Headscratchers / Remember Me

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How'd he hide it?

• How did Charles and Scylla not know what Edge/H3O was doing? He has a very intimate knowledge of what makes them tick, but he's still 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 came from the Memorize main computer?
  • It's highly likely that he was 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 H3O 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 H3O's actions?
    • Absolutely. The fact that H3O 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.
    • Cyberpunk 101: 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? Edge/H3O 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 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 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. 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.
    • 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 A.I.s such as Wintermute. All it would take is Edge managing to worm his way into one exterior network and he'd be in business.
    • 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. 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, 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.

Trace is a horrible security officer

• Why would they make Captain Trace a security officer if he can't freaking memorize passwords and has to use kitschy mnemonic riddles to keep them straight, in a world where your memories are literally coded as data in a hard drive you access through an implant in your own neck? That's like hiring a stenographer who can't type and has to sing a nursery rhyme to remember how to get the cap off a pen.
  • Looking at it from another angle, it might be sort of clever. It might be that he specifically doesn't have the codes themselves memorized; he only has clues memorized, and has to figure them out every time. If his memory is ever stolen, the thief still has to figure out the riddle. Granted, they're not that hard, but it might trip someone up. I mean, he's still a horrible security officer, but that might explain why he uses riddles for the codes.
    • If he removes his memory of the answer so that he has to solve them every time, why doesn't Edge just give Nilin the answer?
    • 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 H3O 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 H3O are the same thing, that's the reveal. Edge may be a consciousness within H3O 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.

(MAJOR ENDGAME SPOILERS) Nilin is stealing stuff...

... that Edge already has.

• All the information that Nilin steals is stolen through the Sensen implants, which Edge/H3O 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 H3O 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 H3O. 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 can't really be true, though; Edge wasn't created by Nilin, Edge gained consciousness in response to Nilin's memory of the crash being sent to the server. That's why he calls her "Sis" the entire game, he was made by her parents, making her his older sister. Functionally speaking, there's no difference between Nilin's Sensen and anyone else's, and Edge is constantly doing and looking into things through other branches of the system that Nilin can't reach or see herself (for instance, knowing what special abilities she can take from other enemies). The hacking glove might contribute to that, but Edge talks to and guides her without it for the first stage of the game anyway, and only has her describe things that have no mechanical components.

What makes Nilin different?

• How did Nilin resist the memory wipe at the very beginning? Towards the end she mentions how there isn't anything special about her, she had no natural ability, she was just a really good learner since her father made the technology and she watched him. So what makes her different from all the other people who have been wiped and couldn't remember their own name let alone half the stuff she manages to get back before ever getting the official download of her persona?
  • She and/or Edge managed to mess with the system somehow so the memory wipe didn't quite work as expected?
  • She probably isn't. The way the doctor talks about her case, resisting the memory wipe enough to recall her name is unusual, but it happens occasionally. He talks about re-administering the process himself, but doesn't really seem surprised. There are a lot of factors that probably contributed to it (experience with relevant technology, having had a memory removed when that technology was probably in the prototype phase, interference from Edge, etc), but there's not really anything to suggest she's unique in not having the memory wipe stick on the first try.
  • Maybe Memory Hunters are more resistant to being wiped than baselines. When Bad Request is captured he proves similarly resistant, and the Hunt Glove Mnesist states that fewer than one in 10,000 people have the "cerebral attributes" required to be Hunters. This would also explain why the doctor is unsurprised at Nilin's resistance; while she's the only subject capable of moving under her own volition in the prologue, everyone else in the basement is a zombie. In comparison, when Nilin breaks into the upper levels of the Bastille in Episode 4, the place is crammed to bursting with Errorists, many of which are similarly (semi)coherent.

(Endgame Spoilers) Why doesn't anyone...

...recognize Nilin?She spends a pretty big percentage of the game running around the company that she apparently used to work for, and had a pretty decent rank in, considering her parents own it. Remember Me doesn't exactly do subtlety or anything, so it may just be asking too much of the game itself, but shouldn't somebody in that huge building have recognized her as "Nilin, the CEO's hot daughter that went rogue" and not "that brutal terrorist from the news"? I know it's mostly to preserve the reveal and all, but on a second playthrough, it seems really, really forced.

• 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.

(Semi Spoilers) Is Remixing a memory truly foolproof?

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 Fridge Logic 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 contradictory, 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?

If either scenario happens, wouldn't she start asking questions? Wouldn't that be just as worse as trying to lie and explain why her mother suddenly has car accident related wounds? If neither scenario happens and she is able to construct an explanation for it all, wouldn't she still start asking questions if her mind constructed explanation doesn't line up with whatever lie was concocted to explain why her mother has wounds? If any of this was thought of when remixing was first used, wouldn't that require the remixers to not only check the key memories they remixed but also the subsequent memories as well so that Fridge Logic doesn't occur?

• 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 Fridge Logic 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.
• On a similar note, how does remixing work so well on Olga Sedova? I understand that making her hate Memorize would help Nilin out of their immediate altercation and maybe even secure Olga's help for a little while, but the sharade has to come apart rather quickly, doesn't it? Her husband is alive after all. Before long his doctor would contact her again about the payment, or some relative might enquire about his health, or she would his belongning in her appartment, or something like that. Not saying it must happen, but Nilin and Edge seem pretty confident that they've converted her for good and even rely on her for transportation, despite her allegiance to them being built on a lie that could expose itself at any moment. You'd think they'd taken the opportunity and disposed of Olga asap.

(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.

Romance?

Okay, Word of God states that they meant to have an in-game romance but were stopped by Executive Meddling, but who was the love interest going to be? Edge is the only one that makes sense to me, but they said part of the reason the romance was vetoed was because the executives thought guys wouldn't want to play out kissing another guy, and Nilin wouldn't be able to kiss Edge anyway for obvious reasons. The only other options I can think of are Tommy and Bad Request, either of whom would have needed a lot more screen time to be a decent romantic interest, or that it was a character who was removed outright.

• My guess is Bad Request. It'd be a Rescue Romance, probably.
  • Agreed. That would make the most sense, particularly if you consider Madame's derisive comment about Nilin being Bad's "girlfriend" to be The Artifact.
• The Making Of video shows early footage of Nilin — back when she still had the skull-and-crossbones outfit — following an objective to attempt to seduce a character we never saw in the final game for a mission, but that may or may not be related.

Scylla responsible for the whole plot of the game?

Specifically, the third remix sequence. The "happy" ending of it would suggest that if Scylla had simply given her daughter that toy, then the car accident would never have happened. Subsequently, their relationship wouldn't have suffered at all and Nilin probably wouldn't have joined the Errorists. I do know that's just my speculation.

• Well it's pretty much confirmed that Sensen exists in its current state because Charles is desperate to remix or remove Nilin'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.

(Major spoilers) Why does Edge/H3O fight back?

Edge wants to die. He orchestrated everything from Nilin's awakening so that she could destroy him. So when the time finally arrives, why does he even fight back? Random cybermooks to build up her S-Pressens enough to cause serious harm is one thing, but dropping bombs and screaming shock waves is a little strange if you're trying to let yourself be destroyed.

• 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.
• Definitely kill-or-be-killed; right before Nilin comes face-to-face with H3O, Edge's last words to Nilin are pretty much that. By ensuring she's facing danger, she's forced to follow through to save herself. The mooks are necessary to let her use her S-Pressens, but they're based on relatively simple enemies (Prowlers, Enforcers, and Seraphim) — not a big threat this late in the game except through sheer numbers. H3O's other attacks are a major concern for Nilin since outlasting them doesn't provide any extra benefit to her.

(Mild spoiler) Nilin doesn't need to sneak around by the end...

She knows that she's the daughter of the company, and she's already swayed her mother Scylla over to her side. Why, then, does she need to sneak into a heavily guarded stronghold, murder a bunch of security guards, when her own mother could have just walked her through the front door? A disguise can't be too hard to come by, not when you're friends with the CEO of the evil company and with a professional assassin.

For that matter, none of the game needed to happen in the first place. Nilin didn't have a bad relationship with her father; she could have explained to him long ago that what he was doing was problematic, instead of joining a group of underground rebels. She has inside connections that nobody even considered taking advantage of, no wonder it took the Errorists decades and a political assassination to get anything done.

Was Scylla crazy from the start?

• This was probably never meant to be a point in the game but Scylla seems delusional from the very beginning. The car crash was NEVER Nilin'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. Nilin wasn't misbehaving at that moment and Scylla completely stopped paying attention to the traffic so Nilin 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).
  • Most people don't put effort into blaming things, it's just how they process the situation. A disproportionate amount, maybe, being that Nilin was a kid, but she was still too old to be having a complete meltdown over a toy, and Scylla had to turn around because Nilin was about to get herself hurt (ironically). Under normal circumstances it would be the kind of thing that everybody just feels bad about and goes on about their lives, but Scylla lost her entire leg in that crash. Advanced sci-fi tech or not, that's still months, years of rehabilitation and chronic pain that she had to go through because her bratty kid was throwing a tantrum. She couldn't get over it and based on what we know about Nilin (namely the part where she's selfish, doesn't think before she acts, and is perfectly fine to dodge the consequences of her actions whenever possible), that's just part of her personality. It's messed up to hold a grudge against a kid, but saying Nilin had no fault in the accident isn't right either.
    • Scylla took her eyes off the road when approaching a light at high speeds in the rain, to talk to a kid who had already quieted down. We know how Nilin is now, after the accident, being blamed for her mother's injury, and presumably years of parental neglect on Scylla's part. The only real difference between the remixed and real memories is that the reason Scylla chose not to pay attention changed.
    • Well, yeah. Nilin had unbuckled herself and Scylla reacted accordingly out of fear that Nilin would get hurt, she didn't consciously decide that the road was the less important issue at hand. That's why the reason for her distraction has to change: the only way to make the event turn out "correctly" is to make Scylla think she was just being sloppy and irresponsible (which she isn't, she's methodical and precise to the point of outright villainy) while Nilin was being a little angel in the back seat (which she absolutely wasn't). There are a lot of ways the story could have been resolved, but since Nilin is making all the decisions in that scene, what we get is yet another trip down wrong-memory lane where Nilin happily erases her bad behavior so that someone else can take the blame and make her own life easier. Again, Scylla's reactions are pretty extreme, but considering that, the accident caused her a literal lifetime of pain while her daughter clearly never grew out of her selfish squalling phase until long after she became an adult and joined a terrorist organization.
    • "Unconscious" irresponsibility is still irresponsibility, just like texting and driving. 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, 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 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.

The Fantasy Gun Control in general.

• The social effects; Gun control laws actually increase the proliferation of illegal firearms; Japan's gun control laws are about as draconian as the "Law of the Stone Age", and the country has a thriving black market in guns - because a <$500 factory-made semi-automatic nine-millimeter can be sold for the cost of a luxury car. To say nothing of the profit margin for bullets.
  • Your argument is something of a tautology. Banning firearms increases the number of illegal firearms because suddenly all (or at least most) firearms are illegal. In fact, most crimes involving guns involve legally purchased firearms. Japan certainly has a black market for guns. But it also has a very low usage of those same guns even by the criminals who possess them. For one thing, it's an escalation of force where the police can escalate much further and faster. Then there is the price on the black market, which puts them out of reach of most criminals and discourage crime syndicates issuing them trivially.
    • "In fact, most crimes involving guns involve legally purchased firearms." Not in America. Most gun crimes, by every estimate and study I can find, are committed by people who illegally own guns.
• The execution; why don't the police use less-lethal weapons such as tasers, flash-bangs and tear gas? Hell, just capsaicin spray is debilitating with an impressively low risk of long-term side effects.
• The exception; the crime that got Nilin imprisoned and wiped in the first place was a Psychic-Assisted Suicide - with a handgun. 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 loaded (albeit safetied) which results in him shooting his wife with it.

Why can't Nilin disable drones?

• The surveillance drones shoot Nilin dead with a hail of bullets the instant she steps into their range. She can't do anything about them except stay out of their detection zones, which often includes putting walls between herself and them. Yet the Seraphim, Nephilim, and Zorn — all of which are military-grade robots — don't attack her with instantly-lethal force and she can destroy them with her Spammer (plus reprogram the former two with Rust in Pieces or stun the latter with Sensen DOS). When Nilin gets the ability to see drones' detection zones, she harvests a component from another drone said to be destroyed by Leapers. How does it make sense for these little things to be such harbingers of doom for Nilin compared to the types of threats she can totally send to the scrap heap?

How was it possible to kill memory!Nilin?

• The objective of the final remixing is to make Charles think he killed Nilin when he was remixing her memories of the car accident. Except, we have repeatedly seen that killing the memory owner in their memory is a completely safe option - remixing simply doesn't hold in that case, since the owner dying creates a paradox. Memory!Charles should've simply bumped into the "Fail" screen and had to rewind Nilin's memory again, shouldn't he?
  • I see three possibilities for this:
    (1) Remixing works differently in-universe than from the player's view, and isn't lenient enough to allow a trial-and-error approach. The route where the player gets it "right" is the only one that Nilin actually follows.
    (2) Since Charles was using a prototype on young Nilin, maybe he hadn't developed any safeguards against causing memory bugs. Or he tried to, but he wasn't able to test them thoroughly yet.
    (3) Charles did include safeguards, but Nilin disables them (or convinces Charles they failed) when she hacks the prototype.

What was the point of the final remixing?

• Not only should Charles be aware that Nilin is alive and is a notorious errorist, Nilin then approaches him in the flesh, so he instantly realises that he's been duped! How was that supposed to help Nilin convince him? All the things she tells him are about the real life consequences of his actions, and they're all legit, so he'll either listen to reason, or he won't. I guess it makes a difference whether they're being spoken to a father who'd "cured" his daughter vs. a father who'd accidently killed her, but Nilin ruins that effect by approaching him!