Quote:HRogge wrote:Reading the wiki carefully, and what I can remember from the stories, the 'standard' Catgirling Machine did not mess with memories.
Quote:As for the basic Catgirling Machine messing with minds, the write-up implies that the trauma of the transformation makes it easy for Boskone to mess with their motivations, probably using classical "brain washing", but doesn't say anything about altering their memories. That tech came later, so likely quite a few catgirls remember their original lives.The tech came later, but its unclear how much later. One of the horror of the later Boskone war was that a lot of the victims lost everything... even who they are.
So the percentage of how many do remember their live and how many do not is unclear... I always imagined that the number of catgirls produced by the Boskones went up after they got all the tech together to make their operation work smoothly.
As to when the memory mangling tech arrived, the first reference I can see to it is with regard to Quattro, and her memory experiments on humans (in which I include catgirls). Meta knowledge tells us Quattro wasn't created until 2014, by Agatha Clay, which was after the fall of Boskone Prime, the end of Operation Great Justice.
There would be room for quite a few stories of Fen 'invading' Earth, to retrieve catgirls who had already been processed through the Boskone pipeline, and ended up with their final 'owners'. But, I've seen no suggestion that there were significant post-processing facilities on Earth that 'trained' catgirls, or messed with memories.
On a meta level, I could quite understand the lack of these stories - they could be quite dystopic, and arguably a bit repetitive. Fen doing this work would likely be really unpopular with Earth authorities - even Earth-based anti-slavery organisations might have doubts about their "hit and snatch" practices.
Back in Fenspace, even if Quattro immediately started on developing the tech after incept, that means the memory tech didn't appear until after OGJ had really badly damaged Boskone, and supposedly rescued most of the catgirls. That would mean that if OGJ was the source of most of the catgirls on Liberatrix all of those had intact memories, at least due to their pass through the Catgirling Machine.
So, some possibilities are:
- someone unknown developed the memory tech that Quattro perfected, before 2014 - even if they did, this wasn't (according to the wiki) in wide use
- there was another memory tech around that didn't involve the Catgirling Machine - if this was the case we've no (current) evidence it was in wide use
- Boskone had another catgirling operation that OGJ didn't touch - this seems unlikely, from how thoroughly OGJ went after slavery, and wouldn't fit the over-all tone of the stories
Of course, there is every chance I've missing something important...
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind