History Headscratchers / RememberMe

[[folder: (Major Endgame Spoilers) Why doesn't Nilin just...]]
Remix Edge's memories? There's nothing stopping her from editing Edge's memories the way she would anyone else's, except it'd be quicker and easier because she doesn't have to accommodate logical cause and effect (Edge knows those aren't actually his, and can't die unless killed). She judges literally from on high that everyone should just have their memories back and suck it up (I'd love to know what she'd say if asked if people with PTSD are also expected to do that), but she's already killed or edited the memories of all the people who would normally be a difficult patch in her life. There's nothing inherently wrong with Sensen technology, it's just being abused and applied in predatory ways; with Scylla's epic bitchiness cured and the mass-mutant-slavery project dismantled, proper regulation and enforcement by competent officers could solve all the problems Sensen seems to have. It'd take Nilin years, likely decades, before she got anywhere, but a lifetime of penance and digital psychotherapy seems a lot less costly for everyone involved than the endless lawsuits and surgical procedures and emotional turmoil that comes with all the memories flooding out of [=H3O=]'s banks.
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* How did Charles and Scylla not know what [[spoiler: Edge/H30]] was doing? He has a very intimate knowledge of what makes them tick, but he's still [[spoiler: a major component of the machine that their livelihood depends on.]] Was there really not a single security officer in the entire company that noticed that the spurious order to open the dam and flood the city [[spoiler: ''came from the Memorize main computer?'']]
** It's highly likely that he was [[spoiler:bouncing the signal around through various channels to mask its source so no one could trace it back. As for tracking it from the other direction, is anyone actually keeping an eye on exactly what H30 is doing? Nobody knows that H30 has gained self-awareness. It's shown that Charles is a hermit who is lost in his own head, and Scylla has little interest in anything beyond building her fortune and ruling the city with an iron fist. And neither of them can even ''access'' H30's physical components anymore unless they do so together. Taking that into consideration, would anyone else even be capable of monitoring the specifics of H30's actions?]]
*** Absolutely. The fact that [[spoiler: H30 has a consciousness]] doesn't make any difference, and in fact it would make it that much stranger that no one would notice. The sabotage of the dam would be the most obvious one, but anything that he does has to be done remotely, and using stolen security passes, and ''all'' the technology involved came directly from the heart of the Memorize corporation, specifically from a part of the system that should have no outgoing dataflow at all, to the Sensen of an escaped convict and known criminal. I mean, if Trace is any indication, the integrity of the security office at this company is questionable at best, so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that whatever sysadmin is in charge of making sure that a vast cybernetic system that attaches directly to the brains of millions of people is just blisteringly incompetent, but that's just about what it would take.

*** True, but that's not the problem: it's not why didn't anyone jump on the case, it's ''why wasn't someone watching it in the first place''? [[spoiler: Edge/H30 might be a better hacker than anyone, but it's not about covering tracks, it's about noticing that a large part of a major system that shouldn't be doing anything is working overtime.]]

*** Because he's not supposed to have it. "Oh, look, I just happen to have the top-secret security codes." "Why do you have access to his moved memories?" "Uh..." Not to mention that Edge and H30 aren't the same thing.
*** Edge spends the ''entire game'' doing some seriously not-okay stuff and Nilin never seems to catch on, or object. ("Gee, I just stole those security codes for the dam and gave them to Edge.... Goodness gracious me, how did this horrible flood happen?") Giving her passwords gleaned from Trace's removed memories wouldn't be any less suspicious than all the other stuff he does. And, uh, yeah, Edge and H30 ''are'' the same thing, that's the reveal. Edge may be a consciousness within H30 and not fully in control of how it responds to her infiltrating its actual, physical location, but there's no indication that Edge doesn't have access to the same data banks that H30 does, and the whole plot revolves around the fact that Edge ''can't separate himself'' from that information.

* All the information that Nilin steals is stolen through the Sensen implants, which Edge/H30 literally ''is'', and all the memories that get removed from people end up in his own database. That's the point of all this, he can't destroy himself and can't destroy the memories he's storing, and has to get Nilin to do it for him. The entire plot hinges on the fact that Edge ''cannot'' separate himself from the Sensen system, but Nilin's hacker glove can only steal information ''from Sensen implants''. There is no information she can steal that Edge isn't already irrevocably attached to.
** It's mentioned by H30 that Edge is only one facet of the entire system, so maybe Edge actually didn't have access to the data he needed? And like you said, all of the memories that are ''removed'' end up in his database -- if they haven't been removed, then they're not there at all, hence why he needs Nilin to go steal memories from people; those memories are still stored in the individuals' heads, not in H30. He can't seem to actually access anyone's Sensen. He can hack into anything with an Internet link, but when it comes to the Sensen itself, that seems to be a block for him -- likely because the Sensen (or the memory portion of it, at least) is a closed system, and memories are only uploaded/shared when the individual chooses. The only person whose Sensen he ''might'' be linked to is Nilin's, which makes sense when you remember that she's essentially his creator.

** That's assuming she ever wanted a damn thing to do with her parents' corporation. From a very young age her mother hated her, her father was a distracted mad scientist, and both of them are obviously workaholics. Before the start of the game, she's already involved with the Errorists and she's good buddies with Tommy, who runs a popular pub in the slums. Scylla's dossier in the Mnemesis files also mentions she has a child but doesn't talk about that child's gender. It's entirely possible that Nilin was rebelling against her parents from a very young age and spent a lot of her formative years hanging out with a bad crowd, so nobody in her parents' corporation had ever met her, or at least hadn't met her as an adult.

When a memory remixer remixes a key memory of a person, the latter's outlook and apparently subsequent memories adjust in order to fit the key memory that was remixed. However, is it truly fool proof that it doesn't cause in-universe FridgeLogic for a person? For example, a man remixes the memories of his daughter so that not only was she not the cause of her mother's car accident but she was never in one as well. Do all of the subsequent memories that the girl has after that moment change? What about the possible memories of her visiting her mother in the hospital while the latter was recovering from said accident? Do these specific memories instantly change in order to fit the key memory, or are they erased completely in order to not conflict with the key memory?

If they are changed, what possible explanation could the mind of a little girl construct as to why her mother is in the hospital in the first place? Would these altered memories make sense for this little girl. When she is grown up, would these altered memories still make sense for her more wiser self? If they are simply erased as they are too conflictory, wouldn't that create some blanks in the girl's memory? Would the little girl's mind be able to construct explanations to fill in the blanks? If her mind is not able to fill in the blanks, wouldn't it dawn on her that she has moments she can't account for?

** Just going by the examples we see in the game, it seems that memory remixing relies on changing specific details, and then letting the person's mind use its own understanding of cause and effect to fill in the blanks, and keeping the end result of the memory consistent with the victim's current state. Scylla's case seems to suggest that the logical follow-up does apply to a person's entire memory, so they themselves won't arrive at FridgeLogic for their own memories, but there doesn't seem to be anything to stop them from noticing that objective evidence (for instance, her description of the car accident as she remembers it versus the way she described it to her insurance provider when it happened) doesn't match up.

** There does seem to be some limit to how far you can remix someone's mind and have them accept it; otherwise the remix you use on Scylla to get the Happy Birthday achievement should be an acceptable solution to that section of the game (a better one, even, since it removes the trauma outright) but it doesn't work, presumably because one second later she would ''know'' her memory had been messed with since she suddenly has a fake leg.

Remix Edge's memories? There's nothing stopping her from editing Edge's memories the way she would anyone else's, except it'd be quicker and easier because she doesn't have to accommodate logical cause and effect (Edge knows those aren't actually his, and can't die unless killed). She judges literally from on high that everyone should just have their memories back and suck it up (I'd love to know what she'd say if asked if people with PTSD are also expected to do that), but she's already killed or edited the memories of all the people who would normally be a difficult patch in her life. There's nothing inherently wrong with Sensen technology, it's just being abused and applied in predatory ways; with Scylla's epic bitchiness cured and the mass-mutant-slavery project dismantled, proper regulation and enforcement by competent officers could solve all the problems Sensen seems to have. It'd take Nilin years, likely decades, before she got anywhere, but a lifetime of penance and digital psychotherapy seems a lot less costly for everyone involved than the endless lawsuits and surgical procedures and emotional turmoil that comes with all the memories flooding out of H30's banks.

* Well it's pretty much confirmed that Sensen exists in its current state because [[spoiler: Charles is desperate to remix or remove Nillin's memories of the car crash, and moves on to trying to remove bad memories in general, so yeah pretty much everything ties back to the crash.]]

[[folder: (Major spoilers) Why does [[spoiler:Edge/H3O fight back?]] ]]

* ''Edge'' wants to die. ''H3O'' does not. Edge is not all of H3O.
* But H3O did make Edge to bring Nilin to the cube. Maybe he was trying to create a kill-or-be-killed situation, since Nilin clearly didn't want to kill him.

* This was probably never meant to be a point in the game but [[spoiler: Scylla]] seems delusional from the very beginning. [[spoiler: The car crash was NEVER Nillin's fault. Scylla calmed her and told her never to do such a thing again and then turned around to the back seats, completely missing traffic lights. Nillin wasn't misbehaving at that moment and Scylla completely stopped paying attention to the traffic so Nillin just wasn't responsible. Even if she was screaming from the top of her lungs, Scylla is an adult driving a car for God's sake, you just don't drive a car being oblivious to everything on the road. She must have had put a lot of effort into blaming the whole thing on a kid (she even makes a point out of never forgetting the event).]]

* The exception; the crime that got Nilin imprisoned and wiped in the first place was a PsychicAssistedSuicide - with a ''handgun.'' [[http://dontnodentertainment.wikia.com/wiki/Frank_Forlan Frank Forlan]] ''was'' a cop who had it on his desk at the moment, but he was permitted to keep the handgun with him at all times despite being a ''known alcoholic.'' In the memory Nilin remixes to make him commit suicide, he even keeps it ''[[ArtisticLicenseGunSafety loaded]]''(albeit [[NotWithTheSafetyOnYouWont safetied]]) which results in him '''shooting his wife with it'''.

* The social effects; Gun control laws actually ''increase'' the proliferation of illegal firearms; Japan's gun control laws are about as draconian as the [[http://dontnodentertainment.wikia.com/wiki/Law_of_the_Stone_Age "Law of the Stone Age"]], and the country has a ''thriving'' black market in guns - because a $1000 factory-made automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a ''luxury car.'' To say nothing of the profit margin for ''bullets.''

* The social effects; Gun control laws actually ''increase'' the proliferation of illegal firearms; Japan's gun control laws are about as draconian as the[[http://dontnodentertainment.wikia.com/wiki/Law_of_the_Stone_Age "Law of the Stone Age"]], and the country has a ''thriving'' black market in guns - because a $1000 factory-made automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a ''luxury car.'' To say nothing of the profit margin for ''bullets.''

* The social effects; Gun control laws actually ''increase'' the proliferation of illegal firearms; Japan has similarly draconian gun control laws, and a thriving black market in guns - because a $1000 factory-made automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a ''luxury car.'' To say nothing of the profit margin for ''bullets.''

* The social effects; Gun control laws actually ''increase'' the sale of illegal firearms; Japan has similarly draconian gun control laws, and a thriving black market in guns - because a $1000 factory-made automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a ''luxury car.'' To say nothing of the profit margin for ''bullets.''

*** Cyberpunk 101: [[spoiler: an AI is a better hacker than a human could ever be. It would not be impossible for a human to cover up his tracks in such a situation, but it would take a long time. That is not a problem for an AI that happens to live in one of the most powerful systems on the planet, particularly in a universe where he has access to millions of people's discarded memories. Edge has more than sufficient wherewithal to keep his tracks clean, even if the world's most heroic sysadmin jumped on the case.]]
*** True, but that's not the problem: it's not why didn't anyone jump on the case, it's ''why wasn't someone watching it in the first place''? [[spoiler: Edge/H30 might be a better hacker than anyone, but it's not about covering tracks, it's about noticing that a large part of a major system that shouldn't be doing anything is working overtime.]]
*** You seriously can't think of a half-dozen ways off the top of your head that [[spoiler: a powerful AI could mislead, distract, bribe, or deceive a sysadmin]]? The root of this objection seems to be that you're not willing to meet the writer halfway and figure that [[spoiler: Edge anticipated these problems and has surmounted them by the time he takes up his role as Nilin's mission control. The problem with our theoretical heroic sysadmin is that he's using the systems Edge lives in to watch Edge.]]
*** Firstly, no, I'm not meeting the writers halfway because the writers did a ''terrible'' job of doing their half of the job. [[spoiler: Secondly, Edge is not actually an artificial intelligence. The system was never designed to be an AI, and the part that Edge represents and was born from is a ''storage device''. I can buy that several lifetimes' worth of memories could produce a sapient being, I can even buy that those memories would create a classist, suicidal terrorist, but what I ''cannot'' buy into is the idea that a huge company worth billions of dollars whose proprietary technology involves what I can only assume is a ''brain stem implant'' would not have someone watching it like a hawk. It is too huge and too important to too many people and too many bank accounts for no one to notice that a machine that serves the same function as a photo album is suddenly sending out information and using system resources well beyond what ought to be allocated to it.]]
*** [[spoiler: So you can buy the sudden and spontaneous generation of a sentient intelligence (and Edge is an artificially created sentient being who lives in a computer, so he qualifies for all purposes as an AI; saying otherwise is just hairsplitting) within a massive bank of servers made to store human memories, but your suspension of disbelief suddenly fails at the idea that the same intelligence is smart and capable enough to fool the local sysadmin(s), who may or may not even know that sentient artificial intelligence is even possible? Seems like a pretty arbitrary place to draw a line in the sand, particularly when one considers the fine tradition of hacker AIs such as Wintermute. All it would take is Edge managing to worm his way into one exterior network and he'd be in business.]]
*** [[spoiler: To put it another way: is it really that hard to believe that not only is Edge ''really'' good at covering his own tracks, but that whoever is in charge of watching the systems in which he resides is not looking for signs that the server has spontaneously generated an artificial life form? Isn't it more likely that they simply have no idea what they're looking at and Edge is able to hide his transmissions within the immense amount of traffic that server must deal in every single day, as it absorbs the negative memories of an entire city, if not an entire civilization?]]
*** Hairsplitting, no. [[spoiler: Edge may be a machine, but he wasn't programmed or designed to be able to think or learn the way an intelligent creature does; his... genesis, I guess, is entirely organic and comes solely from human experience. He talks like a person, thinks with human bias, has a human understanding of filial bonds, and has humanlike selfishness to the point of immaturity in places. He's a machine, but he is not an ''artificial'' intelligence. That's an extremely important difference, especially in terms of this topic because your only reason for saying he should be a better hacker than any human is that he's an AI: having a brain doesn't automatically make you qualified to perform neurosurgery. And saying that he's such a badass hacker that he can flawlessly evade detection by everyone who ought to have been paying attention to what every facet of the Memorize system is doing at all times is a huge stretch: if he's such an amazing hacker, [[ICannotSelfTerminate why can't he just delete the memories that are causing him all this pain in the first place?]] Why can't he move them to some other storage device, or send them back to the people they came from, without having to lure Nilin in to do the dirty work for him? Moving memories is not complicated, there are street kiosks for exactly that purpose, available for every Joe Schmoe's use.]]

*** Because he's not supposed to have it. "Oh, look, I just happen to have the top-secret security codes." "Why do you have access to his moved memories?" "Uh..." Not to mention that Edge and H30 aren't the same thing.
*** Edge spends the ''entire game'' doing some seriously not-okay stuff and Nilin never seems to catch on, or object. ("Gee, I just stole those security codes for the dam and gave them to Edge.... Goodness gracious me, how did this horrible flood happen?") Giving her passwords gleaned from Trace's removed memories wouldn't be any less suspicious than all the other stuff he does. And, uh, yeah, Edge and H30 ''are'' the same thing, that's the reveal. Edge may be a consciousness within H30 and not fully in control of how it responds to her infiltrating its actual, physical location, but there's no indication that Edge doesn't have access to the same data banks that H30 does, and the whole plot revolves around the fact that Edge ''can't separate himself'' from that information.

*** [[spoiler:"Unconscious" irresponsibility is still irresponsibility. If being "methodical" requires '''taking your eyes off the road''' in wet conditions ''after'' the light clearly turns yellow just to lecture your secured daughter [[note]]who is not only rebuckled, but the child locks are engaged[[/note]], you have a ''really'' bad method. Scylla literally evil-monologues about how she's going to profit off of people's suffering, even though she's ''already'' absurdly rich and powerful. Adult Nilin being just as morally-questionable as she's been the entire game doesn't ''retroactively'' make Lil' Nil' at fault for being an excited 5-year old who was, gasp, ''sniffling''. I think you need to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsDPMqNyd8A rewatch that sequence]]. Especially the part where Scylla has the parts of the car preserved and sitting in her office, like some sort of modern art. She is going far, ''far'' out of her way to keep mementos of her pain.]]

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** My guess is Bad Request. It'd be a RescueRomance, probably.