killj0y wrote:

Similar question but with some of the Menton morphs or even with just a splicer. If the morph is limited in capacity how can it take the entireity of your ego? Does craming a math genius into a worker pod mean that when you take him back out he's going to be missing a chunk of his brain and will have to revert to a stored backup to regain his faculties?

Basically, the remainder of your ego is inert within the brain. Think of it like running software on a computer with lower specs... in some cases, the software will run, but it will run poorly and will not be as effective (my dad's computer at his house is like that... it doesn't meet the system requirements for his antivirus, so it moves as fast as molasses). This is what happens to your ego in an inferior morph brain.

Scottbert wrote:

Hmm, I kind of like Decivre's second interpretation since it offers the possibility of rescuing someone from being stuck in an animal... Or the potential plot of someone who needs to hide hiding in a pet with plans for later retrieval... Of course, there'd probably be some mental stress from being less intelligent than a flat for so long, but at least there's hope of recovery. On the other hand, his first interpretation is good if you want to play up the horror angle ('Nothing left of him, the poor bastard...')... I guess it's up to the GM and the needs of the plot.

Well, I gave two different interpretations for a reason: the former is a sicko who plugs minds into animals for funsies, while the latter is someone safely transferring an ego from one body to another body, both of which are designed to house full egos. I doubt that Nine Lives goes through the steps to make sure that the animal mind is prepared, or that safe retrieval and transfer is possible. As a friend once put it about something totally different (but equally apt), "this guy's mind has hopped into the ROFLcopter, and he's dragging you around in a pair of LOLlerskates whether you want him to or not". Permanent ego damage (if not straight vapor production) is all but guaranteed.

Another potential use for this sort of thing would be producing profoundly well-trained police dogs. You could probably sleeve in and out of one safely, though it'd require going through neural pruning, storing the idle parts of the ego offline in the stack, and grafting on a set of canine instincts, skills, and memories, the sort that the operating ego hasn't ever had a chance to develop the natural way - what chemical explosives smell like with a completely different olfactory apparatus, for example, and the same sort of skillsofts necessary for quick adaptation to a vastly different body plan without years of physical therapy and neuroplasticity drugs. I can see, for example, the right kind of detective forking into a smart dog, so he can be his own best friend. On the other hand, I can see someone contacting a former cop, and when he egocasts out to take the job, his black-market fork is pared down, partially overwritten by an ego obtained from a smart dog's cortical stack, and subjected to extensive psychosurgery. I'd probably start calling them werewolves, given the human cunning and - if made as attack dogs - that special kind of disregard for the life of their targets that only sociopaths (who are notoriously difficult to control) are normally capable of.