Memory Wipe

While memories may never have been "sacred", the transhuman future means that a person's memories are more readily accessible by others than ever before. This means that to protect secrets or intentions, some people occasionally block or erase memories to keep them from others. Commonly, this involves devices such as the Memory Lock (p. 149 Panopticon) or drugs like Grey Ranks (p. 175 Firewall) to block long-term memories from forming. Others may undergo lengthy and possibly damaging psychosurgery to remove or alter their own memories, and similar processes can be done with Brainhacking. The fact that editing memories stored in a cyberbrain is much easier led to the advent of this particular technology, used by some criminal or special operations types.

Memory Wipe: The Memory Wipe is an add-on which integrates with Mnemonic Augmentation, such as is automatically included in Cyberbrains or Infomorphs. It serves as an automated process to delete certain memories stored in Mnemonic Augmentation, which puts them out of reach of brainhackers and psychosurgeons. This system can be fairly nuanced, either able to delete all memories held in a single period of time (up to one week), or memories can be "tagged" for deletion in the interface (Make an Interfacing test to tag memories in a pinch) and all scrubbed at once as a Complex Action. This can be highly disorienting to some people, as memory wipe users are often conscious and aware they have wiped their own memories, and thus keenly aware they can now no longer remember something. A gamemaster's discretion, deleting more than several continuous minutes of memories may require the user to make a Continuity test (p. 272 EP) to handle the possible stress. Like with many computer systems, the speed at which the Memory Wipe removes the memories means they are often not completely deleted, and a psychosurgeon may attempt to recover the memories with a -30 Psychosurgery test, in an action which may take minutes or hours of work depending on how much memory was deleted. This augmentation is also available as a software upgrade for Infomorphs. Requires Mnemonic Augmentation. [Moderate]