How do you monitor yourself? Psychosurgery skill? I would imagine a person doing this might gain mental traumas/Zen enlightenment (quite possibly the same thing). Consider Greg Egan's story "Mister Volition" - monitoring yourself too closely might be bad for your sense of existence.

No, a psychosurgeon is more like a programmer for egos. If he doesn't have Profession: Psicology and Profession: Neurology, he doesn't have access to those fields of expertise. He can see if his mind is being tampered with, however. At least, that's how I see it.

I would imagine some sort of antagonism is going to develop between your instances, which is going to manifest as some very unhealthy psychological tendencies when you merge. If nothing else, the peculiar divergence in your experiences, with one of you doing things under constant surveillance and the other constantly watching himself do things with no control... That's what alienation is all about, and it will only accumulate over time. And of course, if the active Alpha does become compromised, then it might just take issue with being disposed of. An Alpha fork of yourself is one of the most dangerous things you can fight, and infection by an Exsurgent means she will have the advantage. I once thought of something kind of like this, as a way to speed up or teamwork mental tasks, while minimizing discontinuity and alienation. It goes like this: Get a secluded place to work, with all the equipment you need. Make a work schedule for eight hours and for eight people. Find a way to randomize who gets which job (draw lots). Then fork, then fork again, and then a third time. Then, draw a lot. You now have eight instances of yourself running parallel. Each one of you has a very similar experience, drawing a lot and performing a randomly assigned task. Each one of you has a very similar relationship to all the others, with no one having authority over the others. Conflict and resentment are unlikely to arise. Even if one of you must get a shitty job, she will probably accept that it was fair because, from her own, subjective POV, it was she who delineated and assigned the task. Hopefully, you'll be able to remain in seclusion for the duration, with no outside influence causing any of you to diverge too far from the others, and everything will be fine.

athanasius wrote:

It's a good idea for teamwork, i'll use it, but we are more interested in exploring the possibility of an human that can "see" ti's own mental proces at work. I admit it's a bit zen but we find it funny and actually the character is in a form of permanent dissociative disorder as side effect, it's a must for the fun of evry session! PS, the observing ego can't act but control the neutrino caster, if exurgent is involved can use the explosive escape (done last session).

I think the key is to make the experience of each of your forks is as similar as possible, and to keep them from getting into conflicts with one another. That means a stable environment, with as few unknown factors as possible. That way, the merge won't be quite as traumatic. What you're describing is... The complete opposite of that. I see a blank character sheet and a calculator in your near future. There's a reason why most Firewall lifeforms go with regular backup insurance and cortical stacks. ;)

As long as the player is fully aware that this is not a perfect solution and may make him just as crazy as what he's trying to defend against, and is willing to roleplay that, it sounds like a very interesting way to go. Now the real question is whether the master ego will be able to tell when the slave's brainstate changes due to natural evolution, such as the incredible self-awareness brought on by this process, and stop itself from pulling the trigger. I hope it has one hell of a psychoanalysis skill to make that determination.

I'm intrigued by the way people seem to think about forks and the way they work. I would love to play that out at the table, if one of my players tried it. : ) "I make a fork, to jam those gun drones and help us escape." "Okay, what are you doing?" "I make a fork, and tell it to get in my Ecto." "You fork. There's now an exact copy of you sharing your system, and it tells you to move yourself onto the Ecto. It has absolutely no regard for your volition or well-being, it expects absolute compliance from you, and you know it intends to sacrifice you to the Exsurgents to cover its escape. Take... 11 Stress, and roll an opposed WIL times 3."

You can use forks for all kinds of things, but you have to consider carefully how to go about it. When you Alpha fork, you become two instances, who both experience the exact same subjective continuity. Whatever you were thinking immediately before forking, both of you are now going to be thinking the exact same thing. So if you think about it like you're making a copy of yourself, then both of you will consider itself to be the real you, and the other to be a mere copy, and conflict will ensue. I had an example earlier in this thread of how to use mass-forking to complete extended tasks. I think the chief concern is to get the expectations of all of the forks to fit together. The simplest way is to just settle for a Beta fork. Prepare a pruned version of yourself ahead of time, which expects to serve you and is happy to do so, and then instantiate named and numbered copies as often as you need to. But if you really need those Alpha-level skills, then there's no such thing as "a copy of me."