It's not forking. You're already loading the person into a simspace as an infomorph, you just make a back-up before you run the procedure. Then, you just run it again and again until you get it right, deleting any imperfect versions and starting from scratch each time. The final version comes out no differently than if they'd gone in for a normal surgical procedure today and were unconscious while "under the knife".

Yes, you're resleeving the person into an Infomorph form but, unless you want to psychosurgery right onto the wetware (and, let's be honest, who in the hell would do that outside of the Jovians?), then that's already happening anyway. After that, though, it's a non-issue. It's not resleeving if an Infomorph jumps from one device to the next, so why would this be any different? As far as the person involved is concerned, they don't know anything about the process. They resleeve as an Infomorph into a white room. They have no loss of continuity as their state is saved and the operation begins. If it fails, they're deleted, and reinstanced from the back-up, whereupon they have no loss of continuity. There they are, in that white room, in that exact same moment. Remember what Continuity, Alienation, and Integration tests reflect. -Continuity is drawn from a character losing continuity of self. For some people, this isn't a big deal, but, for most, it's a huge issue. If the character doesn't know about any sort of loss of continuity, they don't suffer the stress involved, which is why resleeving via Ego Bridges in person doesn't require a test. The character doesn't lose any continuity here. A few hours elapse in the world outside, or longer, but, for them, it's no different from going to sleep and waking up again. No need for a continuity test here, since there is no loss of continuity. -Alienation is due to coming to terms with a new face. Simple solution: Create a simulspace avatar for the Infomorph that's identical in all ways to their physical body. Do a full body scan beforehand and a brain mapping of sensory input to make sure it feels right. An Alienation test might still be necessary, of course, especially if the character has COG or WIL bonuses in their morph, but, if it is still necessary, it'll be done with bonuses attached. -Integration is largely smoothed over by the same method. If the body feels about the same, there should be no problems. As with Alienation, though, a test might still be necessary, especially if the morph has REF/SOM bonuses and so forth. So, all in all, even if you can't make the process entirely lacking in stress, you can make it fairly stress free. An alternative way to do this, without dealing with back-ups, is to fork them without their knowledge. Have them enjoying a relaxing, peaceful sim, with a duplicate sim running on the same server. Then, just copy them over with no loss of continuity and no awareness of the duplicity (resulting in no need for an Alienation test). Run the procedure on the fork and, if successful, delete the original (or keep it as a back-up just in case). If It fails, delete the fork. Repeat as necessary.

It's not about you actively trying to stop the surgery. It's the fact that the mind is much more complex then simply cutting something open and moving stuff around. The opposed test represents (as far as I've come to understand) your mind trying to come to terms with the changes being made to it the same way a body might reject a foreign organism.

Yerameyahu, Alienation and Continuity tests come from, respectively, dealing with a new form of body/mind and breaks in your continuity. Reinstantiating from a back-up typically means downloading into a new body and a loss in continuity, neither of which the person has to deal with after they've been sleeved as an Infomorph. Perhaps I'm not making myself clear, really... 1. The person is hooked up to an ego bridge and uploaded into a system as an Infomorph (or just downloaded into it if in a cyberbrain or already an Infomorph), making an Alienation test as appropriate. 2. A back-up (literally a saved state) is made when the person is brought into the simspace for modification (I.E. After they've become an Infomorph). 3. The modifications are made. 4a. The modifications are successful and the person is downloaded into their body again (making an Integration/Alienation test again, though likely at a greatly reduced modifier, if one at all; for them, only about an hour has passed). 4b. The modifications are a failure. The person is deleted and reinstantiated from the back-up. For them, there is no loss of continuity and no alienation (they were an Infomorph, after all; no change, no test). Return to step 3. This isn't resleeving someone from an old back-up. This is just reinstantiating them from an extremely recent one. No loss of continuity, no knowledge of the procedure's mechanics, no stress associated with it. Then, you just download them back via an ego bridge and do psychotherapy in an accelerated sim to eliminate any stress they might have accumulated since then. I can't emphasize enough that the stress from resleeving is not derived from resleeving itself; it's nothing to do with the mechanics of the process. The stress is from getting used to a new body, seeing a new face in the mirror, differences in moods/clarity of thought, and, of course, losing continuity. When you don't have any of these things, you don't have any associated stress as a result.

you know there's a part in gatecrashers about a firewall agent interrogating several egos in a simulspace environment (presumably using psychosurgery) - one of the captured egos has some kind of internal suicide code to drive herself insane. When this happens, the Firewall agent halts the interrogation and tells his muse to start over. [i]Tethyon (Muse): Too late. The subject’s ego fle is essentially corrupted. She drove herself mad. Bhinravi: Well, shit. Ditch the copy and load a new one. We’ll try again.[/i] This implies that he could keep trying until it worked. I think you have to ignore the effects of what happens to that particular ego after the backup otherwise it doesn't make sense. how can you force a person to make a continuity check if they're aren't aware of what's happened to them? The person's experience - I would say step 1 and 2 happen at the same time 1. I am hooked up to an ego bridge and uploaded as an infomorph - alienation test 2. I am backed up. no alienation test needed. 3. I undergo psycho surgery and it is successful. I lose whatever stress is necessary for the procedure. 3a> i undergo psycho surgery and fail. I die as I am deleted. I am reloaded but I have reroll the alienation test from step 1. 4. I am returned to my body - alienation test. Now Yerameyahu what you seem to be saying is this: 1. I am hooked up to an ego bridge and uploaded as an infomorph - alienation test 2. I am backed up. no alienation test needed. 3. I undergo psycho surgery and it is successful. I lose whatever stress is necessary for the procedure. 3a> i undergo psycho surgery and fail. I die as I am deleted. I am reloaded and have to make a new roll every time I am deleted and reloaded. 4. I am returned to my body - alienation test. Thus according to your interpretation, a person that is backed up but reloaded 10 times has to make 10 new alienation tests. Let's say he loses 2 stress every time he is reloaded - that means he lost 20 stress. But the backup was ONLY made up from the first time he was hooked into the ego bridge. That backup has no data or information from the 10 reloads. How can that happen? That information somehow jumped from each deleted copy into the backup. That doesn't make sense logically. If that same person saw an exsurgent, lost 20 stress from that and died - would you have his backup come back with the knowledge of the exsurgent and 20 lost stress? However, I will say this - deleting an ego should cause stress loss especially if you're trying to help a person. Killing the same person over and over is pretty damn callous.

Alienation tests are a result of adapting to a new mind. They are unnecessary if a character's body has not changed. If they were running as an Infomorph before their back-up, and running identically after, there is no upset; no change. If you had to roll Alienation every time an Infomorph's program shut down and was restored, it'd mean an Infomorph transferring between systems or shutting down and restarting would cause Alienation tests too, which they don't. You have to look at WHY the rules say something instead of carte blanche applying it. Alienation is about dealing with the problems of adjusting to a new morph and, if the morph is not just similar but the exact same one as from before the back-up, Alienation does not apply; there's nothing there to adjust to because they already are adjusted. As for Continuity tests, you might have an argument there, since they would lose a significant amount of time, in which case you just use the forking method. If you do that, they don't lose continuity, since, for the duration, they've got continuous memory flow. This isn't removing the risks or speed bumps of resleeving, it's just applying them how they're intended to be applied. Changing bodies causes mental stress, losing continuity causes mental stress, but, in this situation, no continuity is lost and no body changed, so no problems.

Right, it seems to me that there's another miscommunication worth pointing out. I am not talking about a standard back-up. The back-up mentioned in the core rules is a back-up via cortical stack, or an ego-bridge back-up, or what have you; data reflecting a brain state, but without the template it's running on. I'm talking about taking a "save state" of an Infomorph, a copy of its data, template and all, at an exact moment in time. This means that, when reinstantiated, it has no alienation test because it is literally picking up right where it left off. This is why if you, say, stop an Infomorph running on your ecto (terminating the program but not deleting it) and transfer it to another, then run it again, you don't face any tests. Remember, an Alienation/Continuity test comes from changes in mental state or continuity, and we're not changing the mental state here. The Infomorph's program is copied and put aside, and reinstanced from that, not a standard back-up. Deactivating an Infomorph, transferring them, and reactivating them is no different, to them, than shutting down the device, or them copying themselves to another and deleting the original. It's not a traditional back-up and, therefore, not subject to the standard back-up rules (except for Continuity, of course). I'd, personally, argue that a person who makes a standard back-up from an Infomorph template and resleeves into that same template wouldn't have to deal with the usual stress too, but that's another story for another time.

That sounds like serious munchkinism (both on the Case morph and the skill finagle), crizh. :) But of course I can see *why* you'd need it. Axel, I just don't think that pseudo-backup is a real thing. *shrug* I don't see where in the rules it says you can pause an infomorph with the device still running (and therefore having the 'pause' available to copy). It says if the *device* shuts down, the infomorph is unconscious ('paused'). And honestly, that's still discontinuity. I also don't see how a copy (however managed) isn't a fork, and therefore must follow the forking rules (Alienation and possibly Continuity).

Okay, I see. If it's possible to have non-backup 'pauses' of infomorphs (and I wasn't previously aware they could turn themselves off), then it does make sense to make copies of that. I think you're probably right about this point, then. :) Can you provide the page reference? All I can find are mentions of shutting down the entire device, often assuming *immediate* reboot as well. I still think that every copy (whatever method) is a fork, and the book says any fork has Alienation (and possibly Continuity). So: new instantiations from a for-real backup are new infomorphs (Alienation and Continuity), and new copies from a 'pause' pseudo-backup are forks (Alienation and maybe Continuity.) Alienation either way, for every new subject. -- I'd also like to get back to the OP a little. crizh gave an example of a situation where Psychosurgery is very difficult (Apt 40), and the unsavory measures he was driven to. On the other hand, 40 WIL is the highest possible; it's crazy-high. It's also very much up to chance, because WIL*3 can roll badly just like anything (and probably maxes out at 99?), so you could get the temporary result. It may simply be that such minds are hard (nigh-impossible) to permanently edit. I do think (that is, guess) the point of the opposed test is (at least partly) to reflect the immaturity of the psychosurgery science/art, though I could certainly see a house rule for a bonus when willing. :) It is also *fully* possible that willing subjects don't resist at all, and it's a simple Success Test for the psychosurgeon. Possibly with a houseruled penalty based on WIL, if you want that in your game. Can we ask the devs what they intended?

I'm pretty sure it's not about you actively trying to stop the surgery. It's the fact that the mind is much more complex then simply cutting something open and moving stuff around. The opposed test represents (as far as I've come to understand) your mind trying to come to terms with the changes being made to it the same way a body might reject a foreign organism.

Yerameyahu wrote:

Okay, I see. If it's possible to have non-backup 'pauses' of infomorphs (and I wasn't previously aware they could turn themselves off), then it does make sense to make copies of that. I think you're probably right about this point, then. :) Can you provide the page reference? All I can find are mentions of shutting down the entire device, often assuming *immediate* reboot as well.

It's on page 265, same page that says you can shut down devices to turn off Infomorphs: "[I]nfomorphs may also shut themselves down, though it is rare that they do so"

Yerameyahu wrote:

I still think that every copy (whatever method) is a fork, and the book says any fork has Alienation (and possibly Continuity).

Every copy is a fork, yes. The psychological stress from forking comes from the knowledge that there is another "you" out there, though, not from forks being somehow unique.

Yerameyahu wrote:

So: new instantiations from a for-real backup are new infomorphs (Alienation and Continuity), and new copies from a 'pause' pseudo-backup are forks (Alienation and maybe Continuity.) Alienation either way, for every new subject.

Alienation from forking is due to being sleeved into a new form, as has already been noted. If you're running from a "pause", you're not going to deal with Alienation. Continuity, yes, but not Alienation.

Yerameyahu wrote:

Can we ask the devs what they intended?

Already ahead of you. Sent something to direct them to this thread.

Forking causes alienation because your mind data is downloaded and put into a new Infomorph form. If you're simply copying a running program onto a new device and then delete the old data, that is forking, which Infomorphs do all the time. Infomorphs are uniquely posed to fork, though not without consequences (forking still causes a Continuity test if they're aware of it, is illegal in most habitats, and causes a ton of legal/social issues). Still, I sent a request for the devs to weigh in on it here, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Actually, I try my darndest not to game the system. I just like to interpret the rules by intent rather than to have them assumed to be set in stone. The system I suggest is great for interrogating prisoners too, it should be noted.