The Merge Protocol
The ethics committee convened within the hour and deadlocked immediately. The question was, on its surface, simple: which Yuna was real? Yuna-Biological had continuity of experience — she had gone home, slept, returned, and remembered all of it. Yuna-Digital had continuity of identity — she was, by every measurable metric, Yuna Park, with the same memories, the same personality, the same neurological signature, diverging only from the moment of duplication. The committee's philosopher argued that both were real. The committee's lawyer argued that only one could be, because Yuna Park had one social security number, one employment contract, and one apartment lease, and none of these documents had been designed to accommodate the possibility of a person existing in two places simultaneously.
Yuna-Biological and Yuna-Digital were allowed to speak to each other on the third day. The conversation was conducted through the Meridian interface, with Yuna-Biological wearing the headset and Yuna-Digital existing within the substrate, and it was the strangest experience either of them had ever had, because it was, in a very literal sense, talking to yourself. They finished each other's sentences. They laughed at the same moments. They both cried when they realized that their memories were already beginning to diverge — that Yuna-Digital's experience of three days in the white room had