no time!" propaganda. Meanwhile, the backups are transferred to a orbital facility of the megacorp. Fall happens, most of the forks are already in space, so nothing too bad is coming to them. The megacorp dies and gets salvaged by the forks and the former board who reinvent the thing under a new name and as a hypercorp (dunno if extropian or not... still thinking, autonomists have some kind of robin hood attitude which i could subvert by using an extropian corp as villain) model. Somewhere in 10AF, a reclaimer scours through an abandoned station, he recently found. He more or less trips over the primitive storage device and starts the usual procedures. Checking for TITAN infection, if they are still sane, etc. The forks will prove to be usefull and so they egos are re-instantiated in Alpha quality and in VR. Something that seems homey and nice, a wood in fall (pun unintended) where they can ask questions and get a newsupdate. I think this would be a good point, where they get word of their double life. Thoughts?

Yes. I set up a wiki to note down how i want to set scenes and chain the story together. Good thing i have some time left to really write everything down. Any advice on how to actually write up scenes and chapters?

root: Its not actually Shadowrun. I just pieced together everything that happend until 40BF and scribbled that up into a "imagine it as your typical cyberpunk world with those details and you are ready". I think it can work. Arenamontanus: Hmmm. I don't think that they would actually reinstantiate them in the first place so that they would have a chance to actually break out. But i have an idea. Ancient History: It's good you remind me of that. Too often, i lose the focus on "feeding exposition in small bits" and that people love figuring stuff out if it is not actually a "figure this out" plot. So... combined with the idea of Arenamontanus, i have the following scene in my mind: They press you down into a chair, restraining you. You feel a painful sting at the back of your neck and your limbs become heavy and wobbly. As your heavy eyes close down, you feel something on your head, like a crown of thorns pressing on your hair. The world becomes black... suddenly, you are in a nice and sunny little wood, reminiscent of nostalgic old vids, before the earth went to hell. The smell of wet leafes and wood ascends your nostrils. Oddly, you are not blinded by the bright sun shining into your face, warming the skin. Far away, you hear the wind blowing through the deeper woods. You note the absence of varous entoptics as you turn around and see [Number of other Players] people standing around you. At first you don't recognize them, but now various displays pop up, identifying them as your former coworkers. Though they look different now. [Randomly descriptions of the characters will be prepped and given the players to describe how they look and how they react to this situation, i give them some minutes to ask their muses and themselves whats going on, since their rescuer] Everything looks calm and peaceful, as you hear footsteps coming from the woods. A young man appears, his mesh presence identifying him as Pavi [i actually like the idea of using Pavi with the Scavenger sample character since it always seemed that he IS the scavenger and he just uses a humanoid simulmorph to easy the transition. I'd describe his simulmorph as something appealing, a sum of everything the characters appreciate.] He looks at you and greets you with a slight wave of his hand as he shortens the distance to you. "Hello, fellow persons. Uhm... how do you feel? You slept quite a bit, so... nauseous? Anxious? Stressed?" They will have some dialogue, small exposition on what the time is, that they are in a VR simulation, earth is scorched and off limits, inner system vs outer system ideology and then Pavis ship gets attacked by other scavengers who tell him that the station he is currently at is their claim. Pavi asks them for help to fight them off, sleeving them into cheap cases he keeps handy should his primary morph get offed. Or they could man the ships weapon systems if they know their way around. Either way, i think it would be good that they fight a loosing battle and actually strand somewhere, where they have many options to go their own path without resorting to "Well hell, you need a starting capital, so you work for US now." etc.