Alistair,

I had my consciousness uploaded to a computer system so that I could live forever in the internet. Turns out it wasn’t an upload, it was just a copy. Long story short, my electronic identity is being held hostage by a virtual me, while my real identity has all the physical details. How do we compromise on who has what control?

Existential Crisis in Saitama

Existential Crisis,

So you have three courses of action available to you:

1. Kill your cyber persona. Given that this persona is sentient it will be difficult to do, but not impossible. The same methods used to destroy nonsentient code can be utilized to kill sentient code without discrimination. Try tricking your persona into downloading onto a fixed server.
2. Reinvent yourself. Change your name and create a new internet identity to correspond to You 2.0. Then your cyber self can keep the old You and everybody’s happy.
3. This is the best option: Make peace. If you had made a physical copy of yourself, you could do all kinds of crazy stuff with that. Pranks and elaborate heists would be just the tip of the iceberg. Now take that same positive, ambitious energy into your relationship with your cyber copy. Having a copy of yourself that can move through the internet with impunity and communicate with you is a blessing, not a curse.

Alistair