HRogge Wrote:Sounds something like induced Multiple Personality Disorder (whatever it is fashionable to call it at the moment), or some other major fragmentation of the personality. Fiction has some remarkably precise devices which mess with people's memories, but I'm not sure how much you could get handwavium to cooperate in this sort of thing. I suppose you could claim that hard-tech is used to do the damage, and handwavium is working as hard as it can to minimise the bad effects.Ace Dreamer Wrote:Wiping someone's memories is... messy. If you just wipe everything then you've got an adult catgirl with the skills and experiences of an infant. And, they may not be able to relearn any useful skills without a great deal of work.The Boskones had a device that removed most of the "memory", most likely a lot of the more complicated skills and the personality... leaving the victim without an idea who they are. But not all catgirls were "wiped".
One possibility is that the memories are all still there, they just can't be accessed, due to damage to either the retrieval system, or the indexing/associative system that lets people get at their memories. Changing someone's sense of personal identity by changing their body to a catgirl would be quite traumatic, and it is possible Boskone had a way of directing the effects of that trauma. Maybe something like high tech conditioning?
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind