Forking: One Among Many

Posted By: Skinwalker, Firewall Sentinel

Forking is among transhumanity’s last great taboos, challenging the basic assumption that an ego is unique. For many transhumans — even those with otherwise extensive physical or mental modifications — the thought of being a “copy” is distressing if not terrifying.

Social and scientific discourse has largely settled on using the umbrella term “multiplicity” to refer to the wide variety of practices based around the regular simultaneous instancing of more than one copy of the same ego.

A Divided History

There are many competing and conflicting views and approaches to forking’s legality and use.

Forking was a relatively new innovation before the Fall, and its implications were not settled issues before the catastrophe. During the evacuation of Earth, habitats struggled with a simultaneous influx of refugees/infugees and the loss of records that could establish and verify these people’s identities.

Due to this chaos, thousands of backups were reinstantiated under the assumption that their primary egos were dead, when they in fact survived. As identification systems were reestablished and habitats began to share data more reliably, there were often-dramatic conflicts between these unintentional forks who began to fight over which held the primary identity. Primary egos were unable to prove who they were and watched their forks become de facto controllers of their identity and belongings. Alpha forks who had been instanced for months or even years were unwilling to be re-integrated when their primary ego was rediscovered. Survivors of the Fall suffered horrible mental trauma that made the re-integration of old forks extremely difficult.

Primaries and forks both brought charges against the companies that held and managed backup and re-instancing, sometimes as joint suits, sometimes separately. The social and judicial fallout from these cases clogged inner-system legal systems for years. It also resulted in hundreds of cases of forced merging, forks fleeing capture by ego hunters, and bitter legal battles that saw forks survive as individual egos on the condition they create new identities for themselves.

Current Legalities

All these troubles influenced inner-system law-makers to greatly restrict even voluntary, planned forking with a duration of more than a few days to avoid widespread repetition of these legal issues. The major polities require forks to be legally registered the moment they are instanced; some even require forking licenses or place software locks on cortical stacks, cyberbrains, infomorphs, and ego bridges to handle this registration securely and automatically. Many habitats also require forks to be tracked for their entire duration; failure to report a lost fork is a crime. Forks are usually imprinted with a variant of the primary’s ego ID that designates it as a fork and precludes it from any locally proscribed activities (often travel and legal/ financial transactions without the primary ego’s authorization).

Within the inner system, most habitats treat forks as property and restrict forking to 48 hours; in some jurisdictions, forks must be equipped with auto-delete apps. However, many habs instead hew to the 0.1% rule. If an alpha fork of an ego has more than a 0.1% differentiation in their ego map, they are no longer considered the same person as the originating ego. Habitats vary wildly in their response to these time periods or thresholds being crossed — including requiring immediate forced merger with the primary ego, desleeving and deleting the forked instance, or treating the fork as a separate ego. The latter cases are used as excuses to detain the fork for illegal entry to the habitat, misappropriation or theft of habitat resources such as atmosphere and power, and a host of other offenses that accrue heavy fines and legal liability for the originating ego. Though forks can achieve legal status as distinct individuals, they remain in a precarious situation as their originators might appeal to different laws or standards that still treat the fork as property, an impostor, or a non-person.

Other legalities vary around the system. Morningstar habitats treat forks much like other inner-system polities, with the exception of a loophole that allows forks that have been (illegally) instanced beyond a week to apply for citizenship status with the primary ego’s approval, after which they legally become a separate person with no obligations from or to the original. The Titanians take an even more progressive view, with no restrictions on forking, but treating forks as dependents of the primary ego with associated civil rights and protections from abuse. They also allow forks to apply for emancipation from their primary ego, upon which they are granted citizenship as separate unique beings. And, of course, the anarchists and Extropians place no limits on forking, while the Jovians outlaw it entirely.

Regardless of the laws and intent of the primary egos, not all forks themselves are willing to play by the rules. Deletion and even merging are scary and require a certain mindset to simply accept. For this reason, it is standard practice to psychosurgically modify forks to accept their fate. Nevertheless, many forks hesitate when the time comes, pleading with their primaries to let them continue to exist. Others go on the run, hoping to elude the ego hunters sent after them. An underground railroad of autonomists is known to help forks escape to the outer system, where they can live free of their primary egos’ control. In some cases, forks have been known to dispose of their primary egos and assume their place.

Objections

Now that transhuman society has had time to stabilize, the discussion of forking is more prominent in public discourse. The majority still view it negatively — or at least with caution. The trauma and social displacement from the Fall is still a vivid scar, so exposure to risk and complications is considered frightening and foolish.

There are also bioconservative opinions that oppose forking, seeing it as the worst sort of transgressive excess and an affront to the value of an individual human life. The central argument is that each person has only one unique and irreproducible soul. Forking is, at best, an exercise in cruelty that creates an awareness that thinks itself a complete being but can never be anything other than a deluded copy that is spiritually stillborn. Engaging in such behavior for convenience or personal interest is viewed as a serious moral and spiritual hazard. From this point of view, the ease of forking makes it an existential threat, as we will soon be overrun by soulless people-impersonating monsters. This has driven some bioconservatives to attack forks, businesses that facilitate forking, and politicians that support liberal forking policies.

At the opposite end is the argument that forks have personhood and so merging or deleting one is murder. Ethical objections focus on the self-centered intent of people creating forks for specific tasks or purposes: if an alpha fork is generated, it is a whole and complete ego, so holding it subject to the dictates and designs of its originator is slavery by another name. Creating beta forks or lower is even worse, as it only compounds the previous objections by building in handicaps and limitations that purposely hobble the forked ego. These arguments have been part of the social discourse on forking since before the Fall and have made an impression on the thinking of many transhumans.

Surviving religions take mixed positions on forking. Christians adhere to bioconservative views, while Hindus, Muslims, and Jews lean towards the practical attitudes of the inner system. Buddhists, pagans, and techno-creationists embrace multiplicity in full.

Even in communities without ideological opposition, resource limitations can make it almost impossible to acquire the morphs, hardware, or computational resources needed to instance multiple forks for any length of time. Unless an individual can provide everything they need for themselves through work or are lucky enough to be living in an unusually resource-rich habitat, running multiple instances is seen as self-obsessive, greedy, and anti-social. Others point to the many transhumans still struggling to secure and improve their circumstances post-Fall and claim that bodies and resources used to maintain forks would be better used by others. Even the wealthiest inner-system elites who cover their forking expenses out-of-pocket are seen as insensitive and declassé when so many bodiless infugees and others can barely afford case morphs.

Arguments In Favor

Despite the restrictions and difficulties surrounding intentional forking, it has been a slowly growing trend ever since the technology became available before the Fall. Most people who run forks do so regularly, and the most common reasons are utilitarian. Even with the legal restrictions and social stigma, it is still possible and practical to run short-term forks that are only active on the mesh or in simulspaces.

Academic, business, and political leaders are often possessed of unique knowledge and insights and need to attend to multiple simultaneous but vitally important affairs. A habitat administrator forking to manage a crisis, a scientist making rapid progress on critical research by overseeing several lines of experimentation simultaneously, or a hypercorp exec steadily raising profits by being present for literally every major meeting all bring benefits and can help shift the opinions of many people.

Likewise, anyone working in remote circumstances, from gatecrashing teams to the staff of far-flung habitats, will encounter issues that require additional staffing that can’t be obtained any other way. The significant objective benefit of forking in these circumstances has helped the practice maintain a widely-recognized core of legitimacy that has protected it from being totally banned. That the practice is most available and most beneficial to members of the social and intellectual elite is helping forking make steady progress towards broader acceptability.

Of course, some people just don’t give a damn about the broader opinion or what they see as needless restrictions. To these selfdescribed visionaries, multiplicity is an area that transhumanity has neglected to its detriment. Though rare, there are some who want to explore radically different social models and modes of being that are based on or take advantage of forking in creative and experimental ways. Forking is not just a useful possibility, it is central to the way they choose to live.