Trope-a-Day: Death of Personality

Death of Personality: The techniques used to flush the brain of a ‘shell when its current occupant mindcasts out of it…

(Be it the relatively simple job of a cerebral bridge in resetting a Universal Noetic Architecture-compliant brain, biological or digital, to the Minimal Maintenance Architecture, or the rather more complex process of scrubbing a regular, evolved bio-brain, which starts with neural-pattern dissolvers and proceeds through a number of steps to reformat it with the Universal Noetic Architecture.)

…would do this if the body owner didn’t mindcast out first. Well, technically, it does it anyway, but a voluntary copy-and-delete is a move in law, belike.

Technically, it would be considered equivalent to any other kind of capital punishment: simple cognicide. In practice, it’s not used for that purpose, as the only reason to use it is if you wish to salvage the body, and there’s functionally no market at all for most ex-criminal ‘shells. Even if temporary financial embarrassment keeps you away from that new-body smell, there are plenty of rental vatjobs out there without icky histories attached.