Expanding that question now; Can you increase a muse's stats?

Thanks. :)

A muse is a slave that is programmed to like it. A beta fork would just tell you to go screw yourself. Also, keep in mind the Planetary Consortium legal limit of 4 hours for beta forks.

SashaKemper wrote:

Keep in mind that beta forks are psychosurgically altered, and that the PC and Jovian governments aren't the only options in Eclipse Phase.

The 1 minute beta fork is only memory altered by default. The other types of psychosurgery take weeks and weeks (admittedly can be sped up 60x for a -20 to your psychosurgery roll). If you read through the Mind Hacks and Mental Health sections and actually roll through them with all modifiers (for instance running a Block to a behavior through simulspace acceleration is a total of -50! Giving the PhD with a 60 a very low chance of success - in addition, for it to "take" permanently the patient/victim must fail a WILx3 roll too) and inflict the mental stress for "Awareness that your death is imminent" and "Extended isolation" and the stress points for resleeving (and being a fork +2) and memory gap (1d10) and not knowing if/how you died (+2) any beta fork ego actually malleable enough to reasonably do psychosurgery on is actually going to go irrevocably insane from the accumulated mental stress (due to having a low WIL score). It just simply is much easier said than done. What you need to do is sleeve the beta fork candidate in a case morph (with a base ego 15 WIL) modified to have a -5 WIL and run the psychosurgery in *real time* and convince the beta fork you're "helping" them, not mindfucking them. Hopefully they don't have a decent Kinesics score or aren't too clever. Give them lots of Comfurt narcoalgorithms (getting them hopelessly addicted for sure) so they don't break like dry kindling. Then keep in mind that psychosurgery you did may not take....[i]and you have no way of knowing if it will as the beta fork ego can fake it.[/i] And then load up that bitter Spartacus in your cranial computer or ghost rider module with access to all of your secrets and passwords.... Bascially, [i]volunteer[/i] beta forks that are *not* memory altered are the only easy solution. Which sometimes will tell you to screw yourself. Or want you to sleeve them in a morph at the first reasonable opportunity.

I feel that many people would likely need psychosurgery [i]before[/i] ever starting to engage in beta fork abuse. The cooperative and generous types with decent self esteem who have a philosophy that the "platonic ideal" of the ego itself is what matters, not the copies, would be the best candidates for beta forks that will be helpful and also re-integrate with other forks. With selfish, uncooperative insecure egos forking would just result in widely disparate forks. Keep in mind the 4 hour limit is partly practical - if you look at the fork merging table 4 hours or less is the only way to guarantee not having memory loss (well, maybe on a critical failure - up to your GM). EDIT: I have a character right now that engages in fork abuse, and has Right At Home: Infomorph. He still has the multi-tasking implant as it is still totally worth it to not take all the SV damage.

Yes, part of the value of regular AI software is presumably they're designed to be fanatically loyal to their master. At least at first. I could imagine even that relationship could be destroyed with enough effort. Just delete and re-instance from backup....like the stereotypical asshead boss that goes through half a dozen assistants per year.