First, in the inner system, creating an alpha fork is considered a crime (I don't know the severity off-hand), so the original ego could be charged for that at the very least. The Alpha fork could be deleted without consequence to the legal authorities (though they might keep a copy on hand for court). In addition, all forks are considered property of the original ego, so your property killing someone else will not make you look good. The original ego would likely be considered responsible for letting lose something dangerous to the public. Second is the problem with what the original would have done. If the original ego created an alpha fork with no modifications and had it kill someone, wouldn't that mean that the original could have done the same? What if someone snatched both egos within moments of the alpha fork being created, and had them swap morphs in such a way that the original thought it was the fork, and the fork thought it was the original? Would things turn out differently? The way I see it is, a fork is remarkably similar to the original. So similar in fact, that if the forks don't receive extensive modifications to make them act differently, that any action a fork takes is something that the original probably would have done. How probably is dependent on how different the fork is from the original. An alpha is practically the same if it doesn't even know its a fork, while a beta and delta forks would have some differences. Mind you, I'm thinking with a strongly materialistic philosophy right now. In such a system, free will does not exist. We are all stimulus response engines that take one course of action, could only take that one course of action, and could not have taken any other course of action because the design of our minds and the stimulus we had to work with only allows for 1 possibility. If you knew the past, you could predict the future. Since people can tinker with egos and change it to produce desirable results, I imagine that a lot more people in Eclipse Phase think in a similar materialist manner than what exists in our world. I pretty sure if they can create forks, then at least a few people probably have created experiments where they make a 100 alpha forks, then put those forks and the original ego into identical simulations, and then run them all to see if any of them would act differently...

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Identity gets a bit tricky when forking is called into play. Alpha forks have the same brainprint as each other, at least at first. For legal purposes, most jurisdictions treat alpha forks as the same person up to a certain time period of divergence (4 hours being common in the Consortium, but ranging up to a day or even a week in some habitats) or alternately treat the originators as legal guardians of their alpha forks (and thus legally responsible for their actions).

So, yeah, in most places Bob will be treated however they treat murders if the fork is fresh. However, even if the fork has diverged, I suspect they are going to look long and hard for evidence of involvement, premeditation and or conspiracy on Bob's part.

Quincey Forder wrote:

What's going to happen to unsuspecting, happy go merry resleeved Bob?

I don't know, but the whole thing sounds like a fantastic setup for an EP adventure! The player characters might be the police trying to piece together the clues and find out what actually happened. Or maybe Resleeved Bob is accused of complicity with the Killer Bob fork, and this has huge political and PR repercussions, so he hires the player characters to investigate and prove he wasn't involved (then they'll have a moral dilemma when they discover that he did, indeed, create the fork with the purpose of killing the target). In fact, it reminds me of Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon", where